Cloistered

Here is what I think about these days when I feel isolated and frustrated:

1936. A turn-of-the-century apartment in Barcelona: living room, dining room, four bedrooms. A pared-down kitchen, no ice-box. One bathroom. No hot water or central heat. In this apartment live my father, his parents, his two younger sisters, and his older brother with his wife and two baby boys. And the maid, an orphan whom my grandparents took in many years ago. She sleeps on a cot in the kitchen.

The Spanish Civil War has broken out. My grandfather is an accountant in a cement company, but construction in all of Spain has come to a halt, so there isn’t much work for him. My grandmother sends the maid out to the shops every day, and makes do with what she brings back: bread and garlic and maybe a bit of hake or cod.

The older son used to have a job, but now has lymphoma and grows weaker by the day. Doctors and nurses are at the front, stitching wounds and amputating limbs, so he is cared for by his wife and his mother. His wife is a Mexican citizen. Like the Israelites smearing blood on their doors so the angel would spare their firstborns, the family has nailed a Mexican flag on the door of the apartment to deter the anarchist gangs that roam the city.

My father’s sisters are fifteen and twelve, and have to be kept mostly indoors because the streets are rife with soldiers. My father is twenty-two. Ever since his mother sat him on her lap and placed his fingers on the keyboard of the upright piano, music has been his life. A violinist, he is starting to make his way professionally.

Of all the family, he is the most endangered, more than the dying brother or the pubescent girls. Catalonia is in the grip of leftist furor. Centuries of deprivation have stoked hatred among the poor towards everyone and everything that smacks even remotely of privilege: the wealthy and the middle class, the great landowners and the farmers with a single field and a mule, and the church—priests good and bad, monks, nuns, former altar boys, and members of a Catholic organizations such as the Children of Mary.

In high-school my father belonged to the Children of Mary, along with the rest of his class. This now makes him subject to summary arrest and execution. One night his best friend, hiding in his own parents’ apartment, is dragged out from under the sofa and put on a truck headed for Montjuich, the hill overlooking the city where dozens are shot every day at dawn. But my father’s friend is charming, and on the way he strikes a conversation with the guard, who lowers the tailgate and lets him jump off.

As in every civil war, one is at the mercy of disaffected neighbors, disappointed rivals, the spiteful, the petty, and the just plain evil, any one of whom may take it into his or her head to nod in the direction of one’s hiding place. So my father has to stay in the apartment 24/7. Not only can he not go outdoors, he can’t stand on the balcony or close to a window. Not only may he not play the violin--that would give him away immediately--he has to speak softly and tread lightly, lest the downstairs tenants hear a man’s voice and footsteps while my grandfather and the elder son are out of the house.

What do they do, the ten of them, day after day in that apartment? There is a piano on which the girls practice their scales. There is a radio, but reception is poor. Otherwise there is nothing:  no TV, no wi-fi, no working telephone, no books or magazines other than those already on the shelves. There are frequent blackouts.

There is always prayer, and they all say the rosary together every evening. And for my father there are buttons to paint, for a little income. It is fashionable at the time for women to wear large painted buttons made of tagua, an ivory-like plant material. So my young father sits by the window (but not too close) with a slender brush and some paints, and invents tiny bucolic scenes for women to wear on their chests. What, at twenty-two, does he make of women, now that the only ones he sees are his mother, the maid, his sisters, and his brother’s young wife in the bedroom next to his?

Food is the great issue. How to get it, how to apportion it. The decisions are in my grandmother’s hands. My grandfather needs nourishment so he can continue to work, as does the maid. The girls are still growing. The daughter-in-law is pregnant or nursing. Now that his cancer is progressing, the older son doesn’t want to eat much, but he must be encouraged nevertheless. And my father—how to satisfy the hunger of a twenty-two-year-old man? Fortunately, he doesn’t get any exercise, so that helps.

At night the family gathers around the table, a candle flickering in the center because the electricity has been cut off.

“Here, take this bread. I’m not feeling very hungry.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s yours. Please eat it…”

They go to bed early to keep warm, but before retiring they file into the kitchen, one by one, and down several glasses of water. This is to give their stomachs the illusion of fullness, so they can fall asleep.

The war lasts three years.

My father, aged 21, the year before the war

My Mother and the Can of Crisco

During our years in Quito, my mother learned to shop in the open-air markets where Indian women, wearing long braids and black fedoras, layers of petticoats, and, usually, a baby on their back, squatted on the sidewalk. On the ground in front of them lay the produce of the high Andes: mounds of potatoes, piles of onions and corn, and slabs of meat. It was all very real and natural, and crawling with flies.

Her first encounter with an American supermarket was, therefore, a shock.  Everything she could want—from food to cleaning products--was in one pristine, air-conditioned place, all of it canned or neatly wrapped in plastic or cellophane.

One aisle had a surprising array of toilet papers--some strong, some soft, and all in gentle pastels. This was not what my mother was used to: in Spain, the only brand had been a no-nonsense brown, with a picture of an elephant uprooting a tree on the wrapping, while in Ecuador public bathrooms were invariably stocked with squares of newspaper. She was especially taken with the selection of paper napkins, also in many colors. “So hygienic!” she said. “You can have a fresh one at each meal.”

After four years in Quito, where she had to buy her chickens on the hoof and boil every drop of the water and milk we drank, my mother was understandably fascinated with the prospect of ready-to-eat meals. And she wasn’t alone. In that innocent and trusting age, American women cheerfully filled their grocery carts with canned vegetables, meats, and desserts. Here were convenience, nutrition, and endless freshness, and all you needed was a can opener. What was not to like?

The problem for us was figuring out what was inside the cans. The pictures on the labels weren’t always helpful. What, for instance, was that pink cube called Spam? What were those squishy cylinders called marshmallows? The tuna cans had pictures of fish on the label, but as a good Mediterranean my mother wouldn’t think of buying fish that wasn’t practically still wiggling.

We wandered the aisles, feeling increasingly frustrated, when I spotted something that might do. “Look,” I said, “it says Chili Con Carne! Whatever chili is, it has meat. It’s probably o.k.” My mother put the can in her cart and we walked on.

Then, when we were about to give up and leave with an almost empty cart, my mother held up an enormous blue and white can. It had pictures of delicious foods on the label—chicken legs coated in crisp batter, and biscuits, cookies, and slices of pie. Surely, my mother thought, this was the ultimate expression of American practicality: an entire meal in a single can. We bought a can opener and headed home for our first American dinner.

In the kitchen, my mother emptied the chili into a frying pan. “What are all these beans doing mixed with the meat? Your father won’t be too happy,” she said. My father and his family had starved during the Spanish Civil War, and one day he and his brother had managed to steal a huge sack of dried beans, which the family ate for months. Beans were one of the few foods that my father objected to.

As the chili heated, my mother took a taste. “Mare de Déu!” she exclaimed. “This is awful. Here,try it.” I did, and spat it into the sink. The harsh flavor of chili, spicy and bitter, stuck to the back of my tongue.

“Maybe if we eat it with bread,” my mother said, opening a loaf of Wonder Bread and handing my father and me each a slice. But that soft, pliable, crustless square was unlike any bread we’d ever seen. My father took a bite and closed his eyes, chewing. “I feel like I’m eating a piece of towel,” he said.

Our first American meal wasn’t turning into a success. “Well, we can’t eat this. Let’s try the other can,” my mother said, guiltily scraping the chili into the trash.

It took her a while to work the opener all the way around the top, and when she lifted it she said “What is this? Come look!” My father and I ran into the kitchen. The can was filled to the rim with a solid white mass.

“Maybe the food is hidden underneath” my father suggested.

My mother got a wooden spoon and carefully, not wishing to disturb the fried chicken and biscuits and desserts, dug out a bit of the white goo. But there was more goo under that, so she kept digging and digging until finally it became clear that the chicken, etc. on the label had been a lie designed to entice people to buy a six-pound can of that weird white substance.

“It’s some kind of grease,” she said, rubbing a bit of the stuff between index and thumb. “What can Americans possibly do with it?”

My mother dined out on the Crisco story for years. I found it embarrassing and humiliating, and would leave the room whenever she told it. In a way, the Crisco episode mimicked my experience of the American dream: promises of abundant delights as shown in the movies and TV that, upon closer examination, revealed a strange and impenetrable mystery.

Eager Dread

In Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark says of a plump young woman that she "spent much of her time in eager dread of the next meal, and in making resolutions what to eat of it, and what to leave." Doesn't that just about sum up the American attitude towards food? 

We are surrounded by mountains of it, when we should be eating molehills.

Take an ordinary day out of my ordinary life.  Better still, take just half a day.  Even before I was fully awake, I had to use my willpower at breakfast. I had to decide how much yoghurt, blueberries, and almonds to put into my bowl.  I adore yoghurt, and blueberries, and almonds, and could have eaten a great deal of each because it was there in the fridge, but I didn't.  I just had a little bit.  And because I've been warned about caffeine I drank tea, which tastes to me like one step above plain water, instead of coffee, which is what the gods really drink.

I had an optometrist's appointment that morning, and my husband offered to drive.  But first I had to stop by the vet's, and there on the counter was a bowl of candy.  Going in the door, food had been the last thing on my mind, especially since I was carrying a bag with Wolfie's and Bisou's samples for their annual parasite check.  But there it was, and it wasn't even ten a.m.  Again, I flexed my willpower muscle and gave it a miss.

While we were waiting at the optometrist's the receptionist brought us a plate of cookies.  "My sister-in-law made these," she said, "and I didn't want to eat them all myself."  We hadn't been thinking about food when we walked in, but here it was once more.  We couldn't refuse, so we each had a cookie.

After the appointment we went to lunch at a diner, where the menu filled three legal-size pages.  When the food arrived, my husband and I looked at each other and said "Pact!"  This means that we agree to eat only half of what is put before us, and save the other half for dinner the next day. For years I resisted "doggie bags" because I thought they were uncool, but that was before restaurants started serving food in platters as opposed to plates.  I can now be regularly spotted exiting restaurants with a  styrofoam box in my hand.

The menu was studded with photos of fabulous desserts, which we did not intend to order.  But while we ate our half-rations our eyes wandered to the racks of pies and cakes that lined the walls of the diner.  More willpower was expended dealing with this.  On the counter where we paid our bill there sat, you guessed it, another bowl of candy.

I think that our relationship to food is more problematic and less pleasant than, say, that of a humble seamstress a hundred years ago. (I am not talking here of the starving poor, but of someone who had enough decent food to eat.)  My seamstress, unlike me, could look forward to her meals with eagerness untinged with dread.  She probably didn't have much choice in what she ate, but she was free to eat it without second thoughts.  Her ice-box, unlike my fridge, was not stocked with more food than she could eat in a meal or two, so she needn't fuss about portion size. But then, she probably didn't even have an ice-box.

She also didn't have a TV, so after dinner she wasn't assaulted by pictures of platters heaped with breaded shrimp and lobster and French fries.  On her way to work in the morning the streets were not lined with eating establishments, nor did huge photos of donuts decorate the sides of buildings.  And her co-workers probably did not pass around baskets of cookies while they sewed.

If she went to the doctor, she wasn't offered food by the nurse.  If she needed to buy something at the pharmacy, there was no food there.  (Have you been to a Rite-Aid lately?  Half the aisles are dedicated to food, every molecule of it processed.)  If she needed to buy stationery for the novel she was writing, no packages of foil-wrapped chocolates distracted her at the stationer's.  (Have you been to Staples lately?)  If she went to a book shop to buy a something to read after work, she didn't have to walk through the cafe annex with its display of muffins and pastries.

In short, my well-nourished seamstress, except when she was eating her three squares-a-day, was mostly spared the sight of food, the need to make decisions about it, and the guilt attendant on making the wrong choice.

Whereas we, her great-grandchildren, are forced to act as our own prison guards, doling out the day's meager ration lest our livers, hearts, and figures deteriorate.  Modern technology enables us to avoid almost all physical movement so that, surrounded by more food than humanity has ever known, we need less of it than ever.  Our willpower is called upon to make efforts which it never evolved to handle, and as a result our straightforward, joyful approach to food has, like love in a postmodern novel, been replaced by eager dread.

What's Left To Eat?

Every few months a new item is added to the list of Foods That Can Kill.  Here are some of the ones that come to mind:

--Salt, because it gives you high blood pressure.
--Sugar, because it is as lethal and addictive as heroin, and, unlike heroin, makes you fat.
--Fat.
--Dairy, because it causes phlegm and inflammation and makes you fat.  Plus, you're consuming all the hormones and antibiotics the cows were given to keep them at maximum production.
--Soy, because it is estrogenic, and estrogen is linked to cancer.
--Eggs, because they have cholesterol, and are allergenic.  (And you don't even want to think about the conditions of the poor hens in egg factories.)
--Wheat, because it is allergenic, causes inflammation, and makes you fat.
--Fish, because it contains mercury.
--Meat, because it clogs your arteries and makes you fat.  (And you don't even want to think about the conditions of chickens, pigs and cattle in factory farms.)
--Apples, because they are sprayed with some of the worst pesticides in existence.  (BTW, have you ever checked the price of organic apples?)

And on and on.  (Notice that I have only included non-processed foods on this list.)

But until last week, in the ever-expanding desert of dietary choices there was one food that you could always count on.  It was cheap, easily available, nutritious, non-fattening, bland, harmless, and user-friendly.  It was accepted without complaint by little children, snarky adolescents, and adult foodies alike, not to mention dogs.  It was rice. 

Now it turns out that under those glistening grains rice harbors arsenic, a well-known poison that is linked to various cancers.  Even organic brown rice, which I used to serve several times a week because it was so much better for us than potatoes, pasta or couscous, carries the stuff.

Rice is, of course, a long way from being taken off the grocery shelves.  We're supposed to eat it, like everything else, in moderation--whatever that means.  Pediatricians are recommending that parents serve babies rice cereal a maximum of once a week.  But who wants to give a baby even a tiny bit of arsenic every week?

Rinsing rice prior to cooking, I'm told, will wash away some of the arsenic.  Words cannot express how much better that makes me feel....

Some Recipes I've Abandoned

I got married in August of 1967, so I must have cooked my first-ever meal that September, my skin still mahogany brown from my honeymoon tan.  Those early meals took a lot out of me.  My full load of graduate courses was a snap compared to the challenge of putting varied, colorful, nutritious and economical dishes before my brand-new husband for lunch and dinner every single day.

These meals, both lunch and dinner, included dessert (we had tiger-like metabolisms).  Once I tried to make a cake to celebrate the end of finals.  The recipe said to cook the icing to the "hard ball stage,"  which I interpreted to mean that all the icing ingredients had to be cooked until they became a hard ball....

Here are some of my early adventures in cooking, now mercifully discarded:

1.  Tuna casserole.  This was probably the first dish I mastered, made with Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup and enhanced with a sprinkling of crumbled potato chips on top.  I still make it, but with bechamel instead of canned soup, organic whole-wheat noodles, lots of veggies and, needless to say, no potato chips.  It takes longer to make and doesn't taste as fabulous as the original, but then, I don't get as hungry as I once did.

2.  California dip--the ur food of graduate-school parties.  You mix half a pint of sour cream with an envelope of onion soup mix, grab a bag of potato chips (left over from the tuna topping) and go put on your long hostess gown.

3.  Jello.  I used to give it to my kids as a kind of healthy dessert.  Being an enlightened parent, I used a  recipe that called for twice the amount of jello powder and resulted in a stiff, psychedelic, bone-building snack that a toddler could hold in her hand, thus saving the aggravation of spoon and bowl.

4.  Peanut butter balls.  You mixed peanut butter, honey (because of the enlightenment factor), and dry powdered milk until you got a stiff mixture that could be formed into balls.  You rolled these in powdered sugar and fed them to your offspring.

5.  Chicken livers in sour cream.  My husband used to love these over rice, and they were cheap, too.  But we didn't know that they were toxic.

6.  Chicken friccasee, another spouse favorite.  It involved browning chicken pieces in Crisco, then putting them in the pressure cooker along with bacon and cream.  More poison.

7.  Dark steaks.  We discovered that our supermarket, where we could never afford any meat fancier than ground beef, would sell us their slightly darkened steaks at ground-beef prices.  I knew from my European upbringing that dark meat is infinitely preferable to the bright red still-warm-from-the-animal sort.  We got so that we grilled only filet mignon, and relegated cuts like T-bones to humble dishes such as soups and stews.  This spoiled ordinary beef for me forever:  I haven't eaten a steak in thirty years, and can only tolerate ground beef if it is well disguised with onions, mushrooms, and red wine.

8.  Fish sticks.  The only reason I can conceive for eating these is that fresh fish was not readily available in Southern supermarkets in those days.  And a toddler could pick up a fish stick with her hand (one without ketchup on it) and eat it all by herself.

(Fish sticks, jello fingers, endless boxes of Cheerios..a lot of what we ate in our early married days had to do with what a toddler could manage on her own.)

9.  Ice cream.  I served this with a clear conscience, and not just on special occasions.  It is the one item on this list that I really miss.

I'd love to know some that recipes you've abandoned.

Nutrition And Me

For breakfast this morning, I ate an egg.  It used to be you couldn't eat eggs, because they were full of cholesterol and they would clog up your arteries and you would die young.  But now eggs are fine--an excellent source of protein and omega-3 oils and other good things.  So I'm eating eggs again.

I put salt on my egg , too.  For a while in the 80s salt was considered a killer, so I banished it from my cooking.  I even found a way to make bread without using salt, and wrote an article about how to do this (it isn't easy).  It turns out, however, that a no-salt diet is terrible for people with low blood pressure, especially for people with CFS and low blood pressure, so now I'm back to salting my food.

I cooked my egg in olive oil.  Olive oil is the ultimate soul food for me. It is also pure fat, and my collection of non-stick pans attests to my fat-free period, sometime in the 90s, brought on by the Zeitgeist notion that you could eat just about anything without gaining weight (even cookies, especially cookies) as long as you steered clear of fat.

In addition to the egg, I had a small bowl of oatmeal.  Oatmeal is loaded with carbs, of course.  I lost a ton of weight back in the 70s on a practically-no-carb diet.  I remember going into ketosis (a good thing, according to the diet book) and buying a whole new wardrobe. I also remember experiencing some savage food cravings.  I know better now, of course, and have welcomed carbohydrates back into my diet.

As I sweetened my oatmeal with a little Vermont maple syrup--pure sugar, you know--I thought back to those grim days (was it in the 80s or 90s?) when, cowed by the fear of hypoglycemia and obesity, I eliminated sweetness from my life. 

Having finished breakfast, I poured my daily regimen of vitamins and supplements into a pill box, and it struck me how the contents of that little box had changed over the years. They used to include megadoses of C (eventually proven to be ineffective against colds), later a good dollop of E (but no more, since it's supposed to be bad for you), also some gingko capsules (which we now know do nothing for memory), and I've forgotten what else.

Although my supplement list is pretty pared down these days, I do add some Vitamin D--the vitamin that our naked ancestors following game all day on the savanna got plenty of.  The vitamin that we, slathered in sunscreen, swathed in synthetic fabrics and imprisoned indoors by our computers year round, are pathetically  deficient in.

I usually listen to NPR's Morning Edition during breakfast, have been doing so for years.  That is where I get a lot of my knowledge about which substance to banish from my diet and which to welcome back like a nutritional prodigal son. 

Today, no sooner had I doled out my dose of Vitamin D than I heard a reporter say that research has shown that recent claims that we need Vitamin D supplementation in doses as high as 4,000 i.u./day are fallacious and misleading.  We might need, the new research indicates, at most one tenth of that.

Feeling foolish, I put my D capsules back in the bottle.  But I did not throw them away.

I'm keeping them for the day when somebody in a lab somewhere determines that megadoses of Vitamin D are in fact the key to vibrant health.  I just hope that my sound nutritional practices enable me to live until then.

Good Food In Bad Times

Thinking about good food and good fortune this Christmas Eve...

The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939, leaving the country in ruins. By the time I was born in the following decade, in Barcelona, decent food was still hard to get. Meat was tough, eggs and milk expensive, even bread was sometimes scarce. But I ate like a queen, thanks to my grandmother's basket.

It was an ordinary laundry basket, made of reeds. My grandmother, who lived on a farm, would fill it with whatever was in her larder that week, cover the top with a piece of burlap, fasten it with thick thread to the top edge of the basket, and send it by messenger on the train to Barcelona.

The contents of this horn of plenty varied with the seasons. In spring there were cherries wrapped in layers of grapevine leaves, and eggs for my nightly omelette, each carefully wrapped in a sheet of newspaper. In autumn the basket disgorged grapes, dried figs, filberts and roasted almonds. After the olive harvest, there would be a two-liter can of dark, fruity oil. My mother would sprinkle this on a slice of crusty bread, season it with salt, and add a piece of dark chocolate for my afternoon snack--pa amb oli i xocolata—a Catalan tradition.

After the first frost the basket brought sausages made from a pig raised under my grandmother's watchful eye: sweet black sausages that I only learned much later were made of blood, white sausages, red chorizos. There was also salt pork, to be eaten with white beans, and best of all, a grand serrano ham, salty and substantial.

But the most exciting thing my grandmother sent was the capon, which would arrive, annoyed but alive, just before Christmas. For a day and a night this stout beast became my pet. It lived in the laundry tub, and I sat beside him for hours, feeding him bread and inhaling his hot poultry smell. I don't remember making any connection between the empty laundry tub and the succulent main dish on the Christmas table. I just remember that, unlike the tough cow meat that we bought in the city, I had no trouble at all digging into my grandmother's capon.

In summer, there were no baskets. There were instead three entire months at the farm, where I gorged on rabbit in garlic sauce, lettuces picked as the table was being set, melons served still warm from the sun, all accompanied by wine which had spent the afternoon cooling in a bucket inside the well.

A day of rain was a cause for rejoicing: the minute the sun came out my grandmother would send me out on a snail hunt. When I returned, she would dump my harvest into special cylindrical lidded baskets where the snails would spend a couple of days “fasting, like we do in Lent,” as she put it. Eventually my snails would appear at dinner, in an orange earthenware casserole, still in their shells and swimming in a sauce of tomato, garlic and parsley.

Now that I have entered my grandmotherly years, I too I live in the country. My grandchildren live in a city that offers every imaginable food from all over the world. Yet these are also difficult times and food is again a source of worry—not because of scarcity, but because of what might be in it, how the people who grow it are treated, how long we can sustain this way of living and eating.

So I too grow food for my grandchildren. When we visit we take along a blue cooler filled with rhubarb, broccoli, spinach, green beans, sugar snaps, eggplants, and the inevitable zucchini. There are also jars of tomato sauce, dried peppers, and a couple dozen eggs.

All of it is organic, as my grandmother's provender was. All of it is more than food. Like my grandmother's basket, the blue cooler holds love as well as vegetables, biology lessons (you don't need a rooster to get eggs from a hen, and yes, manure is good for plants), and also the message that food is serious business and serious pleasure, grown and nurtured by human hands in collaboration with the earth.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

October 25, 2008 "Complications of the Simple Life"

Dog Cuisine

I've decided to start cooking for my dogs. This was not a major, life-altering decision. However, in my efforts, such as this one, to save the world by living more sustainably, locally, organically and simply, I often end up in a morass of alternatives, possibilities, unintended consequences, and their attendant feelings of dread and apprehension.

O.k., I told myself, cooking for the dogs is a good thing to do, and not a big deal. It is good because everybody, except for dog-food manufacturers and some conservative veterinarians, agrees that home-cooked food is better for dogs than even the best industrially produced food. It is good because the kibble I presently feed my dogs (it has the word “gold” in the name, and the price of gold on the label) costs more, pound per pound, than what my husband and I eat for dinner most nights. It is good because I can buy the meat and rice at the nearby grocery store—the veggies and eggs will come from our garden and chickens—thus avoiding a 25-minute trip to the pet store to purchase the gold food, which will save time and help to avert global warming.

And it's really not a big deal. I can buy the meat and rice in large quantities. And cooking for dogs is a snap (I've done it before): you just brown the meat in a big pot, bung in the rice and enough water to cook it. Then you add the roughly chopped veggies and anything else, like eggs, sardines, or powdered milk, that you feel inspired to include. When the rice is done you stir the whole mess, ladle it into containers that will hold a day's ration, and freeze.

On the other hand, I may be fooling myself. I'm going to be cooking for two German Shepherds, who together total roughly 180 lbs of dog. In the store, I'll have to hunt around for the cheapest source of protein available—ground beef, cottage cheese, canned fish or whatever. I'll be lucky if I can fit a single week's worth of dog dinners in my huge stock pot. And not only will I have to find a way to store these huge amounts of food in our freezer but, even more difficult, I'll have to remember every day to take out the next day's ration so it has a chance to defrost...and with our house temperature presently hovering around 60F, defrosting takes a while. In the face of all this, measuring out a couple of cups of kibble and pouring them into a dish seems like the soul of simplicity.

Nor is cooking dog food at home free of ethical complications. Since there is no way I can afford to feed my dogs locally-grown, grass-fed beef, I will end up buying meat transported from God-knows-where (thus canceling out my gas savings), from animals fed ecologically harmful grain diets and confined in feedlots and slaughtered in ways that...but I won't go there. The cottage cheese won't be organic either, again because of cost, so I'll be supporting industrial dairy farms where cows are pushed to the limits of their productivity and are spent and slaughtered by age four, and where week-old male calves are shipped off to...I won't go there either. As for the fish, with every canned sardine they swallow my dogs will be participating in the rapid depletion of the oceans.

Now can you see what I mean by dread and apprehension?

But I'm still going to do it, because: 1. it's good for the dogs; 2. they LOVE home-cooked food; and 3. I love it when somebody loves my cooking.