What’s the deal with gluten sensitivity? Gluten sensitivity as a proposed disease showed up in the scientific literature in the past few years. The key here is proposed, because there was evidence it might exist, but it remained in a scientific grey area because there was not a known mechanism behind it.

But enough people had already decided or wanted to decide gluten was bad that they took the proposed disease and ran with it, producing and selling a large volume of scientifically dubious diet books featuring “gluten sensitivity”.

A profitable food scare

One of the most popular studies was Gluten causes gastrointestinal symptoms in subjects without celiac disease: a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial. Whole Health Source’s Stephan Guyenet covered in in a popular post. It has been cited over a hundred times in the scientific literature and cited as evidence that gluten is bad in many popular diet books.

But the authors knew it had flaws (listen to an excellent podcast with one of them, Dr. Peter Gibson, here). And so they did another study to make sure it was gluten, a protein, that was the problem, and not carbohydrate intolerance.

Their new study, No Effects of Gluten in Patients With Self-Reported Non-Celiac Gluten Sensitivity After Dietary Reduction of Fermentable, Poorly Absorbed, Short-Chain Carbohydrates, was published recently and is available for free online.

They found a source of gluten that was carbohydrate depleted. As Dr. Gibson says in the podcast “We wanted to do a more detailed and intense study to control for other things in the diet to ensure it was only the gluten we were looking at.” It was also cross-over and examined inflammatory markers in detail. Celiac disease, a gluten-related disease with a well-developed mechanism behind it, was ruled out in the subjects. The subjects were people with “IBS” who reported they felt better on a gluten free diet.

The diet they used for carbohydrate intolerance was FODMAPs (Fermentable, Poorly Absorbed,

Short-Chain Carbohydrates), a diet developed in Australia for gastroenterological symptoms. They used it as their background diet and supplied all the food for the participants. The re-challenge trial diet was even more strict, eliminating FODMAPs, dairy, and low in naturally occurring and artificially added food chemicals “salicylates, amines, monosodium glutamate, as well as preservatives benzoates, propionate, sulfites, nitrites, sorbic acid, plus added antioxidants and colors”

Of course these diet books say “just try eliminating gluten and see how you feel.” But their eliminations usually violate basic scientific experimental principles. Most of these diet books have their adherents completely overhauling their diets. For example, Wheat Belly and a new book called Gut Bliss both tell dieters to not only eliminate all gluten from their diet, but to avoid gluten-free grain products. That is not testing the elimination of gluten, but the elimination of gluten AND foods with added sugar, starchy grain-based foods, etc. That’s testing a lot more than gluten intolerance. In the end I meet a lot of people who end up living a grey area, people who believe gluten is bad, but sometimes will eat it as part of their 20%. If they really have celiac this is devastating. If they don’t, they are living in fear for no reason.

Interestingly many of the subjects in the study got better on the diet they used than they had been on their previous gluten-free diets. This was my own experience as well, that I felt better on a FODMAPs diet, even though it contained some foods I once thought were kind of questionable, but in small amounts, than I did on a “paleo” diet. In fact I’d almost dread going to a “paleo” potluck these days, when so many paleo recipes seem along the lines of “let’s turn cauliflower (which is high in certain FODMAPs) into everything from faux rice to faux pizza crust.”

Of course this doesn’t tell us much about whether or not gluten plays a role in other diseases besides celiac, such as skin conditions. There are some hypotheses about that out there. Unfortunately, as “Stabby the Raccoon” said, paleo has become about “about scaring people over hypotheses.” Why? Simply because it’s profitable. Witness the rise of content farms that publish low-quality articles in this genre and manage to get massive amounts of hits and social media shares that can be reaped for ad dollars.

If you believe you might be affected by gluten, I’d recommend you get screened for celiac. If you don’t have celiac, I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion you have gluten “sensitivity” especially given how poorly defined this potential condition is. It seems wise to consider that FODMAPs might be an issue for you, which turned out to be the case for me.

Luckily, FODMAPs intolerance doesn’t have very much in common with celiac disease. Eating a little wheat is not going to cause a cascade of inflammatory reactions in your body. People who have issues with FODMAPs can typically tolerate some of the offending foodstuffs depending on individual differences and the preparation of that food. The re-challenge diet in the study also seems to point to dietary context as being an oft-overlooked consideration. Some people might be sensitive to one food only if another food is causing the initial irritation.

For example, I do not possess lactase persistence genetically, so technically I am lactose (a FODMAP) intolerant. In the real world, that means it might get uncomfortable if I guzzled a lot of fresh milk, but I can tolerate plenty of low-lactose dairy products and small amounts of fresh dairy. I also seem to be intolerant of the fructans in wheat. When I thought it was gluten, I ate a gluten-free diet that contained a lot of FODMAPs and often my symptoms were much worse than before. When I realized it wasn’t the gluten, I am now able to enjoy small amounts of wheat-containing foodstuffs. Same of fructan-containing alliums such as onions. I can’t enjoy them fresh, but when they are cooked down they do not seem to bother me. That means a lot for me since I love to travel and try a lot of foods. It might not be a biological “need,” but it is meaningful to me.

Note: if you do not plan to read the whole post, please skip to the last section

Kale is one of those vegetables that everyone thinks is so healthy. From kale chips to kale salad, kale has become an extremely trendy vegetable. But people have embraced kale without thinking enough about the chemicals it contains and its effects on the Earth. What you don't know could kale you.

Before scientists were blinded by kale’s health food halo, they studied its horrific effect on livestock. Farmers had been mystified by the births of lambs that already had goiter. Researchers experimented with kale on sheep and rabbits with grisly results. Turns out kale does contain a goitrogen, thiocyanate, which is chemically very similar to deadly cyanide. Some young lambs were stillborn, their brain development stunted by their goiters. The consumption of kale had blocked their thyroid’s ability to function properly even in the presence of proper iodine consumption. With many Americans consuming little iodine, especially those obsessed with health foods who eschew iodized salt, the effects could be devastating.

Even more alarming, later experiments showed that mixing the kale with corn and blood meal increased the effect, something you might want to think about next time you consider sauteed kale with cornmeal pancakes and blood sausage. 

Scientists then never considered that humans would someday consider kale a “health food.” Back then it was only food for livestock and ignorant Scottish peasants. But even though people weren’t noshing on kale chips all day, kale managed to poison them. Cows grazing on kale transferred its poisons to their milk, affecting the thyroid development of children who drank it and causing an epidemic of goiter on Tasmania.

Kale is also rich in sulfur and compounds that convert to sulfur, which is the chemical that makes rotten eggs smell putrid. One metabolite of sulfur, S-methylcysteine sulphoxide, is known to cause “kale poisoning” – severe hemolytic anemia, a life-threatening breakdown of red blood cells, in livestock. Poor sulfur digestion is associated with many serious illinesses in humans, though whether it causes them or merely exacerbates them remains to be seen. 

It makes sense that Kale would be dangerous given it evolved in an evolutionary war against those that dare to eat its leaves from aurochs to insects. One powerful weapon it possesses is lectins, which many of you recognize as a serious danger to human health, implicated in many autoimmune illnesses and other inflammatory disorders. The lectins in kale and other related species are very similar to the equally dangerous wheat germ agglutinin lectin.

Some people think that kale and other related vegetables prevent cancer, but large-scale epidemiological studies have shown no such effect and their phytochemicals may even cause cancer. For example, indole and its derivatives have been shown to promote many types of cancer, possibly by causing hormone imbalances or by stimulating the cyt-P450 pathway that produces genotoxic metabolites. If you already have cancer, it can promote further growth and the so-called “antioxidants” which people think are so healthy can prevent your body from fighting the cancer effectively. 

Studies in pigs have shown that kale’s close cousin broccoli promotes severe DNA damage in the colon. Kale may also promote other types of digestive problems through difficult-to-digest carbohydrates known as fructans, part of a family experts are calling FODMAPs (Fermentable, Oligo-, Di-, Mono-saccharides And Polyols). Many people have found relief from IBS and other stomach problems by avoiding foods like kale on a low-FODMAPs diet. If you are constantly bloated and gassy it might be the pound of kale you are eating for breakfast every day.

You probably already worry a lot about antinutrients in grains, but kale contains many of the same antinutrients that rob your body of important vitamins and minerals and irritate the digestive tract including oxalate, phytic acid, and tannins. 

The amounts of these chemicals in each variety of kale varies widely, so consuming kale is like eating an uncontrolled cocktail of immunogenic and bioactive health-harming chemicals and their even more chaotic breakdown products. Terrifyingly, these chemicals also vary with time of day and season, even when they are in your fridge!

Kale-ing the Environment

As kale becomes more and more popular, it raises the question: how will we feel the world’s almost 9 billion people on kale? The Food and Agricultural Organization at the UN doesn’t track kale production and consumption yet, but they will have to start. At current rates of growth, by 2350, almost all the world’s cropland will be devoted to kale. The consequences to the environment will be devastating.

Large-scale industrial commercial kale production requires clearing massive amounts of animal habitat and killing animals that invade the fields of kale. In the world of leafy greens production, any life that’s not a leaf is a potential liability. After the spinach-related e.coli outbreak, farmers can’t take the risk of co-existing with other plants and animals. Will the world look like the Salinas Valley looks like today? A sterile dry wasteland where any signs of life are promptly shot or poisoned? 

Kale production not only destroys rivers and wetlands, it uses water that human beings need. It needs heavy irrigation during the hot months of the year. Furthermore, kale needs to be fertilized extensively, particularly given its soil-fertility reducing effects, and many farms use industrially-produced resource-intensive fertilizer or fertilizer made from the manure of factory-farmed animals. A full environmental impact analysis of kale production has yet to be done, a fact people ignore when they shovel kale chips blindly into their mouths. 

The way kale is grown also increases its negative effects on your health. The EWG lists kale as one of its “dirty dozen” of vegetables most likely to be contaminated by pesticides. Pesticides used on kale include phthalates, dangerous chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors, wreaking havoc on the human hormonal systems. Many pesticides used to grow kale also are contaminated with immune-damaging dioxin and liver-destroying hexachlorobenzene. 

Even organic kale might be rife with harm. Laverlam, a common organic pesticide, may trigger allergic reactions, which are on the rise in the United States today. As if kale didn’t destroy enough animal habitat, mineral oil used in organic production destroys the microhabitats founds in soil that are home to a great deal of biodiversity.

Thinking you can beat that by growing kale in your garden? Home-grown greens are known to be heavily contaminated by brain-damaging lead and cancer-causing arsenic. 

In the end the best thing you can do for yourself, your family, and the world is to avoid kale and its cousins. This post contains over fifty peer-reviewed references to science, so think about that next time your so-called friend serves you a massaged kale salad with delicious flecks of parmesan reggiano. Remember there is no documented need for kale in your diet and you can get all the nutrients you need from delicious nutritious cow’s liver. 

Just Kidding

I was going to put this part up the next day, but the reaction I got from the post was so extreme that I almost immediately felt guilty. People sent me emails asking advice about other vegetables that might be bad. Some of the comments were hilarious, some just made me feel bad

And in general people took if very very seriously, I guess they forgot I had put up a poll some time ago asking what food should be my victim to demonstrate you can demonize anything with Pubmed. Also I thought the language was pretty silly: "ignorant Scottish peasants" ... " delicious nutritious cow’s liver"??

Yes, Kale does contain chemicals, all foods do. In very large amounts or in certain vulnerable people could cause problems. Many of the studies I chose involved animals with a diet almost completely based on kale, which I think anyone will agree is a bad idea. Most also involved varieties not sold for human consumption and consumed in ways that humans might not consume- uncooked, un-marinated, etc. A lot of the rest involved just scary language about various chemicals and studies involving isolated chemicals.

I do think that the point about antioxidants being overrated is valid, but overall I don't think kale or most other foods (barring actual intolerances or allergies) are going to cause problems as part of a diverse diet. Maybe you shouldn't juice a pound of kale and drink it for breakfast every day though. Sadly to say, I have met people who do things like that. You have to respect that leaves have to protect themselves from herbivory or these plants would not have survived millions of years of evolution. Some of those chemicals to deter consumption can be healthy in small amounts, but unhealthy in largely amounts. 

I will say the issues regarding leafy green production being destructive are worth thinking about, but you can certainly find responsibly-produced kale in season at your local farmer's market. I brought them up because people rarely think about the environmental effects of things that have a moral halo around them like greens, including people more than willing to tell you about how bad meat is for the environment. We should think about the fact that people pretty much demand to have salad greens every single month of the year and what that means for wildlife, wetlands, and biodiversity in general. 

But when you see an article that demonizes a food, think about whether or not there are citations and follow those citations. Ask yourself whether they apply to human beings eating a diverse diet with adequete calories. Or whether they involve very high concentrations no human being eats, isolated chemicals, or preparations that no normal human would put on their plate. I see narratives like this, not as satire, in many diet books and on a lot of diet blogs. I have been guilty of this in the past, when I took a lot of stuff seriously that I no longer worry about. Like phytic acid in foods– most of the studies that show this is a problem involve populations of people who are malnourished. I suppose some people get to that point while dieting though. 

As far as the cornmeal pancakes with blood sausage and sauteed kale, I think that's what I'm going to have for breakfast today. 

 “I was always conflicted about being from the South” says Andrew Beck Grace at the beginning of Eating Alabama, a documentary about attempting to eat local which I watched while I was in Alabama. This particular line rankled some of my relatives, “Why would you be conflicted about being from the South” one said, mere hours after he had said “I can feel my IQ dropping” as we crossed the border between Florida and Alabama (something that doesn’t make sense on any level considering the state of Florida).

Indeed, I feel like I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time myself not to make such cracks about the places and people of the South, a habit I picked up not in the North, but while young in the South, which I spent over half my life so far. Missed in the controversy about Paula Deen, was that some of the off-color jokes she admits telling were about “rednecks”, a term that some people have applied to Deen herself and one that speaks to an ambivalence that isn’t always introspective.

And sometimes it is brilliantly so, such as Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, a story I find myself reading often. A story that despite being short, I would struggle to write about all the meaning in it without filing a novel. Part of O’Connor’s brilliance was that she could do that in so few words.

The children in the story express their disdain for their home place early on:

"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much," John Wesley said.

"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills."

"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said, "and Georgia is a lousy state too."

"You said it," June Star said.

Interestingly, nearly all the food in the story is modern industrial food- white bread, canned apricots, Coca-Cola. To me these emphasize that the story takes place in that very Southern-between place, of embracing modernity in its commodity capitalism form existing side by side with a profound consciousness of the past, often with two few questions asked.

Paula Deen fantasized about an “old fashioned” plantation wedding, the grandmother in a Good Man is Hard to Find fantasizes about visiting a beautiful old “Gone with the wind” plantation, a fantasy that ultimately leads the family to their doom.

Some people have pointed out correctly that if we harangued everyone who told jokes like Deen’s, we’d have few people left. But the fact that she said those things didn’t cause her downfall, it was the fact that unsurprisingly it was part of a hostile and miserable culture in the workspaces she and her family ran.

Admittedly I had been critical of Deen for far longer than this recent incident, who not only represented the transmogrified processed food that has unfortunately come to dominate Southern tables, but actively promoted the corporations behind it. For example, she was a spokesperson for Smithfield, a now Chinese-owned pork factory-farming conglomerate. The fastest way to kill a small town is to put one of their hog farms there.

But there has been considerable backlash against the downfall of Deen, which also isn’t surprising to me. Regardless of anything, her food represents a type of opulence which is OK among the kind of people for whom “elitist” (or even worse “elitist Yankee”) is a slur. Regardless of their income, I have been told by many that a place like Whole Foods is for “those people.” And Paula’s food is for people like them. It represents ease, choice, modernity, comfort, and plenty.

The Southern food which is almost impossible to avoid these days at ritzy restaurants in big cities is the food that many people once had to eat when they had few choices. Food made from scratch, from local ingredients that were once widely available, is now largely for rich college-educated city folk both symbolically and in reality. And like it or not, regardless of my roots, I'm "those people" now, and there isn't really going back on that, though I'm not always sure it's a good thing. There are things I've experienced that are amazing, but there are things I'll never understand in the way I would have if I had "stayed home," but it was a choice made for me when I was 15. 

And probably some of that backlash is right. It seems like crocodile tears for some of these companies that once sponsored her to care so much about the matter. But in the end, the structures that made her decided she was no longer useful and spit her out. It is in the end OK for corporations (Cracker Barrel survived far more egregious accusations for example) to espouse such ideas, but not for their cogs. This is a time when a corporation can be redeemed, but not a person. Smithfield probably ran the numbers and calculated it was no more profitable to continue to stand behind her than it is to allow sows to give birth to their piglets outside a farrowing crate so small it doesn’t allow them to even turn around.

In A Good Man is Hard to Find, a character called The Misfit consumes the family. I won’t quote the story directly and spoil the ending, but instead I’ll refer to Alex Link’s excellent essay (sadly behind a paywall):

In place of the sentimentalized, commodified estate, the story gives us a commodified South that comes to life to consume the family in its tum. It swallows the family with a "satisfied insuck of breath" ( 129) with the help of the Misfit, the embodiment of Lefebvre's residual "incommunicable." As both a terrifying figure out of the tabloids and a perfect southern gentleman out of nostalgic fantasies like Gone with the Wind, the Misfit embodies the Romantic gloss that interposes itself between subjects and the South, as well as the means of transcending that interposition.

And Paula Deen, despite her willing promotion of that system, was just as much a product of it as anyone else. I remember making her recipes in my college dorm cooking club. We had a miserable cramped dorm kitchen. They were easy and they tasted good (don’t let people tell you things like that don’t, maybe they don’t have any fancy complexity, but my mouth still waters reading about them sometimes). Sometimes at the end of the day, looking at the pile of dirty dishes in the sink, I miss the times when I ate that way.

Cooking has become seen as an empowering act allowing you to take charge of your health and the food system. I want to believe that too, but if I, a young person without any children, find it hard to fit into my life, I don’t have much hope for it at least if things stay they way they are. When I learned to cook from scratch I lived in Sweden, where I maybe went to class a few hours a day, and that’s if I was feeling studious. It’s just the realities of the American economy that part-time work is untenable for a large majority of people (try finding health insurance and having a part-time job) and a 9-5 job often creeps onto other hours, consuming your life with after hours and commutes. Plus it’s hard for me to decide to spend hours in the kitchen when it means sacrificing social and intellectual pursuits. 

Also whatever she was, at least Deen was not of the watered down politically-correct version of Southern cooking that has haunted the "those people" media outlets like PBS. You know, like collard greens cooked with olive oil and soy sauce, because butter and ham hocks are soooo bad for you sort of thing. 

In Eating Alabama, you can see how time-consuming and somewhat socially isolating their eat only local project is. They spend an inordinate amount of time seeking out wheat and processing it themselves rather than questioning whether or not it belongs in Alabama any more than the fire ants or kudzu do. The amount of time they spend on it (as well as soybeans) only would make it more affordable than just eating even a fairly expensive alternative if you were seriously underemployed and your time was worth nothing. Plus, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in heritage grains advanced by chefs like Sean Brock and entrepreneurs like Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills. Alabama has its own McEwen & Sons organic cornmeal and grits. I don’t know if I’m related to them, but I a can vouch for their quality.

Though I didn’t spend very long in Alabama this time, I thought the selection of local quality food available was pretty impressive, but you can’t look to move there and just find exact local equivalents to foods you already eat like the couple in Eating Alabama seemed to do. Given the climate and geography, if you want to eat local easily you’ll find yourself eating more seafood and less of things like dairy, which coming from the Midwest where it’s not easy to find things like good shrimp I was more than happy to do.

Local gulf shrimp boil, local pecans, a game cookbook my grandmother had, boiled peanuts

Of course it’s hard not to have the oil spill in the back of your mind, that put a bit of worry onto the region’s oceanic bounty, but is only one of the shadows on the food system there. The relentless sprawl that has already rendered my hometown unrecognizable from my memories. The weight of cotton on the soil, the pesticides used to grow it showing up in foods such as rice grown in the region. And sometimes it seems like like nature itself has it out for the place, ravaging New Orleans, one of the few places I’d say is really proud of its old foodways to the point where it has resisted change better than most.

But the televisions networks that made Deen a star are unlikely to feature this food or its cooks. The Food Network for one exists to sell things at scale. If you wanted to make Paula Deen’s recipes in the far North of Wisconsin, you could. There was nothing in them you couldn’t get at a big grocery store or Walmart. To contrast, I can’t make a good crawfish boil in Illinois. The crawfish available here aren’t even close to being the same. Same with Edna Lewis' incredible cookbooks.

Just like there was no reason for the networks to keep her on when she became a liability to what they wanted to promote, there is no reason for them to promote foods and people that aren’t any good at promoting those things in the first place.
 

 My last name came from Scotland. I’m not sure how the McEwens ended up in the United States. The last in the line I can trace is to an overcrowded Philadelphia tenement. They seem to have been very poor. There are rumors of a murder, a flight to South America, and then somehow they ended up in Arkansas.

Much further back, the MacEwans were a Scottish clan that held a fair bit of land by Loch Fyne, a place I have often dreamed of going. In the 1400s they were broken up, seemingly due to the chieftain's financial incompetence, and became the vassals of other clans like the Maclachlans.

When I was a child I liked the idea of my Scottish heritage being defined by deep blue Highland lochs bordered by pines. And swords, and kilts. At the time it was more attractive to me that my more immediate heritage. The reality was probably that my ancestors of that clan were probably poor tenant farmers. And the kilt wasn’t even invented when they lived in Scotland.

But I’ve often thought of the clan crest, a cut oak stump bearing shoots of new growth with the motto “reviresco”- we grow again, underneath.

Two years ago an overzealous logger on our land cut down the big oak tree in the front of the farmhouse. My father was pretty angry about it and stubbornly left the stump there, as if to refuse to let the tree go. I reminded him of the crest. When the spring came the stump sent out shoots with green leaves, as I knew it would.

In forestry school in Uppsala we had a couple of acres of willow coppicing forest, a practice I had not been familiar with before. Coppicing is the very ancient practice of cutting down a tree without killing it in order to utilize the re-growth. They told us that Sweden was the only place in the world that was using willow coppicing to fuel a biomass power plant. The coppice forests were rather beautiful too, whirring with the buzzing of both honey and wild bees.

Coppicing has experienced a renaissance in the United States on small farms, where it can be used as a method of producing firewood or material for crafts like baskets.

Oak can be coppiced in long rotations. So we’ll leave the stump there to give it a chance to grow again.

American Chestnuts were once an important presence on the landscape here. Their starchy nuts were an important source of food for many humans and animals. I once heard them called “tree potatoes.” When I was a girl I was often fascinated by the “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” of The Christmas Song.

I had never had one. Because of chestnut blight, which was introduced into the United States in the late 1800s from imported Asian chestnut trees, which are immune to the blight. The blight spread quickly, killing over three billion trees.

The American Chestnut should be extinct, but it lives on an an eternal coppice-like state, sending out hopeful shoots that grow and then die again and again in a world that no longer welcomes them. Unless you can get some of the last stock, from nurseries in Oregon and Washington, and plant them far away from these undead remnants. Then they might live, but the odds are against you.

The only hope is for them are scientists, who are have used the genetic material to create resistant varieties. America might yet be covered with chestnuts again. I have wanted to plant some resistant varieties on the farm, but the nursery I want to buy from always sells out so quickly, sure signs that people are replanting.

I tasted my first chestnut while browsing a Christmas market in the Czech Republic, where they sold bags of roasted chestnuts. They were hearty and slightly sweet, not quite the rich fatty nut I imagined in my childhood dreams. These days you can find chestnuts at the local farmer’s market. I think the flour is among my favorite alternative flours, especially for pancakes. It is silky and has maple notes. But it is expensive, which is amusing since in the past, like lobster and oysters, chestnuts were considered an undesirable peasant food.

I was disappointed in not getting the chestnuts this year, but I ordered a random variety of trees from Oikos and the DNR. I’ve been reading Common Sense Forestry by Hans Morsbach, which notes that he like us was a resident of Chicago who had land in Wisconsin. He also owned some restaurants, so I thought it would be interesting to get in contact with him. 

Turns out I can’t. Because he died a few years ago. Knowing that imbues the book with a certain sort of melancholy I don’t often experience when reading books on growing things. He talks about how much of what he does he may never see come to maturation. And I know he never will see it.

That’s what’s really incredible. And I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. It’s a pretty arresting thought, not being anything, not being anywhere, and yet the world still being here. Simply having everything stopping for ever, not just for millions of years. And getting to the point where that’s all there is in front of you. I can imagine anyone finding themselves thoroughly wrapped up in that prospect, especially since it’s where we’re going to get to sooner or later, and perhaps sooner.-The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

If the trees I’ve planted could think, they would see me as I see the wood fly that lives for only a few days.

But they don’t think of this. And while trees sometimes take me into melancholy thoughts of mortality, to try to put yourself in the place of the woodland plant is to imagine that which cannot as Wendell Berry says “tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

But it is only for the moment that one can escape there. Even the “peace of wild things” is a “memento mori.” The gaps in our vitality the forest claim. A horticulturalist relative of mine told me he was clearing away the orchard to prepare for this. Past the orchard gate at that same orchard once I remembered peering into the dark forest. The hinges on the gate was twisted, closed by little vines like those oak or chestnut shoots, testing the world outside, seeing if it had been made ready.

Once a friend told me I had trouble sleeping. I told him how I get to sleep when it comes slowly to me. I go in my mind to past dreams, some of them now old enough that perhaps they are worlds of their own. One of the most vivid is a place of murky waters and thick forest. The trees are very old and imposing, holding many strange creatures and towns. It is my grandmother’s Southern Louisiana swamps, the Chattahoochee in Georgia, the dirty miasma of the Skokie canal, the rushlands that were once great Viking rivers in Ultuna. It is all theses places I have known in once, and perhaps places I haven’t. At some point, moving so much, without a home, this became the place I was from.

The call came in the morning, it was some cows we couldn’t keep in our fields, that another farmer had taken to his own farm. They had escaped. We drove northwest there, a shudder crippled my heart. It was as if this were the place in my dreams. The karst topography, holes on the surface of the Earth filled with waters of mystery. There was a heavy fog that morning. The cow had broken her leg in a hole, bellowing sadly stuck in the swamp. There wasn’t much else to do besides get a gun. There wasn’t much blood or commotion. We pulled her out of the swamp into the grass. She looked as if she was sleeping. Her large belly still sighed. It would have been filled with a calf soon, if misfortune hadn’t followed her into the deep green land. Instead the microbes that helped her thrive in life had turned against her flesh for one last meal.

We found a cow skull once; we thought it was
From one of the asses in the Bible, for the sun
Shone into the holes through which it had seen
Earth as an endless belt carrying gravel, had heard
Its truculence cursed, had learned how human sweat
Stinks, and had brayed-shone into the holes
With solemn and majestic light, as if some
Skull somewhere could be Baalbek or the Parthenon.- Galway Kinnell's  Freedom, New Hampshire

We cut her open. The butcher handed me her liver, it was heavy and dripped with blood on my boots. I also took her sweet breads, they were large and succulent. They always are the best in a young cow. An unfortunate delicacy.

Like hunters we left the gut pile there by the swamp. An offering to some whose home we had disturbed. This land never belonged to any person, it never could belong. It has too close of a relationship with ancient disorder. That’s why it took our cow before we could. You don’t always get to prepare your orchards for when that day comes. I was reminded of this when my grandmother said she’d brought her son’s ashes back to Louisiana. I felt sorry I had been so far away for so long.

Later at home I was tired, but I had to process all the organs, cut away the sinews and freeze what I couldn’t eat soon. I didn’t want to waste anything, and besides it is one of those rare activities where I can be satisfied with work, where the time of work passes quickly in the mundane work of hands.

I cooked the liver and sweetbreads on a hot cast iron with a little salt. They were the best I’d ever had. The sweetbreads popped like popcorn, salty and fatty. I hesitate to give cooking advice for these things. I don’t recommend recreating that day.

That night I dreamt I gave stillbirth to a young lamb and laid him in the grass. I believe it was the lamb from Magnu’s Nilsson’s Faviken book and this artist's depiction of a small microcosm of life growing out of a death. Nilsson has said “ Meat is the remains of what was a living individual that we selfishly raised and killed with the sole purpose of feeding ourselves.”

I felt a million living tendrils

rooting through the thing I was,

as if I’d turned to earth before my death

or in my death could somehow feel.- Christian Wiiman

We always kept our distance from this particular herd of cows. They don’t have names. They have sharp horns. She died much like a wild deer I had seen while hiking once, its skeletal form bent against its tree where its foot was still tangled. Except maybe we are a little less cruel than nature and she didn’t die slowly, stuck in a hole for a long time waiting for the wolves. A part of me welcomed this nourishment from a death that was not a choice.

But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that is swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the grass
Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few who loved him know this until they die.- Galway Kinnell Freedom, New Hampshire

When I was about thirteen or fourteen and first had regular access to the internet, looking back into the past of my name, in boredom. I came across a women who shared it, Gwendolyn MacEwen, a poet and writer. She had died a year after I was born from the alcoholic malady I sometimes feel is a particularly Celtic curse. In pictures she has the most haunting eyes, eyes that seemed far older than her face.

There is one poem of her that I have been remembering since. It is Dark Pines Under Water:

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.
 

I think of it often. I think it must be stored in the deepest part of my brain, where it has gathered a hold of the way words are in my thoughts, like a strange prayer that emerges in the woods and at night. Before her I didn’t really write, but it has been like an infection since.

I was never the sort that anyone could call private. But there is so much that just must be left unsaid for now at least, people whose shadows I trace with my words, deftly avoiding showing their faces.

One way I do that is to write of the past. Of things that no longer live in consciousness on this world. But even then people always seem to have a stake in things.

Instead I try to write of things that seem a bit more mundane. Like trees.

I knew it - you would have too, if you'd been there; it was a figure I’d glimpsed in a car park as a child; an expression crossing the face of a stranger late one night at Waterloo Station as I hurried for a train with my parents; a carving in the portico of a mediaeval church. In some nightmarish way it was particular, and it was also infinite. It was itself, it was the wood, it was the last roses in the garden, and yet it was also a wider sentience, perhaps best described as the feeling that the trees and fields we look at have always secretly been looking back into us.- Alasdair MacLean of The Clientele