The 100-mile dilemma

Whole, fresh and local sounded like a good idea at the time.

Our dinner group has been meeting and eating for about 10 years now and is willing to try just about anything. Like the time we had a totally heart-healthy meal because one of the group had just had a multiple by-pass. So what if the cake tasted like cardboard with rubber frosting?

So how hard could it be to produce a gourmet-quality meal entirely from ingredients produced within 100 miles of our rural New Glarus home? That was the challenge and we figured, except for the wine, no problem! It’s harvest time, after all, not January in Wisconsin (yet).

We were inspired by Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, of course, but also by a 100-mile dinner we had in March at the Raincity Grille in Vancouver. Go to: http://www.dinehere.ca/restaurant.asp?r=117

Let me say up front that the meal was fabulous, the table looked sumptuous and the conversation was, as always, sharp. But it turned out that everybody had a story about getting the food. Pollan and Kingsolver have written books – and made good money – out of the stories behind the food. I’m just writing a blog for free, so don’t expect that level of detail here.

The biggest shock was learning that what we thought should be local, wasn’t. Trader Joe’s cheese is imported. Whole Foods may be whole and fresh, but it’s not local. Brennan’s had local apples and cheese (we bought some award-winning Wisconsin cheddar), but the pears came from Washington, which required a menu change. Even our local metzgerai (Hosley’s meats) informed us that their meat comes from “a distributor” and they couldn’t vouch for its provenance. Thank goodness for the Willy Street Coop and the farmers market.

Dairy, of course, was no problem. Organic Valley, Blue Marble Farm and even Golden Guernsey fall well within the 100-mile compass, so there was plenty of butter and cream from cows that actually eat grass. Our Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box from Tipi Farm near Evansville provided squash, parsnips, garlic and Brussels sprouts. Swiss chard and basil came from our own garden. Apples, potatoes, peppers, creamy goat cheese and even smoked Southern Wisconsin brook trout came from the farmers market.

Fresh eggs and free-range bacon were easy to find at Paoli Local Foods, which is a true Mecca for those who want to eat local and/or organic, and has the best bacon I’ve ever eaten. A conversation with Nancy Potter convinced us that Potter’s Crackers are made with as many locally sourced ingredients as a cracker could possibly be. To brighten up the table, we cut roses from our own garden, and also ordered a centerpiece from Daffodil Parker made with local flowers.

One of our stories concerned the beef. We are omnivores, after all. We considered using the beef we get from our local cowboy/farrier who raises Texas longhorns, but the tradition of the dinner group demanded something special, so we finally settled on beef tenderloin stuffed with chard, cheese and dried cherries. We stretched the 100-mile rule just a bit to enjoy cherries from Door County.

Getting the tenderloin illustrated the second problem with the local market – actually making the connection between farm and table, even after you’ve found the supplier. We ordered the tenderloin from Pecatonica Valley Farms in Hollandale at the farmers’ market a week before the dinner, but when we went to get it on the day of the event, it wasn’t there. The owner, John Lee, rather sheepishly explained that he had forgotten to put it on the truck that morning. While were still rapidly calculating the logistics of a last-minute menu change in our minds, John suggested that he would deliver the tenderloin direct to our home in plenty of time for dinner. Now that’s local! Thanks, John.

For more on this topic, check out Mary Bergin’s Local farmer, meet local chef in The Capital Times at http://www.madison.com/tct/entertainment/253804.

For the apple cake dessert, we found locally grown organic flour from Brantmeier Family Farm in Monroe. Surprisingly, even the wine didn’t turn out to be the problem we feared. Everyone independently discovered Wollersheim wines made in Prairie du Sac with Wisconsin-grown grapes. Entirely drinkable, as they say.

What wasn’t local? The aforementioned cherries from Door County and maple syrup from Maple Hollow in Merrill were a stretch of the 100-mile rule, but still local to Wisconsin. We couldn’t resist offering New Glarus beer, since it’s made just from over the hill from our home, even though we know the hops come from around the world and even the grain probably isn’t local either.

The hard core of not-local came down the kinds of things that have launched fleets of trading ships for centuries: coffee (fair trade in this case), seasonings and olive oil. If there’s a local source for cooking oil, we didn't find it.

And the people. Our food certainly traveled less than the average 1,500 miles to our table, but that doesn’t mean our carbon footprint was negligible. To get all our guests to the dinner required 150 vehicle-miles. A couple of trips to the farmers market and other venues for us made another 100+. Not counting our guests’ travels in search of ingredients or the
various farmers’ trips to the farmers market. Or, stepping back another layer, not counting the original inputs that went into growing the food to begin with.

So was it some kind of environmental virtue that drove us to this experiment? Not really. In the end it was those primal human urges: the pursuit of good food and good companionship. Both were well satisfied on this particular Saturday night.

Reading list

As far as I can tell, these are the books the Drinking & Reading Society has read since its inception, whenever that was. If you have any additions, or can put dates to the selections, have at it.

The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard Dec. 08

Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future by Jeff Goodell Oct. 08

The Voyage of The Beagle by Charles Darwin Sept. 08 

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry July 08 

What Are People For?: Essays by Wendell Berry June 08 

In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan May 08 

Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade April 08 

The Searunners, Ivan Doig (March 08)
 

Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wolves to Yellowstone, Smith & Furgeson (Feb. 08) 

Tent Life in Siberia, George Kennan (Jan. 08) 

The Book of Yaak, The Lost Grizzlies, The Ninemile Wolves, Rick Bass. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; Coyote’s Canyon, An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field, Terry Tempest Williams. (Nov. 07)
Of Moths & Men, Judith Hooper OR After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou
 (Oct. 07)
 Moths & Men, Judith Hooper (Oct. 07)
After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou (Oct. 07)
The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan, Sept. 07
The Land Remembers, Ben Logan July 07
A Natural History of North American Trees, Donald Culross Peattie June 07
Audubon, The Making of an American, Richard Rhodes, May 07
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan, Mar./Apr. 07
My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir, Feb. 07
The Making of the Fittest, Sean B. Carroll, Jan. 07

The Creation, E.O. Wilson, Dec. 06
Great Plains, Ian Frazier, Nov. 06
A Northwoods Companion, John Bates July 06
Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal June 06
Evolution, Edward Larson May 06
Nature Revealed, Edward O. Wilson, April 06
1491, Michael Carr, March 06

Desert Solitaire. Edward Abbey August 04
The Desert Year. Joseph Wood Krutch (August 04 alternative)
Correction Lines, Curt Meine
River Town, Peter Hassler
The Man from Clear Lake: Sen. Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, Bill Christofferson.
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Marc Reisner
A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson
Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27,1883, Simon Winchester July 04
Sea of Glory, Nathaniel Philbrick
The Death of Environmentalism
The Song of the Dodo, David Quammen
Collapse, Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond
A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan
The Survival of the Bark Canoe, John McPhee
Founding Fish, John McPhee
Young Men and Fire, Norman McLean
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner
My Childhood and Youth, John Muir
Birds of Heaven, Peter Mattiessen
Consilience, E.O. Wilson
Listening Point, Sigurd F. Olson
Winter World, Bernd Heinrich
This House of Sky, Landscapes of a Western Mind, Ivan Doig
The Timber Wolf in Wisconsin by Richard Thiel
The Company of Wolves by Peter Steinhart
The Wolf: The Ecology and Behaviour of an Endangered Species by L. David Mech, Dec. 05
Changes in the Land, Bill Cronon
The Last Voyage of Columbus, Martin Dugard

Happy Birthday, Earth

9 a.m. October 23, 4004 B.C. as calculated by Bishop James Ussher in 1650.

When Clarence Darrow prepared his famous examination of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, he chose to focus primarily on a chronology of Biblical events prepared by a seventeenth-century Irish bishop, James Ussher. American fundamentalists in 1925 found—and generally accepted as accurate—Ussher’s careful calculation of dates, going all the way back to Creation, in the margins of their family Bibles. (In fact, until the 1970s, the Bibles placed in nearly every hotel room by the Gideon Society carried his chronology.) The King James Version of the Bible introduced into evidence by the prosecution in Dayton contained Ussher’s famous chronology, and Bryan more than once would be forced to resort to the bishop’s dates as he tried to respond to Darrow’s questions.

The chronology first appeared in The Annals of the Old Testament, a monumental work first published in London in the summer of 1650. In 1654, Ussher added a part two which took his history through Rome’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D. The project, which produced 2,000 pages in Latin, occupied twenty years of Ussher’s life.

Ussher lived through momentous times, having been born during the reign of Elizabeth and dying, in 1656, under Cromwell. He was a talented fast-track scholar who entered Trinity College in Dublin at the early age of thirteen, became an ordained priest by the age of twenty, and a professor at Trinity by twenty-seven. In 1625, Ussher became the head of the Anglo-Irish Church in Ireland.

As a Protestant bishop in a Catholic land, Ussher’s obsession with providing an accurate Biblical history stemmed from a desire to establish the superiority of the scholarship practiced by the clergy of his reformed faith over that of the Jesuits, the resolutely intellectual Roman Catholic order. (Ussher had absolutely nothing good to say about “papists” and their “superstitious” faith and “erroneous” doctrine.) Ussher committed himself to establishing a date for Creation that could withstand any challenge. He located and studied thousands of ancient books and manuscripts, written in many different languages. By the time of his death, he had amassed a library of over 10,000 volumes.

The date forever tied to Bishop Ussher appears in the first paragraph of the first page of The Annals. Ussher wrote: “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, which beginning of time, according to this chronology, occurred at the beginning of the night which preceded the 23rd of October in the year 710 of the Julian period.” In the right margin of the page, Ussher computes the date in “Christian” time as 4004 B.C

Does the universe have a purpose?

The Templeton Foundation does a much better job of discussing metaphysics that the Drinking and Reading Society, so I thought I should pass along this link to their current project - essays by notable folks addressing a question much like the one we discussed over beers. You probably saw the ads in the NY Times, The Atlantic and other journals of thought.

This is the first in a series of conversations about the “Big Questions” the John Templeton Foundation is conducting among leading scientists and scholars.

A TEMPLETON CONVERSATION
Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

Unlikely. Lawrence M. Krauss, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University.

Yes. David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale and a National fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

No. Peter William Atkins, Fellow and professor of chemistry at Lincoln College, Oxford.

Indeed. Nancey Murphy, Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Very Likely. Bruno Guiderdoni, astrophysicist and the Director of the Observatory of Lyon, France.

No. Christian de Duve, biochemist. Winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.

Not Sure. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and the Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium.

Certainly. Jane Goodall, founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a UN Messenger of Peace.

To read their essays, go here: http://www.templeton.org/questions/purpose/

Book blogs

Here are couple of other blogs I thought the group might find interesting.

The Nature Writers of Texas - The best nature writing from the newspaper, magazine, blog and book authors of the Lone Star State. http://texasnature.blogspot.com

Rachel Carson Centennial Book Club - Considering the legacy of Rachel Carson's literary and scientific contributions with a different book each month. http://rcbookclub.blogspot.com

Sometimes we go to nature

Sometimes nature comes to us. This critter was coiled in the middle of my office floor. You can't tell from the photo, but this one was only about 18 inches long and as thick as my finger. I hope it has returned to the savannah.

The eastern milk snake (Lampropeltis triangulum) is a of the group of constrictors called "king snakes." King snakes get their name because they often kill and eat other species of snakes, including venomous species such as rattlesnakes. The eastern milk snake grows to a length of about three feet.

There is a dietary story behind the common name. Besides its occasional taste for reptilian prey — as well as frogs, fish, birds, and eggs — the milk snake avidly hunts small mammals such as mice and voles. After European settlement, milk snakes found shelter in barns and other farm buildings. Humans imagined that these creatures came to milk the cows, hence the name "milk" snake. Most local herpetologists note a correlation between its scattered populations and remnant oak savanna groves, especially those on gravelly, morainal ridges. These open woodlots are transitional ecosystems lying between the open grasslands and the more closed-canopy forest. Milk snakes are rarely found on wet soils and seem to prefer the gravelly or rocky soil of these low but dry hills. They probably also use the mix of shade and sun found in savannas to regulate body temperature.

A taste of things to come

As strange as it may seem, Tent Camping in Siberia is a fascinatiing book, mostly because Kennan is a terrific writer with all the observational skills of Mark Twain and the intrepid character of John Muir, both of whom were writing at the same time. I'm struck with the similarities between Tent Camping and Muir's First Summer in the Sierra.

The big drawback is that the book has not one map. So I'm offering this sketchy approximation to get you oriented. Petropavlovsk is on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula about where the first arrow starts. By the way, a verst is .66 miles.

Tent Camping should be read in January because, no matter how cold, bleak, dark or miserable Wisconsin gets in the winter, Kennan's descriptions of huddling in a cold, lightless, smoke-filled yourt (yurt) or sleeping under the stars at 50 below will make you feel like a wimp for complaining.

Thrills & chills

To whet your appetite, here is a brief, random excerpt from Tent Camping in Siberia by George F. Kennan.

The winter travel of the Kamtchadals is accomplished entirely upon dog-sledges and in no other pursuit of their lives do they spend more time or exhibit their native skill and ingenuity to greater advantage. They may even be said to have made dogs for themselves in the first place, for the present animal is nothing more than a half-domesticated arctic wolf and still retains all his wolfish instincts and peculiarities . . .

(The sledges) are guided and controlled entirely by the voice and by a lead dog who is especially trained for this purpose. The driver carries no whip, but has instead a thick stick about four feet in length and two in diameter called an oerstel. This is armed at one end with a long iron spike and is used to check the speed of the sledge in descending hills and to stop the dogs when they leave the road, as they frequently do in pursuit of reindeer and foxes. The spiked end is thrust down in front of one of the uprights of the runners and drags in that position through the snow, the upper end being firmly held by the driver . . .

The traveler at first sight imagines that driving a dog-sledge is just as easy as driving a street car . . . After being run away with in the first ten minutes, capsized into a snow drift and his sledge dragged bottom upward a quarter mile from the road the rash experimenter . . . is generally convinced by hard experience that a dog driver, like a poet, is born, not made.

On November first . . .we set out with a train of sixteen sledges, eighteen men, two hundred dogs and forty days provisions for the territory of the wandering Koraks. We were determined to reach Geezhega this time or, as the newspapers, say, perish in the attempt.

Late in the afternoon of November 3rd, just as the long northern twilight was fading into the peculiar steely blue of an arctic night, our dogs toiled slowly up the last summit of the Samanka Mountains, and we looked down from a height of more than two thousand feet upon the dreary expanse of snow which stretched away from the base of the mountains at our feet to the
far horizon. It was the land of the wandering Koraks . . .

The rising moon was just throwing into dark, bold relief the shaggy outlines of the peaks on our right, as we roused up our dogs and plunged into the throat of a dark ravine which led downward to the steppe. The deceptive shadows of night and the masses of rock which choked up the narrow defile made the descent extremely dangerous and it required all the skill of
our practiced drivers to avoid accident. Clouds of snow flew from the spiked poles with which they vainly tried to arrest our downward rush; cries and warning shouts from those in advance multiplied by the mountain echoes, excited our dogs to still greater speed until we seemed as the rock and trees flew past, to be in the jaws of a falling avalanche which was carrying us with breathless rapidity down the dark canyon to certain ruin . . .

Failing to find the (Koraks at the bottom), we were discussing the probability of our having been misdirected when suddenly our leading dogs pricked up their sharp ears, snuffed eagerly at the wind, and with short, excited yelps, made off at a dashing gallop toward a low hill which lay almost at right angles with our previous course. The drivers endeavored in vain to check the sped of the excited dogs; their wolfish instincts were aroused and all discipline was forgotten as the fresh scent came down upon the wind from the herd of reindeer beyond. A moment brought us to the brow of the hill and before us in the clear moonlight stood the conical tents of the Koraks, surrounded by at least four thousand reindeer, whose branching antlers looked like a perfect forest of dry limbs.

The dogs all gave voice simultaneously, like a pack of fox-hounds in view of the game, and dashed tumultuously down the hill, regardless of the shouts of their masters and the menacing cries of three or four dark forms which rose suddenly up from the snow between them and the frightened deer. Above the tumult I could hear Dodd’s voice hurling imprecations in Russian at his yelping dogs, which in spite of his most strenuous efforts, were dragging him and his capsized sledge across the steppe. The vast body of deer wavered a moment and then broke into a wild stampede, with drivers, Korak sentinels and two hundred dogs in full pursuit.

Don't know much about history

Here are the answers to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Civic Literacy Test. I sent you the questions by email. Let me know if you didn’t get it (and want to).

The Capital Times
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Graduates Know Even Less About History

The University of Wisconsin-Madison did relatively well in a 50-college test of how much students learned about history and economics during four years of college, but students in Wisconsin and nationally knew little when they came in and not much more when they left.

No college did better than a D-plus on the Civic Literacy Test released Tuesday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonpartisan conservative educational organization that stresses the values of a free society. The national average was F.

Overall, 14,000 randomly selected freshmen and seniors scored slightly more than 50 percent on the 60-question exam. That’s 30 correct answers. A kindergartner could have gotten 20 right just by random guessing.

Check your answers. Email me your results and I will post the winner here.

1. D
2. B
3. C
4. A
5. D
6. E
7. B
8. E
9. B
10. E
11. C
12. C
13. B
14. C
15. B
16. D
17. E
18. D
19. C
20. E
21. A
22. A
23. B
24. D
25. B
26. D
27. D
28. D
29. E
30. D
31. A
32. B
33. C
34. B
35. A
36. D
37. C
38. A
39. D
40. B
41. D
42. A
43. A
44. B
45. E
46. B
47. D
48. C
49. B
50. A
51. A
52. C
53. B
54. D
55. E
56. C
57. A
58. B
59. C
60. B

2 much, 3 many

Bring up the subject of evolution and pretty soon we have evolved into a discussion of religion, including the tale of how and why Dan’s Jesuit prof. at Marquette gave him an F in is Marriage and Religion class. And he wasn’t even married. How many book groups talk about that stuff?

We have also transcended another book group custom by reading 3 totally unrelated books for the same month among 5 participants. Of Moths & Men by Judith Hooper, After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America by E. C. Pielou, and Tent Camping in Siberia by George Kennan. Dan was “reading ahead” on that one.

Next month will feature a selection as well. Watch for a list of books by Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams. I promised to post some other stuff as well and that will happen when I get a bit more time over the next few days.

2 of Dan's favorite writers

I was elsewhere and didn't attend, but thought I would post this from The Capital Times regarding Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams.

WISCONSIN BOOK FESTIVAL When: Festival runs through Sunday. What: Book discussions, readings, lectures, workshops, spoken word, events for children and youth. Where: Venues throughout the Madison area and beyond. For schedule, see www.wisconsinbookfestival.com

Noted environmental writers Rick Bass and Terry Tempest Williams kicked off the Wisconsin Book Festival by agreeing that its theme of "domestic tranquility" is elusive in today's United States.

"Domestic tranquility is domestic violence in the American West," Williams told the audience Wednesday night at the Overture's Capitol Theater. "Violence to the land and to each other."

"I don't understand domestic tranquility right now," Bass said. "It eludes me." In particular, he said the Bush administration's "desperate lust for power and control" is the antithesis of tranquility.

Williams, who lives in Utah, and Bass, who lives in the remote Yaak Valley of Montana, both write searingly of threats to wilderness, especially in the western states, and of the fragile but essential link between human nature and wild nature. Williams, a naturalist and vocal free-speech advocate, is an essayist whose best-known work is "Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place." Bass, author of novels, nonfiction essays and short-story collections, including "The Hermit's Story," has won the Pushcart Prize and an O. Henry Prize.

Playoff reading

It's baseball playoff time and even though the Brewers blew it cause they couldn't get no relief and the Cubs look destined to live with the curse yet another year, it's still a great time of year. And a great time to read a great book - Clemente by David Maraniss. I don't think I had seen Dave in 30 years, but heard him give a "speech" Thursday at RSVP of Dane County. The remarkable thing is it was just like listening to an old friend talk over a few beers. It was emotional to hear him talk about his baseball years as a teen, when guys would get on their bikes with gloves slung from the handlebars and spend the long summer days on the diamond on their own. no coaches. no schedules. no uniforms. no soccer moms. no little league dads. I guess that doesn't have a lot to do with Roberto Clemente, except to explain why Dave was fascinated by him, but Maraniss creates a loving portrait of one of the guys who gave baseball its style.

The beast is back

No doubt now about who ate the fish! I found the heron in the pond this morning and it didn't want to leave. It only flew about 50 feet to a walnut tree right behind the house. I've left the dogs outside to see if they can keep it away, but I think I will have to find a net to cover the pond before we lose the remaining fish - if we haven't already.