What’s Wrong With A Good Pot Roast?–Diary Of A Foodie Who Finally Called It Quits

Billy Harkins grew up in a solidly American Midwestern, middle class home.  He grew up on a farm, milked the cows, mended fences, fed the chickens, said grace over every meal, and knew nothing much of the outside world.  Blanton, their town had a general store, fuel pump, hardware store, farm machinery outlet, and a luncheonette.  The Firsts Presbyterian Church  in New Philadelphia, not far from home, was  founded by a Pennsylvania minister who had a calling and built a small church no bigger than a tractor shed to serve families who had for too long been without close pastoral care.  Thanks to his friendly, sincere concern and unfeigned hospitality he attracted more and more farm families, and soon he was able to raise enough money to build a proper church with a parsonage, Bible study room, and steeple.  

A cousin Billy, an instructor at a small private school in Vermont, said on a recent visit home that Blanton resembled Grover’s Corners, the fictional town of Wilder’s Our Town; and indeed the comparison was right.  Blanton’s residents were just as friendly, respectful, hard-working, and congenial, but without the regrets and sadness of Grover’s Corners families who never realized the humanity and value of their lives until it was too late.  No, the people of Blanton were profoundly religious, patriotic, and very American and had no doubts whatsoever about the rightness and goodness of their lives.

Life in the Harkins household was as simple, congenial, and conservative as any in Blanton.  Breakfast was served at sunup, dinner at noon, and supper in the early evening.  Mrs. Harkins culled vegetables from her kitchen garden, gathered eggs from the roost, potatoes from the back forty, and game from the storage locker.  Every year her husband slaughtered a pig, and it was butchered, trimmed and frozen in the commercial freezer the Harkins shared with their neighbors.  She was an excellent cook and an even better baker, and Billy and his brothers looked forward to her cakes, brownies, and molasses cookies.

The noontime meal was the principal meal of the day, but there was no lingering over it.  The pot roast, mashed potatoes, lima beans and snap peas, milk, and pudding were eaten quickly, for there was always work to do in the long afternoons ahead.  Supper was more leisurely, a real family time, time to talk about the crops, school, the new family in Slow Falls, and the weather.  Suppers were leftovers – warmed pot roast, steamed mashed potatoes, buttered vegetables and biscuits.  The meals never varied, and although there was some variety – chicken, pork, or beef; lima beans instead of snap peas; white bread instead of biscuits, and honey instead of butter – they were the same in proportion, category, and balance.  Billy’s mother was a big believer in The Basic Food Groups, and was sure to serve at least something from each one at every meal.

It is hard to explain how a farm boy like Billy Harkins got a taste for gourmet food.  Most of this classmates trundled on to adulthood eating the same, predictable meals, never complaining or curious about the new cuisine.  Billy on the other hand, sensed that there was more to meat than pot roast, that vegetables did not have to be cooked until soft, that bread and gravy were not staples, and that canned soups were salty, gluey, pasty, and tasteless; or that canned peaches had no taste and thawed broccoli was limp, watery, and worthless.  Call it instinct – taste for and understanding of food is no different than artistic talent, an innate appreciation for form, movement, or color – or some random exposure to cuisine (a magazine in the dentist’s office, for example); but it was there.  By the time Billy was a young teenager, he not only found his mother’s cooking irritating, but his desire for a serious palate awakening insistent.

Billy was a good student, and as much as his parents would be unhappy at his remove, they knew that a good eastern school would be an opportunity not to be missed.  Thanks to an Ohio Scholarship set up by a wealthy alumni, one Ohioan per year was sent east, all expenses paid.

The cafeteria at his college was by no means gourmet but it wasn’t Ohio either; and Billy was exposed to new foods prepared in different ways.  Sauces, for example, were a novelty.  His mother’s meat-and-potatoes dinners were unadorned and ungarnished, simple affairs which, she said, ‘showed off’ the farm freshness of poultry, meat, and vegetables.  And most revealing of all were ethnic nights – Chinese, Italian, and Mexican food.  Compared to the real thing as Billy later found out, they were gloppy,  fatty concoctions, laden with sauce, salt, and garlic.  Spaghetti and meatballs was heavy, thick, and overpowering.  Sweet-and-Sour Pork was deep fried, laden with unused oil, sweetly gooey and treacly, and inedible.  Yet, at the same time, these dishes suggested what they could be.  The spices, all new to Billy, intimated some future use – some combination which complemented, added to, or enhanced.   He ate all that the cafeteria had to offer, ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the dining hall, tasted everything, wasted nothing, and took mental notes.

Perhaps it was because of his artistic nature, his sensitivity, and his innate flamboyance, Billy became a foodie.  What had started at college matured at an exponential rate.  Before long he was nibbling at the outer fringes of the food culture, sampling wild sea oats, prairie grasses, and New Zealand periwinkles.  He took his inspiration from Rene Redzepi, five-star Danish chef known for his foraged cuisine.  Redzepi wandered the inlets, bays, and nooks of the Danish coast for unusual sea fare; culled and gathered much of the fauna that grew in seawater or in the brackish ponds nearby.  His presentation was equally unique and ‘foraged’.  He had an instinct for matching the food prepared with the design that surrounded it, combined with a flair for the unexpected bit of color, strands, or filaments that gave fancy to serious dishes.

Billy spent a month at the California Culinary Institute in Napa to study with Bruno Felipe, a native Californian who learned from Alice Waters but who branched out creatively to innovate and enliven her delicious but often overly simple offerings.   Felipe was known for his food architecture – high, fanciful, delicately balanced creations that were reminiscent of Dale Chihuly’s blown glass creations.   His most famous was sea urchin roe secreted in a nest of crisped, marinated barley stems, hidden by a fragrance of fairy dust, wild mini-grains and peach morsels marinated in blackberry wine. The diner had to imagine what was underneath the spiraling, delicate tower, investigating, selecting, sampling until he got to the roe, nestled and secure well within.

Billy learned the art of ‘Culinary Fancy’, the trademark of Bruno Felipe, and although he had no intention of becoming a chef or restaurateur, he would simply delight in the joy of his own successes and the fanfare of presentation to his friends.

Of course, he had overshot the fairway.  His friends, no matter how sophisticated were not up to the chase of hidden uni.  There were plenty of oohs and ahs at the presentation, but most guests were frustrated looking for what there was to eat.  The story of an American expatriate in India many years ago came to the mind of one guest.  After much searching and a lot of good luck, he had found artichokes in the Bombay market, and quickly told the cook to prepare them for lunch.   When he and his wife returned from swimming at Breach Candy hungry, and ready for the delightful delicacy of artichokes; but there in the kitchen, surrounded by artichoke leaves, hearts, and choke was the cook.  “Very sorry, Sahib, apologies, but cannot find what to eat”.  He smothered a laugh at the thought and at the delicately balanced ‘culinary tower’ of Billy Harkins.

Billy, disappointed and discouraged at the lack of awe and interest at his California Nouvelle Cuisine and Rene Redzepi foraging, turned to French haute cuisine. which had recently come under assault by the new generation of American chefs – like Billy - who wanted to dismantle the old, carefully blended, reduced, curated, subtlety of sauces.  He vowed to return to the cathedral of European cuisine – France – and learn the art of process, reduction, and reformation.  This style of cooking was nothing like he had done in California.  Whereas Redzepi and Bruno created by addition, the French created by assimilation and combination.  This classic French style, he found, was tedious in the extreme – reducing, adding, reducing, combining, reducing until the sauce was complete.  No one ingredient could ever be discerned, and this was the point.  It never should.

So Billy went back home and tried out some of his new classic dishes on his friends; but they had become accustomed to the sharp edges of new American cuisine – the bite of pepper, the pungency of fermented sauces, the clear, unique taste of one thing, clams, sirloin, grouper, or leeks.

After forays into Chinese, Thai, Lebanese, and Dominican cooking; and experimental sallies of his own mixing and combining them, he woke up one day and longed for his mother’s pot roast.   Where had it gone?  Why wasn’t it on the menu of the five star restaurants he frequented?  How had it become the icon of bad Midwestern, tasteless farm cooking?  It was so tender, running with juices simmered for hours in the slow cooker and redolent of the carrots, turnips, and onions that went in the pot with it.  And why were buttered mashed potatoes so absurd? Or cobblers? Or biscuits and honey?

He found himself at his mother’s farm table, eating her famous pot roast, loving it, but making mental notes how he would ‘invigorate it’ – a bit of sage perhaps, a coulis of raspberries.  The damage had been done.  You can’t go home any more.  His palate had been irrevocably changed.  He was more at home with snipe and foraged edible bluebells than he was with home cooking.  So, because he was so convinced that further culinary adventures would only lead him into Rococo excesses, he decided to return, to move back through culinary time until he was back at his mother’s table as a child, eating pot roast, mashed potatoes and lima beans.  It was not regression, he convinced himself, but rediscovery – a culinary and mnemonic journey back home, worth the effort and the trip. 

COVID, Masks, And Race–Mandate Politics At Their Worst

Early on during the COVID epidemic, cities struggled with ‘equity’.  How could they assure that both wealthy white neighborhoods and poor black ones would be equally treated?  In one major metropolitan city the municipality struggled with this issue more than most because the city was still as racially divided as South Africa was during apartheid.  

East of Longridge Parkway the neighborhoods were all black; west of it all white.  Wards to the east were almost 100 percent black, while wards to the west were almost all white; and not surprisingly social indicators were consistent with such racial divisions.  The poorest, blackest wards had the highest rates of crime, delinquency, drugs, poor academic performance, and single-parent families; while the wealthy white wards had just the opposite.

It was not surprising, therefore that when the  COVID vaccine became available in the city the overwhelming demand came from white wards.  Highly educated, professional, and ambitious residents were the first to line up; and in the first weeks that the COVID vaccination website was open to all, most slots were taken by them.  

This was not surprising.  White ward residents knew the importance of the vaccine, had no qualms or reservations about it; no worries about autism, mind control, or deep state conspiracies.

On the other hand residents east of the Parkway and south of the Alhambra River, had other things to worry about.  Drive-by shootings, a resurgence in drug-related violence, and gang-related murders were endemic.  Single mothers, pregnant, abandoned, and left with young children, turned to grandmothers for child care and the city for welfare and other ‘supplemental support’.  COVID, therefore, was never high on anyone’s list of priorities.

As a result, demand for the vaccine was desultory at best.  While coverage rates in white wards increased exponentially, those in black wards remained sluggish and stagnant.

In a stark, racially-motivated move, the City Council decided to rectify the situation by penalizing white wards and giving preferential access to black ones. Preventing whites from commandeering all the vaccine in the city would give blacks a greater chance of protection.  

The Mayor of course denied any racial preferences, and argued that the inequity was due to epidemiology.  Those wards with high levels of mortality, morbidity, and predisposing factors to immune system failure were to be prioritized. 

Residents of white neighborhoods called foul, charging unconstitutional arrogation of municipal authority and discrimination against those who follow the rules – masks, social distancing, testing – and who consequently had far fewer COVID infections. 

Be that as it may, said the City, one cannot ignore the unacceptable morbidity that contributes to COVID infection in minority wards.   We are being epidemiologically sound by prioritizing those districts of the city with the greatest health needs.

Disingenuous and racially motivated, replied white residents. ‘We are not healthy by accident’, they said, ‘ but have been deliberate and persistent in managing our physical well-being.  Why should we be penalized for such positive behavior?’

‘Racism’, shouted the most radical city officials.  ‘White privilege at best and white oppression at worst’, they said.   ‘It is because of you white people that the black man still suffers.  Social dysfunction is your problem, not his.  We will act on his behalf, favor him, prioritize him, protect him from your racist, white hegemonic, destructive ways.  Your privilege comes on the back of the black man.  This will not stand’.

Of course, white residents quickly figured out how to skirt the demonstrably racist policies of the city government; and found that hospitals accepted former patients for vaccinations without question or criteria.  Most residents of white wards had been treated at area hospitals at one time or another, so vaccinations came early and easily; but the hostility against the city administration remained.  It is one thing to be politically attentive to your constituency; another thing to favor it with entitlements and walking-around money; but another thing entirely to baldly, hypocritically, and unashamedly to distort foundational principles of racial equality and use race as a deciding factor in public administration.

The flap died down once vaccines became universally available.  Website sign-ups, waitlists, and priorities were things of the past.  Anyone who wanted a shot could get one often without appointment at walk-in drug store clinics. 

Yet despite this now universal access, the vaccination rates in the black, minority wards of the city were less than half that of white.  Recent data from the District of Columbia, a comparable city, show that vaccination rates in majority black Ward 8 are half that of those in majority white Ward 3 (approximately 25 percent vs 50 percent).  Clearly the reasons for low vaccine uptake had nothing to do with problems of ‘access’, as claimed by the government, but to systemic dysfunctionality.

Similar statistics show a high correlation between low vaccination rates and high rate of hospitalization and infection.  It is clear that the unvaccinated are the cause of the continued spread of the disease.  They are giving each other the infection.

Because of a stated concern for the rapid spread of the Delta Variant, the City Council issued a mask mandate.  All those who enter public and private buildings in the city must wear masks, a setback to the renewed social and economic life of the city.  

A spokesperson for the Council said that it issued the restraining order ‘to protect all citizens of this great city’, but such a statement was a raw distortion of the truth.  The mask mandate was issued only to protect the unvaccinated – those who persistently and irresponsibly have refused to get the shot – and because the unvaccinated in the city were overwhelmingly black, her mask mandate was a transparent, baldly political reprise of the city’s racial policies of a year ago.

New Delta variant-inspired mask mandates are senseless at best.  Vaccinated people rarely, and only rarely give each other breakthrough infections, and if infected, their illness is minor.  If unvaccinated people want to take the chance of infecting each other, it is up to them.  There is no need whatsoever to subject responsible, vaccinated residents to such restrictions.

It is again no surprise that mask mandates are favored by liberal Democratic jurisdictions.  Progressives reject the principle of personal responsibility as a criterion for policy.  The unvaccinated, regardless of their social and moral dereliction, must be protected in an ‘inclusive’ society.  When race is added to progressive fallacy, it is the perfect storm.  The racial policies of vaccination and mask mandates, popular and seemingly universal in all Democratic-run cities are divisive, unnecessary, and self-serving.   Mask mandates will be remembered as a pernicious by-product of the entire pandemic experience.

The Sky Is Falling, The Sky Is Falling–Chicken Little In The White House

Chicken Little likes to walk in the woods. She likes to look at the trees. She likes to smell the flowers. She likes to listen to the birds singing.

One day while she is walking an acorn falls from a tree, and hits the top of her little head.

“My, oh, my, the sky is falling. I must run and tell the lion about it”, says Chicken Little and begins to run.

America is a nation of doomsday-sayers.  Over twenty percent of Americans believe that Armageddon will happen in their lifetimes, and many more expect it the near future – not God-willed, but due to the ignorance and moral lassitude of human beings who refuse the reality of climate change.  

If these environmentalists are to be believed, the earth will continue warming at an accelerated rate, forests will be incinerated, cropland will become dry, cracked, and unproductive, and coastal cities will be submerged.  The earth will become a frightful, uninhabitable place.

Or so Chicken Little says. 

Most people believe in the versatility and adaptability of the human race.  Cities will be reconfigured through engineered wetlands, canals, waterways, hanging gardens, and floating neighborhoods. Recombinant DNA advances will enable hardy, drought-resistant crops to flourish, and eventually most agriculture will move north.  The far northern reaches of Canada, Russia, China, and Scandinavia will become the new grain belts of the world.

Perhaps most importantly, once the human genome is completely deciphered, the age of human genetic engineering will be fast upon us, and man will gain complete control of the environment.  No amount of global warming, Ice Age cooling, or variant climate change will be of any consequence.  

Just as agriculturalists are genetically modifying plants to be resistant to drought, pests, and soil depletion; so will engineers be able to modify the human genome to adapt to environmental conditions.   

Cities will not have to be changed to accommodate global warming.  Human beings will change.  The ability to thrive in water, to breathe different compositions of air, and to live well in either colder or warmer climates will be easily programmed.  Environmentalism will die as a movement, and human modification will be the focus of all attention.

If not global warming, then catastrophic, pandemic viral disease will wipe out human civilization, say Chicken Little doomsday sayers. It is only a matter of time before ‘The Big One’ emerges from a live poultry market in Hunan and destroys the human race.  Corona, Ebola, and plague will be nothing compared to the ravages of Virus X.

There are still some old school nuclear worriers who are convinced that an atomic holocaust is just over the horizon.  It is only a question of when before the world unleashes its nuclear armory in one final, extinction event. 

Americans come by this Chicken Little mentality honestly.  Over thirty percent of Americans believe that the Bible – and the Book of Revelations which predicts an imminent fiery end to the world – is the literal word of God; and millions have been duped in an earlier age by snake oil salesmen, snake charmers, hucksters, big tent preachers, side show carny barkers, and vaudevillian charmers.  

Tens of millions believe in wild conspiracy theories circulating virally on social media – alien invasions, fluoride mind control, international financial cabals, and many others even more far fetched. Millions recount their personal encounter with aliens, and tens of millions more with Jesus.   How can we not believe the most incredible stories of doom and annihilation?

We were not always this way.  Americans not long ago were a hardy lot, afraid of nothing.   Our ancestors braved and survived malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and infection to tame the overgrown bottomland of the Mississippi Delta, the Northern Neck of Virginia, and the pestilential swamps of North Carolina.  

They fought and killed the Indians of the Western plains to make the range habitable for cultivation and residence.  Our great grandfathers fought and killed Mexicans to reclaim lands rightfully theirs.  Our forefathers drove cattle from the Mexican border to the Montana prairies, settled on virgin land and made the dream of Jefferson and Lewis and Clark a reality.

They in their great adventure were maimed, infected, snake-bit, crippled and disemboweled; and yet they persisted.  It was an adventure with death and disease but one of high purpose and determination. The’Greatest Generation’ of World War II was not the first but one of many in the history of the United States – generations of uncommon courage, steadfastness, and honor.

Along comes the COVID pandemic, and we shake in our boots.  Forget the fact that the death rate is high only in the immune-compromised and the elderly (most of whom are immune compromised in some way) populations.  Forget that the disease causes either no symptoms or mild symptoms in young, healthy people – the demographic majority.  Forget the fact that deaths from cardiovascular disease per year far outnumber COVID deaths at the height of the epidemic.  Forget the fact that over 3 million deaths occur every year in the United States, only a small fraction of which were due to COVID.

Not only do we overreact because of an innate cultural assumption of imminent holocaust, because of a similarly culturally innate credulousness; and because of self-serving progressive arguments about disaster and necessary communitarian, government response, we feel entitled to our four-score-and-twenty years, however spent.

The life expectancy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars was barely more than 30 years.  If death was certain at that young age, then why not die gloriously on the battlefield rather than from snakebite?

Pierre (War and Peace) has noted something else – a spirit and camaraderie that seemed to ignore death and dying:

The booming cannonade and the fusillade of musketry were growing
more intense over the whole field, especially to the left where
Bagration’s fleches were, but where Pierre was the smoke of the firing
made it almost impossible to distinguish anything. Moreover, his
whole attention was engrossed by watching the family circle –
separated from all else – formed by the men in the battery. […] Pierre
did not look out at the battlefield and was not concerned to know what
was happening there; he was entirely absorbed in watching this fire
which burned even more brightly and which he felt was flaming up in
the same way in his own soul.

Even though the battle became more dangerous and threatening, the spirits of the men never flagged, and to Pierre’s surprise increased:

Pierre noticed that after every ball that hit the redoubt, and after every
loss, the liveliness increased more and more. As the flames of the fire
hidden within come more and more vividly and rapidly from an
approaching thundercloud, so, as if in opposition to what was taking
place, the lightning of hidden fire growing more and more intense
glowed in the faces of these men

This was more than Henry V’s band of brothers at Agincourt.

Something else animated the spirit of the soldiers – an indefinable sense of humanity, life, and the exhilaration of war. It is more than morale, discipline, or even patriotism.  Pierre saw in the almost happy faces of his comrades a complete, transforming, and overwhelming drive.

By ten o’clock some twenty men had already been carried away from
the battery; two guns were smashed and cannon balls fell more and
more frequently on the battery and spent bullets buzzed and whistled
around. But the men in the battery seemed not to notice this, and merry
voices and jokes were heard on all sides.

Progressivism in the United States deliberately does not pride itself on courage, valor, duty, and fearlessness but on cautious communitarianism, Utopianism and wariness.  Wars are no longer fought for victory, but for compromised stalemate. Better to win conditionally and save military and civilian lives than to win at all costs.   Life has been ascribed an absolute value, not a value only measured by honor, heroism, or high achievement.

So it is no surprise that the Biden Administration has projected a Chicken Little, Afraid-Of-One’s-Own-Shadow approach to COVID; and it is certainly no surprise that liberals in power are relishing the almost uncontested imposition or government lockdowns, shutdowns, and mask mandates.

Nor is it a surprise that the latest government ‘it’s the science’ flip-flops and the unnecessary imposition of restrictions and mandates have finally awakened the sleeping giant of the American people.  Basta! Enough is enough!

Where are you going? - asks Foxey Loxey.

Do you know where he lives? asks the fox.

I don't, says Chicken Little.

I don't, says Henny Penny.

I don't, says Ducky Lucky.

I do, says Foxey Loxey. Come with me and I can show you the way.

He walks on and on until he comes to his den.

Come right in, says Foxey Loxey.

They all go in, but they never, never come out again.