Bishops eats elders, elders eats common peopil; they eats sich cattil es me, I eats possums, possums eats chickins, chickins swallers wums, an’ wums am content tu eat dus’, an’ the dus am the aind ove hit all. Hit am all es regilur es the souns from the tribil down tu the bull base ove a fiddil in good tchune, an’ I speck hit am right, ur hit wudn’t be ’lowed.
—SUT LOVINGOOD (George Washington Harris), “Rare Ripe Garden-Seed”
Even with a perfect computer emulation of the stomach, you cannot then stuff a pizza into the computer and expect the computer to digest it.
—JOHN R. SEARLE, “What Your Computer Can’t Know,” The New York Review of Books
I dreamed in the night I had gone on to Glory,
And found it was full of loose women not whory—
Whose faces were sweet, whose bodies incredible,
Whose sweat was white wine and whose few clothes were edible,
And all of them naturally knew special arts,
And along with the wholes there were sumptuous parts:
Great legs, cherry lips, and deltas aglow,
And breasts you could nibble and cause them to grow,
And buttercream voices expressing their gratitude
To me on account of my marvelous attitude.
“Oh boy,” I was saying, but then I said, “Look,
It’s all very nice, but can someone here cook?”
“I thought this,” said one of the women, “was too good
To be true.” Came a chill. “We were told you could.”
The only cooking I have had to do over the years is for myself, or for children. The children were harder to please. But I can turn out spaghetti sauce or soup that discerning adults find palatable. And I can make these reliable crowd-pleasers.
We didn’t call them “crisps” when my mother made them, when I was growing up. We called them fried squash. But “crisps” has a nice ring to it, and they are crispy. Except for the ones that turn out floppy—but still good. Either way, they are not like batter-heavy sports-bar fried-zucchini strips. Much finer, as to texture and taste. In fact they’re even better than good fried zucchini in a good Italian place.
Take, say, three or four small to medium yellow squashes and slice them width-wise into disks maybe three-eighths of an inch thick. (Some thinner than that, for diversity.)
Let the disks sit and sweat as you pour olive oil maybe five-sixteenths of an inch deep in a heavy, seasoned-over-the-years iron skillet.
While your oil is heating to medium heat, put a double handful of cornmeal and a smidgen of salt into a paper bag. Then put the squash disks into the paper bag and shake it.
Then flick a little cornmeal into the oil to see if it’s hot. If it sizzles fairly fiercely, as if resenting the intrusion, start removing the cornmealed slices (they’ll be mostly covered with the meal but not thickly) from the bag. And place, one by one, the first batch of disks side by side into the oil. Flip them after a couple of minutes.
As they brown, take them out and put them on a paper towel and put others in the skillet. Add more oil as needed (the oil doesn’t have to be a constant depth or temperature, as long as it’s sizzling and lubricating). You’ll lose some cornmeal into the oil, but plenty will stay on.
They’ll get a little browner after they come out. Even if they’re bordering on burnt, they’ll be fine. In fact I would slightly overcook some of them, and let some others be floppier, for diversity.
Eat no more than 10 percent of them right off the paper towel yourself, because otherwise you’ll eat so many of them that there won’t be any point in putting what’s left out on the table, so you’ll eat them all. Use elbows to keep anyone else in the kitchen from eating more than 5 percent.
Hot or warm or cooling or cooled, they’ll be gritty-crunchy from the cornmeal, delicately moist on the inside, and in taste uniquely salty-squashy-olivy-corny-sweet. They could be an hors d’oeuvre, or—in fact they will be an hors d’oeuvre, if your guests catch sight of them on their way through the kitchen.
“Why is it that things taste so much better outside?” is a question people are always asking, and unlike most questions people are always asking (“Do you really love me?” “What is truth?”), this question springs from satisfaction.
Outdoors your senses perk up. And the smells of pine, honeysuckle, grass, and wood smoke are like extra spices: sauce of the outdoors, which isn’t fattening. And you have so much room in which to eat. A mouthful becomes a heartier proposition.
I don’t say there is no downside to eating outdoors. My daughter, Ennis, when she lived in San Francisco, reported that it took some of the zest out of a picnic when you saw, and were seen by, people who were living in the park.
Another thing that will mar outdoor eating sometimes is rowdiness. Once I was attending an outdoor event called the Steeplechase in Nashville, Tennessee, with my friends Slick and Susan Lawson, when a man with no shirt on fell into our lunch, where we had it spread out there on plates on our blanket, and he got up with the bulk of our cold cuts sticking to his upper body. That was awful. It wasn’t anybody the Lawsons knew well. I didn’t know him at all. That wouldn’t happen indoors.
Eating outdoors is somewhat like going naked outdoors. Animals do it. You know why Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe is so sexy, don’t you? Not just because one of the people in it is outdoors naked; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half the people in the entire history of French painting are outdoors naked. It’s because she is outdoors naked eating lunch.
Sexy, and perfectly natural. Most foodstuffs come from outdoors, and cook fires had to be outside originally. In the scheme of things, more eating goes on outdoors than indoors even today. “The whole of nature … is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive,” said William Ralph Inge. Here is an outdoor eating poem I wrote after reading in the Hartford Courant that “the smallest meat-eating animal is the least-weasel.” I call it “End of the Line”:
So on what creature does the least
Weasel feast?
Say a herbivore—
One which, furthermore,
The least weasel at least
Does not eat easily.
Still, that meal must feel,
When finished,
Greatly diminished.
The least weasel, on the other hand, can just let its belt out a notch.
Take a hike up a hill and get out your ordinarily ordinary sandwich and look around at the bird with its worm, the frog with its fly (and here come the ants for your crumbs), and what do you think?
FAME
You may be hot, but that
Don’t mean you’re in control.
The jelly said to the butter pat,
“Hey, we’re on a roll!”
My. (What a good spot on the food chain I lucked into.) This is a fine sandwich.
One thing you want to look out for, eating outdoors, is that you don’t eat bits of the outdoors itself. Bark, pine straw, dirt. I ate a fly once, in some baked beans. Until you have bit down on a live, beans-sated fly, don’t talk to me about what it’s like to have a trashy-greasy taste in your mouth. It lingers. I realized what was happening before my molars quite meshed, but that was too late. Actually, it might have been better if I had briskly chewed and swallowed and then realized. But, as I say, I realized just before I quite finished biting down. A buzz, some movement.
Prejudice, says the Stanford biologist Dr. Terrell Fleming, prevents our learning much from the housefly. True, Musca domestica carries disease in the digestive sputum it deposits indiscriminately on garbage, manure, and the food we eat, and its eggs do become maggots, which to our eyes are nasty, but in other ways, Fleming recently told the Association for the Advancement of Science, the fly is worthy of human emulation. If we could harness the fly’s multifaceted vision, we might still not be able to see maggots as cute, but we could vastly improve our own optic systems, and the fly’s uncanny ability to avoid being swatted may hold the key to preventing airplane collisions. And the fly is a model of metabolic efficiency. Says Fleming, “A housefly after consuming nothing for days still has the energy of a three-year-old child on a sugar rush. But even scientists hate flies. And science is the poorer for that.”
I’ll tell you what’s good, though. Baked beans without a fly in them, outdoors. Even the memory of having eaten a fly in them is not enough to put me off outdoor baked beans. Or deviled eggs. Or potato salad. My friend Lee Smith, who is from Virginia, says, “Northern people on a picnic take whole things. A whole chicken. A whole loaf of bread. Southern people have to have things that have had things done to them.”
But simple is good too, outdoors. On the island of Lamu, off the coast of Kenya, a lady named Christabel and I ate just-caught fish roasted whole on the beach on a grid of green twigs.
Ooh.
Say you do find a little something in your outdoor food that you wouldn’t have found if you and your food had stayed indoors. I am reminded of a time in a Paris restaurant when I cast a warm eye on a raw oyster on the half shell and saw a tiny wormish life-form swimming in the liquid.
I called the waiter over, but by the time he arrived I was unable to point out any swimming thing (chose nageuse). It had evidently succumbed to the lemon juice I had squeezed on the oyster.
I addressed a second oyster, and there was another one of those things. I summoned the waiter again, and this time he had to admit that he saw the thing swimming.
He shrugged and said, “C’est la mer.”
You want to be mindful of what you’re eating outdoors. I know a man who was eating potato chips out of a bowl at night in a semi-enclosed picnic area, and somebody said to him, “You’re bleeding all out of your mouth, there.”
It turned out he had been eating handfuls not only of potato chips but of lightbulb fragments, from a bulb that had broken in an overhead fixture.
That wouldn’t have happened if he had been entirely outdoors. Then too he had been drinking a great deal. He doesn’t drink at all now, and that’s one of the reasons.
Anyway, say you are serving something outdoors and someone complains that there is something unexpected in it. A bee wing or a windblown seed. Here is what you could say: “C’est le grand air.”
I don’t know why there have been so many French references in these remarks so far. Perhaps because “picnic” comes from the French pique-nique (as opposed to the English “pyknic,” which means “fat”). I had better bring in some counterbalancing Americana.
So here are some alfresco cooking hints from the late Slick Lawson, who was deeply involved in outdoor food affairs up to and including annual goat roasts featuring goat gumbo, nude swimming, and helicopter accidents:
“Things cooked inside are eaten with elbows up; things cooked outside, the elbows are on a table.
“Inside, you stand up and stir; outside, you bend over and peek.
“Inside, guests tell you how famous chefs do things. Outside, they tell you how they do things. They have secret recipes that they share with everyone.
“Inside, they help with the dishes; outside, they help with the ice.
“Inside or not, women always help with the bread. Instead of nice hot French bread that you break off, they are compelled to slice it and put garlic and butter on it, wrap it in foil, and turn it into a mush of dough that won’t sop.
“Outside, men want to pick up things. Chairs, beer coolers, and your best client’s wife.
“Inside, people try to make interesting conversation and are dull. Outside, they remember the most deplorable things you did in the good old days.
“Outside, if you discard a chicken lip or the left front paw of a hamster (hamsters have more dark meat than gerbils), someone will tell you that you threw away the best part.
“Outside, someone you don’t much like will leave a dish and follow up with three messages on your answering machine while you are in London.
“Outside, it’s hard to clean up after dark.
“Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are forced to eat outside.
“Outside, anything that falls to the ground belongs legally to the dog.
“Outside, medium rare has a wider latitude.
“After you finish serving from the grill, someone always points out that the fire is just now getting right.”
In San Francisco, my daughter, Ennis, taught three-year-old kids who had various handicaps: Down syndrome, deafness, parental sexual abuse, drug addiction in the womb. When the 1989 earthquake hit, her workday was over and she was at home, but many of the kids were still at the school. After the earth stopped moving, the teachers on duty took the kids outside while someone checked to make sure the building wasn’t about to collapse. It was suppertime. The next day Ennis wanted to give the kids a chance to talk out any traumatized feelings they might have.
“Okay,” she said to her class, “now what happened yesterday?”
“We had a picnic!” the children exclaimed.
SONG TO COOKING OUT OVER AN OPEN FIRE IN THE OPEN AIR WITH CRICKETS GOING GEECHY GEECHY
Food gets brown, wood gets rose,
Eyes join hands with ear and nose
To handle all of this that goes
Fume rise
juice drop
Fpss pif
ssfpop
To thee, O Lord, we lift the praise
For all this air in which to braise.
However progressive, in other respects, the many Southerners of my acquaintance are, and however down-to-earth, many of them treat salade fatiguée and moldy oranges like trash. I have seen dear friends toss precious organic materials right in with popped bubble wrap and outworn socks. Blithely they throw away eggshells, banana peels—even coffee grounds …
After I moved up north to rural Massachusetts, my mother came to visit and took note of my compost heap. She rolled her eyes. As an underloved child on a Mississippi farm, she said, she had to do such things. She gave me a look that said only a perverse smarty-pants eco-freak who had left the church would devote his time to getting the good out of corncobs in this day and age. “Everything your father and I worked so hard to preserve you from,” she said, “you like.”
When I was a child, I loved to play in dirt. Little did I dream that someday I would produce dirt, good, black, and crumbly. I will never be wealthy, but I have made my share of rich soil. My father told me that his grandfather, in cracker Florida, was “poor as owl dung.” If you’ve ever seen one of those owl droppings, hard little pellets of mouse hair and bones, you know they’re not going to contribute much to your prospects for waxing fruitful, but I have added some of them to my compost, in acknowledgment of my roots. They have mingled with collapsed jack-o’-lanterns, buggy cornmeal, maple leaves, and lobster shells to create loam.
Even some of my current neighbors, who tend to be, if anything, whole-earthier-than-thou, have accused me of caring more about compost than about the eventual phlox and tomatoes. That is true only in the sense that I may devote more time to fussing with the compost than to fussing with the phlox and tomatoes. I offered my wife a similar explanation recently when she asked—lightly, but you never know—whether I cared more about my sinuses than about her. That was insensitive of me, I realize now. I should not have drawn an analogy between my sinuses and my compost, because I love my compost. My sinuses follow me around, nagging. My compost stays out in the yard and works. My cereal dregs and dead daffodils decompose together, that my phlox and tomatoes might thrive.
And those tomatoes I do appreciate. They are red and robust and—try to find this in the stores—they taste extraordinarily like tomatoes. (Not to mention the beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squashes, garlic, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers. Dirt, in your own backyard, producing stuff that sticks to your bones. Makes you wonder.) But I admit, compost appeals to me in and of itself, for I have always been tickled by e pluribus unum. Spaghetti sauce or soup can incorporate considerable diversity, but there are limits. Compost is almost a wide-open town. Broccoli stalks lie down with shreds of The New York Times, stale Ritz crackers with herbal tea bags, gone-musky garlic cloves with blown rhododendrons. Give me your tired, your poor, your stringy, and your mildewed, the wretched refuse of your teeming fridge.
Sometimes our heap seems to resist breaking down. “I like compost,” I will yell at it, “but not very mulch!” Or, “Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of this soil!” Our compost never—at least while I’m watching it—steams. You hear about piles that emit visible rays of heat, but that is a gratification I have been denied. Still, I take pride in our down-to-earth clump of decadence:
Flat beer, bones, fireplace ashes, burned popcorn, struck matches, spoiled hay, black zucchini, lobster shells, fish eyes, incompletely devoured cat kills, finger blood, hair from our combs and brushes, dish-rinse water, peels, hulls, parings, stems, twigs, leaves, bark, sawdust, eggshells, pencil sharpenings, moldy applesauce, weeds (if seedless), sand, month-old bread, live worms, corncobs, apple cores, pine straw, wine dregs, string, crusts, crumbs, sardine oil, melon rinds, artichoke chokes, shrimp legs. A heterogeneity of tissues, coming together to create a richness, like unsavory influences forming a style.
And of course I keep an eye out for dung. Years ago, I had an old horse, and more manure than, honestly, I needed. Now I have to make do with road apples of opportunity. Do you know how Aunt Betsey Trotwood, in David Copperfield, runs out and waves a broom to chase off donkeys whenever they pass her house? When people ride horses past mine, I am glad. If I thought I could run out and startle them, the horses, into making a deposit as they go by, I would. That stuff makes your compost strong.
I fuss with my heap, yes, but I have a gimme cap that says “Compost Happens,” and so do I believe. Someone sent me a video put out by Alameda County, California, titled Do the Rot Thing. Exemplary Alamedans are shown systematically turning out compost that, by the looks of it, might be packaged as a breakfast cereal or knitted into a nice nubbly sport jacket. My compost is stranger than that. Over the years, I have buried in it three snakes and untold fingernail clippings. I used to add a lot of cigar butts and Red Man leavings. My system won’t tolerate tobacco anymore, which is a good thing, but no quid ever fazed my compost. My compost is eating, at its leisure, a pine log eight inches thick that I put in there as a friendly challenge. Maybe I could have consoled my mother if I had expressed my feeling for compost in hymnal terms: What once was waste, now is ground.
Ah, Church of England clergywear: dog collar, surplice, cassock. As that Austin Powers fellow might say, not exactly what’s happening, baby. Members of the Southwell diocese of Nottinghamshire (pronounced Suth’l-disNoshersher) feel that it’s high time vicars serve Communion as their parishioners take it, in casual dress. Draw in young worshippers in increasingly secular times, sort of thing. Otherwise, studies suggest, for every one hundred children who went to church in 1930, by 2030 only four. Who’ll fill the pews, you see. The bishop of Maidstone was game, said he’d consider wearing jeans. Traditionalists were aghast. “If you are standing behind the altar as the Eucharist,” argued one (happened to be a designer of ceremonial robes), “you are standing there as Christ. Difficult to imagine Christ in jeans and T-shirt.” Point there. This week, General Synod convened. Church’s governing body. Whole matter brought up for debate. Bang: jeans and T-shirt thrown right out. Anglicans taking their transubstantiated wine and bikky will continue to imagine Christ in dog collar and so on. Do them good, too.
I heard on the radio about weed dating. Single persons making one another’s tentative acquaintance while weeding down a row of collards or something. A potential twosome will bend over and pluck along together for a ways, and then everybody will switch. Although she had met no one she wanted to see again, said one woman who had tried weed dating, she did feel that weeding people out, so to speak, between bean rows was more natural than in a bar.
It is a good thing I am not single myself, because I would be a terrible weed dater. I am a solitary weeder. Weeding helps me think. The last thing you need, when you make a living doing semi-creative work, is something else semi-creative to do while you are trying to focus. Weeding is in no way creative. Weeding is clearing away irrelevancies, so the vegetables, too, can focus. When you pull up all the weeds crowding a tomato plant, you can almost hear the tomatoes going, “Whew!” Which is not to say tomatoes want to chat—my impression is, they want to get on with turning red. When I’m weeding, my mind is safely a thousand miles away. Weeding as an icebreaker? I can’t see it.
At any rate, I can no longer separate weeds from the context of my particular marriage. When our garden is producing, I weed every day—but sporadically, disjointedly. This is in part because I don’t think straight but also because of the way my wife plants: lavishly, multifariously, nonlinearly. Basil, pole beans, and hollyhocks mingle with innumerable weeds. And many of Joan’s favorite plants, at various stages of their development, resemble weeds to me. So I tend to hop from one incontestable weed to another.
But what if I were the kind of weeder who can stick to a row and would welcome a soul mate to do that with. As we weeded, what would be our conversation?
Incidentally, according to the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, an Appalachian version of “weeded” is “wed,” as in “Did you-uns get them weeds wed out yet?” So if you find yourself weed-dating with a winsome mountain gal, and she says, “I wed with my brother just this morning,” you don’t necessarily have to write her off.
One thing you and a possible life sharer might discuss is what a weed is, anyway. Other languages don’t mince words. French is mauvaise herbe, Italian malerba, Spanish mala hierba: a bad herb. German is Unkraut: a non-cabbage. But The Oxford English Dictionary says no one knows where the Old English wéod came from. Just growed, evidently.
Okay, etymology is too dry for romance. Let us, if we must, be creative. Let us picture a fellow, Vern. Scrawny and indistinct-looking. And a lady, Inez. Stringy-haired and uncurvaceous. Two nice people, with feelings, who have tended to be dismissed, over the years, as weedy. All afternoon Inez and Vern have been weed-dating fruitlessly. Every person she or he has come up against has given her or him a glance and then looked down, at the crabgrass, and then away, toward who the next prospect might be. Dusk is approaching.
Then at last the pairing-off brings Vern and Inez together. As it happens, they are English majors. There between rows of brussels sprouts, among picked-over burdocks and dandelions, they try to get the ball rolling, as is their wont, by quoting from literature.
Vern: “It was Emerson who said, ‘What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.’”
Inez: “‘A weed is but an unloved flower’—Ella Wheeler Wilcox.”
And their eyes meet, and they know, and they pitch forward into each other’s arms and tumble into the topsoil. All the cool weeders, hearing Vern and Inez thrash and whoop, suddenly feel less cool, or rather too. It was Shakespeare who wrote, “Sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.”
I want to gnaw your ankles,
Root behind your knees,
Nip your bended elbows,
Browse your forehead, please.
Oh, let’s make love and supper with-
Out washing off our hands.
Eat prairie oysters, turkey breasts, and
Other savory glands.
Let’s make love and supper with-
Out washing off our hands.
I want to wrinkle your neck’s nape
And stretch out your back’s small,
Go “This little piggy” on your toes
And, honey, that ain’t all.
I want to heft your two prize calves
And play like you’re a farm
And I’m the farmer and my house is
Underneath your arm.
I’ll cultivate your collarbone,
Achilles’ tendon, palm
And ears inside and out and lobes
And hair on end or calm.
I like your eyelids and your hip
And relatives and friends.
Your navel is a constant source
As are your finger ends.
The bottoms of your feet rate high
Before and after bath;
I want to reckon on your ribs
Whenever I do math.
I’m taken by your vertebrae
And back behind your ears,
Your Adam’s apple, temples, and
Most of your ideas.
Oh, let’s make love and supper with-
Out washing off our hands.
Eat prairie oysters, turkey breasts, and
Other savory glands.
Let’s make love and supper with-
Out washing off our hands.
I tried to eat my English peas.
The peas they had their own ideas.
“Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” Walter Brennan keeps asking people (but Lauren Bacall beats him to the punch) in To Have and Have Not. In his book about writers in Hollywood, Tom Dardis assumes that William Faulkner—“because it sounds like Faulkner”—came up with that line. Faulkner did contribute to the shooting script, but the bee line has now been traced to an earlier draft by Jules Furthman. What Faulkner did write, in Flags in the Dust, was “the garden lay in sunlight bright with bloom, myriad with scent and with a drowsy humming of bees—a steady golden sound, as of sunlight become audible.”
Bees themselves may not know they’re buzzing; like human teenagers before cell phones, they communicate by means of dancing and pheromones. In an astonishingly intimate documentary, Tales from the Hive, you can watch a forager bee doing the waggle dance, by which she gives the worker bees directions to a new source of nectar. Bees buzz because bees be busy. Their intense wing vibration makes sound waves to human ears.
And I don’t know about your garden, but in mine I do not hear bees waxing Faulknerian. Every year for the past ten or so, the U.S. bee population has declined by a quarter to a third. And if you don’t think you can get bit by a dead bee, consider this: according to the actor and conservationist Ed Begley Jr., “One of every three bites of food you and I eat is pollinated by honeybees.” One bite thank you Lord, one bite thank you Mama (excuse me, Ed, that’s mine), one bite thank you bees.
Without bees we’d not only be out of honey, we’d lose most of our apples, blueberries, blackberries, watermelons, cucumbers, squashes, almonds, cantaloupes, and so on, because—it’s a sweet system. While gathering nectar and pollen for their hives, honeybees serve as little cupids for the fruits and vegetables. In graphic terms, the bees offhandedly (I don’t want to say inadvertently—I think they kind of know) carry pollen from the male parts to the female parts of fruit and vegetable blossoms. And why can’t the apples and cantaloupes do this for themselves? Because it would be weedy and unsocial; it’s not how these fruits and vegetables roll. Do it for each other? That would make appaloupes. Well, couldn’t we get undocumented workers to do it? Or the Internet? Nope. Other insects and the wind can do some of it, but mostly it’s got to be bees.
Do you regard bees in a negative light? You may be thinking of “killer bees,” which have made their way over from Africa and up from Brazil into terrible disaster movies and a real-life invasive presence across the South and the Southwest. Indeed you do not want to stir up these bees, because they will come out in full swarm and chase you for half a mile stinging you hundreds of times while you run, and if you dive underwater, they will wait for you to come up. Their venom isn’t any stronger than other bees’, they just have a hair-trigger all-in defense system. But far more Americans are killed by pet dogs every year than by killer bees. Some hope has been advanced that these bees might be bred with regular honeybees to produce a hybrid more resistant to what is causing colony collapse disorder.
If only we knew what the cause is. Beekeepers go out to their hives and find that their bees have disappeared. Wandered off to die scattered, where their bodies are hard to find. When little autopsies are possible, they do not lead to definite conclusions. Maybe it’s the mites that get on bees; maybe it’s the chemicals employed to kill the mites.1
Maybe it’s the stress on bees from being loaded into trucks and dragged all over the land to service blueberries in Maine and almonds in California. Maybe a forager bee comes in and does the hell-I-don’t-know-where-anything-is-anymore dance.
Of all the theories put forward, here’s the one most appealing to my sense of non-fitness. Bees’ immune systems depend on their foraging from diverse blossoms. Bees that have fallen into agribusiness are more and more being fed high-fructose corn syrup and, get this, “pollen substitute.” Feeding corn syrup to honeybees is like feeding LeBron James a beach ball. And pollen substitute? No wonder our bees are leaving us; we’re making them feel like they aren’t really bees.
We know we are what we eat: venison puts hair on our chests, and we are very, very silly if we eat foam. We know, further, that we are what we eat eats: for our health, we should demand pork from pigs fattened on good organic swill uncontaminated by antibiotics. But we are also what brings what we eat into fruition. We are all part bee.