Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere
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Part of the fun of my morning walks is saying hello to the pasture animals — cows, goats, and horses. I’m afraid that this neighbor has overloaded the pasture, but at least the cows and goats have plenty of hay.
Carrot top pesto with roasted baby carrots and a quiche bought at Trader Joe’s
I am strongly of the view that what keeps us alive is negative entropy. When I bring this up with people who I think might be interested, their eyes glaze over with boredom, and I drop the subject. Entropy = disorder. Negative entropy = order. Life goes on only because life magically resists the natural tendency toward decay and disorder.
Obviously we eat to obtain energy. And obviously we eat to obtain certain nutrients. If we ate no calcium, for example, we would have no bones. We could eat compost and get calcium and calories. But that’s not enough. We would not be able to thrive on compost. We’d develop all sorts of diseases and then die. Why? Because all the order, all the life, is gone from compost. Once bacteria have squeezed the last bit of order out of compost (the bacteria then die and become part of the compost), only plants can use the compost then. Plants can use the compost because they use photosynthesis to create new order, in the form of complex organic molecules, out of the dead raw material.
I have written in more detail about this here. It boils down to a theory of nutrition based on physics rather than on biology. A theory from physics does not in any way negate a theory from biology. Rather, physics just takes us back one level to a more fundamental science of life.
What does this have to do with fresh leaves? It is photosynthesis, using energy from the sun, that is the basis of life on earth. Life has the ability to take dead elements (such as calcium, nitrogen, iron, magnesium, and water) and build the vast variety of complex molecules that are necessary for life. Those dead elements, as in compost, are simple and lifeless. The order, as in the products of plant life, is exceedingly complex — alive. It is photosynthesis that gave them life and order. Chlorophyll is a rich source of order. And chlorophyll is only one of the countless orderly molecules that plants produce and that we need to thrive and to avoid disease.
This, I think, is why people do not thrive on ultraprocessed foods. Ultraprocessed foods are like compost. The energy is there, some of the simple nutrients are there, but the order has been processed out and is mostly gone. Bodies live on, because they’re getting energy (too much of it, really), but the body breaks down, because it’s starved for order. It’s just a hunch, and I can’t offer any evidence. But I suspect that the reason we sometimes eat too much is that our bodies are starved for order, even though we’re overfed on low-order foods.
So then, carrot tops. If you can get your hands on some living leaves fresh out of the sun, eat them! They are a magnificently rich source of order.
My farmer friends Brittany and Richard grew the carrots and harvested them the morning before I made the pesto.
Carrot leaves — fresh chlorophyll!
Grilled salmon with green beans and garlic mashed potatoes
I had been waiting for this place to open for months, following their progress on their Facebook page. It’s the first real bistro in the benighted red county I live in. The place is named “The Dalton” (I’ll explain below why its name also is my surname), and it’s in the mean, racist, theocratic little town of King. I love bistros, but I’m also fascinated by the clash of what I might call bistro culture with white Christian theocracy, in a town that normally feeds on wings, barbecue, burgers, and baloney.
The main thing to know about King, North Carolina, is that it’s a white-flight suburb of the nearby (blue-voting and remarkably civilized) city of Winston-Salem. King is an ugly little town that consists mostly of a one-mile strip development with fast food, grocery stores, a tire store, and a “Christian Supplies” store, whatever that is. The town is politically dominated by a large Baptist church with a crew of nasty little Bible-college preachers. (I’ve seen and heard these preachers at county commissioner meetings when something like putting “In God We Trust” on county buildings and county vehicles is on the agenda.)
Baptists, of course, including those who are secretly sinful, don’t want others to have the freedom to buy alcohol. For years, the power of these Baptists was able to keep “liquor by the drink” and ABC stores out of King. In North Carolina, cities and towns can be either “wet” or “dry,” depending on how the town’s voters vote in a referendum. In 2022, proponents of liquor by the drink were at last able to get a referendum on the ballot. In November 2022, it passed, 63 percent to 37 percent. It has taken almost two years for King’s first bar to open.
The best restaurants make most of their money off of alcohol rather than food. So at last a bistro — with a big bar — had a chance to make a go of it in King. They got the best old building in town. For years, King’s high street had been run down and seedy, with only one strong business, a drug store. Several buildings on the high street are being renovated now. If the Dalton restaurant succeeds, it should lift the entire (very short) high street along with it. The high street is named Dalton Road.
The road is named for the old Dalton plantation that was a few miles north. The plantation is historically significant, not least for the wills and other records of the plantation’s owners, David Dalton Sr. (1740-1820) and David Dalton Jr. (1781-1847). The Dalton family papers are in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University. I am not descended from the Daltons who owned the plantation. Rather, that branch of the Dalton family and my branch forked in Albemarle County, Virginia, in the early 1700s and migrated south from the Charlottesville area separately. The Daltons arrived in Virginia very early, during the Williamsburg period. Two names come up again and again in the family trees — Timothy, and David. Where you find Daltons, you will find a David.
I have not yet met the owners of the bistro. I’d love to ask them some questions. They have made a huge investment in renovating and equipping the building. I asked my waitress how many people were working that afternoon. Fourteen, she said. That is a huge staff. Most country eateries operate with two to four people. The place is nicely furnished, though not lavish. They have proper heavy white china and good flatware. The prices are reasonable. My waitress said the place has been packed in the evening. It must be a tough calibration for “upscale” menus in downscale locations, where the food has to be good enough to justify higher prices and to satisfy customers with higher expectations, while not being too expensive or so citified that people don’t understand it.
King is sixteen miles to the south of me, so I won’t be tempted to go there very often.
As though to remind me that I was in Trumptown, as I was enjoying my grilled salmon an older couple came in. The man was “open carrying.” He had a pistol in a holster. This is legal in North Carolina unless a business posts a sign at the door forbidding weapons inside. This irked me at first. But the couple were quiet and polite and not out to make a scene. I’d never seen open carry in a restaurant before, but I’ve heard stories about how people who open carry want to make a show of it, like the people who make a show of holding hands and praying before they eat their barbecue and fries.
I have several reasons for wanting to support this place, but I’d do for only one reason — the fact that that ungodly Baptist church up the road didn’t want it there and lost the battle to keep it out.
⬆︎ The vanilla ice cream was only $2! Other dessert choices were $6 and $8.
⬆︎ King’s high street is on the National Register of Historic Places. I believe this was the old bank building.
Dorothy Thompson leaves the White House after a visit with Roosevelt, May 1940. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Today’s substack from Heather Cox Richardson contains a sharp warning about what Trump will do to those who oppose him, if he ever gets power again:
“On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be ‘bloody.’ He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is ‘a fascist to the core … the most dangerous person to this country.’
“On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those ‘radical left lunatics’ on Election Day.”
Our mediocre media soft-pedals Trump’s overt fascism. Most Americans are strangely unconcerned about what Trump intends to do if he ever gets power again, because journalists are afraid that to tell them would sound shrill and unobjective. We even have a new term for how the media normalize Trump’s depravity to avoid sounding shrill — “sanewashing.”
But scholars like Heather Cox Richardson don’t have to care what Republicans or centrists think about what she writes. She writes for a smaller set of people. She has, I believe, 1.3 million subscribers on Substack, as well as 2 million followers on Facebook. That’s a lot of people, but it’s only 1.3 percent of the American population.
Richardson writes today about Dorothy Thompson, a journalist who was expelled from Germany in 1934. Thompson was a rare journalist who risked sounding shrill when what she was writing about was gruesomely ugly. She had written in 1931 that Hitler was a man of “startling insignificance.”
In Harper’s Magazine in 1934, she wrote:
“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”
It seems that Dorothy Thompson analyzed everyone she met in the same way she analyzed Hitler. She wrote a fascinating piece for Harper’s Magazine in 1941, Who Goes Nazi? She asks us to imagine a parlor game at a large gathering of people. She describes twelve people in the room, whom she labels A through L, and asks whether they would “go Nazi.” She wants us to see how It Could Happen Here. People today are just the same as people were in 1941. For persons A through L, which types seem familiar? Whom do you like, and dislike, the most? Which one is Elon Musk? Is there a Liz Cheney in the room? For those of us who would never go Nazi, why?
It’s an odd paradox, and only the best of journalists and historians can get at it — how it can be that some of history’s greatest monsters also are pathetic little creeps.
Here’s another paradox. Given any major issue, the higher the stakes and the greater the controversy, the harder it is to find out what is really going on. Sources that depend on large audiences have to water things down so as not be accused of taking sides. But, somewhere in the fog of propaganda, there will be a few who are doing their best to get at the truth. Dorothy Thompson did it then. Heather Cox Richardson is doing it now.
Update: The New York Times seems to have had a fit of conscience:
The influenza B virus. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
I had not had a Covid vaccination since 2021, and I had never had a flu shot (though, lucky for me, it has been more than 30 years since I’ve had the flu). Because I’m going to be on two long flights and two long train rides next month, I figured it was time to go get some shots.
At first I thought it was strange when my doctor’s office said that they don’t have the vaccines. They referred me to the dominant pharmacy chain here, CVS. Then I realized that it’s probably not efficient for small rural practices to keep those vaccines when the pharmacies are doing the job with greater efficiency. I’d never had a shot at a pharmacy before; this is new to me. But I understand that, since 2009, all fifty American states have given pharmacists the right to vaccinate. The pharmacist who gave me the shots said I was her 40th flu shot that day.
I went to a CVS in the little town of Walnut Cove at 6 p.m. on a Friday. The sign said that walk-ins are welcome. I had some questions, and I found that the pharmacist was very well informed. She answered all my questions. Though proof of immunization is not required at present for airline passengers, I asked for some documentation just in case. She gave me two printouts. For the Covid vaccine, I got the “MODERNA 2024-2025 COVID 12YR+,” in which the 12YR+ means that it’s the version of the vaccine for people older than 12. For the flu vaccine, I got the “FLUAD TRIVALENT 2024-2025 SYR,” from a company named Sequirus, Inc. This vaccine is optimized for people over 65. It includes something called MF59, an oil-in-water emulsion that, for reasons not fully understood, increases the effectiveness of the vaccine, which may be important for older people whose immune systems aren’t what they used to be.
The shots cost me nothing. My Humana Medicare Advantage coverage paid for it. I can see online in my Humana account that Humana paid CVS $89.71 for the flu shot and $156.13 for the Covid shot.
As expected, the next day I didn’t feel exactly sick; malaise is probably the best word. I had a low-grade fever of 99.7 the day after, but my temperature was back to normal on day 2. My upper arm is a little sore, but only a little. That’s just what we are told to expect. It’s OK to get the Covid vaccine and the flu vaccine at the same time, but you probably want to time it so that you have a couple of days off to deal with the after-effects.
Modern medicine is a miracle. Yes, drug companies want to gouge us where they can. But I also think that vaccine technologies are far more advanced and far safer than lovers of conspiracy theories will ever admit. The flu and Covid vaccines are products of international cooperation. In addition to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is the World Health Organization and the health agencies of other advanced countries, all cooperating on the science and delivery of these vaccines. There is a huge amount of global research on vaccines and their effectiveness.
I have never had Covid. And, by the way, you can still get four free Covid test kits from the U.S. Department of Health & Human services by going here.
As an amateur scholar of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, I’m very interested in non-amateur Sir Walter Scott scholarship. As far as I can tell, though, not all that many people pursue an academic interest in Sir Walter Scott. Scott has fallen out of fashion. As I’ve argued before, we’re overdue for a Walter Scott revival.
From Googling, many months ago I discovered the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. They are very serious. I’ve watched some of their YouTube lectures. They know who today’s Sir Walter Scott scholars are, and they bring ’em in for lectures. The median age of the group seems to be pretty high. That doesn’t surprise me. I don’t expect younger people to take an interest in Scott until somebody — somebody please! — makes a beautiful movie from, say, The Heart of Mid-Lothian.
The club is 130 years old. Princess Anne attended their dinner on their 100th anniversary.
It happens that, when I’m in Scotland next month, there will be a lecture based on a novel about Scott. Ken has secured tickets for us.
The lecture is at the New Club, Edinburgh, Edinburgh’s oldest social club, which I suppose is why there is a dress code for the lecture. Fine. That will be a reason (if I even needed another one) for me to take a couple of my Harris tweed jackets back to their homeland for a wee visit.
Tofu and cashew lo mein over baby bok choi
I promise to back off on food photos soon. It’s just that I’m inspired by the attitude toward food and cooking that accompanies the fall change of weather. Instead of dreading heat from cooking in the kitchen, the attitude reverses: Get double service from the heat of cooking by both cooking food and warming the house.
Whole wheat spaghetti makes an entirely agreeable lo mein noodle. My farmer neighbors Brittany and Richard grew the bok choi. A neighbor gave me the sweet red pepper.
A baked pumpkin. I’ll scrape the goody out with a spoon. This pumpkin became soup. See below.
It’s pumpkin season, after all, so I hope you can put up with my pumpkin evangelism a little longer.
Once upon a time in America, a time that I can remember, everyone in rural America acquired fresh apples in the fall. Lots of people had their own apple tree. Those who didn’t have their own apple tree probably had neighbors who did. And many people lived near orchards where you could buy apples by the bushel or the peck. A family of four to six people could easily use a bushel of apples by Thanksgiving. If you bought enough, they’d last until Christmas, because apples keep well.
Pumpkin pie is as American as apple pie. Maybe pumpkins weren’t as much of an autumn must-have as apples, but plenty of people also acquired “eating pumpkins” for fall. Pumpkins keep just as well as apples, so there was your pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, and maybe Christmas, too.
These days, you can buy fresh apples all year. I have no idea how that works, because, traditionally, any apples that lasted through the winter would be pretty shriveled by spring. In C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, set in Tudor England, the London womenfolk sometimes sent the menfolk to market to get apples, even shriveled ones, because apples were an important food. As for pumpkins these days, you’d better get them before Halloween, because after that there won’t be any. That is a shame. Because pumpkins, properly stored, will easily keep all winter.
I came across an article at BBC News about pumpkins as an international superfood. They will grow in poor soil, they’re drought tolerant, they’re very nutritious — including the seeds and even the leaves — and they keep well without needing any refrigeration.
Pumpkins also are a good “prepper” crop. A few years ago I supplied some of my neighbors with seeds for what we call “little pumpkins.” The proper name of the little pumpkins is Long Island cheese squash. Several of my neighbors grow little pumpkins now, and each year they keep the seed for next year’s crop. A good stash of homegrown little pumpkins could help make winter a lot more bearable if something happened to our usual supply lines.
Pumpkin soup is a challenge. A savory stock is essential. I like to add just a touch of nutmeg and a teaspoon or two of sugar.
A neighbor gave me the little pumpkin for the soup. The local farmers from whom I buy vegetables grew the lettuce. I baked the bread for the grilled cheese.
Pesto with sweet peppers and walnuts
This was a hard gardening year here. During midsummer there was a prolonged period of heat and drought. It was so bad that the deer ate tomato plants and the leaves of young oak trees, something I’ve never seen before. Gardens without irrigation were ruined. After the rain returned, the deer of course went back to their usual diets. In spite of the rough summer, the spring and fall hay crops were good, so the horses and cattle should eat well this winter, even though, like the deer, the pasture animals had a rough time of it during the summer.
After the rain from Hurricane Helene in late September, my basil plants rebounded. Today I pretty much clipped all the new growth. The first frost probably is not far off. Basil is precious.
I’ll be getting fresh vegetables through late November from my local young farmers, Brittany and Richard — broccolini, baby bok choi, sweet potatoes, sweet peppers, lettuces, beets, and such. Last week I got the last of the summer okra. I’ve been roasting it and tossing it into pasta dishes with parmesan.
Wait for the bagpipe! It starts at 0:32.
I’ll be in Scotland for a couple of weeks in late November. I’ll have more about that when the time comes. I’m planning to write some blog posts from Scotland. For now, I’ve been looking for interesting things to do in Edinburgh.
If I could have my choice of musical events, I’d want to hear the Scottish Fiddle Orchestra. But they apparently do only three or so concerts a year, and there’s nothing in November. I’m leaning toward the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at Usher Hall in Edinburgh. A Beethoven piano concerto and a suite from Swan Lake are on the program. Still, I’d like to find something more Scottish.
“Highland Cathedral” is a piece that sounds ancient. But actually it was written in 1982 by some German musicians, for a highland games in Germany. It has become so popular that many people would like to see it become the Scottish national anthem. Here are three versions of it on YouTube. Given that the piece was written in Germany, I don’t think I need to apologize for leading with a performance by the Johann Strauss Orchestra in Maastricht. It’s the most polished version. But…
⬆︎ This version by the Edinburgh Military Tattoo is very good. It takes a really good band to play in tune, especially with as many instruments as there are here. The Edinburgh Military Tattoo has superb, and superbly disciplined, musicians. The bagpipe players are true professionals. I believe that’s Princess Anne in the audience at 3:10.
⬆︎ And here is the Scottish Fiddle Orchesta at Usher Hall in Edinburgh, along with the hall’s organ. This is the least polished performance, yet still very good.
There is an otherworldly magic in the sound of bagpipes. I don’t think you have to be Scottish to fall under the spell.
