The Feed Store

I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay.

The maypop shows, however, that localism need not mean confining oneself to an austere and moralistic diet. If I cannot grow bananas and mangoes in the Ozarks, I can nonetheless harvest maypops.

To nurture small-scale local agriculture is to oppose the Maoist, Stalinesque, Hitlerian, Huxlian, Schwabian, Gatesian push to monopolize global food production. My cows plod the Underground. And I plod along with them.

"Anyone who does much language study knows that training your ear to hear the language spoken correctly is half the battle of language acquisition. If you know what sounds right, then when you encounter the words spoken incorrectly, they will sound wrong..."

We’ve recently started the annual tradition (three years going strong!) of holding a wild game dinner with our friends and church community. Each family brings a dish harvested from the East Texas area, and past menus have included crab, venison, wild pig, crappie, and, of course, squirrel. We tell stories about the harvest of each, and each family explains how the dish was prepared—from start to finish.

Our modernist mindset too easily leads us to the comfortable notion that ‘they’–the government, the scientists, whoever–are going to save us with the latest whizz-bang techno-fix. They’re not. Nobody is coming to save us.

Robert Frost begins one of his best known poems by stating, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The New England poet is...

The cheese crafted here came about as a byproduct of a larger whole, the natural dividend of a complete way of life, and this is the foundation of the best farming.

As we come to the supper table to feast upon pheasant breast or the backstrap of a whitetail deer, we gain an inkling of that invitation to the true Table of Hospitality, where the Lord looks upon us lovingly despite our attack upon him.

I thus find myself in the odd position of resisting romanticism while, nevertheless, hoping that future conditions will create that temptation.