A Prayer for Death in Passivity, Apathy and Abuse

"There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people." - Wendell Berry.


Articles like this from the Huffington Post infuriate me and millions like me, but the worst part is that that's even possible. If they start jailing people for recording the abuse of animals, it's our fault. It's because we (as a whole) haven't learned a god damn thing from the thousands and thousands of hours they've already recorded! Who hasn't seen the inhumane conditions their food comes from? Very few. But who hasn't ignored it? Not enough. If we simply ate better, none of this would be an issue, and we'd have all the power, not to mention sweet bods, healthy hearts, and clear consciences.


Nothing is more powerful than food. As Michael Pollan - among countless other brilliant food writers - has pointed out, you vote with your mouth 3 times a day. If you seriously want things to change in this country, you have way more control than you think. Corporations like Monsanto and big agriculture play a huge role in our government, because the government governs the people, and people gots to eat. What the people eat is up to the people however. Support a small farmer, stop eating shitty meat, stop eating fast food, get your food from the farmer's market, change gonna come.


Happy Tuesday.

How I Came to Live in a Barn: Part 4

Welcome to Friday and another edition of "How I Came to Live in a Barn," the series that strives to connect drinking to farming as relevantly as humanly possible.

As a quick preface to this series, from April to December of 2010 I lived in a barn. No electricity, no running water, no kidding. During that time I worked on a legitimately (though proudly uncertified) organic farm in Southern Kentucky. This series is about the many whims, fascinations and revelations that eventually inspired me to drop everything and go farming. Once we catch up to the present, I'll use the occasion to explain what I'm up to now, beyond the blaug. Is this preface going to appear at the beginning of the entire series? Damn straight. Ready? Wunderbar.

How I Came to Live in a Barn: Books

A great book begets great curiosity. You find yourself in places like restaurants cooking; in New York City drinking; in the vineyards of France tasting dirt; and living in a barn because books exist, and because they beget such powerful curiosity. A bartender friend of mine once suggested that a good book should change you––this is an homage to a few of those books.

As I sat in the garden that fall in Burgundy, minding my own business, I was suddenly accosted by Michael Pollan's genius. Sometimes a good book is just well-written and I've experienced many of those, but sometimes a good book is both well-written and well-timed, and those books can become something more than just books, but revelations. "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was precisely that.

The book had been exhaustingly recommended to me, I just hadn't got to it yet. Finally a good friend shoved it in my hands and demanded I read it while in France. When I opened the book, I had just come from tasting dirt at Bertrand Gautherot's house (see last week's post), and was more-than-a-little vulnerable. I was familiar with the issues Pollan focuses on––conventional agriculture, big-organic, localvorism, etc.––but I'd never paid any real attention to them. Having gained the perspective of Bertrand's methods versus those of his neighbor's, the subject was suddenly tangible. Also, Pollan has this way of writing that makes it seem like your super-logical buddy Mike is just saying "Hey dude, this conventional farming shit is kinda messed up," and then proceeds to detail why––masterfully and without pretension. After this book, I became annoyingly fastidious in my food choices. I read labels intensely, went to the farmer's market often, and began to read more about food––not just wine. In a lot of ways, this book was the beginning of my road to the farm, and as I heard time and time again last year, I was not alone in this.

Kermit Lynch did a number on me as well. The first time I read "Adventures on the Wine Route" I was way too impressionable. Not only did the sentiment of the book speak to my convictions, but the style with which it was written spoke to my sensibilities as a reader. At the time I first read it, I was progressively drinking more French and Italian wines, mostly organic, and wasn't sure exactly what made them so different––so much better. Kermit helped me to understand.

Like all great works, it's timeless. It was first published in 1988 but reads like it could've been published yesterday. I devour it once a year, and take something new from it each time. If you ask me what my favorite book is, I'd be hard pressed to say another. It's a book about wine, but it's also about everything. To me, it's about wine in the way "The Sun Also Rises" is about bullfighting, and I write, sell, think and drink the way I do with many nods to Kermit.

Lastly (I say lastly because I'm limiting myself to three here) is Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution" which I mention just as much for the book as for how I was introduced to it. A man by the name of Eric Texier recommended I read it, and afterward I realized something I'd never realized before: I know nothing about nature. It's a wonderfully poetic read, endlessly quotable and never overly technical, but it's mainly about nature. I loved the book but knew I'd love it more if I could understand it's subject, and felt compelled to follow Fukuoka's example.

Fukuoka was an everyday man turned farmer who developed a style of no-till natural farming that works with nature's example, rather than trying to control it. It's another timeless classic and a word you will increasinly begin to hear in reference to farming practices: Fukuoka-style. More and more farmers are moving towards no-till, non-intervention, permaculture-like methods and Fukuoka is among the most widely-known voices. Texier was inspired by his writings and next week, we'll talk about the role he and another natural winemaker played in my future... as if introducing me to Fukuoka wasn't enough.

But there are so many books that belong here, so many writers. If you were to traverse the route from my living in a barn to my childhood, you could simply follow the trail of books (as well as breadcrumbs, respectfully) until you arrived at a skateboarding young Fraust rocking a Wu-Tang t-shirt and baggy-ass jeans quoting "Ishmael" wildly, because that's more or less where it all began.

Postscript: The best part about writing this was that the only book I mentioned that I don't have a copy lent out, is Kermit's. It's the only one I never lend.

Eating Animals II: eating vegetables

In preperation for Friday's post, I got to thinking about animals...

This summer along with lambs, cows, and pigs, we raised turkeys. We decided not to raise the heritage breed, but to raise the conventional, broad-breasted turkeys, and to raise them unconventionally. They lived their entire lives outside, protected from predation by solar-electrified fencing, with constant visits from your's truly. I loved those turkeys. I loved Tomahawk, and I loved Iceberg. I loved Galliopo, Chaos, Gunnison, Gravner and Beardo. I named them, too, because I was a fool in love. Then November came and we had to process them.

As Michael Pollan has pointed out, "process" is a kind term for killing, cleaning and packaging, but that's what it is: killing. The night before, we loaded them all in the truck, and as the truck pulled away with all of my buddies staring at me, my heart sank, and the next day we killed them. I helped. I can't be more honest when I say it was the hardest day of my life, and I still haven't reconciled it completely. Killing is not easy, and truthfully, I'm glad it's not easy. I'm glad it was hard on me. It shouldn't be easy.

Having raised food in this manner I look at food I didn't raise very differently. And this doesn't just apply to meat, but to vegetables as well.

It's hard in the winter to get fresh, local, organic vegetables. Hard, but not impossible. It's important to do so however, as an animal lover, vegetarian, or what have you, because the chemicals, preservatives, clear-cutting and soil depletion involved in conventional vegetable production (not to mention genetic modifications, poisoning of ground water, encouragement of monocultures, etc. after etc. after etc.) is massively detrimental to wildlife and humans alike. Get your veggies from organic, local farmers when you can. The devastation caused by conventional vegetable farming is less spectacular than feedlots obviously, but it's not necessarily less harmful in the long run. I didn't intend on this being some brand of public service announcement, but that's sorta what it's become. A vegetarian is equally as responsible for making responsible food choices as an omnivore. And, as a shameless natural wine plug, both are equally as responsible for making good beverage choices to go with their diets. Drink wisely, eat wisely, still party, but do it responsibly. After last season on the farm, I can't see it any other way.

Now enjoy the lamby lambs. I call her Boogie.

Slow Food

<---- Flood line on barn. The window on the right is my room.

I remember the day we got the pigs––I mean, are you kidding, I was pumped. It was a memorable week all around, really. The flooding in Nashville wasn't limited to Nashville––many of our farming friends in and around our little wonderland in zone 6 were effected. One friend lost all the topsoil he'd ever built––something akin to losing your life's work in a weekend. There was 11 inches of water in my room in the barn and I kayaked for the first time that day, directly out of that barn. That next week we got the pigs.

We raised the pigs in what will become the 2012 garden for the majority of the summer, then moved them into the forest to finish them on acorns, hickory nuts, roots and whatever slop we had around. I spent a lot of time with the pigs, preparing their slop with the help of fermentation, and trying not to get too attached to them––a grave mistake I made with the turkeys. The pigs and turkeys both have wonderful stories, and I will get to those in the coming months. For now, however, onto the eggs...

The hens are out on pasture, they follow behind the cows and lamb in the Management Intensive Grazing System, similar to that outlined by Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin in "The Omnivore's Dilemma." The idea is that you keep the livestock in small paddocks to help concentrate their manure and move them to new grass often. If left to their own devices, cows will happily eat only the grass they like––the candy and ice cream, as Salatin describes it––and hang out in the shady treeline where they will drop their manure and fertilize the living daylights out of their lounge spots, not the pastures. In our system, we limit the space they can fertilize with electrified netting, and move them every 12 hours. Every 3 days we pull our chicken shacks (a roost, a feeder and an egg-mobile) behind. The chickens then spread out the manure in search of nutritious, buggy treats, and we collect the eggs daily.










The plastic on the high tunnel was put up this summer, and it was an intensely hot project. Once done, we plowed and tilled it, then planted spinach, chard, carrots, kale, radishes, etc., and kept it cultivated. What irrigation we need comes from a gravity fed pump, and there is no additional heating. I can't say enough about how amazing this project has been, though––not much is growing these days, but I picked my spinach on Monday.

The last piece to this puzzle is the english muffin, which came from Whole Foods, the uncontested birth place of the english muffin. Naturally.

I guess you could call this a summary. A very extreme summary. A small look at the things it took to make my breakfast this morning. The reality is that this sandwich was no less than nine months in the making. Despite how hard the work is, and how hard it is to justify taking the life of a pig (a very controversial topic within myself), I did my best to do all of that justice. If working on a farm did one thing to me (and it did many), it was give my breakfast a story, one I can't help but think about every time I eat absolutely anything,


Breakfast: a sausage, egg and spinach sandwich on an english muffin. But that doesn't tell any sort of story, now does it?