On the Sublime

Food, hunting, enchiladas, and the strongest passion.

I’ve not written about food in awhile. Some of you may be happy about this: my incessant sermonizing on radical eating around this time last year still too fresh in your minds. Others, who came here because, presumably, I write about food, might have spent the last few weeks wondering where the heck their lobster carbonara¹ recipe is.

This newsletter is about a lot of things. It started off with me writing a simple recipe each week², but in the ensuing three years I’ve veered off into fatherhood, the outdoors, enlightenment, fitness, and even dabbled with poetry and photography. Cow We Doin’ consists of multitudes. But, with just about a month until the start of archery deer season in most of New England, I am once again thinking about the importance of being connected to your food.

Jesse C. McEntee

asked the other day “why [do] we hunt?” He proposed the following: for survival, for entertainment, for conservation and for inspiration. I get that. However, I am — and I presume most of you who read this are, too — fortunate enough where I don’t need to hunt to survive. I can feed myself and my family with weekly trips³ to the grocery store⁴. And while I do enjoy hunting — the being out in nature, the immersion of myself into an ecosystem far older and far greater than myself — I don’t relish the killing. Instead, in harvesting a deer⁵, I can’t help but feel more intimately connected with the world, with what it takes to be a part of the food chain. There’s a sense of appreciation that you get when you are responsible for what you eat. You are, as Piebald so enthusiastically sings, “part of it.”

This feeling, I think, is tied to the Romantic idea of the sublime. Edmund Burke, perhaps the preeminent Romantic, described the sublime as the “strongest passion,” one which is experienced after surviving a great terror or fear, one which results in an overwhelming feeling of delight upon being alive. It’s the juxtaposition between danger and safety that allows us to experience something beyond either emotion⁶. It’s what comes at half-light in the woods, hearing the hoot of an owl, the grunt of a buck, the crackling of leaves, of not knowing what’s beyond you in the darkness. It’s the moment of panic when a shadow flashes by you underwater, the relief when you realize it’s a striped bass. The amazement at watching fifteen of them swim by. These are emotions you don’t get — can’t get — when you get your food only from the grocery store.

Driving up to Acadia last week, we passed the Big Chicken Barn in Ellsworth, Maine. The structure is monolithic. And while now an antique shop, the building was originally, as the name implies, a chicken barn built to house 20,000 egg-laying chickens. Constructed in the 1950s, the barn coincided with Maine transitioning from a rural, agrarian economy into that of the post-war boom⁷. Why bother keeping your own backyard chickens — or shooting a wild turkey, for that matter — when you can get such economies of scale?

Looking from the road, I struggled to comprehend 20,000 chickens in one location. That was seventy years ago: today, it’s not unusual for a large commercial egg farm to have upwards of five million chickens. That many birds is an abstraction: to buy eggs from a factory farm is no different than buying something off a production line. The meat from those chickens might as well be lab-grown and mass-produced. Where’s the sublime in that? What connection can we possibly have with five million of anything⁸?

You needn’t take up bowhunting to have a connection to your food. There’s awe⁹ in growing your own vegetables, in visiting a farm in the winter, in eating a field-harvested bison. You can find the sublime in your food in any number of ways — but in order to do so, you can’t take it for granted. You have to think about where your food is coming from. How did it get to your plate? What is your connection to it¹⁰? That connection is what I talk about when I talk about radical eating; that connection is what Mrs. CWD and I are trying to teach the kiddos to recognize when we have them help plant seeds, volunteer at the farm, help prep and cook and clean. Food — as do all things in life — comes from somewhere. Recognize that. The more of that you do, the more of the sublime you uncover, the greater your sense of appreciation and gratitude.

It’s that gratitude I’m feeling thinking about the chance to restock our freezer with venison this fall. As one might imagine, with 400-pounds of it to be eaten, beef has frequented our plates of late. Not having the chance to visit the grocery store since returning from our vacation, we’ve been subsisting on cow, supplemented with vegetables from our garden¹¹. The lazy-man’s enchiladas we made the other day were entirely of ingredients of which I could trace the origin. And, the furthest distanced ingredient — the beef¹² — could very easily be replaced with a protein I harvested myself: like the deer, which as the weather cools, I’m thinking more and more about.

Here’s how we did it.

Preheat your oven to 400(F). Layer a few flour tortillas on the bottom. In a separate skillet, sauté a bunch of vegetables — onions, peppers, zucchini, whatever is on hand — seasoned with a vaguely Mexican blend of spices. Spread those on top of the tortillas, and then, in the same pan, cook enough ground beef to make you feel comfortable with the same spice blend, and dump those on top of the veg. Cover with a few more tortillas.

In a blender, combine three or four tomatoes, a cucumber, salt, and cumin, plus maybe a squeeze of lime juice. Blend until smooth, and then smother over the tortillas. Top with cheese — plenty — and bake in the oven for 15-20 minutes until gooey. You can even turn on the broiler for the last few minutes to really get the cheese looking good.

So there are your lazy-man enchiladas — and yes, I’m aware we made this one already in March¹³. But the recipe is good and easy and I’m sure no one will be disappointed¹⁴.

The Family CWD, with nary a break in the action, is heading back up to the Granite State this weekend, where, tomorrow morning, I’ll be attempting to show enough proficiency with my bow to secure a new hunting spot. After that, I’m sure the Kiddos CWD will find some trouble to get into, on or off of the water, with a multitude of extended cousins. Perhaps Mrs. CWD¹⁵ and I can take a moment to breath.

Whether or not you’ll be wrangling toddlers this weekend, I hope you take a moment to appreciate the grandeur of the world. Get outside a little bit — find something greater than you.

We’ll see you back here next week.

1. For this, and for the lobster poutine I’ve promised

Alice Jones Webb

, it would require Uncle Steady and I to be successful in capturing any sort of lobster while we’re out freediving. Too date, we’ve been less than stellar on that front. The hope is a week in New Jersey might increase our success rate — though I’m not optimistic that we’ll find any lobster off the Barnegat Jetty.

2. Originally, this was going to be titled “Red Sauce Only” and just be a newsletter with various red sauce-based dishes.

3. Albeit, expensive.

4. To say nothing of two chest freezers filled with grass-fed beef and a garden hemorrhaging cucumbers.

5. Or turkey. Or fish or lobster, oyster or crab.

6. On this note, it’s no wonder (see what I did there?) that words describing amazement and terror are often so closely linked. In Greek, the words for fear and wonderful are the same [θᾰ́μβος], as is the Latin verb for reverence and for fear [Vereor]. In English, terrific connotates exceptional but comes from the Latin root terrificus, which besides sounding like a spell from Harry Potter, means “to make frightened.”

7. A week earlier, I was staying in Millinocket, ME, where, as far as I could tell, the economic situation hasn’t changed much since 1950. There are no chicken-barns-turned-antique-emporiums in Millinocket.

Great views of Katadhin, though.

8. One might, to argue the other side, counter that the sheer overwhelming nature of factory farming in itself is an example of the sublime. But while I do get a sense of terror in thinking about it, I don’t think there’s the requisite relief to qualify under the Burkean definition. I think the Romantic Sublime requires at least an understanding and appreciation of the awe at a smaller scale. We can be moved by the vastness of the ocean because we comprehend our own position relative to it. The ocean is not abstract in the way that five million chickens is.

9. Awe being another word imbued with the sublime: “a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder.”

10. Here’s Aldo Leopoldo, in “The Song of the Gavilan:”

Food is the continuum... not only your food, but food for the oak which feeds the buck which feeds the cougar who dies under an oak and goes back into the acorns for his erstwhile prey. This is one of many food cycles starting from and returning to oaks, for the oak also feeds the jay who feeds the goshawk who named your river, the bear whose grease made your gravy, the quail who taught you a lesson in botany, and the turkey who daily gives you the slip. And the common end of all of this is to help… make another oak.

11. Truly living off the land, just like Auntie CWD, eMD.

12. 57.9 miles, for what it’s worth. That’s not far off.

13. Ironically with the last of the venison from last fall and just after

Sam Sager

and I “lost” our first cow.

14. And if they are, I’m sure I’ll hear all about it via text message.

15. I am ashamed to admit that last week I forgot to acknowledge that she recently celebrated a birthday — so here is my belated, virtual, happy birthday!