The Continental Op

THE GIRL WITH THE SILVER EYES
DASHIELL HAMMETT

"Little fat detective whose name I don't know"-her voice had a tired huskiness in it, and a tired mockery-"you think I am playing a part, don't you? You think I am playing for liberty. Perhaps I am. I certainly would take it if it were offered me. But- Men have thought me beautiful, and I have played with them. Women are like that. Men have loved me and, doing what I like with them, I have found men contemptible. And then comes this little fat detective whose name I don't know, and he acts as if I were a hag-an old squaw. Can I help then being piqued into some sort of feeling for him? Women are like that. Am I so homely that any man has a right to look at me without even interest? Am I ugly?"

I shook my head. "You're quite pretty," I said, struggling to keep my voice as casual as the words.

"You beast!" she spat, and then her smile grew gentle again. "And yet it is because of that attitude that I sit here and turn myself inside out for you. If you were to take me in your arms and hold me close to the chest that I am already leaning against, and if you were to tell me that there is no jail ahead for me just now, I would be glad, of course. But, though for a while you, might hold me, you would, then be only one of the men with which I am familiar: men who love and are used and are succeeded by other men. But because you do none of these things, because you are a wooden block of a man, I find myself wanting you. Would I tell you this, little fat detective, if I were playing a game?"

I grunted noncommittally, and forcibly restrained my tongue from running out to moisten my dry lips.

"I'm going to this jail tonight if you are the same hard man who has goaded me into whining love into his uncaring ears, but before that, can't I have one whole-hearted assurance that you think me a little more than 'quite pretty'? Or at least a hint that if I were not a prisoner your pulse might beat a little faster when I touch you? I'm going to this jail for a long while-perhaps to the gallows. Can't I take my vanity there not quite in tatters to keep me company? Can't you do some slight thing to keep me from the afterthought of having bleated all this out to a man who was simply bored?"

Her lids had come down half over the silver-gray eyes, her head had tilted back so far that a little pulse showed throbbing in her white throat; her lips were motionless over slightly parted teeth, as the last word had left them. My fingers went deep, into the soft white flesh of her shoulders. Her head went further back, her eyes closed, one hand came up to my shoulder.

"You're beautiful as all hell!" I shouted crazily into her face, and flung her against the door.

BOOK: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

I wasn't forced to wait long after becoming an omnivore for Michael Pollan to extend another hand to lift my gastronomic philosophy further out of the mire. Though I felt this book should probably have served as a conclusory 100 pages of The Omnivore's Dilemma, it was nonetheless an engrossing and important read.

One of the best things about this book is that Pollan, having given us the tools to liberate ourselves from the RDA Food Pyramid, finally commits to giving us some rules to live by. They are as follows:

•Don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.
•Avoid food products containing ingredients that are A) unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup.
•Avoid food products that make health claims.
•Shop the peripheries of the supermarket and stay out of the middle.
•Get out of the supermarket whenever possible.
•Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
•You are what what you eat eats too.
•If you have space, buy a freezer.
•Eat like an omnivore.
•Eat well-grown food from healthy soils.
•Eat wild foods when you can.
•Be the kind of person who takes supplements.
•Eat more like the French. Or the Italians. Or the Japanese. Or the Indians. Or the Greeks.
•Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism.
•Don't look for the magic bullet in the traditional diet.
•Have a glass of wine at dinner.
•Pay more. Eat less.
•Eat meals.
•Do all your eating at a table.
•Try not to eat alone.
•Consult your gut.
•Eat slowly.
•Cook and, if you can, plant a garden.

Of course I am having to fudge nearly all of them. I cannot grow a garden, buy a freezer, pay more (though I can eat less!), and my great-grandmothers would have to have been worldly indeed to recognize all of the foods I eat (I knew all four of them, and though they came to Cascadia from all corners, they had very little truck with ethnic foods), but the rest of the rules are pretty much doable. I should eat at my table, and more slowly, and replace the stubby bottle of Sessions lager with at least a few servings a week of resveratrol, but I do a bit of cooking, I certainly consult my gut, I eat with friends, and, recently, I eat a pretty respectable amount of fruits (to be joined soon enough by vegetables other than carrots). I have waged total war on HFCS, rarely eat anything with dozens of ingredients (though these wasabi almonds I found recently have more than five, sadly), and if there has ever been anyone who ate like a subcontinental Greco-Franco-Italo-Sino-Japonic, it is this guy.

That said, I have a ways to go. I currently eat more like a scavenger than an omnivore, but I do okay. I expect to do even better seasonally, that is to say, this season. We'll see!

BOOK: The Code of the Woosters

Of the few people who might be reading this, most have seen Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry portray that great duo, Jeeves and Wooster. However, I doubt if any of them have read much of the man himself, PG Wodehouse. (Disclaimer: I have just begun, myself.)

I can offer a palliative:

I was standing there, hoping for the best, when my meditations were broken in upon by an odd gargling sort of noise, something like static and something like distant thunder, and to cut a long story short this proved to proceed from the larynx of the dog Bartholomew.
He was standing on the bed, stropping his front paws on the coverlet, and so easy was it to read the message in his eyes that we acted like two minds with but a single thought. At the exact moment when I soared like an eagle on to the chest of drawers, Jeeves was skimming like a swallow on to the top of the cupboard. The animal hopped from the bed and, advancing into the middle of the room, took a seat, breathing through the nose with a curious, whistling sound, and looking at us from under his eyebrows like a Scottish elder rebuking sin from the pulpit.
And there for a while the matter rested.
Jeeves was the first to break a rather strained silence.
'The book does not appear to be here, sir.'
'Eh?'
'I have searched the top of the cupboard, sir, but I have not found the book.'
It may be that my reply erred a trifle on the side of acerbity. My narrow escape from those slavering jaws had left me a bit edgy.
'Blast the book, Jeeves! What about this dog?'
'Yes, sir.'
'What do you mean - "Yes, sir"?'
'I was endeavouring to convey that I appreciate the point which you have raised, sir. The animal's unexpected appearance unquestionably presents a problem. While he continues to maintain his existing attitude, it will not be easy for us to prosecute the search for Mr Fink-Nottle's notebook. Our freedom of action will necessarily be circumscribed.'
'Then what's to be done?'
'It is difficult to say, sir.'
'You have no ideas?'
'No, sir.'

BOOK: The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

In keeping with this month of food blogging, I thought it only fair to share my thoughts about this book, which apparently I was the last to actually read.

Before I do that, however, it is best to explain my strange relationship with food. At around twelve years of age I became a vegetarian for ethical reasons. Not long afterwards, I decided that to do my conscience justice, I would need to also become a vegan. And so, for nearly seven miserable years I abstained from animal products (though with a strongly Buddhist bent to my philosophy, I would eat whatever food would otherwise be wasted, though such animal consumption was still fairly infrequent). When I was 20, and living in Eugene (where it would have probably been easier than any other place on earth to maintain veganism, certainly the opposite of my experience of living in Missoula), I started to consume animals that I believed to be predators. Pollan himself actually revisits the anecdote that convinced me, one of Ben Franklin watching some anglers catch fish. He thought to himself that if these animals eat each other, he could think of no reason why they themselves should not also be eaten. Though as Pollan points out, this was only after the fish had hit the frying pan and begun to smell "admirably well." This list of creatures I could now eat, though arbitrarily excluding any kind of mammal, included most flightless birds, all lizards, and many types of fish (who I once heard called "swimming vegetables" by a friend).

All of which led me to the dietary choice I have had made for several years now, up until this week: I would eat non-mammalian predator animals, and do my best to procure dairy from those animals such as enjoyed good lives.

It is fair to say that I have been more concerned about eating chicken twice a day than I have been with reflecting on what the implications of this choice actually are. Despite what I have been eating so far this month, and though the recent posts in this blog would seem to call me a liar, I swear I usually eat fairly wholesome food. I singlehandedly brought my weight down 100 lbs solely by dieting. I try to avoid overly processed things. Though I don't eat much in the way of vegetables, I was not consuming really terrible fried meats either. But if it was the ethical quandary that brought me to this point, I wasn't doing a very good job of showing it.

About vegetarianism/veganism Pollan makes several points (which I will sum up in my own words):

-One cannot impose human values on animals.
Put simply, the life of a domesticated animal lacks a freedom that makes many humans feel it is degraded, or we imagine that they pine for their freedom when really they may prefer "not getting [their] head bitten off by a weasel within a couple of weeks."

-In many areas that humans choose to live, lack of human canivory leads to a non-sustainable chain of agriculture.
Indeed this is true in most places. It is well and good to eat greens instead of flesh, but when those greens are flown in from Argentina, sprayed with pesticides, and harvested by machines, etc etc, any moral high ground is lost utterly by the new externalities it creates. Further, a closed energy loop of sun-plant-human is neither desirable or sustainable from an ecological perspective. Without animals, we lose the ability to naturally sustain the soil the plants are grown in. While it is true that we may not have to eat these animals, they do need to die to complete the circuit. Return to the above point about the weasel, and then look south to the next.

-Nature rarely provides a good death.
Pollan writes "in the wild [animals] don't get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones." For example, he gives a grisly account of how bears will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. To be fair, this is a worst case scenario, but the best they could probably hope for is to be chewing some grass one day and be taken unawares by a mountain cat who, we can hope, does a quick job of it. Indeed, there are worse deaths. Languishing in a factory farm would be worse. But what about living their life on a farm in which they can still act free, but are eventually slaughtered as painlessly as possible?

I do hope the gentle reader will take it as given that, at least from an ecologically ethical standpoint, this view is correct. This is certainly the strongest part of Pollan's argument. But it was not out of environmental principles that I began this journey into specialized eating. On the contrary, I eschewed meat out of concern for the animal involved.

Why, then, the sea change? I am convinced that the natural order of things exists for a good reason. The earth ought to know what it is doing, and our every attempt to undermine this expertise has resulted in disaster. Whether by an agriculture based so largely on corn that putting America under a mass spectrometer we would see nothing but kernels (so much so that now we want to turn vast amounts of corn into gas to power the trucks to take more corn to the animals that are being engineered to eat it, which we will burn more corn gas to go and get and consume with a carbonated beverage made largely of corn after which we will eat a dessert made largely of corn corn corn corn corn corn), or by a system of meat-manufacture that puts an innumerable amount of animals in the basest possible conditions of abject misery and endangers the health not only of the eater, but of any human susceptible to the drug-resistant microbes that such factory conditions and the overuse of antibiotics has, does, and will continue to create.

Yet I still digress back to the ecological concerns! Let me try again.

I am convinced that this natural order exists for a good reason, and that straying from it results in disaster. Thus, animals are a necessary part of our food chain. I am also convinced that an animal can enjoy a good life, free of misery and fear, at the hands of humans. In fact, I believe this is almost certainly the only way 99.9% of animals will ever experience such a life. Our pets already do.

So if we are forced to do things nature's way, and animals are obliged to take part, and these animals must die (as we all will!) to complete this loop, and we want these animals to have a good death, and their meat is nutritious to us, what is left?

We must be the stewards not only of the land, but of the animals. Where human cultivation exists, and domesticated animals take part in it, we must insist that it models nature as closely as possible. We must practice polycultural farming, we must feed the land at least as much as it feeds us, and we must insist that those sentient components of the chain are allowed a dignified life, and death, that allows them to express what Pollan calls their "creaturely character."

There are farmers who farm sustainably. There are farmers who farm ethically. There are farmers who farm locally. Until we begin to vote with our feet and with our dollar, industrial produce and meat will continue to deaden our world.

Examining the many stages of growth my diet has undertaken, I view it with a linearity not just of time, but of logic. Each step was taken with the knowledge of what came before it and with an attempt to improve it. If, as I now intend, I begin to eat ethically appropriate meat, I will be doing a lot more for the cause of the steer than I ever did as a vegan and eating nothing but industrial grain.

I am an omnivore anew.

BOOK: Biomimicry

Janine Benyus
Biomimicry

Premise:

1. Nature runs on sunlight.
2. Nature uses only the energy it needs.
3. Nature fits form to function.
4. Nature recycles everything.
5. Nature rewards cooperation.
6. Nature banks on diversity.
7. Nature demands local expertise.
8. Nature curbs excesses from within.
9. Nature taps the power of limits.

If it sounds simple, then you are ahead of the industrial curve. Benyus explores several different fields to which these lessons would be beneficial. Among them are agriculture, energy production, manufacture of goods, medicine, computing, and the market. Benyus comes off as something of a Luddite, and her frequent depictions of the noble savage rankle a bit, but neither stop her from interviewing truly innovative scientists and businesspeople who are working to fully realize this concept of biomimicry. From polyculturalist farmers to industrialists looking to green their business, Benyus points both to existing problems and solutions already in place.

Readers of Cradle to Cradle will recognize a fair bit of prescience in this lesser known or heralded work. While this book could benefit from a second and more recent edition, (for example her "examples" of biomimicry in two businesses who make a portion of their trade in recycling what are probably dangerous petrochemical substances in their apparel), it is a solid and readable bit of inspiration toward a future of working with, rather than against, nature.

Benyus hits on two points that I just can't quite hold truck with. Her first is the oversimplification of "primitive" cultures. While a deep and spiritual connection to the land is admirable, we must not confuse creation myths with ecological wisdom. While Amerindians might have been born conservationists, a little bit of disconnection from the land has allowed us to discover some very important things about what is at stake and how about how to act as individuals. The same is very true about non-renewable resources, something which Benyus holds as a sacred trust for future generations. Provided we don't drown ourselves with their use, better it seems to have burned them all up in the name of progress that they may never need to be used again. I wouldn't trade the things that we humans have gained with them for the world, literally. Now, however, is the point that I am sure Benyus would agree with me on that we must free ourselves from them.

Read it, but with a sharp eye.

SPOILER: It sucks!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

There is nothing to spoil. No one who is very important actually dies. Harry is the final horcrux, as we all knew (and as Rowling denied in interviews). Every single plot element is telegraphed well in advance.

Now I know there are certain things that it would be highly silly to criticize a children's book about, but this series honestly used to be better. They used to be adorable self-contained stories with just a hint of arc, an idea that seems to have been thrown out by book five (around the same time, it seems, Rowling began getting paid by each narrow margined, triple spaced, size 16 typed page).

Don't bother.