Born with a plastic spoon in my mouth

OK, this is my debut blog, taken from thoughts written down this morning in my "morning pages," a handwritten journal I've kept for the past year since my husband's niece and my friend Susan gave me "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron, highly recommended for artists at any stage of their development. Writing is the easy part for me. Figuring out how to share my writing has always been the challenge, so we'll see how I can push this out to the hungry hordes of voracious readers, clamoring for my bon mots. Here we go:

Reading Pierre Franey's autobiography ("A Chef's Tale: a memoir of food, France and America", 1994, which caught my eye on the library shelf), candid and startlingly lovely, his unrestrained embrace of life. Before Julia, Jacques and Mario, there was Pierre, a master chef who devoted his life to food and cooking, making delicious dishes for the joy of doing so. There were no celebrity chefs in Pierre's day, but he was as close as it got, having created the "60-Minute Gourmet" column in The New York Times and presiding over two of the greatest French restaurants – Le Pavillon and La Cote Basque –ever to be opened in America. Pierre's long gone now, having grown up before WWII in what he calls the halcyon days of France, in Burgundy, in a large, complicated family. I am struck by the intricate descriptions of the plants, woods, animals, fish that provided sustenance for his family, and how intimately people (country people throughout time) were involved in what we now so righteously call the "farm-to-table" process, or HOW food gets into our greedy mouths. For all my research, experimentation, foraging and cooking, I'm still a post-WWII Baby Boomer, born with a plastic spoon and processed formula in my mouth. Nothing "natural" about that heritage. I still eat and enjoy synthetic "food" like Cheez Its and Dairy Queen "ice cream", and am clueless about where much of the groceries I buy came from or how they got onto the store's shelves. Shockingly clueless,.

For all my good intentions and worthy actions, I'm still a person very much of my time, with my plastic (BPA-free!) water bottles and grocery list. The only farmer I know is Jim Abma, who I greet merrily when I run into him during my frequent forays to Abma's Farm for eggs, meat, produce, illusion. Sometimes I visit their petting zoo. This spring, months ago, they had a pen of the most adorable pink and white with black-spotted piglets. Next time I went they were gone, and the freezer shelves at Abma's were full of pork chops. I bought many. They were wonderful. Oh piggies, forgive me for I knew not what I did, or now I so claim. In my next life, or in a more evolved state in this one, I shall be a vegetarian, if not a vegan (but that's another blog, my thoughts on veganism).