What do you care about? What do you want to do with your life in terms of impacting others? I know you pretty well and I honestly don’t know.
I got asked this by someone important to me the other day. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked about my beliefs or my direction in life. And it won’t be the last. I normally don’t talk much about such things, but I am going to give it a go and spell it out for you as best I can.
Let me start by saying I don’t have all the answers. I am flawed and can be contradictory. We all are, if we’re honest with ourselves.
Let me say next that I’ve been reticent about revealing myself publicly largely because we live in an increasingly hateful and polarized society. So I ask you to be respectful in the comments if you believe strongly about something I am about to write about. That goes for anyone responding to someone within the comments. Civility and respect are not negotiable here.
Questions rolling in my mind, I took another one of my “thinking walks” through St. Paul today, similar to the one I did on Christmas Day, to sort things out. Turns out I saw a few things relevant to the task at hand. More on that in a moment.
Almost eight miles later, while eating ramen, I managed to boil it down to this: I do what I do in order to be useful to others, to encourage wise, participatory use of our natural world, and, most importantly, to be kind, tolerant and sympathetic — especially to people who are not like you.
My first response to my friend’s question was that I help people get more out of their wild foods. This I do well. The notes I receive from readers who use my recipes and techniques lift me up when I am down. I cherish them.
There is, however, a subtext to why I’m so passionate about whole animal (or plant) cookery. My reckoning is that if you learn to use more of any given fish or plant or animal, you will find yourself killing fewer of them. I started hunting largely to limit my connection to the industrial food system, and I’ve managed to go damn near 20 years buying almost no meat and fish for my home.
I kill when I need to, and that’s it. I just spent four days at a duck hunting camp and never fired a shot because my freezer is already full.
I view animals, and even plants to some extent, as fellow beings, peers in many ways. Our ability to kill is near limitless, should we choose to, and our society wastes food at a nauseating rate whether it’s hunted or bought. Even within the confines of the law, a hunter can kill a bird, take just the breast meat and toss the rest. Legal maybe, but to me that is a moral crime. So for 17 years, I’ve set about offering you options, should you choose not to just breast out your birds or take only the backstrap off a deer.
This leads me to conservation. I am a Life Member of Quail Forever and the California Waterfowl Association, and am a member of a number of other conservation groups, some hunting-related, some not. Joining a “critter club” is an easy and obvious choice if you are a hunter, angler or gatherer: If you extract resources from an ecosystem, you should do something to give back to that ecosystem, beyond the mere purchase of a license.
I travel a lot, and this has implications for the environment. Years ago, I traded in my truck for a car that gets 34 miles per gallon, so that’s helped a little. Until we have more and better electic charging stations, however, I can’t switch to an EV just yet. Someday though. Beyond that, I am working to offset my impact even more, probably by something as simple as planting trees. I like trees and they eat carbon for breakfast. Donating and volunteering for the Arbor Day Foundation or the Nature Conservancy are great for this.
Giving to help trees and prairies and marshes and birds is important, yes, but safe. And easy. Giving to help people poses more challenges, because we don’t hold our fellow humans as blameless as we do nature.
I have tried to use food and recipes as a way to introduce you to cultures and people you might know only from the news, or rumor. The more you know a culture’s food, the more likely you are to understand and appreciate that culture — or at the very least tolerate it.
Tolerance is a misunderstood word. It literally means to put up with someone, not like them. To me, this should be the American baseline. We are a diverse country, made up of thousands of groups of humans. E pluribus unum should mean something.
It would be great if we could all get along happily, understanding each other’s backgrounds and needs and whims and humor and customs. That isn’t going to happen anytime soon. The least we can do is recognize that that other person has a right to live their life as they see fit.
If you love Mexican food but hate Mexicans, or love hip-hop but hate black people, I’m sorry, but I just don’t have time for you. Go somewhere else.
Where does all this come from?
I grew up in New Jersey, and while my high school was mostly white, my teenage jobs were all mixed: My main mentor when I worked as a carpet cleaner after school was an ex-con named Gaylord Reid, a black guy who was one of the kindest humans (and best carpet cleaners) I’ve ever met. Gaylord taught me a lot over my high school years, including that ex-felons can be perfectly good people who just made a mistake.
Later, I worked as a reporter and low-level editor at the Madison Times Weekly Newspaper, the black newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. I was the only white employee. I was also one of only two white employees at an Ethiopian restaurant called Horn of Africa. Suffice to say I learned more in those few years about race relations and what black people go through that I had in my lifetime before that.
As a newspaper reporter, I mostly covered politics, which was an education in and of itself, but when I came to California I covered agriculture and got to know farm workers. That was eye opening. The realities of immigrant farmworker life are an American tragedy. Makes me want to punch people who blithely toss slightly bruised vegetables in the trash (not even the compost!) The work it takes to put cheap food on your table is astounding.
I quietly seethe at the racist jokes I hear from time to time while at hunting camps, knowing full well that I get to hear them only because I am a white guy. I rarely say anything. I’m not proud of that, but I’m not in charge at these deals, and I can say that I’ve never heard anything racist said at my own culinary hunts. Hat tip to all of you who attend them.
So yeah, racial justice and a general tolerance of others is more than a little important to me. The bad shit I’ve seen over the years happen to my “not white” friends has, at times, been blood curdling.
But my final word on tolerance goes to those dazzling urbanites out there who love to piss all over rural people and “flyover states” like North Dakota or Nebraska. I loathe those jokes as much as I do those against ethnic groups. This is one reason why I love to feature recipes from Appalachia or the Great Plains. There are good things in rural areas, people.
Other than this essay, I don’t plan on beating you over the head with any of this. If I can lead at all, it is through quiet example.
I give to food banks, community gardens and seed saving non-profits. Sometimes I cook at soup kitchens. Food security means a lot to me. For the most part, I’ve always had it — I’ve been poor, but even at my worst, I had something to eat, even if it was just rice and tunafish. But I know lots of people who haven’t.
Many of those are immigrants. Immigrants are some of the bravest people I know. There’s a great meme noting that accented English is the sound of courage. As a native English speaker who spends a lot of time in Mexico, I live this. We’re all just trying to get by, trying our best to make our way in this world.
So I’ve asked the local Latino aid organization to help Spanish-speaking immigrants with their English. It’s simply a fact that if you’re in the United States and can’t speak English, you are at a disadvantage. I’ve spent my life as a word nerd and a writer who has studied many languages, and there’s a need for volunteers. Count me in.
And I reckon that if I am profiting from Mexican recipes, I should find a way to give back to the people who created them, no? It’s only fair. This is one way to do it. There will be others.
My bottom line is this: You do you, but if you want my advice it would be to find two places to help, one for nature, one for humanity.
Maybe help immigrants. Or help veterans. Or help immigrant veterans, I don’t know. But help someone else. Start local. And that brings me to my walk (never did think I’d get to it, did you?) As I walked, I saw dozens of locally owned businesses that I’d like to shop at — businesses I didn’t know existed. Now I do. They’re all owned by people like you, regular folks trying to make a living. Give them a hand. Buy their stuff. Eat their food.
If you don’t have money, volunteer. If you have money, donate. If you have money and time, do both. Plant trees. Pick trash out of a marsh. Help someone learn English. Go across the street and see if that old lady is OK. Talk with her. Maybe make her muffins if she likes them.
Do something outside yourself. You don’t have to tell anyone. I hadn’t really, until now. You’ll find you like yourself better once you do.
Thoughtful post.
In a way, it pains me that a person of your caliber feels it necessary to take accounts and justify his time spent here on this planet. The number of people you've touched through your writing, the joy of discovery you've brought through sharing your colorful stories and recipes and techniques, even the moments of connection when one recognizes an ingredient that has hitherto been simply a piece of the landscape but suddenly become an essential component to a whole new taste profile, these are the things that should be self-evident that what you do MATTERS-- and matters to a great number of us!
I can't count the number of times I've opened my inbox to find the perfect dish featuring whatever I've picked or gathered or stashed away in the freezer awaiting the proper mood to tackle it for supper. Or commiserated with you as you've woven heartache or disappointment into something sumptuous to share with a friend. Or just opened my eyes to new possibilities and combinations when I'm stuck in some culinary rut and lack the imagination to see what's right there under my nose.
I know it often seems that much of today's society is in chaos and heading toward catastrophe, but then here come your words as a gentle reminder that we have the choice-- all of us-- to follow a pathway that leads to commonality and reconciliation and compassion, even if it's just as simple (or as profound) as preparing something wholesome and timeless for someone else to sit down and enjoy with us at the table. It's hard to remain hateful toward someone who's fed you with thoughtfulness and generosity-- or conversely, toward someone who despite your differences is genuinely appreciative of a fine meal graciously prepared and thoughtfully served -- whether that's in person or in pixels.
Please never doubt that what you do here has repercussions that go far beyond "just" a simple food blog, and that the connection you've made with so many of us serves a broader purpose in bringing folks together in celebration of something that connects us as humans-- the enjoyment of the gift of good food broken in good faith.
Thank you for another lovely essay, Hank.