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The Economy Of Eden

“I have learned how to grow healthy crops,” wrote Sir Albert Howard in his 1940 book An Agricultural Testament, “without the slightest help from mycologists, entomologists, bacteriologists, agricultural chemists, statisticians, spraying machines, insecticides, germicides, and all the other expensive paraphernalia of the modern experiment station.”

Breakfast At The Victory

In the Victory there was no such thing as The Last Word. Truths, conclusions, absolutes — all had about the same permanence as the steamy smells that circulated in the Victory and drifted out onto the street.

Corned Beef On Rye

When I was seven, my father used to complain that I ate like a dinosaur — the kind that stood on its hind legs and ripped off tree branches with its mouth. The louder he yelled at me, the more I used my spoon like a shovel, until he’d wrap his fingers around my wrist and squeeze so tightly I couldn’t breathe.

Sunbeams

The way one eats is the way one works.

Czech proverb

Dinner

TV dinners, small yellow eggs, baked Alaska

The Meek

“A tough row to hoe” is not a casual metaphor if you’ve actually done it. Unless you’ve picked cotton. My mother picked cotton as a child. For her, hoeing a garden was leisure compared to pulling the heavy sacks and slicing her hands to ribbons on the sharp, dry husks of the cotton boles.

A Story

For years I would ask my wife each day at dinner, “Why must we eat this food? It’s terrible — knishes, chicken soup, challah, kreplach,” and my wife would say, “We have to eat this food. We’re Jewish.”

Saturday Morning At The Supermarket

Great Man Going

In the unfamiliar role of prey, we’ve come to recognize our own demise in the destruction of the environment. In the lifelessness we’ve projected on all other matter, we’ve come to see our own lifelessness.

Daddy