Helping Out at the Food Pantry

In my last post I talked about helping out at the local food pantry. The food pantry mention caused an old friend of mine to send me an email skeptically questioning whether the people who get food from the food pantry are actually needy, hungry and deserving.

I’m sure that his email was prompted, at least in part, by his knowledge that I am of the conservative persuasion. That’s probably putting it mildly. I believe that liberals and progressives are destroying truth, justice and the American way of life, Roosevelt was a socialist, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is lucky that she didn’t live in Salem in the 1600’s and Hillary Clinton is evil incarnate. My friend is even more conservative than I am. He’s so far to the right that I wouldn’t be surprised if he has circumnavigated the political globe and is actually touching the left.

Given my conservative leanings, his beliefs regarding our entitlement society and his skepticism about the motivation and work ethic of the “needy,” it’s no wonder that he was surprised that I was helping out at a food pantry.

My response to his email was that, like him, I'm very skeptical of the statistics about the number of hungry in the United States. I think the latest one I saw is that one child in four goes to bed hungry. I'd like to see how they define hungry and how they gather the data. But that’s another discussion, and one that is probably not suited for this blog.

That being said, I know for a fact that there are a lot of low income people in North Georgia. This area isn’t exactly a Mecca for job seekers. Still, I question how many of the people who come to the food pantry in Fannin County truly qualify as hungry, needy and deserving of a helping hand. I’m willing to bet that a certain percentage of them are dirt bags who are gaming the system. That’s not based on any personal knowledge but rather on my 37 years of an experience as a trial attorney. The human race consists of saints and sinners and every variation in between. You sample any human population, you’re going to find a fair percentage of dirt bags.

Still, knowing how prideful people in these parts can be, I’m also confident that some percentage of the those who use the food pantry are decent people who have fallen on hard times and really need help. Like most Americans, liberal or conservative, I am more than willing to give a helping hand to those who will help themselves. That’s always been the American way.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is that I believe the local food pantry is an example of how folks in these parts tend to respond differently to perceived problems than, say, folks in the big city and is, therefore, worthy of support.

The local food pantry does not receive government funding to purchase food (though it does purchase low cost government food). All the food offered by the food pantry is paid for or donated by private sector. An all-volunteer group called Feed Fannin raises thousands of dollars and donates it to the Food Pantry or uses it to buy food for the pantry. Feed Fannin and a couple of local churches grow food for the pantry. The local Walmart and Food Lion donate food that they would otherwise throw away. Doctors, professionals and local businesses have food drives where they discount their services in exchange for donations of non-perishable food items for the pantry. One doctor managed to donate 15,000 pounds of canned good in this way recently. Hell, people come in off the street with extra produce from their gardens and donate it to the food pantry.

In my mind, the food pantry and the groups and individuals that support it represent the old-fashioned country virtue of local folks helping local folks. Rather than turning to, relying on or expecting government to solve their problems, some folks around here saw that there were people who had trouble making ends meet and so they tackled the problem locally using local resources. That says a lot about the community and the folks who comprise it. It may not be surprising that things are done that way around here considering that the root stock of many in this area are the Scotch-Irish who left the British Isles to get away from the intrusive and controlling hand of government.

This attitude of independence and self-reliance was once a defining trait of Americans. Alexis de Tocqueville was a brilliant Frenchman who visited the United States in the early 1830’s in order to examine this new experiment on the world stage―Democracy. He traveled around the country and spoke with persons of high status and low trying to figure out what made America tick. He wrote about his observations in two books entitled Democracy in America Part 1 and Part 2.

Tocqueville discovered that most Americans in the 1830’s mistrusted government solutions and preferred to rely on themselves to solve problems. He said: “The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely on his own exertions in order to resist the evils and difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it.”

My perception that folks in this area are more self-reliant and less inclined to run to government for help than in other places may well be a romantic delusion on my part. If it is, don’t bust my bubble because the delusion makes me feel good. There’s one thing you can say about being fat, dumb and happy—at least you’re happy.

So I think I’ll continue to help out at the food pantry. It operates in a manner that is consistent with my conservative beliefs, probably helps some genuinely needy people and makes me feel like I contributing to my adopted community. Besides, if it wasn’t for helping out at the food pantry I’d have never learned that you can buy frozen chitlins at a grocery store.

Nothing To Write Home About

Sometimes it is a challenge to write a post on this blog every week.

My objective when I starting this blog was simple: to write about my reactions, observations and experiences as a crusty, cynical and somewhat eccentric retired trial attorney who has moved to the sticks of North Georgia after spending close to 40 years living and working on the west coast of Florida in one of the most populous counties in the South. Because I have a natural tendency to see the humor or inanity in most situations, I try to bring a certain puckish levity to my posts.

You would think that writing one moderately funny post a week would not be that tough. It’s not like I’m writing the Declaration of Independence or a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Hell, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope during a three hour train ride. In my defense, the Gettysburg Address only has 272 words. Most posts average a thousand words. Furthermore, I’m using modern words, and we all know that things were simpler in the old days.

But there are weeks like this last one when nothing of note happens and my experiences are humdrum and boring. It’s at such times that writing a post becomes a task.

It has rained here every day for the last seven days. The extent of my activities over the last week is to attend a monthly meeting of the Fannin County Master Gardeners, help out one afternoon at the Food Pantry, go to the public library three times, and work in my workshop. Over the last week I have not encountered one unusual character, stumbled into a funny situation or made a fool of myself. Hardly the stuff to write home about, much less use as material for an interesting post.

The rain has made it impossible to move ahead with my garden because the soil is too wet. If you try to work the clay soil when it’s wet, you end up making adobe bricks. That’s great if you’re building a pueblo but not so great if you’re trying to grow vegetables. Like every farmer and gardener in North Georgia I’m waiting for three or four dry, sunny and windy days to dry the soil out. Waiting for the weather to change is not an activity that’s fraught with high excitement.

A meeting of the Fannin County Master Gardeners is more exciting than an embalmers’ convention, but not by much. The most interesting things discussed were the upcoming Master Gardener plant sale and the annual Rabies Clinic. I don’t think I need to say much more than “plant sale” to take the excitement out of a room. Independent testing has shown that a plant sale has the same effect on a horny guy as salt peter.

The Rabies Clinic has its humorous possibilities. It brings out all classes and types of people in Fannin County to get their dogs vaccinated to comply with state law. It’s a rare opportunity to see a snooty rich lady with her equally snooty lap dog in close proximity to a good ol’ boy with his pack of large, snarly and vicious hunting dogs. Both of them are seeking discount rabies vaccinations. A clash of lifestyles is always fodder for an interesting post. Unfortunately the clinic is not for a couple of weeks.

What’s it say about your life when the high point of the week occurred when I was helping out at the Food Pantry? I saw something that I have never seen before. The Food Pantry distributes food to needy persons in Fannin County. I was unpacking boxes of food donated by the local Walmart when I discovered that one of the boxes was filled with 5 pound bags and 10 pound buckets of frozen “chitterlings.”

Chitterlings, a/k/a chitlins, are chopped up pieces of the small intestines of pigs. At least I think they were chopped up. It’s possible the packages contained entire pigs’ intestines. It was hard to tell. To be honest, the packages looked like they contained a bunch of frozen condoms all pressed together.

Admittedly, I have not done a lot of grocery shopping but I didn’t know you could buy frozen raw chitlins in a grocery store. I wonder if it is a regional product that is supposed to appeal to people in these parts. Since Walmart was getting rid of the chitlins it may indicate they are not the popular seller that Walmart thought they would be. Maybe some smart ass Yankee in the corporate purchasing department thought: “Hey, I can buy these cheap and sell them to the hillbillies in North Georgia. Don’t they eat stuff like chitlins?” Yeah, and black folk in the South sit around and tell B’rer Rabbit stories.

What I really want to know is what you do with a ten pound bucket of chitlins. I know that you can deep fry them in grease and make something like a greasy, crispy snack food out of them. I’ve tried them that way, and it took a week of brushing and gargling to get the taste out of my mouth.

It never occurred to me that people actually buy them to cook at home. I thought people stopped eating chitlins for real about the time of the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification. If pressed I would have said that today chitlins are cooked and eaten only in Third World countries or just maybe in this county for ceremonial purposes to celebrate your ancestral roots if your ancestral celebration ritual includes slaughtering and butchering a pig.

According to the Joy of Cooking you can sauté chitlins with onions and peppers. I looked up what sauteing means, and it’s a fancy way of saying frying in grease. I guess the distinction is that the snooty lady with the snooty lapdog eats her chitlins sautéed while the good ol’ boy with the vicious dogs deep fries his. All I know is that Meredith will have nothing to do with them. If I want to try them I’m on my own. And I may do that. There’s a certain cache to being able to say that I bought a ten pound bucket of chitlins.

As you can see, there’s not a lot to talk about this week. I vow that as soon as the weather clears and I can get my garden in I will seek out persons, events, and experiences worth writing about.

Cow Farts and Gardening

I read a while ago that the Environmental Protection Agency is funding a study on cow farts. Apparently this has something to do with the theory that bovine flatulence is the single greatest source of ozone-damaging methane on earth. I’m not sure I’d like to be the scientist for whom that theory is named. Having an impressive sounding theory named after you like the Theory of Relativity or the Theory of Plate Tectonics is okay, but Yacavone’s Theory of Cow Farts is not something I’d like to have as my legacy.

I find this study highly interesting from a technical standpoint. First, you would have to determine what is an appropriate sample herd. This leads to the question (which I assume is unresolved) of whether all types of cows fart the same. It’s possible that Guernsey cows fart more or with a higher concentration of methane than Jersey cows.

My experience is that some people fart more than others. I had a fraternity brother who may have been the world champion. Not surprisingly, his nickname was Stinky. He was from New Jersey and of Polish extraction. I’m not sure whether either of those factors account for his prodigious flatulence, but I though it was worth mentioning. Anyway, if it’s true for people, then it’s probably true for cows. It could easily take a year’s worth of research to resolve that preliminary issue.

I also think the study would have to take into consideration the effect of diet. It would not surprise me if some grasses and grains caused cows to be gassier than other grasses and grains. Just think about the effect of Mexican food and beer on humans. Who knows, maybe alfalfa has the same effect on cows as refried beans have on humans.

But more than anything I’m intrigued by the question of how one goes about measuring the amount that a cow farts. I suppose you could put a bunch of cows in an airtight barn and measure the concentration  of methane in the barn after a certain period of time, but where do you get an airtight barn much less one big enough to house a representative sample of cows? I would think that sealing a bunch of cows in an airtight barn would put the cows off their feed and affect the results of the experiment. Moreover, wouldn't an airtight container the size of a barn filled with explosive methane have the potential to be a giant bomb?

I’m convinced that the only way to get accurate results is to capture a cow’s farts in the cow’s natural setting: grazing in a pasture. That would require some device attached to the production end of the beast which would capture the farts as they occur. It would have to be lightweight and comfortable. The last thing you want is a cow with a chapped ass.

The only thing I can think of that would fit the bill is a cow diaper with an inflatable balloon. As the cow tooted its way through the day, the balloon would inflate. Of course, since we don’t know how much gas a cow passes in a day (that’s why we’re doing the study) it’s entirely possible that by the end of the day the cow will look like it got rear-ended by the Graf Zeppelin. Seeing a herd of cows with blimps hanging from their butts could produce nightmares if you aren’t prepared for it. The sight might frighten young children into becoming vegetarians.

Another concern is that methane is lighter than air. It’s possible that the test cows could just float away. I see a Chic-fil-A commercial in here somewhere.

I suppose the ultimate mystery is what the EPA is going to do once it gets the results of the study. Assume it does show that cow farts are harmful to the environment. What then? It’s not like you can train a cow not to fart. I suspect that most of us have difficulty with that issue time to time, and we’re intelligent animals though you wouldn’t know it if you have ever watched daytime TV.

The more I think about it the more I believe that there are a couple of good old boy scientists at some agricultural college in Middle America who are laughing their asses off at the windfall of funding they just got from the EPA. Meanwhile the taxpayers are paying for yet another stupid study. This one stinks—in more ways than one.

But who am I to poke fun at the bureaucrats at the EPA? I’m a gardener, and there’s plenty to poke fun at when it comes to that hobby. Here I am barely able to contain myself now that the start of the planting season is almost here. I’m carefully sprouting my vegetable sets under grow lights in the work shop. I’ve made meticulous plans about where I’m going to plant my sets and seeds in the garden. Every day I check the weather forecast and assess the soil moisture and temperature. When the right day comes I’m going to run out to the garden with barely controlled excitement and eagerly plant my sets and seeds, then step back expectantly waiting for nothing to happen. Talk about anti-climactic. There’s more action at a quilting party.

An old McDonald’s commercial had the line, “Gee, you’re easily amused.” That pretty much describes the action-packed hobby of gardening. A gardener needs to have a low entertainment threshold. Watching a garden grow is like watching rocks erode. Progress is measured in weeks not seconds. You could learn to play the viola or become a licensed cosmetologist in the time it takes a garden to grow. And yet, every day a gardener will trudge down to the garden to see if there is the slightest change from the day before and get really excited if there is.

It’s kind of silly when you think about it. To be honest, measuring cow farts sounds like it would be a thrill a minute compared to gardening. Silly me. Silly EPA.

Hard Work

I assume that some people read this blog because they are attracted to the idea of moving to the country and living the simple life—having a big garden, canning vegetables, raising chickens and goats, making cheese, baking bread, and otherwise dwelling in idyllic pastoral splendor. I think the current term for this is hobby farming.

Hobby farming is a fantasy for quite a number of people who have grown tired of the life in crowded suburbia. There are enough people who dream about a life of simple country leisure to have spawned several magazines devoted to living La Vita Rural. Be forewarned that the ones I have seen, particularly the slick and glossy ones, paint an overly romanticized and sanitized version of the rural lifestyle. The odds are that the people who publish those magazines prefer to write about country life rather than live it.

A typical article in one of these magazines might be about the joys of raising miniature Nubian goats. The accompanying photos show an attractive middle-aged couple leaning against a white painted fence gazing at their flock frolicking in a green clover-filled pasture. The woman is wearing freshly shined boots, gleaming white jodphurs, and a white linen blouse. The man looks like he stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog. You get the impression that they spend much of their time sitting on the veranda sipping gin and tonic as they enjoy their slice of heaven.

I’m here to tell you that it’s not like that at all. If you really want to get back to nature and live the rural farming life, be prepared for hard work and dirt. 

Take the joys of raising goats. I have met several of people who raise goats. That seems to be a really popular thing to do around here. (That and raising llamas and alpacas. Go figure.) I even know a couple that is breeding miniature Nubian goats. They do not look like they stepped out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine; they look like stepped out of a National Geographic article about the life of peasants and peons in East Buttcrackistan. 

What these rural glamour magazines do not depict is getting up at 5:30 in the morning when the temperature is 20 degrees to milk your nanny goats. They do not tell you about the joys of shoveling goat poop, carrying heavy containers of goat’s milk for pasteurization, and all the other gritty work required to raise goats. The goat farmers I’ve met do not wear shiny leather boots. They wear big rubber boots to keep their pants out of the mud and goat shit.

Back in the day, there was one magazine devoted to country living—Mother Earth News. I used to love reading the old Mother Earth News. The great thing about the magazine is that it never gave me the impression that homesteading or hobby farming was like living in a sanitized high-priced gated community. Two images always came to my mind when I read Mother Earth News and thought about living the lifestyle. The first was walking around with grubby bare feet in a commune somewhere in the hills. The second was any place in the undeveloped Third World. 

What else could anyone think when the articles were about building a house out of straw bales, heating your dwelling with composting cow manure, and the joys of living in a yurt? Mongols live in yurts. If living in a yurt is so great why did the Mongols work so hard to conquer the known world in the 13th Century? It’s because living in a yurt sucks. The Mongols knew that. The reason they went on their rampage is because they envied the lifestyle of the civilized world and wanted to live better. Living better did not include living in a yurt. 

I aspire to live the simple country life, and I have a big garden even by Fannin County standards. It gave me a great deal of inner satisfaction to look over my garden last summer and see all that I had grown. It was even more satisfying to eat fresh vegetables from the garden.

Obviously, I enjoy gardening, but I have no illusions that it’s easy to have a big garden. The fact is, it’s hard work. For example, a couple of days ago I spent five hours preparing my garden for spring planting by spreading bucket loads (that’s a tractor bucket) of manure and compost over the soil and rototilling it in. I have a big walk-behind rototiller, and muscling that puppy up and down the rows was a challenge. My lower back kept telling me, “Hey bro’, this sucks. Are you sure you don’t want to sit down?” Thank God for Motrin and a couple of stiff drinks. 

When I was finished I did not look like the people you see in the glossy hobby farming magazines. With my work boots, bib overalls, old t-shirt, beat-up baseball cap and blue bandanna wrapped around my head to catch the sweat I looked like an Oklahoma dirt farmer in the Great Depression. Add to that the fact I was dirty and grimy and gimping along with a sore back. Think of Pa Kettle playing the part of a zombie on The Walking Dead, and you’ve got the picture.

This is my long-winded way of suggesting that you look before you leap into your fantasy of moving back to nature.