Running Red Lights

 

There was a great article this morning in the Sunday Times sports section about figure-eight stock car racing, which one racetrack tow-truck driver described as "definitely one of the most dangerous types of motor sports there is".

 

It's a pretty simple concept. Drivers maneuver their 650-horsepower cars around a cramped half-mile figure eight track (which is usually unpaved), at speeds approaching 100 miles an hour. In order to make the transition from running clockwise around one loop to running counterclockwise around the other, they are obliged to steer directly into oncoming traffic trying to make the same transition in the other direction. Imagine driving full-tilt down a busy urban street and running every red light you encounter, relying on your timing, reflexes, and a whole lot of luck. Crashes are frequent and spectacular; fatalities are not uncommon. Even so, the sport endures at dozens of tracks around the country and is a multigenerational affair in many families.

 

The reporter sums it up pretty succinctly:

 

"The people who do this, who tenderly build racecars that cost up to $50,000 and then drive them repeatedly into crossing traffic, know that they are wired differently."

 

Hey, wait a minute. Are we sure he isn't writing about chefs here?

 

My average workday for the most part feels an awful lot like a succession of potential head-on collisions, most of which I manage to avoid by sheer dint of experience, snap judgment, and sometimes pure luck. In order to succeed as a chef, you can't back down when things get messy. You need to stick your neck out and make the hard decision, knowing full well that the entire operation may come grinding to a halt if you blow a call. You need to have the courage of your convictions to stick to a decision when it is the right thing to do, and the willingness to stand on the brakes and swerve when you sense the gap closing too fast. When it's Monday morning and the gas isn't working and your breakfast cook is in police custody, when the produce truck is late and the dish machine is down and the barista has locked herself in your office to cry and oh, by the way, the CEO is in town and wants to tour today… you, as the chef, can't just slow down and drift into the pit lane to think things over. The rest of the cars are still careening around that track and you need to grit your teeth and stare down the oncoming traffic and make a MOVE, motherfucker. And not only that you have to enjoy it, live for it, even look forward to it. As a good friend in the business said to me recently at the tail end of another 14-hour day: "Boredom is my Kryptonite".

If you get off on an environment where things routinely burst into flames, where blood, sweat and tears are more than a figure of speech…well, there's just something fundamentally different about you. If you take it for granted that an honest day's work starts somewhere north of the ten-hour mark and probably doesn't involve a lunch break, if you assume that your average workday will almost certainly involve raised voices, foul language, physical discomfort, stress, confrontation, and the near-sexual release of cranking out mass volumes of good food…well, fuck. You're reading this, aren't you?

 

For the past several months my late-night, can't-sleep bedside reading has been Sun Tzu's The Art of War, in an edition edited with commentary aimed directly at contemporary managers in the business world. The basic premise – that modern corporations are not far removed from feudal Chinese warfare – holds up as pretty sound. And who among us hasn't felt the occasional urge to behead a concubine or two, just to make our point?

 

One theme which recurs again and again is the issue of resource allocation. Does the wise General send reinforcements to shore up an underprotected area, or does he leverage his strong positions in order to divert pressure from his weaknesses? Defend the castle or storm the bridge? Do you slide that extra tight end over to the weak side to cover the gap, or do you double-stack him with your fullback and go up the gut?

 

In other words, just another day at the office. Do I break up my dream team on the sautee line in order to shore up a pantry that's chronically weeded? Do I shave my product cost to the bone to free up more cash for labor, or do I max out on the fact that my food kicks ass and drive the top line sales, in the hopes that it all flows through? Do I spend my morning doing mis for the weakest station in my empire, or do I dedicate my time to challenging and developing my A-players, knowing full well that they're the ones who are going to carry my ass in the long run? That's how I spend my early commute every day, mentally juggling scenarios as the cool morning air swirls inside my helmet and the bike laps up the miles of darkened asphalt. By the time I walk into the kitchen at 6AM I know who is going where and doing what, which subtle adjustments we are going to make to face the day, where we might fall down and what I'm going to do to stop it.

 

And if I have to run a few red lights to get there, what the hell. It isn't the speed that gets you, it's the sudden stop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Privilege of Age

A week or two ago I heard Chesley Sullenberger III on the radio. You remember our man Chesley – he's the stone cold ace who seemingly without flinching dropped a 747 smooth as silk into the Hudson when he lost power over Manhattan. Saved something like 200 lives, minimal drama, all in a day's work or so it appeared.

He was receiving yet another accolade or honorarium when I heard him, and with characteristic humility he said something like the following:

"I have had the privilege of living long enough to become very good at something that is extremely difficult to do well. My profession may be one of the few in which grey hair is considered an asset rather than a liability".

Amen, Chesley. I have doubtless butchered the quotation, and I am sure that one of my more astute friends (that's you I am talking about, Quigg) will find the actual speech on a podcast and link to it just for the pleasure of calling me out. Anyway, his words brought to mind a couple more choice ones from my halcyon rock-climbing years:

"Good Judgement is the result of experience. Unfortunately, experience is all too often the result of bad judgement"

Or:

"There are old mountaineers and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers"

And lastly:

"Go big, or go home".

The gist of this all is that we live in a world where youth and vigor are all too often confused with skill and capability. The cult of youth has long since overtaken our cultural fascination– we lionize the teenaged basketball prodigy, the twentysomething software genius, the barely pubescent pop star whose woman-child persona is a form of temporal androgyny trapping her somewhere in the twilight zone between schoolgirl and sexpot. This is far from news, and as I creep up on forty I spend an increasingly disproportionate amount of time reflecting on the failed promise of my own early years. I seem destined to wrap up my fourth decade without the Great American Novel to my credit, sure as I was that I had it in me. Likewise, I never managed to pioneer a new route on a major alpine wall, nor did I develop some seminal piece of game-changing technology. Ditto the heartbreakingly insightful collection of essays which would define my generation, and along with it the archetypical hit record of my era. Instead, I find myself just another guy raking leaves in the suburbs on a Sunday afternoon waiting for the Seahawks game to start and worrying about the CV joints in my pickup.

I am ten years too late for Boy Wonder status no matter how you spin it.

And yet, as Chesley so adroitly phrased it, I have had the privilege of living long enough to become very good at something which is difficult to do well. And I increasingly have reason to take satisfaction from this.

As of this year, I have been cooking professionally in one way or another for a full twenty years. Restaurants, boats, hotels, corporate dining…at the end of the day it is all food, and I haven't done anything else for my entire working life to date. For nearly ten of those last twenty years I have been managing cooks and kitchens, first as a fine-dining restaurant chef, later as a banquet chef overseeing massive high-end functions and an executive sous chef responsible for the 24/7 chaos of a luxury hotel. I may not have seen it all, but I have seen enough to have some perspective. I have lived through enough hairball situations that I know from experience what to do and more importantly what NOT to do. My first instinct is more often than not a good one, and I find that I can increasingly foresee and troubleshoot potential problems before they evolve into full-blown crises.

When I was just starting out at the hotel, I had a sous-chef who was thirty years into the life and had spent his whole career hammering it out in the big hotels. One December in the midst of a full-on Saturday banquet meltdown I innocently said to him: "Hey, at least it can't get any worse".

Chris turned and looked at me with eyes as big as saucers, caught in mid-stride between the ovens and the dishup line, moving like a man with his hair on fire.

"Oh, no", He said. "No, it can always get worse!"

He was right, of course. It can always get worse. The skill lies in recognizing this and having the presence of mind to see it coming and the decision-making ability to keep it from getting there. The food press may buzz with the under-thirty hotshots who are making the scene in Seattle or Chicago, but look around. The true heavy hitters – the guys that guys like me look up to? They're all Old! Thomas Keller? Eric Ripert? Jean-Georges? Older than me and then some, and they all did their time in the trenches. Aging golfers and tennis players have to soak their arthritic joints and watch the superhuman ascent of Tiger and Rafael Nadal, but chefs have the satisfaction of watching their idols grow old before them and aspiring to get there themselves.

A few weeks ago my Dad and my buddy Dave and I went out to the Sunset to see Jonathan Lethem give a talk and afterwards we retired to a Mexican joint around the corner for a bowl of oxtail pozole and a few margaritas. One way or another the conversation turned to commercial fishing and the story of a young scalloper whom my father had known several years back. He was good, he was bold, and one day he went out for one last set with the weather turning foul and he never came back. Everybody's best guess was that he snagged something on the bottom and with the seas running hard his boat took on water and went down in minutes.

My father paused, an older man with two younger men, themselves both fathers of young boys, hanging on his words as he reflected.

"A guy who had been fishing like that for forty, fifty years – he might have had a chance. He might have felt that drag start to hang up a split second sooner and cut the winch loose before it stopped him. He might have just felt something funny in the way the gear was running and decided to slow it down a touch, and that would have been enough. At a time like that there just isn't any substitute for time out on the water".

Let the boy wonders have their moment in the sun. There are old fishermen, there are bold fishermen, but there sure as hell aren't a lot of old, bold fishermen.

Food on the Table

Tonight I made lasagna for dinner. Easy, economical, and the kids love it. So do I although I always end up feeling like my stomach has been injected with high-density polyester resin after I am through eating.

 

Maybe I should just eat less.

 

That is beside the point, at least as far as this particular line of inquiry is concerned. What I am talking about is lasagna. One package of Barilla no-boil pasta sheets, two jars spaghetti sauce, a container of ricotta, some ground beef left over from last week's tacos, and the end of a five-pound bag of shredded mozz that I brought home from the Cash & Carry to make pizza for Miles' birthday. Ten minutes to assemble, an hour in the oven while I read the paper and have a cocktail, and it's a done deal.

As I was digging in to slice the sucker, Jennifer raised the subject of stuffed shells. This happens often in our household; we have not even begun to consume the meal in question, yet we are already discussing what to make next, or what we have eaten in the past, or where and when we have eaten something similar or better or different or wholly unrelated. The food in front of us serves as a catalyst for memory and speculation as much as it does nutrition.

 

Stuffed shells. Something else easy and universally popular. Bears the same effective relationship to lasagna that a calzone does to pizza. Certainly not in the same league as a madeleine when it comes to blowing out the floodgates of memory.

 

And yet, at the mention of them I was transfixed. "You remember the last time we talked about eating stuffed shells"? Jennifer asked.

I was already there.

 

This happened maybe eight months ago, shortly after I left the hotel for the greener pastures of Redmond. It was a school night, coming up on dinnertime, and neither one of us had given much thought to planning a meal. Jennifer was still unused to having me home in the evenings, after years of feeding only herself and the boys from a simple but reliable repertoire fortified by the bounty of Trader Joe's freezer case. I was still growing accustomed to regular meals after living for the better part of a decade on whatever I could hold in one hand while I kept working with the other, so the very notion of cooking for my family on a regular basis wasn't even on the radar. In other words, we were screwed.

 

"Why don't you just run up to Sam's and grab some stuffed shells or something"? Jenny suggested. "They're pretty good. The boys love 'em". So off I went to Sam's Club.

And that's when I had the breakdown. In front of the frozen foods case at Sam's, considering breaded chicken products.

 

It was less of a breakdown than a full-blown crisis of conscience. As I debated the merits of frozen pasta versus chicken cordon bleu, it hit me all at once.

Whatever I chose, I was getting ready to feed my family absolute crap.

 

Coming to terms with my absolute lack of integrity was suddenly staggering. There I was, having dedicated my entire working life to the preparation of great food from scratch, yet not thinking twice about giving my kids a plateful of the worst kind of unpronounceable mass-produced garbage. All because I was too damn lazy to plan a real dinner for my own family after devoting the past ten hours to feeding complete strangers. You can spare me the rhetoric about the cobbler's children – it was absolute bullshit and I knew it. Looking at the overflowing freezers I knew I couldn't go there anymore.

 

For starters you have to understand how I was raised. My mother stayed at home well into my adolescence, and my childhood in retrospect was a nonstop cascade of fresh-baked bread, homemade soups, and frequent forays into the Julia Childs oeuvre. Packaged food was actually a treat as far as my brother and I were concerned, reserved for nights when my parents were going out or had dinner guests. Fast food we got a few times a year, only in the context of long car trips. I grew up assuming that sitting down every night, as a family, to a home-cooked meal, was an inalienable right of childhood. And as my own incipient parenthood loomed, I assumed that the same would hold true for my offspring.

 

As Eliot so ably observed, however, between the motion and the act falls the shadow. My kids grew into the age where dinner started to matter just as my own career entered a phase which precluded any semblance of a normal family life. Hence the near-cultish devotion to Trader Joe and take-and-bake pizzas. Sure, I would sometimes throw down on the weekends with homemade pizza or barbecued pork shoulder or huge pots of beef stew, but those were the exceptions. Dinner as a family was a novelty.

 

This has long since ceased to be the case. Ever since the night of the stuffed shell breakdown, I have consecrated anew the importance of the evening meal. Most days I am home in plenty of time to cook. Jenny and I strategize about meals in advance and shop accordingly. I can't remember the last time we cooked something out of a box, or exercised the "nuclear option" in any context other than a road trip.

And yet the sting of my own inadequacy still lingers like the pain of a phantom limb. I feel that there is still damage to undo, and a greater reckoning with my own sincerity which must be brought full circle. I am, in essence, a hypocrite. I talk sustainability at work until I am blue in the face, but I am too lazy to separate the food waste from the garbage at home. I rail against gas-guzzling SUVs, yet think nothing of burning two full tanks on an all-day ride for no particular reason. I preach integrity to my staff and colleagues when I know my own is sorely lacking.

 

Last week I spent a day touring a state-of-the-art aquaculture operation in Southern Washington, and finished the visit with an all-organic lunch of grilled salmon, salad, sourdough bread, and artisanal cheese. We sipped locally-bottled blackberry soda and apple juice while my boss held forth on the future of farm-to-table initiatives and our corporate commitment to sustainable fish farming. The air carried the scent of freshly mown hay and Mt Rainier loomed in the distance beyond the rows of greenhouses. And all the while I thought of those goddamn stuffed shells and how easily we lose sight of what's important.

 

Let everybody else eat whatever the hell they want. Screw it. I'm going home to make dinner for my kids.

 

 

 

 

 

One from the Archives

I blame this one on David.

Then again, I could say that about so many things, foremost amongst them my occasional tendency to sit down and write with a sense of purpose. Entirely his fault.

Today, towards the tail end of a leisurely summer evening run, our conversation turned towards our combined body of unpublished work and its relative merits. Suffice it to say that the totality of this work, if set alight, could go a long way towards alleviating our dependence on foreign oil. David asked "Have you taken a look at any of it lately? You should at least post it on your blog or something".

I've had friends like this before. "C'mon. How cold can the water be? Here, have another beer"

Or "Of course we can fly your tent like a kite in this freak windstorm. What could possibly go wrong"?

And so I found myself tonight with my wife and kids safely on the East Coast as I dug through the file folder labeled ominously "JSR Personal". And there, amidst the letters and baby pictures and inexplicable relics, I found a sheaf of poems that I hadn't seen in years. This is one of them.

Thanks, Quigg.

The Cook's Prayer

"The true fine arts number five: Painting, sculpture, music, dance, and architecture – the foremost branch of which is confectionary".

--Careme

God, let me be foremost a painter

That I might capture on a single plate

The languor of a summer afternoon.

Grant me as well a sculptor's eye, to see

Each object's dormant inner form, that I

Might draw potential out with practiced hands.

And like an architect, who balances

The usefulness and beauty of a thing

Grant me the knowledge of a golden mean.

Teach me to sense, as true musicians do

The time to blend in seamless harmony

But also when to soar on high, alone.

And like a dancer, grant me simple grace

To fully realize my every move

Such that my very passage through a space

Embodies the transmission of great love.

The Things I Miss

 

A few weeks ago my shrink told me that she figures that I have the brain of a recovering meth addict.

 

Note the use of the present tense. Turns out it's not such an easy trip out of the woods.

 

Methamphetamine, pharmacologically speaking, causes the brain to produce vast quantities of dopamine. I'm talking crazy huge amounts here, several orders of magnitude beyond anything that occurs in the normal course of life. Imagine a 110 appliance plugged into a 208 line by accident and you pretty much get the picture.

 

Dopamine makes us feel good. It is the substance that courses through us when we feel intense love for another person, or when we throw a bike into the apex just a lttle too hot and feel the rear wheel hop out ever so slightly on the exit. Dopamine floods our brain at the moment of orgasm, the instant that our hand latches onto the bomber hold just past the crux on a sketchy climb, the first time our newborn child muckles on to our finger with his impossibly tiny fist. Dopamine celebrates accomplishment, release, triumph, raw sensual pleasure. It is adrenaline's hot, slutty cousin – desirable and available, but fleeting. We can't help but come back looking for more.

 

The problem with meth is that once you have lit your dopamine receptors up like God's own Christmas tree, they lose their sensitivity like taste buds with a bad case of pizza burn. Hence the addict's dilemma: You want to recapture the feeling, but it takes more every time. After meth, nothing else feels remotely pleasurable. Love? Forget about it. Sex? You probably aren't even interested, unless it's going to help you score another hit. Art, music, illegal street racing… whatever it was that used to give you that rush, it's gone. And when you go into rehab and lay off the crank, your life descends into a swirling wash of greys and browns without a speck of color to pique your interest. It takes months, or years, for the brain to exercise its remarkable self-healing powers and relearn the pleasure principle.

 

I never did meth with any regularity, but I might as well have.

 

For half a decade, I had a job that kept me at a point of near-permanent emotional and mental redline. The demands of trying to manage an operation like that demanded every bit of focus I could muster, and forced me to endure psychological punishment beyond anything I had previously thought possible. On my days off I waited in a cold sweat for the phone to ring, and on my putative vacations I spent most off my time searching for a decent WiFi connection so I could check email. There was never enough time in the day, never enough resources at my disposal, never enough effort or energy or discipline to get my arms around it. When things went wrong, they went colossally wrong; mistakes were measured in vast sums of money, or the unquantifiable yet infinitely more serious measure of damage to reputation and integrity. A single oversight could send a sixty-thousand dollar wedding spiraling irrecoverably into the abyss or leave the entire kitchen suicidally understaffed for a holiday weekend breakfast rush. When it was bad, which was most of the time, it was really bad.

 

On the fleeting occasions when it was good, however, it was fucking phenomenal. Dopamine bonanza. When the kitchen was firing on all cylinders, when my sous-chefs all had their game on and the food looked tight and and I was driving the whole fire-breathing machine full tilt like a GP bike down the back straight at Catalunya, I had the feeling of absolute invincibility. I was coordinating the efforts of twenty different people executing simultaneous banquets while the restaurants were going off the hook and I had it all in hand, every detail accounted for, every contingency covered, an army of people who jumped at my word and carried out their tasks like a well-oiled SWAT team in the belly of the beast… at those moments it all came together in a comingled rush of exhuberance both tempered and elevated by the certain knowledge that all hell could break loose without warning.

 

I miss that.

 

I miss expediting service for the holiday brunches when we cranked three hundred covers through the dining room in the space of four hours at a hundred bucks a head, the tickets stacked so deep that I used a line of doubled-up duct tape to create another slide for incoming orders. I miss buying Iranian Osetra by the half-kilo tin and stirring it into beurre blanc with a plastic picnic spoon. I miss the sight of thirty-five perfect cylinders of foie gras hung in neat rows from the shelves of a walk-in cooler, swaying gently like tree fruit in a breeze. I miss butchering tenderloin steaks by the hundred and seeing them racked up, seared, and buttered prior to service. I miss the slow buildup to a big night, the days of prep and planning, the rehearsal, and then the final mad crescendo of dishup followed by the delirious release when it was all over. I miss the cigarettes on the loading dock with my boss when we reviewed the game tapes, celebrating the wins and dissecting the missteps.

 

I miss sliding a finished plate into the window and for a brief moment pausing to consider just how gorgeous it is. I miss the food that my cooks would make for each other late into service when there was a lull, and I miss the sounds. The steel-on-steel ring of sautee pans hitting a stovetop, the hiss of rendering fat, the crash and sizzle of an entire sheetpan of product upended with an expert flip onto a red-hot broiler. I miss the raised voices, the cursing, the locker-room posturing and above all the knowledge that any one of these people would go to the wall for me before they gave up.

 

Why do guys like Jordan and Lance keep trying to come back? Think about it. Once you have performed at that level, been the undisputed best in your chosen line of endeavour – what's left? Can you really be happy selling insurance or calling games, or even coaching? Unless you're a freak like Bill Bradley and you go on to the US senate, you spend the rest of your life remembering what the rush felt like and forgetting how frightened you were of losing it. Which goes a long way to explain why Brett Favre is currently in talks with the Vikings.

 

And me? I'm home for dinner every night and I take the weekends off. My phone doesn't ring between Friday night and Monday morning, and when it does it's usually my boss calling to let me know that there's a sale at the Nike outlet. I make it to every cub scout meeting and little league practice and most nights I sleep like a baby.

 

And when every once in a while I go for a few drinks with my old crew and we start talking shop, I can physically feel the itch like bugs underneath my skin and I start getting that old familiar churning in my guts like it's gametime. And even though I haven't smoked in almost a year, I find myself thinking about those post-mortem cigarettes on the loading dock. Damn, they tasted good.

 

Guts and Gears

Plenty of people are already on the job at five in the morning. Cops, breakfast cooks, diner waitresses, transit drivers… it is far from an exclusive club.

On the other hand, very few people start their workday at said inhuman hour in a vast and empty commercial kitchen with a fourteen-inch knife in their hand staring down the gutted carcass of a wild Alaskan salmon the size of a full-grown schnauzer.

Don't ask me why a schnauzer as opposed to some other like-sized creature. I just like the sound of it and it conveys the point that this is a big goddamn fish, so big that it overhangs the cutting board at both ends. At five AM, with nothing but the hum of fluorescent lights and the cycling of refrigeration units to keep me company, I have to fight the twinge of an incipient bad-trip feeling like the bugger is going to reanimate on me and start flopping around the table looking for its missing entrails. Harsh thoughts before my second cup of coffee, but I suppress the image long enough to hook the fish with my thumb through the gills just forward of its left pectoral fin and find the sweet spot where the end of its severed spine protrudes slightly from the surrounding muscle. I put all the weight of my arm and shoulder behind the curved blade and separate the filet from the rest of the fish in a single unbroken motion, pin-bones giving way to the knife with a slight popping feel like the teeth of a sticking zipper or the string pulling loose from the mouth of a burlap sack. I flip the fish over so that the exposed skeleton rests on the countertop and repeat the motion in mirror image, leaning into the knife so hard that my right foot lifts slightly at the midpoint of the stroke. I am left with two glistening slabs of deep pink flesh and a gape-mouthed head connected to a distant tail by nearly two feet of perfectly denuded backbone. The frame goes into the garbage and I set about the more tedious work of deboning, skinning, and portioning what remains.

My longtime culinary mentor Patrick Dore used to hate it when he had to start a day with heavy butchering. The man was an animal at the bench, capable of knocking out more work than anybody else I have ever known, but he liked to ease into the day with tasks that were easier on the senses. Picking basil leaves was a favorite, or even peeling spuds. Cooking pasta, making sauces – anything that didn't involve blood under his fingernails and the inevitable slickness of protein on his hands. Later in the day he could French out lamb racks and clean tenderloins with the best of them, but before lunch service he would put his energies elsewhere.

For me, butchery and fabrication have always been among my favorite aspects of the profession. I am good at it, and I enjoy it. Breaking down animals into usable pieces requires a certain degree of raw technical skill that comes only with careful observation, repetition and practice. Mistakes with meat are generally expensive mistakes, which is why in so many kitchens only the chef and maybe the sous-chefs end up handling the product. In a singular inversion of the usual division of labor, the messiest and most elemental tasks fall to the most senior personnel. Interesting. If you see a line cook cutting portions without a scale or direct supervision, it means that he is damn good at it and has earned the right to do so.

In order to take something apart, you first have to understand how it is put together. This applies to a salmon or a side of beef just as readily as it does a clutch assembly or a brake caliper. Trying to prevail with brute force invariably leads to heartache; you need to find the natural seams between muscles, the layer of sliverskin that lies against the bone, the natural weakness in a joint. I can render a chicken into eight servable parts in about ninety seconds, because I know instinctively where to find the gap between leg and thigh, and how to trace the inside curve of the wishbone with the tip of a boning knife. I can pop the remaining half of hip-joint out of a ham using sharpening steel for leverage, and strip the delicate loins from a rabbit's ribcage without mangling them at the point where the spine doubles in width. I can reduce a fifty-pound halibut into seven-ounce portions, and I have converted whole strip loins into more New York Steaks than I could even begin to count. Each of these tasks entails a methodically scripted process tempered by awareness of when to back off the knife or change your angle by a few degrees.

Likewise machinery. In tearing down an engine, the mechanic follows a carefully proscribed set of steps, applying the correct tool with the correct amount of force to the proper point of contact. Impatience and overexuberance result in stripped fasteners and broken parts – don't ask me how I know. Ruined metal is just as expensive as ruined flesh and unlike meat it can't find a home in the stockpot. When I approach a mechanical component for the first time I work slowly and tentatively, feeling out the weaknesses, referring to the diagrams, taking one careful step at a time. By the third or fourth time around I can proceed with greater fluency, and the more frequent tasks devolve into second nature. I can set the valves and ignition timing on my bike by feel and intuition before my coffee gets cold, and I don't hesitate to pull the slide and needle from a recalcitrant carb in a far-flung parking lot should circumstances warrant it. I know how these systems work, have spent hours mulling over how the pieces intersect and have struggled in the past to get them right, much as I once fought unsuccessfully to butterfly a lamb leg and wound up instead with an expensive pile of stew meat. The learning curve is steep but rewarding.

The difference of course is that machinery, in the end, becomes whole again. The meat, however, continues its journey down the food chain in smaller and smaller pieces until its very molecules are scattered, and the chef or butcher moves on to the next unsullied carcass to begin anew.

.

The Day No Pigs Would Die (with apologies to Robert Newton Peck)

It is indefensibly trite to reiterate the fact that having children forces you to look at the world through a new set of eyes. The blogosphere is cluttered with the saccharine enthusiasm of parents who would have you believe that they just noticed for the first time that the sky is blue, or that milk will come out of your nose if you laugh hard enough while drinking it. Enough already. We know how precious and transparently observant your offspring are, so spare us the soliloquy. Call me a heartless cynic, but after eight years of parenting remarkably precocious and observant little boys I have come to realize that my children are in essence no more likely to inspire epiphany than anybody else's.

This being said, even I get zinged once in a while.

Yesterday my four-year-old and I were riding home in the truck after a visit to the cake decorating shop, where we had chosen tiny plastic trees and a little plastic skier and sugar granules that looked like tiny granite pebbles. We were riding and talking and listening to music as we always do (he is a sucker these days for that "Swing of your Hips" song by Matt Nathanson) when out of nowhere he asked:

"Papa, do bacon and sausage come from pigs"?

"Yes buddy, they do", I answered, in keeping with our policy of absolute honesty except when it becomes inconvenient.

"And do they have to kill the pig to get the bacon and sausage"?

"Yup. They sure do". This was verging on dangerous territory.

"Papa, how do they kill the pig"? Oh shit. This was a new one. Time to be very, very careful and not embark on a diatribe about feedlots and waste lagoons and the death of Rural America.

"Well sweetie, the pig lives a very long and happy life and eats lots of yummy food and then when it gets old they shoot it in the head with a gun and it dies right away without feeling any pain". At this point I could feel the cartilage of my nose pressing against the skin as I mentally figured how many years I have before he reads The Jungle. Long pause from the passenger seat as we rounded the corner onto our street.

"Papa, if no pigs died, would there be no bacon and sausage?"

Here we go. Break out the ToFurkey and Field Roast and cue the theme from Charlotte's Web. I could already envision our family mealtimes spiraling into an abyss of separate meals, impassioned defense of animal rights, and all the other theatricals that come packaged with an incipient preschool vegetarian. I have seen this movie played out in other households and believe me it is not pretty.

"You're right, buddy. There wouldn't be any bacon and sausage".

Another looong pause as I parked the truck, killed the engine, and unbuckled his car seat.

"Papa, I LIKE bacon and sausage"!

Halleluiah!

I am all in favor of my children knowing where their food comes from, and owing to my line of work I think that they have a better sense of it than most of their contemporaries. They have seen me come home from work in blood-spattered whites after a long day of butchering, and they have seen me carry a brace of freshly killed mallards in from the truck when my buddies are in the thick of waterfowl season. They have heard the tattoo of lobsters beating their staccato death throes against the side of a four-gallon stockpot. My older boy has caught hatchery trout on a spinning rod and watched impassively as I scaled, gutted, and grilled his prize, which he then pronounced to be "tasty". Last spring he asked me if we could go hunting when we went back to Maine that summer, and I had to explain that deer season didn't start until November.

The tricky part is deciding when to let them in on the rest of the picture.

I can remember all too well discovering at age twelve or thereabouts exactly how it was that veal remained so lusciously tender, which led to a knockdown family dinner fiasco at a fancy Italian joint in Westchester. I railed against the lot of the factory hen, wept for the piglets that were snatched from their brood-sow mother, exploded in outrage when the conditions that so readily incubated Kreutzfeld-Jacobs were exposed to the public. I also marched in protest against the abuse of animals in cosmetics testing and outright cried when I first learned about the use of chimps in medical research. And yet I never even flirted with vegetarianism. Meat, it turned out, is just too damn tasty.

Like so many of us, I am caught between the legitimate desire to eat only free-range, hormone-free meats and dairy products and the inability (or unwillingness) to pay the price. I am a hypocrite of the highest order. When spending somebody else's money buying product for a working kitchen, I will readily kick down thirty-five bucks a pound for farmstead cheese and five dollars plus for organic "heritage" chicken, but Sunday morning at the Safeway I struggle with the extra ten cents a piece for cage-free eggs. Could my wife and I give up our drive-through espresso habit and direct the savings towards feeding our children more wholesome food? Absolutely. Do we choose to? Sadly, no. Does this make us bad people?

Maybe it does. And maybe, before too long, I will have to explain to my sons why it is that we sometimes have to make difficult and contradictory decisions that pit resource allocation against moral imperative. Xbox or grass-fed beef, kids? You make the call.

All I know is that I LIKE bacon and sausage.