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May 19, 2013
I’ve been in China visiting my son the last week or so. The other day I saw a sign in both Chinese and English (not that unusual). The Chinese said: 蒸饺 and below it the English said: “Dump Ling”. Naturally I took this to be sign of a growing tolerance for dissent in China’s public forum. Like everyone, I’ve read that an arts and culture scene that has space for people like Ai-Weiwei has resulted in greater and greater opportunity for street level expression of opinions that run counter to the status quo.
Of course I had no idea who Ling was. I could only infer that someone wanted to dump him. I was reasonably comfortable attributing a male gender to this execrable Ling—after all is it usually a man that people want to dump, whatever culture we’re talking about. Well, maybe not. This is the former land of Soong May-ling, better known to Westerners as Madame Chang Kai-shek, who was a political figure in her own right. She died in 2003, and it’s doubtful that my students would have any idea who I would be talking about. So frankly, it didn’t occur to me that Soong-May could possibly have been the Ling that someone wanted to dump.
It seemed more likely that Ling was some kind of minor local official—maybe someone who works for the bus company, or who manages the KFC down at the mall. Or maybe this unfortunate Ling was a college professor known for giving particularly pedantic and boring lectures on food ethics and animal welfare. Who would not want to dump Ling, if that were the case?
Except that, as those among my two regular readers who happen to read simplified Chinese characters have already figured out, this sign did not really have anything to do with dissent or protest at all. I realize how exceedingly unlikely it is that either of my two regular readers actually does read simplified Chinese characters, but still I can’t exclude the possibility that maybe somebody out there is going “Chuff, chuff,” up their sleeve right now, taking delight in the way that people are being strung along by this week’s entry in the Thornapple blog.
Because if you copy 蒸饺 and put it into Google translate, you will see what I did not recognize walking along the lake at the Summer Palace. You will see that there actually is a food connection to this week’s Thornapple blog, and that when we went inside to try some of the 蒸饺 (along with a nice cold Tsing-Tao beer), we discovered that they were delicious!
Of course, given the high level of brilliance I associate with both of my regular readers, I’m sure you have already figured out what we had, if you hadn’t done so by seeing the title alone. Still and all, I’m not going to spell it out for you. Who is brave enough to enjoy the chuckle without trying the Google translation?
Go ahead. And don’t think I meant 转储市长. This was not intended to be another Virg Bernaro blog.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
May 12, 2013
One remarkable thing about intensive pig production: Those gestating sows lined up in “crates”? They don’t typically exhibit the most obvious signs of stress, frustration or reduced welfare. Now before backfilling this storyline just a bit I want to ward off the suggestion that I think this observation goes very far toward justifying this particular production practice on ethical grounds. In fact, as will become clear for those who persevere through today’s twisted pathway of tangents, irrelevancies and feigned ignorance, I’m not here on the second Sunday of May to write about pigs or animal welfare at all. So don’t write me any angry letters, at least not yet. I’m fully aware of “stereotypies” and behavioral abnormalities observed in gestation crates, and (I repeat) I’m not here to defend industrial pork production, in any case. There were a few blogs about that two years ago, so go back and look at them.
No. First I’ll explain for the uninitiated that the gestation crate is actually a very narrow pen built to hold one sow while embryos develop into little piglets. It’s so narrow that she can’t turn around. She can stand up to the feed and drink the water that is delivered to the front of the pen, and she can lie down. In Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) the pens are lined up in long rows, but you’ll see these crates one or two at a time even on some small farms. More typical is the farrowing crate, which is for after the piglets’ birth, and though it looks similar, it’s designed to prevent the little piggies from being crushed. But enough on explaining things for the uninitiated. I said I wasn’t here to write about pigs this May morning.
No. I’m curious about the relative lack of any sign that these sows are unhappy with this arrangement, which looks incredibly boring at the least, and intolerably cruel to most casual observers. Pigs are smart, after all, and how would you feel penned up like that? Now notice I said relative lack just now, because (like I said above) I’m not here to recommend this treatment. The most plausible explanation I’ve heard is that if you are a pig, one of the big stressors in your life is a lack of surety about where that next meal is coming from. Or if that seems a bit too abstract for a creature that, smart as she is, may not be able to conceptualize states of affairs in the optative mood of the future tense, maybe she’s stressed by the fear that some other pig is going to beat her to the tasty bits. Is this a dismissive way to understand a pig?
No. Arguably, these sows are being quite rational. My son tells me that his school cafeteria opens up at 5:00pm and that almost everybody shows up right at five on the dot. And why? Because it’s all gone by 5:30, even if the cafeteria is nominally open until 8:00. And when I went down for my “free breakfast” yesterday at 9:30 there was no more milk for my cereal. So I went down this morning at 7:02, right after it opened up. The place was packed. Indeed, there was cold milk for my cereal, but there was no place to sit. It seems that humans quite rationally adapt their behavior according to the possibility that some other pig is going to beat them to the tasty bits. Wouldn’t it be much more stressful to just have an endless supply of the stuff out there so that nobody would have to worry about having access to some tasty bits?
No. Or at least maybe not. It’s not entirely clear that the “plenty” solution doesn’t just induce greedy pigs—err, people—to eat too much. And “greedy” here connotes no moral judgment. It’s just a function of a natural competitive drive. The behavior I witnessed this morning had all the marks of a feeding frenzy. I didn’t actually need to eat that sugar doughnut out there on the buffet table after I’d finished my cold cereal (even if it did go well with my second cup of coffee). It might have been more relaxing if everyone had just the right amount of cereal and cold milk placed in front of them in a situation where it was just dead obvious that no other greedy person could get to it. Would that be a bad thing?
No. My idea would relieve a lot of stress around breakfast time, I think. People are like that. Or at least sometimes they are.
Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
May 5, 2013
If you have checked the date of today’s entry, you know that it’s past time to fire up the charcoal. Presumably you’ve already got the cabrito soaking in marinade, and you’ve put the Pacifico or the Negra Modello on ice. You’ve just taken a quick break to check out the Thornapple blog before heading out to the back yard (or the back forty, if you’re from Tejas) to start the party. I’ve already referenced one of the greatest food songs in this blog twice already, so I’m loathe to follow that path again. But now here in 2013 when it actually is Cinco de Mayo on blog day, I’m kind of at a loss as to what I should do. Perhaps, as one of my commentators suggested last fall, “Ha llegado el momento para que usted pueda escribir acerca de tequila.”
On the other hand, perhaps like the Jamestown settlers that were in the news this week, you are fresh out of both cabrito and tequila. Perhaps you saw Doug Owlsley, head of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution posing with the macquette of a 14 year old girl named “Jane”. The name appeared on the manifest of an ill fated supply ship that happened to arrive at Jamestown just as the colony was beginning it’s “starving time” over the winter of 1609 and 1610. Not to suggest that being out of cabrito and tequila would be in any ethically relevant way similar to the situation of the household where Jane’s abraded remains were discovered, but what do you do with a week when the lead story on food ethics has to do with cannibalism?
I guess you could point out that this is not generally recommended by any of the major philosophical traditions. On the other hand, one could take the other route and follow Cora Diamond’s observation from the classic 1978 paper “Eating Meat and Eating People,” that there are not really any compelling reasons not to eat people as long as they are already dead (as would appear from the evidence currently extant to have been the case for the unfortunate Jane). Diamond was not really aiming to endorse the ethics of cannibalism so much as she was making the point that our beliefs about what is and is not food do not rest solidly on an ethical basis in the first place. Still and all, if you are inclined to be rationalistic about things, and if you were in the middle of the starving time or, for that matter, inclined to reflect on it, noticing the irrationality that runs through our food practices might be a reason for digging up and utilizing a generally frowned upon and unarguably unaesthetic source of nutrients. Diamond writes that there might be some tasty bits there, but I take this claim to be hyperbole.
If you are disposed to amuse yourself by reading philosophy rather than eating cabrito this May 5th, I’ll report that Diamond’s paper is available all over the internet from various people who taken it upon themselves to download the PDF from J-STOR and put it on some random website. You can GOOGLE it or you can get it legally by signing up for J-STOR’s “Register and Read” program at this link. There are ethical issues here, too, but unless you are into eating paper copies of philosophy articles—also not recommended, mainly because of the ink—I don’t see much of a connection to the main themes of the Thornapple Blog. As for myself, I’m going to treat this as a tangent and get right on back to cannibalism.
Not to be squeamish, but I truly don’t see much humor in the fate of Jane, not to mention the other Jamestown colonists, so I’ll take a 90-degree turn to synthetic meat. This is a meat-like stuff that’s ginned up from tissue culture. Tissue culture has nothing to do with Kleenex and everything to do with Petri dishes, which, in the case of synthetic meat, are scaled up to the vat size so that we can have meat-like stuff (maybe we’ll call it “processed meat food”) to eat. It’s not here yet, but hang on. I’m curious. I’d genuinely like to know what my two regular readers think about this idea. The general consensus among philosophers is that “Hey, this is GREAT! No more animals!” But what about real people?
As for myself, I think it’s kind of creepy. Afterall, there’s no limit to the kind of animal tissue you can start with. Maybe the Smithsonian can regenerate some stem cells from Jane’s DNA and there can be little dishes next to the macquette where you can experience what the starving time survivors did. After all, who’s the worse for it?
Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
April 28, 2013
I remember the worst speech I ever gave. Or at least it was the worst received speech I ever gave. I was standing up in front of a bunch of scientists who were working on cloning adult mammalian cells in about 2001. This was the line of research that gave us Dolly, the celebrated sheep. I think both of my readers are old enough to remember Dolly, although it’s always a bit humbling to remind yourself that most of the undergraduates in my classroom probably don’t.
I tried to begin my speech by drawing a distinction. One of my good friends once said that the motto of contemporary philosophy is “No distinction is so trivial that it’s not worth making.” So I know that we can go overboard with drawing distinctions, but I didn’t think the one that I was making was trivial at all.
I started with the question “What is biotechnology?” When asked this question, I usually answered something like this: “Biotechnology is a cluster of laboratory techniques that use recombinant DNA.” This captures gene splicing, which relies on rDNA’s capacity to bind with itself, as well as cloning, which involved removing the entire DNA molecule from an adult cell (in Dolly’s case it was a mammary cell), and then placing it into an embryo that had had its own DNA removed. That’s what the guys in this room were working on, and it had the potential to produce exact genetic copies of individual animals (including humans, so far as we know), as well as to produce “stem cells” that could potentially be used for both research and medical therapy.
“But,” I said, “there is another way that people use the word ‘biotechnology’, as when they say ‘My daughter works in biotechnology,’ or ‘I’ve got my life savings invested in biotechnology’”. Here they are thinking about human organizations rather than laboratory techniques, though of course these companies or universities or labs generally use those laboratory techniques. The point I was trying to make to those guys was that it was important to sort out which ethical objections to biotechnology are focused on the laboratory techniques and which are targeted to the way that organizations were conducting themselves.
It seems like we’re witnessing another round of outrage against “biotechnology”. For my money, it’s almost entirely focused on the second sense I was talking about. People are incensed by the conduct and business strategy of some large agribusiness firms, most notably Monsanto. But I’m not sure that these incensed people have a very good idea what the laboratory techniques we associate with biotechnology actually are. And if not, how can they be so sure that there aren’t some ways to use those techniques (by different organizations, perhaps, with different motivations) that would be ethically acceptable?
I’m still not sure why my 2001 audience was so angry with me, but perhaps they were all so focused on the $$$ to be made from cloning that they took me to be criticizing them for being greedy. Sometimes the lady doth protest too much. But what about today’s outrage against biotechnology? If I couldn’t make this speech to a roomful of scientists, could I make it to a roomful of foodie protestors?
Golly gee, fellas! Find her an empty knee.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
April 21, 2013
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. I’m wondering, “How ‘bout breakfast?”
It’s becoming almost impossible to avoid free breakfast when you are on the road. The B&B thing has spread beyond those charming little mom & pop joints where someone rents a bedroom and treats you to ham & eggs in the morning. Of course this was never the reality in the B&B world. I’ve become quite wary of those “strada” pans that come out of the oven pretending to be a freshly made hot breakfast.There are just enough exceptions to prove the rule that however lumpy and smelly the first B is, don’t underestimate the ability of your charming hostess to exceed that limit when it comes to the second one.
But surely both of my regular readers have already begun to anticipate that this B&B thing is just a random excursion inserted primarily to throw the trolling robots off the scent. Some of the robots have gotten clever enough to insert text from your blog into their algorithmically generated comments. I got one for last week’s blog that asked “How long did it take you to make More Poo?” As tempting as it might be to go on at some length in response to that delightful query, I think I’ll try to crawl off the tangent bandwagon and get back to those chain hotels that are trying to lure you in with the promise of free breakfast.
Now my economist colleagues would be quick to point out that such establishments have simply incorporated the average cost of operating their breakfast nook into the room rate, so in fact you pay for the free breakfast when you pay your lodging bill. But frankly, this answer is just not dark and conspiratorial enough for my taste. No, I’m more inclined to point out that those scrambled eggs that the gawking honkies are scooping onto their plates were made from what egg-insiders like me know as “breakers”. They were poured out of a milk carton back in the little closet that the hotel refers to euphemistically as its “kitchen” and warmed to a gelatinous consistency in an electric frying pan. Meanwhile, those sausage patties arrived at the hotel pre-cooked and toasted to that perfect shade of brownish grey, so that they could be warmed in the frying pan or popped into a microwave for about thirty seconds.
There was a time when you could get out of the hotel and skulk down to a little corner dive café where you would be able to eat a decent hot breakfast for about $5.95, but that time is passing us by. It’s too easy tell the low-wage worker who mops the floor to pour some liquid eggs into a frying pan or pop some refrigerated sausage patties into a microwave. How can you compete with that when you have to break your own eggs? And on top of all that, the bean counters that regulate people who travel on per diem are telling them that they have to eat the free breakfast that comes with the room rate, or else shell out the $5.95 all from their own pocketbook.
There’s a food ethics point in here somewhere. Let’s see if the robots can find it.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
April 14, 2013
I’m reading Stephen Stoll’s book Larding the Lean Earth (2003), and I’ve found something I need to share. Stoll’s book is a history of soil conservation ideas in North America. He’s mainly focused on an interval between about 1820 and the outbreak of the Civil War. It was at that time that writers on agriculture (and they were legion) first started to celebrate an ethic of soil conservation. Not to bore you with too many details (after all, if you insist on being bored with details you can always read Stoll’s book yourself), the idea was that farmers had a moral obligation to practice soil conservation rather than abandoning their farms for the virgin lands that lay to the West.
This was a moral obligation to their neighbors, mind you, and not to the Earth itself, as latter day conservationists would have it. The idea that farmers could have an obligation to the land itself had to wait for Liberty Hyde Bailey and the early decades of the 20th century. There’s a fine statue of Bailey on the MSU campus in the courtyard behind the Plant and Soil Sciences Building. But that’s not what I wanted to write about.
No, the thing that really struck me about Stoll’s book was a little section near the end where he writes about the discovery of large guano deposits in the Caribbean. Guano is excellent fertilizer and American farmers became an insatiable market for boatloads of it starting in the 1870s. Stoll writes that this caused a permanent shift in the mindset of American farmers. No longer would they think of soil fertility as something that had to be generated from within the boundary of the farm itself. Fertile soil could be bought in a bag, and the whole idea of fertility shifted away from being a cycle of nutrients from soil to plants to animal dung and back to soil. Now it became a one-way trip by boat to rail to truck to plant to grocery to mouth ending in what we’ve euphemistically called “poo” here in the Thornapple blog. Poo is a waste product, a source of pollution, and instead being part of a cycle, this kind of poo is just a deadweight cost that people in an industrial economy have to bear. Stoll thinks that this mentality of input agriculture prepared the way for synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides.
I first encountered bat guano as an adolescent reader of Ian Fleming’s book Dr. No. That’s what was nominally being mined on Dr. No’s secret island, if you recall (though it was bauxite in the movie version. Seems that literal references to poo-like substances were a no-no in the early 60s film industry). At about the same time Keenan Wynne was portraying Colonel “Bat” Guano in Dr. Strangelove. A Google search turned up the finding that “JBG” stands alternately for “James Bond Girl” and for “Jamaican Bat Guano”. Mere coincidence? I think not, Chucko. Even then the dark forces of the industrial food system were weaving their spider web. Fleming and Strangelove director Stanley Kubrick must have been embedding clues deep in American pop culture so that your Thornapple blogger could un-earth them for you a half century later.
Still and all, it makes you think. Or does it?
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
April 7, 2013
There are those days that always seem to lie ahead for us. Births and deaths, of course, but especially those days when you can put a particular date on them for a long time in advance: weddings, graduations, retirements… Their advent looms over the present as we wait and prepare for their coming. My life may be more densely furnished with minor versions of such days than many people. To the life of a teacher scheduled with class preparations and final exam days I’ve added a sequence of travel days and days when I have to deliver a certain talk or presentation. My life is constantly one of making sure my ducks are in a row. And then the day arrives. The travel ritual of suitcase, check in and taxicab shifts from rehearsal to performance; I’m in front of the audience and the piece that I’ve gone over in my mind repeatedly will be repeated one final time, but differently—“for real”. There’s a moment in the early minutes of these days when a certain “it’s here” feeling comes over me, and I sense that the game is afoot. Now’s the time to shift from planning and preparation. Now I simply reconcile myself to the fact that the event is going to unfold, and the experience of it is simply to be undergone.
Feast days are both instances and practice times for the experience of arrival. Like a lot of folks, we normally stock the pantry with a lot of generic stuff that can be whipped up as the notion strikes us. To that are added those perishable items that will be eaten sometime soon, maybe tonight. We plan the menu around these cornerstones, but the decision to do so is always opportunistic. Something struck our fancy, or caught our eye at the marketplace. The big feast days—of which there are comparatively few in the contemporary calendar—are different. They have a structure and import that requires advance orchestration: what we will have, who will be there, how will all the various moving parts will be coordinated?
Last week I completed a trip just in time to sit down at the table for the obligatory slice of Dearborn ham that anchors Easter dinner. This is not a longstanding tradition in the Thompson household. We had never heard of Dearborn ham before we moved to Michigan almost ten years ago. But it had been settled that this would the pivot for an Easter dinner with family, and it was a damn good thing that I was able to swoop in and not mess up that particular parade. It was bad enough that I was not around to whip the mashed potatoes (which we omitted in my dishonor). Thanksgiving and Christmas complete the set of feast day dinners for us. There are some other minor traditions (chili dogs at Halloween?) that don’t seem to rise to the level of a rehearsal-performance duet, and as a result they don’t much serve as much preparation of those other, even larger arrival days that punctuate our lives.
Anticipation. As Carly Simon said, it’s making me late. Keeping me waiting. And then there was that ketchup thing, if you are really obsessed with food culture.
But then there are also those mornings where you wake up, catch your breath, and it’s (almost) here. I don’t know of other people have that moment early on a big day/feast day morning, but you should. These are the good old days.
Paul B. Thompson is the W. K. Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
March 31, 2013
If you are one of the two regular readers of the Thornapple blog, you will recall that last week I wrote about the proper way to serve watermelon. To wit, with the rind on. This comment immediately attracted the attention of leading food safety advocates, who disputed the point vociferously. Actually, this is not strictly true. Leading food safety advocates are pretty much oblivious to the Thornapple blog. But I was able to reconstruct the way that they would have responded to the blog if they thought that it had even one scintilla of influence on public opinion, and I can assure you that it would have been vociferously.
The problem with serving watermelon with the rind on from the perspective of a leading food safety advocate is that the rind is where the poo is. Microsoft WordTM is telling me that “poo” is not technically a word at all, but I think you know what I mean. Sometime not long ago there was an outbreak of food poisoning associated with cantaloupe. It seems that people were buying the cantaloupe and slicing it up in their kitchens. In so doing, they were contaminating the fleshy tasty bits of the cantaloupe that people eat with microorganisms that had been living peacefully, minding their own business, on the outside of the melon. Those microorganisms (we used to call them “germs”) got on the outside of the cantaloupe because they were excreted either by a cow, pig or deer living in the vicinity of the melon field, or perchance by a farmworker handling melons. As distasteful as all this sounds, it makes fodder for all manner of modern social movement.
There is, for example, the movement to improve the working conditions of the workers handling the melons. We can blame the employer for not providing adequate sanitary facilities to his or her employees. More relevantly for this week’s blog, we can blame the industrial food system, which is bringing all manner of poo into our homes where it can be inadvertently sliced into fleshy bits that we like to eat. Now, I’m not sure I understand how this problem would not have applied to those melons I bought off the back of someone’s pick-up truck, or those melons that I picked out of a neighbor’s melon field down in South Georgia one time, for that matter. But we’ll just ignore that inconvenient bit of logic for the time being.
The poo problem is also showing up in those re-usable cloth bags that ecologically minded people are taking to grocery store. It seems that people are tossing chunks of shrink-wrapped meat into them at the check-out counter, then tossing the bags back into the trunk of the car after the meat has been transferred to the refrigerator when they get home. It takes but a dribble of juicy meat bits in the fibers of a reusable bag to make an inviting home for the microorganisms that got rubbed off a cantaloupe. They’ll sit there minding their business peacefully until some future grocery store trip gives them a chance to hitch a ride on an apple, a pear or a Cadbury bar. And that’s when the trouble starts.
However, nobody in the industrial food system really seems to care much about this problem in the abstract. The poo hits the fan (if you’ll permit me to morph a common expression for a family blog) when somebody in a social movement suggests that we should eliminate all those paper and plastic bags that they are loading groceries into at your local gigantic mega-market combination grocery, hardware, clothing, sundries and stationary shop. You know what I mean. At this point, the innocent microorganisms minding their own business on cantaloupe rinds become a liability issue when they hitch a ride on somebody’s Cadbury bar. It’s not a big issue with your standard industrial issue plastic or paper bag, mainly because there are too few of them. But let them multiply up in a juicy meat bit that’s had the opportunity to fester in somebody’s car trunk for a week or two, and, well, there you have it. And if the gigantic mega-market combination grocery, hardware, clothing, sundries and stationary shop hasn’t given you the opportunity to use a sanitary paper or plastic bag, then maybe it’s their problem, rather than yours. Or at least some food safety advocate with a law degree will say that it is.
Now there are differences between cantaloupe and watermelon rinds, the former being more likely to be cozy homes for microorganisms than the latter due to the relative smoothness of their skins. But this is all a matter of degree in the mind of an imaginary food safety advocate. So any blogger recommending serving watermelon with the rind on is very probably in league with the gigantic mega-market combination grocery, hardware, clothing, sundries and stationary shops of the world. Or did I get that wrong, now. Maybe it’s the food safety advocate who is in league with the gigantic mega-market combination grocery, hardware, clothing, sundries and stationary shop. It’s actually kind of hard to tell in today’s world of battling social movements.
You get the picture. Maybe you should take that bag out of the trunk and throw it in the washer. Use hot water.
Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
March 24, 2013
Today’s topic in food ethics is the proper way to eat watermelon. I know this is out of season, but cut me some slack. I’m going to assume that the proper way to serve watermelon is with the rind on, cut in a semi-circle or some portion thereof. None of this salad-style stuff for us! How can you make watermelon teeth if there’s no rind?
Explaining watermelon teeth for the uninitiated would take me off on a tangent that truly is better saved for summertime. The driving food ethics question is: Do you work around the bits that are close to the rind, saving the tastier bits that came from the center of the watermelon for last? Or do you go straight to the heart (of the melon, that is)? I’ve always been one of those “Save the best for last types.” My Grandaddy Thompson and my father-in-law Paul Lanier always dug in for the richest, tastiest bites right out of the box. I think this may be one of the fundamental metaphysical divides in human nature.
Now some of you technical types may be saying to yourselves, “Now this isn’t really a question in food ethics at all. At most it’s a matter of aesthetics.” But again I say, cut me some slack here. That, too, is a tangent better served in a warmer season. And were it actually watermelon time in Michigan, I would be begging that watermelon rather than slack be cut. But as you will note from the date atop the page (whenever it is you happen to be reading this), it is late March as I’m writing it. It’s the time of the year that the only watermelon you’re going to get will be at some lousy hotel or cafeteria buffet. And for that kind of watermelon the questions I’m pondering today are pretty much irrelevant.
I must confess that I take “save the best for last” to ridiculous extremes. I have favorite dishes, and by this I don’t mean favorite recipes, but favorite plates and bowls from which my porridge or cottage cheese to eat. Being of the male persuasion, my expectation is that I will gradually use all the plates and bowls in the cupboard before loading them in the dishwasher. No use wasting water, I say. Accordingly, “saving the best for last” means that I use my least preferred bowls and plates first, expecting that I will get around to the pleasure of eating my Grape Nuts from that special blue bowl sometime later in the week when the sink is clogged with all the un-favored dirty bowls awaiting the weekly (or was it monthly?) wash. Trouble is, I live with someone obsessed by a bizarre fixation on tidiness, or maybe it is cleanliness (which, after all, is next to Godliness). She’s always snatching up those dirty beige bowls almost as quickly as I can soil them, rinsing them out and running the dishwasher. I go back to the cupboard expecting that I’ll reap the rewards of my abstemiousness. The best is now available to be had, I’m thinking, but there are heaps of beige bowls still in line for use before I have my chance at the favorite blue one.
So now I’m rethinking my lifelong commitment to saving the best for last. I’m thinking that the next time watermelon season rolls around, I’m going straight to the heart. I think I’ll be a better person for it.
You see, there was a food ethics theme here after all.
Paul B. Thompson holds the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University.
March 17, 2013
I’m going down the road feeling bad. Goin’ down the ro-oh’d feeling bad. I’m going down the road, (feeling bad) lawd lawd. Do’n wanna be treated this-a way.
Ahhh! Now I’m feeling better already. I survived my encounter with the GPS robot who wanted me to drive the rent-a-car right through a very large and heavily padlocked chain-link gate, and I am now safely ensconced within the Atlanta airport, waiting for my flight to Detroit. I’ve got my weak coffee (but who’s complaining) to my side and I have about forty five minutes to post the blog this morning.
I went to college in Atlanta, and I was here back in 1971 when a radical new pizza shop called Everybody’s opened up. I arrived here last week to learn that it is closing. Sad news, but ample opportunity to regale my friends and a few total strangers who were attending the Public Philosophy Network meeting at Emory University about how great it was to get beyond the saltine cracker crust with bland tomato paste toppings of the 1960s and have a tasty, fresh dough rising crust pizza with decent toppings from Everybody’s. I mean it’s also great to regale friends and total strangers at these conferences about how great it was to hear the Jefferson Airplane playing live at the University of Colorado field house back in the sixties, but if we were to be totally honest we would have to admit that not absolutely everything about the sixties was great. And one thing that was not so great was the pizza.
One of the locals was puncturing my stories, talking about how the pizza at Everybody’s wasn’t all that good. Well maybe not by the wood-fired artisanal organic crust pizzas of the present age, but in 1971 Everybody’s was a revelation, I tell you. Ahh! How soon we forget.
I was also able to regale people with stories about how I used to ride my bicycle to school every day, down one big hill and up another one. Since the conference center was at the top of one of those hills, I found many opportunities to reminisce about how I actually could not steam down one hill to build up momentum for the ascent (whichever way I was traveling) because the road is curvy and you can’t see very far in advance, and there was a railroad crossing dead center at the very bottom, and you needed to be prepared to stop. A great story that I’m sure everyone thought to be exceedingly amusing.
Except that when I drove down the hill on Clifton Road this morning, I discovered that there is no railroad crossing, nor is there any sign that there ever has been a railroad track at the bottom of the hill. There is a stop light, which would, in fact, entail much the same caution as a railroad track, but frankly it’s just not such a good story. And this my friends is just one more reason why you should suspect that not everything we read in the Thornapple Blog is true. Aside from the pizza thing, I’m not entirely sure what the food ethics connection in this blog is, so just chalk it up to your friendly blogger’s mental confusion and vexation at living in a world where only robots have reliable memories—so reliable that they are inflexible (it seems) when it comes to new entrance ramps for the Atlanta Rental Car center. As for the rest of us, how soon we forget.
Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University
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