Would You Like a Side of Acorns with that Seal?

We know that sometime after the harvest of 1621 the Plymouth colonists shared a feast with their native neighbors. Although we don't know what they did eat, we have a good idea of what was not included on the menu. Surprisingly, some foods that we consider Thanksgiving staples did not appear on the original groaning board.

Ham, for example. Although the colonists had brought pigs with them from England, there's no evidence that they had butchered a hog at this point. They probably did eat wild turkey, goose, venison, or grouse; it's just as likely that the first Thanksgiving included some fatty and nutritious seal, which at the time was plentiful in the waters surrounding Cape Cod.

Although cranberries might have appeared on the table, the colonists lacked sugar, so their wild turkey was not adorned with cranberry sauce. There's little doubt corn was part of the meal, but it would have been dried corn at this time of the year. The season for fresh corn had ended before the harvest.

Neither sweet potatoes or potatoes were common in New England at this point in time, so if you're planning a historically accurate Thanksgiving you can leave these off the menu. The residents of Plymouth Plantation certainly had no notion of the marshmallow and, remember, no sugar, so candied sweet potatoes would have been as foreign a concept to them as General Foods International Coffee.

It goes without saying that not even Squanto possessed a ready supply of french cut green beans, cream of mushroom soup, and Durkee dried onion rings, doesn't it?

Finally, historians have uncovered no evidence of a Puritan recipe for pumpkin pie. In fact, the colonists not only lacked sugar, they lacked milk; no cows made the crossing on the Mayflower. Pumpkin would have made an appearance at the feast, maybe even stewed pumpkin, but no pumpkin pie.

Enjoy whatever you've decided to cook tomorrow. Rejoice in the fact that you're not huddled around a fire pit eating seal and are instead quaffing quantities of beer glued to the illuminated box of football. Plus ca change...

Squanto Would Have Loved This

I'm actually going to post a recipe here, or at least what passes for a recipe in my kitchen. The secret to cooking is to, at all times, attempt to make what has begun as healthy as unhealthy as possible, and to make what begins unhealthy as fat-filled and calorific as possible. Adhere to these standards and everyone will believe you are a good cook.

Keeping these tenets in mind, the only thing better than bacon is candied bacon. I know it sounds weird, but it's not. It's delicious.

First, buy some decent thick-cut bacon and fry it until it's medium-well, crisp but not too crisp. Put it aside, clean out the pan. In the clean skillet, melt together one cup of sugar or brown sugar, three tablespoons of honey, and two tablespoons of water. Cook on medium high until it stops bubbling and has turned into a syrup. Turn the heat to low and place the bacon strips into the syrup, turning once until coated. Put the coated bacon on wax or parchment paper and let it dry.

Eat the candied bacon until you puke.

Serves anywhere from one to six, depending on how much sugar and fat you and your friends and family can eat at a sitting.

Why Burgers Grow on Stalks

Unfortunately last night's meeting did not feature fisticuffs. I did get home early enough to make a dent in my Netflix queue, and feel compelled to recommend King Corn, a smart, funny, engaging documentary about how our food is produced. While driving across the country, two friends realize that all the corn grown in Iowa is not edible sweet corn but instead the beginnings of processed food. They decide to rent an acre, move to Iowa to farm it, and follow their corn into the food chain.

You won't learn anything from the film that you don't already know from the work of Michael Pollan. Our bodies are mainly corn. When we eat meat we're eating corn, because the cows have been confined on feedlots and quickly fattened with cheap corn. Drink a soda, or eat cookies or candy, and you're consuming corn in the form of high fructose corn syrup. By attempting to follow their crop from the field to the table the filmmakers show exactly how and why this is the case. Along the way, they give us the history of our current Farm Bill and the rationale behind farm subsidies that pay farmers to produce more and more corn, more corn than can be eaten fresh so by necessity more and more corn that, in its natural state, is inedible. We also watch them attempt to taste their crop, turn part of their yield into homemade high fructose corn syryp, and visit one of the feedlots that is the destination for about a third of their acre's bounty.

Most intresting is their simple illustration of the economics that leads to agribusiness. Once they arrive in Iowa, they sign up for government subsidies for their acre. That year's basic subsidy is $28/acre, paid half before planting and half after the harvest. Their yield was about 180 bushels, which where selling for about $1.58/bushel at harvest. After expenses, they were around $19 in the red for their acre. The basic subsidy offset this loss; add in additional government incentives (the amount of which they didn't explain - I'm making a guess here) and the profit was maybe $12 an acre. This is why the family farm can't sustain itself. The price of equipment isn't part of this formula, only the price of fertilizer, herbicide, and seed. In order to make barely enough to lease and service the large tractors needed for this kind of farming one would have to farm at least 1,000 acres, although bringing in $120,000 a year might not be enough. Farms must get bigger and bigger, with greater and greater yields, in order to be profitable.

The only real solution would be a change in our subsidy policy, to go back to subsidizing controlled yields in order to keep the price of grain high rather than encouraging overproduction and therefore cheap grain. On the other hand, because of our current farm policy, the price of food is cheaper than it's ever been. Remember when steak was a luxury? Cheap corn makes beef affordable, and makes the dollar menu possible.

Rent the film and see all this for yourself. In addition to being thought-provoking, it has a killer soundtrack and is beautifully shot and edited. You'll be glad you saw it.

Meeting-palooza

I began the week frustrated by the fact that I have a meeting each and every night, plus at least one daytime meeting three out of the five days. That's a whole lot of municipal government in action, folks. As it turns out, though, we've got a full moon right now, so thus far the meetings have been incredibly action-packed.

It all started with the Zoning Hearing Board Monday night. I was there to hear testimony on an item that ended up being continued until next month, but before that happened the Board held a hearing on a request for a variance to allow a warehouse to be converted into an artist's live/work space. The warehouse is situated in an alley in the most densely populated neighborhood of my city; the variance was to waive the requirement to provide off-street parking for two cars. In other words, granting the variance would mean that two additional vehicles would fight for the very limited parking available in the alley.

Current residents of the surrounding blocks packed the meeting. Parking, as you might guess, is an extremely emotional issue. So emotional that a fistfight almost broke out. So emotional that one resident called the Board a bunch of a-holes, screamed that the meeting was a joke, and incited his friends and neighbors to verbally abuse the Board and the applicant. Someone speaking in support of the applicant was shouted down and called "beside the point." After all that, the applicant got his variance, and will now have to live among neighbors who resent him and his car.

Last night it was on to the Recreation Board, normally a sedate, boring, and pointless-seeming hour of my time. Little did I know that football season had just ended and the recriminations just begun. The room was packed with angry coaches and parents. The issues? Trophies for pee-wee football. Trophies are unfair! Little kids love trophies! Trophies cause fights! Since the trophies were already purchased they will be distributed, but a policy will be developed for 2009. Next issue: some kids didn't get to play in every game. Parents screamed at coaches, coaches screamed back, after an hour and a half we hadn't even gotten past public comment and to the agenda, and I'd had enough and left.

Tonight should prove equally interesting. I'm attending a discussion of the creation of a BID in our downtown, which is in effect an additional property tax. If the full moon turns parking and pee-wee football into infernos of feeling, I can't imagine the effect it will have on a debate about the creation of a new tax.

High Atop the Grassy Knoll

It's the week before Thanksgiving, which means it's time for our annual reconsideration of the Kennedy assassination. PBS got things started last night by rerunning Oswald's Ghost, a documentary that's useful in that it outlines the day's events and all explanations of said events, both logical and illogical, in a mere hour and a half. Lone gunman, magic bullet, grassy knoll, CIA/Bay of Pigs/Castro, FBI/mob, David Ferry and a band of not-so-merry gay men, Oswald as government agent, Oswald as KGB agent, Oswald and his mother as nut cases: it's all there.

I'm just young enough that November, 1963 means nothing to me personally. I can tell you exactly where I was when Kennedy was shot: in a bassinet in Brooklyn, sleeping or crying. I was about a month old. What's interesting to me is our culture's absolute and resolute refusal to put the "mystery" of who was behind the tragedy to rest. If anything, the intervening years have only added more and more layers to the onion, rather than providing answers.

Could Oswald have acted alone, out of a desire to enter history? I guess. Sure, he was apparently dyslexic and failed his sharpshooter exam, but everyone gets lucky once in a while, and maybe that was his day, where he could get three shots off in six seconds and hit his moving target. Could a shadow government have used him as a patsy? I guess. Sure, all sorts of things happen beyond the knowledge of the public. What's interesting is that the public believes lone gunmen were responsible for every other assassination, or at least most of the public believes this. John Wilkes Booth, acting along. Sirhan Sirhan, acting alone. James Earl Ray, acting along. John David Hinckley, alone and obsessed with Taxi Driver. Each of these men could just as easily have been patsies and part of a larger conspiracy, but most of us don't go there. For some reason, though, we've decided the Warren Commission was part of a larger cover-up and that there's more to this particular story than meets the eye.

Undoubtedly the times had much to do with this. The same administration that rushed out the Warren Report was also lying to the public about Vietnam. The intervening years didn't exactly engender a larger trust in government, what with Watergate, Iran/Contra, Whitewater, Lewinsky, WMD and the rush to Iraq. On the other hand, it's not as if 190 years of scandal-free government preceeded the assassination; Teapot Dome, anyone?

What probably makes the events of that long-ago November stay with us as a mystery and a controversy is the fact that, in many ways, the hegemony of the post-war era ended with the flight of those bullets. I don't mean the cliched end of Camelot, end of idealism here, I mean the beginning of distrust, unrest, and disaffection that lasted for the next 20 years, until everyone decided they'd had enough and it was morning in America again. Whether or not he acted alone, Oswald accomplished his purpose. He entered history.

The $13 Flight Takes Off

Cheapie Irish airline Ryanair announced last week that it plans to offer service from it's base outside London to New York, Boston, LA, San Francisco, and some as yet undetermined cities in Florida. The cost? Ten euros, currently around 13 bucks. I'm assuming that's one way, but still, that seems too good to be true. Of course, this apparently is too good to be true, since Ryanair charges fees for everything from checking in at a counter to speaking with an agent. Add in the fees and you still have a round-trip flight to England for, say, a hundred bucks. Is it worth it?

I've never flown Ryanair, but apparently it out-budgets American budget haulers. The windows don't have shades, the seats don't recline, there's no back pocket in which to stuff smelly sandwiches and boring magazines, and you have to put up with a live version of QVC for the duration of your flight, with attendants hawking everything from beverages and meals to jewlery, watches, and George Foreman grills. OK, the George Foreman grills might be stretching it, but you see my point.

If you're hopping from one European city to another all of this is probably an inconvenience you'll put up with for an hour or two in order to get to your destination cheaply. The question becomes whether enough consumers will be willing to fly for at least six hours without being able to recline their seat, and with what amounts to a live auction going on in front of them. Yes, suddenly we're all poor, and maybe this will be the only way any of us can afford international travel for the next couple of years, if we can afford it at all. On the other hand, maybe I'm just too old for this kind of crap, because I think I'd rather stay home or take a cheap flight to Ft. Lauderdale than spend that number of hours trapped upright in a small seat breathing bad air.

No start date for the service has been announced, because Ryanair has yet to purchase the needed planes. Once it's up and running, we'll see what the market will bear, and how frugal the American consumer can really be.

Top of the Morning

I'm not the smartest person in the world. I'm pretty certain that, were one to gather up all that I don't know and put it in one place, one could fill the hold of a battleship. I do know, however, that if the water company pulls up to your driveway at 7 AM and starts digging holes on said driveway that you aren't in for a good day. I also know that if you put on some clothes, walk to the end of the driveway, and ask the water men, "What's up?" and they say, "Just looking for the source of a problem," your day isn't likely to improve.

That is all.