The New Agrarian

This week on my eponymous site, I posted this essay about beating eggs and the difference a little work makes in cooking.

Since I’ve written a couple of times about working on a shaving horse, I suppose I should post some examples of what I’ve been able to do on it. So far, two stools, functional and good-enough looking, and good projects for building skills.

For my first day working on a shaving horse out at Duke Homestead I just grabbed whatever potentially suitable wood I had lying around, which happened to be some pieces of Bradford pear and dogwood branches I’d trimmed the previous spring, still with bark on. The dogwood was easy enough to work, the pear considerably more challenging: not only is it harder wood, but none of the branches was straight, and each had side branches that had to be trimmed, leaving knots. Back home, after I built my own shaving horse and bought a spokeshave, I had another go at the pear branches. The tricky grain made a good exercise for learning to use the tools, and with considerable patience they turned out gorgeous. So I dug out a piece of butternut I’d bought years ago, cut it for a seat, and made a stool. Read on

For much of the summer, work crews have been repaving the main road that runs past my house. First they widened it, then they repaved it, then they painted new lines. The road was already plenty wide enough for two cars, but bicyclists use it — recreationally; I’ve never seen anyone commuting from Hillsborough to Durham on a bike — and I expect the road was widened out of safety concerns. But…

I use the road to run. I don’t run far on it, because there’s too much traffic and too many blind curves, but I have to run a brief stretch on it to get from my neighborhood to other less-traveled back roads. The wider road may be safer for bicycles — that remains to be seen — but it’s more dangerous for me. It used to be that if I saw or heard a car I could hop off onto the grass, but now for most of that stretch the paved road drops right off into the drainage ditch. And most drivers, I’ve noted, seem to think that however wide their lane is, they own the paved surface.

The wider road is also more blacktop for turtles to cross, if you care about turtles. I do, but they don’t have much of a lobbying interest with municipal governments and highway commissions.

The end result of this “improvement,” then, was to make the road less safe for those of us who rely on our feet and not on wheels. But there’s a catch, and this is the interesting part. Read on

Recently I was rereading Aldren Watson’s Country Furniture and was reminded of his observation that early American woodworkers were, as they had to be, generalists. In England the profession was ancient and structured and specialized; in the colonies a woodsmith had to be joiner and turner and sawyer and everything else, and as the cities grew and urban shops specialized there were always smaller towns where a generalist might be of service. There simply were not enough skilled workers — enough workers, period — to permit great specialization. What was needed in that environment, Watson wrote, was a “singular adaptability to find practical solutions,” not a learned understanding of existing solutions.

For that matter, a woodworker would be lucky to be able even to specialize in working wood; likely he raised some of his own food and perhaps ran one or two side businesses. Early American villages, Watson wrote, were only tenuously connected to the larger world, and so “Each person in the small community did all the things for which he had an aptitude.” Read on

Occasionally I see arguments to the effect that eating red meat is dangerously damaging to the environment — red meat specifically, as compared to poultry. For example, that it takes 2,500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, but only 800 gallons to produce a pound of chicken. (“Only” is relative here.) Or that 27 pounds of carbon dioxide are produced for every pound of beef consumed, but only 7 pounds of CO₂ per pound of chicken. The figures vary so wildly that I won’t bother citing sources: I assume these numbers are inaccurate; I offer them only as examples of the argument being made, which is that eating chicken is more “environmentally responsible” than eating beef.

I wrote recently about my objection to this sort of bean-counting, this reduction of lives and complex realities to mere data. Here’s another example of what I meant: linking pounds of meat with pounds of CO₂ or gallons of water ignores the fact that those pounds of meat come from once-living creatures, which somebody has to kill. Read on