Culinary Goods

Recently, I borrowed a book that I’d noticed at D’Ambrosio Architecture & Urbanism, where my wife Erica works.  Thanks to Gwen and Franc for loaning me their copy of The Great Good Place: cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day (Ray Oldenburg. 1991, Paragon House).

For a book about cafes, bars, and hangouts it wasn’t as rollicking a read as I imagined it might be, none-the-less Oldenburg’s case for “the informal public life and the Great Good Places essential to it” sheds light on some fundamental elements of culture and society that too often we overlook.  He points out that,

Great Civilizations, like great cities, share a common feature.  Evolving within them and crucial to their growth and refinement are distinctive informal public gathering places.  These become as much a part of the urban landscape as of the citizen’s daily life and, invariably, they come to dominate the image of the city.  Thus, its profusion of sidewalk cafes seems to be Paris, just as the forum dominates one’s mental picture of classic Rome.  The soul of London resides in her many pubs; that of Florence in its teeming piazzas.  Vienna’s presence is seen and felt most within those eternal coffeehouses encircled within her Ringstrasse.  The grocery store-become-pub at which the Irish family does its entertaining, the bier garten that is father to more formal German organizations, and the Japanese teahouse whose ceremonies are the model for an entire way of life, all represent fundamental institutions of mediation between the individual and the larger society.

He goes on to comment that in North America we have lost (or largely failed to develop) the habit of spending time informally among our neighbours in the common gathering places that typify most other cultures.  Instead, he points out, we seek relaxation, entertainment, companionship, even safety, almost entirely within the privacy of homes that have become more a retreat from society than a connection to it.  As homes acquired master bedrooms, gourmet kitchens, tiled hot tubs, and patios with gas-fired barbecues, the public environment lost most of the facilities that had earlier provided amenities and entertainment for one and all.  We have traded our interest in public space for a more restrictive and personal concern with our homes and gardens.  He continues,

By mid-century, Americans were moving into communities without sidewalks, social centers, or corner stores.  The overequipped house was mass-produced in underequipped neighborhoods.

Oldenburg calls for streets that are an extension of home, where community life is casual, walking takes people to more destinations than cars, and where the interesting diversity of the neighborhood reduces one’s reliance on television.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the book is the section that discusses the concept of free-ranging and Patrick Goldring’s 1969 book The Broilerhouse Society.

Few of us range as casually, as freely, or as comfortably in our neighborhoods as our grandparents did in theirs.  Indeed, many homes have no sidewalks out front.  People are expected to come and go in the privacy of automobiles.  Traveling in this manner, people cross an environment without ever becoming part of it.

Oldenburg introduces The Broilerhouse Society, and traces the modern history of the chicken by pointing out that it formerly had the liberty of ranging freely about the farmyard, pecking and scratching when and where it pleased,  ”Chickens, moreover, were in contact with the natural world, with its days and nights, its seasons, its warm weather and its cold.  No longer.  Most chickens are now hatched and confined under highly controlled conditions.  Night and day are artificially controlled and accelerated by colored light and a bare minimum of physical movement is allowed.  Chickens survive on tasteless and flavorless formula food.”

A wonderful CBC Ideas series called Have Your Meat and Eat it Too is currently exploring the state of our meat and suggests that the situation remains similar today, “Almost all the meat and eggs you’ll find on supermarket shelves come from factory farms or feedlots - places where the animals that provide our food are kept by the thousands and where the majority never get to see the light of day”.

Few of us, at least in Western society, show much reverence for animals and their state of being.  This is particularly (and I think rather oddly) the case for animals that provide us with dietary sustenance.  However, Patrick Goldring’s The Broilerhouse Society suggests that we also have a strikingly parallel disregard for ourselves and our states of being,

Goldring’s Britain, he charges, is becoming like that for human beings.  ’Broilerhouse man, living on what is often tasteless and flavorless food, lives a life which is increasingly better organized but is also becoming tasteless and flavorless as his food.’ But most importantly, free-ranging is being curtailed.  We are well on the way Goldring contends, to a life-style in which we live in one small cell and are connected to another small cell, where we work, via commuting in yet another small cell.  Of the domestic cell, Goldring suggests: ‘The Englishman’s home today is not his castle.  It is his centrally heated, bright, combined nesting-cage and excersice run.  The family-sized television replaces the crowded cinema, the bottle of beer from the off-licence, the visit to the pub, the tely discussion, the pub argument.  Furnishing and decorating the home have become subjects of absorbing interest to the nation while public architecture has degenerated into a featureless bore.’

I’m not sure if in 1969 Goldring anticipated today’s large screen high definition televisions, home gyms, ‘reality’ tv programs, and a plethora of home improvement shows but certainly since his writing many of us have continued on the path he described.  We continue to cross the environment without becoming part of it and neglect our communities without realizing the impact on our quality of life and health.

Despite a cultural obsession with dieting we are becoming more obese - plumping up like boilerhouse chickens.  A new CBC food show “The Main Ingredient” recently discussed our diet and the obesity epidemic.  It was suggested by one commentator on the program that we go back to simpler, more fulfilling foods as opposed to the controlled diets and convenience foods that typify much of today’s consumption.

Perhaps we need to expand our reference of ‘free range’ beyond that of merely applying to the chickens we eat but also to encompass our lives too.  To take time to step out of our homes, cars, and offices and reconnect to the community and environment surrounding us and to take the time to begin eating real food again.

Let’s take the liberty of ranging freely about, pecking and scratching here and there, reconnecting with our communities and with the natural world, with its days and nights, its seasons, its warm weather and its cold.  In this vein I’d like to end this unusually long entry with some words from Kathleen Dean Moore (Professor of Philosophy and Writer Laureate at Oregon State University in Corvallis) from her book River Walking: Reflections on Moving Water.

Moore discusses the value of “poking around” and describes it as “more capricious than studying, but more intense than strolling.” She states that all learning comes from making connections between observations and ideas and she maintains that poking around is a guaranteed way to learn. It is about exploration and wonder, about developing sense impressions, observing details, and finally about making connections between what we are learning and what we already know.  She states that we create another piece of who we are every time we notice something, or every time something strikes us as important enough to store away in our mind.

When I was growing up, an entire day of poking around was a treat reserved especially for birthdays.  My birthday came in the Ohio summer, and my treat was to have the whole family pile into a rented rowboat and poke around Hinckley Lake all afternoon.  I can picture us still:  Because it is my birthday, I am rowing, dragging strings of elodea off both oars.  My father leans over the bow, looking for snails and tiny floating ferns among the duckweed.  In the stern sits my mother, rejoicing beyond reason at watery smells; beside her, my little sister on her back, watching the buzzards, and my older sister with a pocketknife, sawing and sawing at the stem of a water lily.  The day is aimless, usually complicated by afternoon winds, always unproductive.  But each small, individually wrapped observation is a gift.

We make our memories in places where we come together as family and friends, where we participate and share in the world around us.  Home is where we go to rest - a community is where we live.  So please take some time to enjoy your free ranging liberty by “poking around” a bit.  You never know what you will learn, who you will meet, or who you’ll become.  Enjoy the people, the landscapes, and the Great Good Places that make our community special.  Let’s meet for a pint on the way to the public market.

But I don’t want to make too much of the instrumental value of poking around. The whole point is that poking around is good in itself, like music, or moonrise. So I poke around at the frozen edges of Winter Creek in the late afternoon when the sun comes in low over the oak knoll and throws a long, rippling shadow from each dried cattail across the creek and up the farther bank. As Thoreau observed in Walking, the sun shall ‘perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.’