Hawai'i Day Fourteen: Books and Beef

Breakfast today was my usual muffin, and lunch was a bit of leftover nachos from last night. In between and after we hit the Kapoho tidepools down the road and I spotted another moray eel - this one an adult the size of my arm. Tomorrow we're planning a drive over to the Kona side of the island in order to visit Pu'uhonua o Honaunau, which is having a Hawaiian Cultural Festival all weekend, so today we laid low at 'home', doing a lot of reading.

So far on the trip, I've finished two books - one today - both of which I've enjoyed, and both of which were (not surprisingly) food related.

The first was Meat: A Love Story by Susan Bourette, which follows the author's journalistic journey from a magazine assignment that has her working for a Canadian meat packing plant, to vegetarianism (briefly), to eating muktuk (whale) with Inuit, moose hunting, working in a Texas steakhouse & at a NY butcher shop, attending a raw meats buffet, and even volunteering at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture - the community-based, 'back-to-basics' farm that (in part) supports the restaurant of Dan Barber, Blue Hill Farm, which you might've seen on one season of Top Chef.

Her writing is sharp and the prose is fast paced, and the fact that she was able to get herself invited or at least allowed into the placed she did is admirable. The only thing that kept bothering me while reading the book was the recurring theme of her being very, very bad at everything she tried to do. From being so bad at breaking down chicken that she's assigned to wrap meat in paper at the Pizzuco's butcher shop, to falling to the ground (and getting kicked out) of the kitchen at Pappas Bros. Steakhouse. It seemed to happen every chapter, every challenge she faced. And it got a little old to me. It came across at times as comical, but usually seemed a self-deprecating type of humor usually put forward by those lacking self-confidence, looking for others to build them up. It may have been the truth, but it seemed played up, and after ten chapters of it, seemed almost anti-feminist: a 250+ page declaration of how bad this woman is at "man's work". But still a good read, particularly for anyone wanting as much insight into the world of meat that they can get their hands on.

The book I finished today was Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting by Michael Perry. As the title suggests, it's the memoir of the author's experience returning to farming in his adult life, after a childhood growing up on a farm. I think it's really well written, weaving memories of the past with his 'present' experiences. It made me laugh out loud several times, and repeatedly had me in tears.

Interestingly enough, this author also admits his inadequacies boldly - and they're illustrated in several building projects he finds a way to mess up. Perhaps the fact that this is a memoir creates the balance necessary for those moments to not paint him as incompetent, but I think the difference is that Perry writes about those mistakes in a way that shows how focused and mindful he was of trying to do the right thing, but just not getting it right, whereas Bourette comes across as not paying attention, doing things half-heartedly, and thus failing. I think that's why the moments of self-deprecation in Perry's book came across as honesty whereas I question the truth of Bourette's falls and failures.

I started a third book, called Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness by Jeff Wilson, but didn't find it to my liking. My first introduction to Shin Buddhism, aka Pure Land Buddhism, was in Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea by Jaimal Yogis, which Dan & I both read and enjoyed very much recently. In it, Yogis mentions how he didn't 'get' Pure Land Buddhism until one day when he realized he was already in the Pure Land. That made me curious about the tradition, but reading Wilson's writing on Shin makes me think Yogis was applying his Zen beliefs to the Shin tradition. Assuming Wilson - an assistant professor of religious studies specializing in Buddhist traditions and Shin practitioner - is a more reliable source for information on Shin than Yogis, it feels too dogmatic and, well, religious for me. What I love about the Buddhist traditions I've studied is the philosophical structure, the lack of pomp and circumstance, and the absence of mystical other-worlds, gods and monsters. Coming from that angle, Shin comes across as almost Christian, with it's core belief in the 'Pure Land' that you'll go to when your earthly body is no more. Perhaps I need to read more to understand it better, but for now, I'm switching to another book.

I got an advanced copy of Chris Anderson's latest economic exploration, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which looks at the use of a $0.00 price tag to actually make money, that I'm digging into now. His last book (The Long Tail) was an interesting investigation into how businesses (like Amazon.com, for example) were making money by selling small amounts of lots of things, as opposed to large amounts of a few things, because of changes in some of the fixed costs. I've been fascinated by free goods for years in many ways (from my introduction to the gift economy of Burning Man in 2002 to my recent everything's free yard sale), and am interested in models used (past and present) to make a living by giving things away.

Assuming I knock Free out before our time here is up, I'll be back to food related reading with The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds, and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot by Chip Brantley. I'd never heard of a pluot until trying one from Tiny's Organics last Summer, but the biology and genetics behind it are interesting to me, so it should be a fun read.



And now that my Summer reading is dissected completely, I should probably return to more solidly foodie matters - like what I made us for dinner.



I began marinading a beautiful, grass-fed, locally raised steak yesterday in lots of ginger, garlic, and soy sauce, and tonight I seared it off on the grill, and served it with some grilled long beans we bought at the farmers market, and some pre-fab, frozen hash browns (a request from Dan, as he's been craving them). At first, I thought I'd mistakenly overcooked the beef - tasting a bite from the end that seemed beyond medium-rare, and noticing the depth of color of the meat. But then I realized the color was largely the soy sauce marinade having penetrated the meat, and (aside from the end bite) was seared on the outside but juicy and delicious in the middle. I dare say it was possibly my best steak cooking performance. So many years of vegetarianism have left me behind on learning to properly cook meat, but I may finally be getting the hang of it. Dan seemed to think so.




(Dan's writing all about our trip over at our other blog, The Dans In Hawai`i, so I'll just stick to writing what I know: food.)