Duck fat rivals pork fat.
In the summer of 1997, I first became aware of Emeril Lagasse. A friend of mine loved strong coffee and loved to cook. I had never heard of this now famous chef, but my friend was already a fan. And perhaps rightly so.
At a chef's convention, Emeril was quoted as saying, as if it were the slogan for the next season's fashion trend, "Pork fat rules!"
Who could argue with that? And who would say that is a fleeting trend? Those are words to live by.
Shortly after reading this quote in the local paper, my friend and I purchased a truck-load of cinder blocks, a long and hefty piece of rebar, some steel wire, and lots of charcoal. Oh, and a decent-sized hog from a local farmer.
Hank Williams, Jr., used to sing about how country boys can survive, and how his rowdy friends came over to roast a pig in the ground. We couldn't dig a pit, so we made one above ground. The landlord was not too pleased with the remains of our pig roast. Then again, he didn't taste that pig.
Tonight for Christmas dinner I made my first duck. It was not my first time to enjoy duck, but it was my first time to prepare it myself. A recipe from Julia Childs, appropriately embellished with butter inside the duck and out, contributed to a medium-rare, delectable success. In closing out this wonderful day, I would like to affirm, for the record, a simple truth: duck fat abides.
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
The Economics of Empathy (and Thanksgiving)
In the United States, the Thanksgiving holiday is two weeks away. For those who have experienced it, Thanksgiving can be a wonderful holiday. Everyone across ethnic, political, and religious lines can equally participate. Indeed, that was the purpose in President Lincoln's proclaiming it a national holiday in 1863, when the country was torn apart by Civil War.
In more recent times, Thanksgiving seems to be part of a double holiday, or at least a double tradition. Thanksgiving Thursday is followed by Black Friday, so named because it is the day when, traditionally, retail sales increase to the point that merchants begin to turn a profit for the year. That is, their books move into the black. The observance of Thanksgiving is completed by consumption. Let us not forget that the purpose is to pause and render gratitude for the blessings of one's life. From the outside, however, it could seem as though Americans are most thankful that they can hit stores at ridiculously early hours on Friday morning to spend money on largely frivolous things.
That is a cynical view of Thanksgiving. It is one to which I am susceptible. But there are, I believe (or would like to think), more sober observers of this holiday and the use of money. Some people volunteer at soup kitchens for the homeless or the working poor. Others donate money to these shelters or similar aid organizations so that they can operate to serve the needy. Many of these volunteers and donors tear up at the thought of a child's going hungry on any day, but especially on a festive day that celebrates not just bounty but, most basically, shared life together in community. These people recognize that although they may be celebrating life, others are fighting for it.
These benefactors, just ordinary people, are thinking not primarily of their own happiness: watching football, enjoying tasty food, relaxing from daily labors, basking in the company of treasured friends and family. They are trying to share the simple happiness that comes from food with others who lack it.
In a 10-minute TED talk given two years ago, Harvard professor Michael Norton takes up the question "how to buy happiness." His research, both in the United States and abroad, confirms, perhaps unsurprisingly but still emphatically, that people report increased happiness when they spend money on others, not on themselves. The amount of money spent does not matter. What matters is the target.
In more recent times, Thanksgiving seems to be part of a double holiday, or at least a double tradition. Thanksgiving Thursday is followed by Black Friday, so named because it is the day when, traditionally, retail sales increase to the point that merchants begin to turn a profit for the year. That is, their books move into the black. The observance of Thanksgiving is completed by consumption. Let us not forget that the purpose is to pause and render gratitude for the blessings of one's life. From the outside, however, it could seem as though Americans are most thankful that they can hit stores at ridiculously early hours on Friday morning to spend money on largely frivolous things.
That is a cynical view of Thanksgiving. It is one to which I am susceptible. But there are, I believe (or would like to think), more sober observers of this holiday and the use of money. Some people volunteer at soup kitchens for the homeless or the working poor. Others donate money to these shelters or similar aid organizations so that they can operate to serve the needy. Many of these volunteers and donors tear up at the thought of a child's going hungry on any day, but especially on a festive day that celebrates not just bounty but, most basically, shared life together in community. These people recognize that although they may be celebrating life, others are fighting for it.
These benefactors, just ordinary people, are thinking not primarily of their own happiness: watching football, enjoying tasty food, relaxing from daily labors, basking in the company of treasured friends and family. They are trying to share the simple happiness that comes from food with others who lack it.
In a 10-minute TED talk given two years ago, Harvard professor Michael Norton takes up the question "how to buy happiness." His research, both in the United States and abroad, confirms, perhaps unsurprisingly but still emphatically, that people report increased happiness when they spend money on others, not on themselves. The amount of money spent does not matter. What matters is the target.
The short video is worth watching for the creative ways in which Norton and his colleagues test this hypothesis. Some tests are even humorous. And the results were not solely about personal happiness but, more generally, about the positive effects that accrue within groups who are charitable, empathetic, or just concerned about others. There appears to be a multiplier effect that arises from demonstrating empathy: the reward is greater than the investment when one invests in other people.
My sense is that this will also increase one's general sense of thanksgiving. Spending money on others will foster an increased feeling of gratitude for one's current lot in life. A huge part of this is through deepening personal connections. Sometimes it comes from making the effort to establish them.
I am reminded of the Thanksgiving scene from the movie The Blind Side. The video below does not adequately depict the scramble that the Tuohy family members have on Thanksgiving for the television where the day's American football games are being shown. Thanksgiving in their world is about private consumption: family members eating plates separately, watching multiple screens, and not really communing with one another. They are alone together. Their guest is alone by himself. This is where the clip begins.
Mrs. Tuohy discerns the difference, and she does something about it. It was not enough, she realizes, to invite Michael into her home for the holiday because he had nowhere else to go. She, and the rest of her family members, needed to make him part of their family. And this meant that Mrs. Tuohy's family needed to act like one itself. Disconnected viewing of television around a large room needed to give way to the connected holding of hands around the Thanksgiving table.
After all, what would have been the point of reproducing in their home the isolation that Michael already felt without one?
This is the economics of empathy: greater rewards and personal happiness accrue when we invest in -- that is, spend time or money on -- other people. First comes empathy, then happiness, because empathy establishes personal connection. By it we embrace our common humanity. This is the purpose. But the effect is that by it also both giver and receiver become truly thankful.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
The Ethical Imagination of Art
Why, when we see acts of apparent selflessness, do we often swell with emotion?
Why, to put an even finer point on this, when we observe even fictional gestures of sincere compassion, do we pause, tear up, reach for a tissue or a nearby loved one, and become seized with something that transcends admiration -- something that feels like melting?
Art, in its various forms, uniquely taps into the human imagination, grips our emotions, and, if we listen, instructs. Take, for example, the following short video clip, which of late, and deservedly, has been making the social media rounds.
Why, to put an even finer point on this, when we observe even fictional gestures of sincere compassion, do we pause, tear up, reach for a tissue or a nearby loved one, and become seized with something that transcends admiration -- something that feels like melting?
Art, in its various forms, uniquely taps into the human imagination, grips our emotions, and, if we listen, instructs. Take, for example, the following short video clip, which of late, and deservedly, has been making the social media rounds.
(The YouTube link for the video is here.
The brief article about the video from Gawker is here.)
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Empathy in Kafka and in Life
Franz Kafka’s fantastic stories of “The Metamorphosis” and “A Country Doctor” present a narrative world that not only assumes the reader’s suspension of disbelief but also requires it. The stories require it in order to generate in readers appropriate empathy with the characters. These two acts -- (1) the willingness to engage in the narrative world and (2) the resulting emotional engagement with the characters in their relational contexts -- enable literature to foster empathy with others in a way that transcends the constraints imposed by relational life outside of literature. “The Metamorphosis” in particular facilitates in the reader a transformation of understanding by narrating Gregor Samsa’s transformation of being.
Friday, September 20, 2013
"As It Used To Be": Children's Relationships in Vesaas
In Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace, the narrated interaction between eleven-year-olds Siss and Unn reveals the complex depths of the relationships that adolescents create. Through this innocent complexity, the Norwegian Vesaas illuminates an important dimension of what Arnold Weinstein calls the fiction of relationship. Vesaas does so, both in his fictional story about the friendship of two young girls and in the relationship that they actively construct.
Most basically, the connection between Siss and Unn reminds readers that children’s relationships are far from simple or rudimentary merely because the participants are not adults. Children, too, both long for relational intimacy and fashion their individual and social identity through their personal connections. It may be tempting for adults to look condescendingly on these early forays into friendship. Vesaas challenges us not to do so.
Most basically, the connection between Siss and Unn reminds readers that children’s relationships are far from simple or rudimentary merely because the participants are not adults. Children, too, both long for relational intimacy and fashion their individual and social identity through their personal connections. It may be tempting for adults to look condescendingly on these early forays into friendship. Vesaas challenges us not to do so.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 3: Coetzee
In the previous two installments of this series on the fiction of sexual violence, I reflected, first, on the disabling dehumanization that is pictured in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Next, I traced how sexual aggression creates dysfunctional and disfigured relationships in William Faulkner's Light in August. In this post, I want to make some initial soundings into one instance of potential sexual assault in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace.
This novel is the most complex of the three in its representations of sexual violence, and this is the reason I say "initial soundings." I cannot here say everything I would like to say -- and that the novel invites, and deserves, to be said.
And I say "potential sexual assault," because the brilliance of Coetzee's narrative is the way in which he adroitly, and realistically, captures the ambiguities that attend instances of alleged date rape on college campuses. Of course, David Lurie is Melanie Isaacs' professor, which adds moral entanglements to this coupling.
By focusing on a scene early in the story, I suggest that Coetzee narrates a fiction of sexual violence: one the one hand, a story about a questionable rape; on the other hand, the alleged assault also creates deathly distance between the characters. The relationship between Lurie and Melanie is not a given; it is made. It is, in this sense, a fiction. Of what the relationship is made is precisely the question that carries through a major strain of the story's conflict.
This novel is the most complex of the three in its representations of sexual violence, and this is the reason I say "initial soundings." I cannot here say everything I would like to say -- and that the novel invites, and deserves, to be said.
And I say "potential sexual assault," because the brilliance of Coetzee's narrative is the way in which he adroitly, and realistically, captures the ambiguities that attend instances of alleged date rape on college campuses. Of course, David Lurie is Melanie Isaacs' professor, which adds moral entanglements to this coupling.
By focusing on a scene early in the story, I suggest that Coetzee narrates a fiction of sexual violence: one the one hand, a story about a questionable rape; on the other hand, the alleged assault also creates deathly distance between the characters. The relationship between Lurie and Melanie is not a given; it is made. It is, in this sense, a fiction. Of what the relationship is made is precisely the question that carries through a major strain of the story's conflict.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
The Fiction of Sexual Violence, pt. 2: Faulkner
In the first part of this series on the fiction of sexual violence, I briefly explained the twin aspects of "fiction" according to which I will explore this theme. I began with Toni Morrison's Beloved and a reading of the effects of Ella's experience as a sex slave (quite literally as a slave in the Antebellum South). And I suggested that we see in her trauma how sexual violence both disables a person's capacity for love (both loving and being loved) and dehumanizes the person in the process. In Faulkner’s Light in August, the sexual violence between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden is different.
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