I read the Aubrey-Maturin books for the first time when I moved from San Francisco to New York, in 1995. They weren’t all written then, but I read what there was in just a couple of months. One good thing – and there really aren’t that many – about 20 years’ elapsing is that you can read all the good books again, almost new.

Even if my memory of them were better, it would still be worth every minute to hear Simon Vance’s version. His voices give life to the characters, and round them out in ways my imagination couldn’t have done. I have a fondness for the cadence, the expressions, and the niceties of the English of Victoria and her immediate predecessors – at least, as they’re rendered in literature, which provides my only experience of them – and O’Brian and Vance between them have me working “what joy” and “never in life” into conversation.

There was, apparently, a nautical taboo against discussing any success prematurely and throughout the series, often and often,  Jack Aubrey restrains himself. “There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip,” he reminds himself. And so there is. The specter of unfulfilled potential fills me with dread.

I’ve never attempted anything as difficult and dangerous as a naval action, but the maxim applies to all our endeavors, large and small. The injunction against counting your chickens, the agricultural equivalent, would probably be more appropriate here, but I like Aubrey’s version better. I shudder to think what you’d find if you were to excavate that vast chasm between potential and achievement. Just today, I tossed in some broccoli raab seedlings that got eaten by some mysterious insect within 48 hours of my planting them outdoors. Then there’s the five bee colonies, none of which survived even one winter. But you’d find them only if you manage to dig through the 60,000 or so baby oysters that died on us last year.

And yet, when I see new things taking shape, I’m not thinking about the slip. It’s all lip, all the time. It’s figs. And raspberries. Ramps will be a quiche. And that truckload of wood, a shed. What’s that they say about hope and spring?

I’m very much afraid that I’m counting my chickens, even though I know full well that it’s a lee shore.

Figs-to-be

Quiche-to-be

Shed-to-be

Yes, Kevin and I have caught tuna fever. It’s tempting to blame our friend Jon, who, out of the blue, invited us on what turned out to be a successful tuna fishing trip. But tuna is big around here, and we spend a lot of time with people who fish. We would have caught it sooner or later, so I have to let Jon off the hook. So to speak.

If you’re going to catch a tuna, you have to have the appropriate tuna-catching equipment, and so, over the winter, we geared up. Those of you who have ever bought fishing equipment know that there is a direct correlation between the size of the fish you want to catch and the cost of the gear that catches it. Tuna gear ranges from pretty expensive to ungodly expensive, and you have to choose where on that continuum you’d like to be.

There are several schools of thought on this. The first, I like to call the Cortesian school, after my friend Skip Cortese.

I’m taking a liberty in calling him my friend, because I actually met him only once, when he and his charming wife, Lisa, invited a bunch of seedy journalists into their home, on Mobile Bay’s Dauphin Island, to eat a dinner prepared, just for us, by Wesley True, arguably Mobile’s best chef. My first clue that Skip was a fisherman of the Cortesian school was the boat docked outside their house, a 32-foot Regulator with twin 350s.

A Regulator is to boats what a Vita-Mix is to blenders, and the 32-foot version with 700 horsepower is an unparalleled offshore fishing machine. But you can’t catch a fish with a boat, even a 32-foot Regulator. For that, you need gear. My suspicions about Skip were confirmed when, after we talked about fishing for a while, he asked if I’d like to see the tackle room.

Tackle room? We have a tackle box. It’s a big box, but still.

Why yes, I most certainly would like to see the tackle room!

It’s a room as big as a good-sized bedroom, and its walls are lined with rods and reels. Really good, really new rods and reels. Spinning reels and conventional reels, in all sizes. And tuna gear. Big, shiny, tuna reels, rigged to land a giant. Fortunately, the tackle room is equipped with comfortable chairs, because I had to sit down.

The Cortesian school of gearing up is founded on the principle that the best gear increases your chances of catching fish. It is a principle that few would take issue with, but not everyone can afford to gear up accordingly.

Then there’s the Gloverite school, which I’ve named for our friend Bob Glover. People caught tuna long before Penn came out with the 130VSX reel, retail price $1300, and Bob tells stories of catching them with a balloon, a laundry basket, and some clothesline. I will admit that I’m not clear on the details. I will also point out that Bob doesn’t fish this way anymore, and I name the school after him only because he told me about it.

But most of us are neither Cortesian nor Gloverite. We are somewhere in between. Kevin and I have our wistful Cortesian moments, but just enough Gloverite sensibility to keep us from regretting that we don’t have a Cortesian budget.

In our neck of the woods, the standard tuna reels go from the 30-class (the smallest) to the 130-class (the biggest), with several classes in between. The bigger the reel, the bigger a fish it can handle, because it has stronger drag and a larger spool that can hold more line. A skilled fisherman can catch a very large fish on a surprisingly small reel, but an unskilled fisherman is much more likely to get spooled – have the fish run away with all the line, and then break off.

Because we fish to eat, Kevin and I have no desire to catch an 800-pound giant tuna. We’ll be targeting the smaller fish, 50-150 pounds, and those can be caught on relatively small equipment. Trouble is, there’s no way to guarantee the fish on your line is one of those smaller fish. It’s not random – there are places and times for smaller fish, and places and times for larger – but neither is it foolproof. Although a 30-class reel would be fine for the fish we want to catch, we wanted slightly larger reels to accommodate a larger range.

The reels we decided on, Penn 50VSWs, can hold up to 2000 yards of line (depending on what kind of line it is), and is rated at 45 pounds of drag. Because the reels are extremely well made, and will last almost forever if properly maintained, we kept our eyes open for used ones. A few months ago, we found them. Captain Eric Stewart, one of the best-known tuna captains on Cape Cod, and skipper of the Tammy Rose, was selling three that he’d been using. We knew they’d been well cared for, and we hoped they might even come with some special bluefin mojo. We bought all three, and a similar fourth, for a full complement.

Our new, used, tuna reel

By the time you buy the reels, the rods, the line, the lures, and, oh yeah, the boat, you’re definitely seeing the merit of the Gloverite school. I know I sure was. But then I remembered what it was like to bring home 15 pounds of the bluefin tuna we caught with Jon, and the sushi we made out of it that night, and I’m reminded that I’m unwilling to stake my tuna-fishing future on a balloon and some clothesline. Bob Glover doesn’t even do it, and he’s got the school named after him.

We took the shrink wrap off the boat this week, and Kevin’s been getting it ready for the water. The stripers have begun to arrive, and we should have a good chance at a keeper in the next week or so. The tuna bite is said to begin in June, when the smaller fish get in the habit of feeding off the Provincetown shore.

We’ll be ready. Or, at least our gear will.

Kevin wanted to role play: “You be the fish,” he said.

Yesterday, I was ready to say ‘I hate gardening,’ but I slept on it and a new day convinced me that wasn’t really true. There are parts of gardening I don’t mind (seed starting, watering), and one I actively enjoy (harvesting!).

Yesterday, though, I was doing one of the parts I hate. Wheelbarrowing. I’m on record as believing that, in the pantheon of important inventions brought to us by the Chinese, the wheelbarrow just doesn’t rank up there with paper or gunpowder. Or noodles, come to think of it. It is thanks to the wheelbarrow that gardeners everywhere have been spilling large loads of heavy things for over 2000 years.

Yesterday, it was compost. We have a big pile of what used to be pig and chicken poop, combined with kitchen scraps, leaves and straw. It is now part compost, part mostly-broken-down leaves and straw (the poop and the scraps, thankfully, seem to have broken down completely). Wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load, I hauled it up to the garden. It really wasn’t any fun.

Although the afternoon I spent wheelbarrowing gave me an excellent workout, I derived none of that sense of satisfaction and one-with-the-earthness that real gardeners report. Instead, I came away with the sense, and not for the first time, that what we do is woefully inefficient, and borders – literally and figuratively – on fruitless.

The town’s compost pile, available to all residents!

And now, the morning after, I come across a New York Times piece by Verlyn Klinkenborg, the Times’ house agricultural commentator. Klinkenborg grew up on a farm, and now lives and writes about “The Rural Life” for the Times, on whose editorial board he sits.

Klinkenborg is of the Agrarian Pastoral school. Wendell Berry, but without the dirt under his fingernails. He’s a gentleman commentator; although he lives on a farm, there doesn’t seem to be a livelihood involved.

I think we’re all entitled to an opinion about farming, whether we feed people or not. In fact, I think it’s important that all of us, whether we farm or we don’t, pay attention to the way our food supply works, and have discussions about it in the public space. But I get a little tired of the rose-colored glasses through which some of our commentators look at our country’s agricultural past.

Klinkenborg put those glasses on to take a trip through California’s San Joaquin valley, and lamented that the farming happening there looked so little like the farming of his youth. He brings up a couple of important issues – irrigation and water use are critical to the future, and the present, of California agriculture – but imbeds them in a meditation on mechanization. “Lost in the Geometry of California’s Farms,” he (or his editor) calls the piece, in which he regrets that, “Every human imperfection linked with the word ‘farming’ has been erased. The rows are machined. The earth is molded.” And here are the culprits: “Every tractor, vastly too small a word for the machines in the distance, was raising a dust storm all its own, and there were hundreds of them, up and down the valley.”

Come on, Verlyn! There are lots of things we need to fix about modern agriculture, but straight rows aren’t one of them. Many of the things that have made agriculture efficient have caused problems. Reliance on monocrops and overuse of chemicals are bone fide issues. But machinery? The economies of scale that allow machines to do the work of humans help keep food inexpensive without any real downside.

Any time he wants ‘human imperfection,’ Verlyn Klinkenborg is welcome to come to my house. He’ll find me tipping over my wheelbarrow full of mostly broken down compost, wishing for a tractor. Fortunately, every farmer who takes on the grave responsibility of feeding the world already has one.

This, despite the fact that here’s a special place in my heart for trout fishing, since that is the first successful fishing I ever did. At least, that’s my story. Every time I tell it, Kevin just rolls his eyes.

It was ten years ago that we took a trip to Paradise. We spent a rainy Memorial Day weekend in Paradise, Pennsylvania, where Kevin’s brother Rob had a cabin. There’s not much to do in Paradise – which, despite what you may have heard, is smack-dab in the middle of the Poconos – and we spent a disproportionate amount of time trying to find decent places to eat.

It actually wasn’t that disproportionate, given that finding a decent place to eat in the Poconos in 2003 wasn’t so easy. We finally lit on a Thai place in Stroudsburg, and it was good enough that we still talk about it (it’s called Saen Thai Cuisine, and I believe it’s still there). That was the only place, though, and we cooked most of the rest of our meals at the cabin, where the best cooking option was the grill.

When you’re hungry, and you have a grill, and there’s a trout hatchery with a catch-your-own pond just down the street, it’s not hard to connect the dots.

Fishing for trout at a hatchery is a lot like shooting them in a barrel. But it’s still fishing. You cast into the pond, and you’re not any less excited by the tug on the pole for knowing that the pond is teeming with hungry fish, put there just so you have something to do. Well, I wasn’t any less excited, at any rate. Kevin was significantly less excited, and made merciless fun of me for even labeling our activity “fishing.” “This isn’t fishing,” he said. “This is shopping.”

I’m afraid that what we do in our backyard isn’t too far removed. The pond has trout only because the good people from the hatchery put them there. Right after stocking, we have a robust population of hungry fish that have not had the opportunity to develop street smarts. They are not hard to catch.

And so, the other night, with dinnertime fast approaching and a cupboard comparatively bare, Kevin donned waders and went out with a light rod equipped with a little gold spoon-like lure. Twenty minutes later, he had dinner in the form of two small brown trout.

And then, there was a small miracle. Like anyone who cooks every day, I’m constantly trying to put something good together from the odds and ends of leftovers, the vegetables about to wilt, and whatever’s in the pantry. Most of the time, it’s fine. Every now and then, it’s quite good. And, once in a blue moon, it’s delicious.

As Kevin smoked the trout, I put together a salad of rice and chickpeas with herbs and capers, dressed with a mustard vinaigrette. They went beautifully together. “This is spectacular,” Kevin said after the first bite. “Too bad it’s a one-off.” This, because almost everything we eat is a one-off, the product of what we happen to have, today.

But maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be a one-off. And so, I am taking the radical step of writing down the recipe. This has the added bonus of allowing you, if you are so inclined, to duplicate it. Imagine that. What a system!

How to Smoke a Trout in a Kettle Grill

Put a handful of hardwood chips in a bowl of water to soak.

Gut and clean your trout, and remove the gills. Leave heads and tails on. That’s all the prep we do – no brining or even salting, since the fish’s flavor is mild enough to be easily overpowered.

In a kettle grill, start a fire with about a half-chimney of charcoal. Trout smoke quickly, so you don’t need a huge pile. When the coals are completely covered with ash, pile them on one side of the grill and put the soaked wood chips on top of the pile.

Put the trout on the side of the grill away from the coals, so you’re cooking on indirect heat. Cover the grill, and keep the airflow low so it doesn’t get too hot.

After 15 minutes, turn the fish – you’ll get a sense of how quickly it’s cooking. A 1.5-pound trout will smoke in about thirty minutes at 200 degrees, but times vary depending not on fish size and grill heat.

Smoked Trout with Rice and Chickpea Salad
(Serves 2, with leftover salad)

For the salad:

1 T. olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
½ large bulb fennel, chopped
1 ½ c. chickpeas (one can, rinsed, works fine)
3 c. cooked rice
¼ c. capers, chopped
zest of one lemon
1 c. chopped mint
1 c. chopped parsley or basil (I used parsley, but basil would be great)
¼ c. toasted pine nuts
salt and pepper

For the vinaigrette:

2 T. white wine vinegar
3 T. olive oil
1 T. Dijon mustard
salt and pepper

2 smoked trout

In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions and fennel and cook, stirring occasionally, until they’re wilted and beginning to brown. Add the chickpeas and rice, and stir just until everything’s warm. Turn the heat off, and add the remaining ingredients.

For the dressing, combine ingredients in a jar with a lid and shake well. Dress the salad just before serving. Serve warm, or at room temperature, with the trout.

I know, I know. It looks like dead fish. But it tasted really good.

Here on Cape Cod, we were perfectly safe; nobody trying to elude capture flees to a peninsula that juts into the Atlantic Ocean, accessible only by bridge or boat. The trauma and horror, the grief and the fear, were as remote to us as if we’d been in Nebraska. Kevin and I followed the news intermittently, and went about our business.

We’ve never aspired to self-sufficiency, but interconnectedness never feels as important as when there is terror, just up the street.

On September 11th, we lived in New York. Kevin’s apartment, where we were that day, was literally in the shadow of the south tower of the World Trade Center. When it fell, we stood in a closet doorway, the way you’re supposed to in an earthquake, and hoped it wouldn’t fall on us. We didn’t leave the building until that afternoon, when we walked through the rubble, to my Upper West Side apartment, and moved in together.

I remember dinner. We went out, to the Chinese place down the street. Everyone, it seems, was out. We were all talking to the people on the corner, the people in line, the people at the next table. We were New Yorkers on a day when we were all New Yorkers.

I don’t want a life that sets me apart from my fellow man. I value the connections that interdependence fosters; they are the neurons of civilization. In times of trouble, I don’t want to go to ground, with my husband and my root cellar and my generator. I want to reach out, and to know that we’re all in this together.

Kevin and I have freezers full of food, a lake full of water, and a property with enough wood to heat our house and cook our dinner in perpetuity. We have tools. We have skills. We have guns. Come Armageddon, those would look like the building blocks of survival. But, come Armageddon, I’ll go down with the ship, thank you very much. The idea that we’d hunker down on our two acres, trying to protect what’s ours against desperate people who aren’t so lucky, is more distasteful to me than any fiery end.

Tonight, for dinner, I scrambled eggs from our chickens with bacon from our pigs and onions from our cellar and garlic from our friends. It was, as it always is, profoundly satisfying to eat food that we grew, food that we knew. I love our two acres, and what we’ve done with them. But I never miss cities, and neighbors, and humanity, as much as when there is terror, just up the street.

Once you leave the city, once you own land, you start dealing in size. Land, even just a little of it, is larger than anything you could ever fit in an apartment, and land has to be covered in something. That something usually comes in yards.  Cubic yards.

We’ve bought soil, we’ve bough compost, and we’ve bought mulch, all by the cubic yard. The first time we did it, I asked Kevin how much a cubic yard was. He looked at me strangely, because he knows I’m pretty good at math. “It’s 27 cubic feet,” he said. “I know that. I’m pretty good at math.” I said, realizing I’d asked the wrong question. “But I can’t visualize how much that is.”

So Kevin and I did a visualization exercise, starting from a unit of volume we both have a pretty good handle on – the gallon. One cubic foot is equal to about 7.5 gallons, which is more than I would have thought. That means one yard is equal to 202 gallons. Understanding that one yard equals as much milk as you drink in four years leads you to the inevitable conclusion that visualizing mulch in milk units is a completely useless exercise.

You’d think you could get a good feel for what a yard is by buying one and putting it in your truck, but that doesn’t work so well, either. To buy a yard of mulch, you go to the mulch place and pull up to a truly gigantic pile of mulch. You back your truck up to it, and the guy with the front-end loader scoops a yard of mulch from the pile into your truck.

And that’s when a yard looks like a drop in the bucket because you’re comparing it to Mount Mulch. Once you get it home, though, it starts to look bigger. It is at its biggest as you shovel it out of the truck. That is when it is seemingly endless, and 202 gallons have nothing on it.

But it will never look that big again. Once you spread it out, the largeness of land comes home to you. You notice all the thin spots with incomplete coverage, and that yard of mulch seems woefully inadequate to a job of any size at all. It is downright small. Which is why, this past week, Kevin hitched the trailer to the truck and came home with not one, not two, but three yards of mulch.

I am large, I contain mulchitudes.

Our friend Dave has been visiting, and everything changes around here when Dave visits. Heavy work gets done at an alarming rate. The shower gets used every single day. And, if we ask nicely, we get to eat biscuits and fried chicken. Dave is from the south, and he is an excellent cook.

Given that Dave was here, I wasn’t all that surprised when, the other day, I came home to find a truck and trailer, filled with what I was told was three yards of mulch. I was a little more surprised to learn that, while I was out, Kevin made the second-largest purchase of our life together.

I thought buying things by the yard gave me authentic rural cred. Only city slicker buy things in gallons. But it turns out that the yard is a gateway unit. Buy yards for a while and, soon, they stop being enough. That’s when you start buying things by the ton.

The same day he bought three yards of mulch, Kevin also bought eight tons of driveway base and twenty-four tons of crushed bluestone. Of all the things we own, thirty-two tons is, by weight, smaller only than our house. And that not by much.

If Dave doesn’t leave soon, we’ll be buying things by the shipping container.

We finished buttoning up the farm in January, when we took in almost all our equipment. We left nine trays, densely packed with about 10,000 almost-legal oysters, to brave the winter. And brave it they did! We came back from our vacation to find them alive and well.

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks putting trays back out, which is time-consuming but not back-breaking work. We load the boat with some thirty trays, each three feet by four and five inches deep. At low tide, when the farm comes out of the water, we take the trays out, unload them, and start the time-consuming part: legs.

Loading oyster seed

The trays have to be kept off the sand, both so water flows all around the oysters in the tray (thereby maximizing nutrient access), and so sand doesn’t get in. If the oysters get buried, they’ll die. There are lots of ways to keep oysters off the ground, and farmers around us use many of them. You can suspend them from posts that are more-or-less permanent, or you can build a kind of structure that the trays sit on. We put legs on trays.

There are also lots of ways to put legs on trays. The easiest way is to get someone else to do it for you. We get our trays from Myron, at Ketcham Trap, and we specify everything about them – size, liner, wire gauge. We could design them with legs, and Myron would be happy to make them for us. The problem is that they’d be more expensive, and more difficult to stack. That last part is important to us, since our boat, at 17 feet, is relatively small. Trays that don’t stack compactly add up to many extra trips out and back.

Which is not to say that it’s impossible to design tray legs that A) keep the tray off the ground without sinking into the sand, B) enable compact stacking, and C) don’t run up the cost too much. It’s just that we haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

Kevin putting seed bags in trays

So, instead, we cut one-foot lengths of half-inch PVC, and drill a hole through it about an inch from one end. We insert a leg in each corner of the each tray, and run a zip tie through the hole to secure it to the tray. Then we put a second zip tie on to keep everything solid, and the tray goes on the ground. We put them in rows of about thirty trays, leaving a gap every five trays so we don’t have to walk around entire rows.

We’re a small operation, and 250 trays can accommodate our crop – which begins at 100,000 but always ends up smaller as some oysters die, some get eaten, and some escape because of storms, equipment failure, or stupidity (ours, not theirs). If pressed, we could get all 250 out in a week of working every tide. Because we don’t need all 250 until later in the season, when the oysters have grown out more, we can take the spring equipment season at a more leisurely pace.

There is drudgery in putting out trays but, on a sunny, calm day when we get the rhythm of the work, it’s not at all unpleasant. The best thing about putting out trays, though, is filling them.

Me, looking charming

The seed we got as pinheads last May averaged something under two inches by the end of last season. We put them in 160 onion bags and stored them over the winter in a giant cooler, wrapped in burlap and kept humidified. Yesterday, Kevin and I and our friend Dave (who took these pictures) took them out of the cooler, and put them back out on the farm.

Oysters go dormant when they’re cold, and the water isn’t quite warm enough for them to wake up and start feeding yet. Soon, though, they’ll open their shells and start bi-valving away, and we’ll find a rim of translucent new growth on their edges. At least, that’s what we hope for.

The day we put the seed out is a good day. Nothing bad has had a chance to happen yet, and we can look with hope on the 160 onion bags that hold what is to be this year’s crop.

Let the season begin.

Well, maybe it’s because I just turned 50 and I think fight-picking is a prerogative that comes, with gravitas and AARP membership, as a perquisite of age, or maybe it’s just because it’s been a slow spring, but I’m going to go ahead and pick that fight now.

So here goes.  I think genetic modification offers more potential to improve our food supply than any other agricultural innovation on the table, and I think carte-blanche opposition to it is short-sighted and anti-science.  (This post is a variation of a piece I did for the Huffington Post.)

There’s a tendency, I think, to associate GM technology with the forces of evil, as embodied by Monsanto, but genetic engineering has also been deployed for unalloyed good (and I’ll defend some of what Monsanto’s done in a future fight).  Eaten any Hawaiian papayas lately?  Chances are, they were genetically modified to be resistant to the ringspot virus.  And then there’s golden rice, a GM version that’s high in vitamin A, the lack of which is estimated to make some 250 million children in the developing world very sick.  Some of them die, and golden rice could help.

What’s the objection to these things?  It’s hard to find one, so opponents have to resort to the all-purpose objection of last resort: uncertainty.  We can’t be sure that these foods are safe either for us or for the environment.

And that’s true.  In a complex world, full of plants and animals and ecosystems that we’ve been manipulating for millennia, there are no guarantees.  There are no guarantees for GM organisms, just as there were no guarantees for the crops that came before them, which were manipulated in entirely different ways.  Before we had the technological wherewithal to mix specific genes, we tried to induce favorable mutations by firing radiation at seeds and hoping for the best.  Is that technique any less likely to create a monster?  It may even be more likely, given that scientists had much less control over the process.  Yet there was no outcry.

Which is not to say we don’t have to be very, very careful.  But certainty isn’t in the cards, for GM foods or for anything else.  We need a standard – beyond a reasonable doubt? – for all our food innovations.

Whatever that standard is, I think my favorite GM project, AquAdvantage salmon, meets it.

The AquAdvantage salmon is an Atlantic salmon with one gene from a Chinook salmon and another from an ocean pout which, together, ensure that the fish produces growth hormone year-round, rather than only part-time.  The AquAdvantage fish reportedly grows more than twice as fast as its unmodified brethren.

That translates to somewhat less feed, and a lot less labor, as well as lower energy input and less waste and pollution.  Which translates to, among other things, a much lower price tag.  Since fish is one of the most healthful foods in our diet, and there isn’t enough of the wild kind to go around, this could be excellent news.

Its GM-ness is the only snag, and is why the fish has been working its way through regulatory channels for a mind-numbing seventeen years.  In that time, the FDA (I know, I know) has compiled long, detailed answers to the questions about safety for human health and the environment.  On human health, they say, unequivocally (on page 107), that “We looked for direct food consumption hazards. None were found.”  The second question is whether the fish would be a threat to wild populations if it were to escape.  Because the fish are raised in land-based pens, that question applies to a catastrophic failure of the holding facilities (which certainly could happen).  Again, the FDA says the fish is safe.

None of us should consider an FDA assessment the last word – I certainly don’t – but if you slog through everything they’ve considered on this issue, it’s hard to find a viable objection.  Seventeen years is a long time to evaluate a fish.

The AquAdvantage salmon, according to AquaBounty, its creator.

But I don’t want to ask what you think about the AquAdvantage salmon.  I want to ask you something different.  When you see a headline along the lines of, “New Study Released on Safety of GM Fish,” what is it that you hope the article will say?

Do you hope it’s the smoking gun, the last nail in the coffin of Frankenfish?  Or do you hope, hope against hope, that we find out the fish is safe?  Safe, so we can raise salmon with a fraction of the resources.  Safe, so we can ease the pressure on our wild stocks.  Safe, so families with tight food budgets can have salmon for supper.

If your impulse is to oppose GM food because it’s GM, why is that?  Is it really out of the question that a gene from another organism can make food more healthful, more disease-resistant, or better tasting, without compromising its safety?

Before you answer that, I’d encourage you to read the story of Mark Lynas.  He’s a prominent environmentalist, and he helped bring the anti-GM movement to the fore.  And then, after more than a decade of activism, he changed his mind.  Earlier this year, at the Oxford Farming Conference, he gave a speech in which he said this:

For the record, here and upfront, I apologize for having spent several years ripping up g.m. crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-g.m. movement back in the mid-nineties, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment. As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

Kevin and I farm oysters, and it’s hard work.  We signed on for that work, partly in the hope that it would help us fend off decrepitude, but it is the magnitude of that work that makes our oysters a luxury product.  If we can’t make enough money to be compensated for our time, labor, and investment, we can’t be in the business, and so our product is out of reach for lots of people.

If you came to me tomorrow and told me that scientists had created an oyster modified with, say, a blue mussel gene that made it reach market size in half the time, I would sit up and take notice.  I would want to hear more.  I would hope against hope that it would be safe and delicious, that I could grow it faster and sell it for less, and that more people could eat oysters.

Genetic modification raises hard questions that need thorough answers.  But, given finite resources to feed a growing population, wouldn’t it be great if science could help us grow more nutritious foods with less time, effort, land, and money?  I’m a farmer, and I say yes.

I’m rooting for the fish.

We ate a lot. If you’re going to eat a lot, Charleston is a great place to do it; it is a food town. Fortunately, because Charleston is also a city with actual sidewalks, we also did a lot of getting around on foot, so we have only a couple of extra pounds to shed.

We didn’t just eat. We visited local historic sites, listened to some live music, and golfed. We slept late. But mostly, we ate. We probably ate more restaurant meals in the last six weeks than in the last two years. And it was delightful.

Up until now, our noses had been in more or less continuous contact with the grindstone for a good four years. Taking a break and coming back, we see the grindstone’s charms afresh.

The grindstone, however, took a beating while we were gone. Cape Cod, and all the people on it who hadn’t left for Charleston at the end of January, got hit with storm after storm through February and into March. We knew the house had lost power for a couple of days at one point, but the temperatures were cold enough that our freezer contents weren’t at risk. We also knew the house hadn’t suffered any damage, but we didn’t know what state the property was in.

The property was fine, it turned out. Littered with arboreal debris, including one big branch that took out our hydroponic system, but mostly undamaged. Chickens were fine. Boats were fine. Structures were fine.

They oysters, though. We didn’t know about the oysters.

Normally, most Barnstable Harbor oyster farmers bring most of their equipment in over the winter. The ice that courses through the oyster flats destroys everything in its path, and it’s always a risk to leave trays out once temperatures drop.

It’s a risk we took, in a small way. We had about 10,000 oysters that hadn’t quite reached market size last season, and before we left we packed them into nine trays, grouped together tightly and covered with plastic mesh. We had no idea whether the trays would still be there, or whether the oysters in them would still be alive. After hearing the stories of the storms and the ice, we weren’t optimistic.

This morning, we went out to take a look. Wonder of wonders, all was well. The oysters were exactly as we’d left them, and there didn’t appear to be any death at all. Which is not to say we’re out of the woods – oysters have an annoying habit of dying off en masse, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason – but so far, so good.

Oysters before

Oysters after

While the oysters had been weathering the storms, some choice parts of our pigs had been hanging in the basement of our friends Al and Christl, where temperature and humidity happen to be just right for charcuterie. Although a prosciutto tasting is still a good year away, the guanciale we’d cured had been hanging long enough to be ready.

I know it’s my inexperience talking, but I can’t quite get used to hanging meat products out in the open air. Especially meat products from pigs Kevin and I raised from piglethood in our own back yard. We’re invested in that pork, and have an abiding sense that not a scrap of Doc, Spot, or Tiny should go to waste.

I can assure you, now, that the guanciale certainly won’t. It dried beautifully, and there will be a bucatini all’Amatriciana in the not-too-distant future.

Guanciale before

Guanciale after

Coming home to live oysters and perfect guanciale was particularly satisfying because, when we invite friends over to the house to share them with us, we won’t have to cringe whenever they have to use the bathroom. While we were gone, our friend Larry Egan, who is also the host of the Handyman Hotline show on local station WXTK, completely remade our one bathroom.

When we bought the house, way back in 2008, we knew we’d have to replace the original 1950’s fixtures and décor, but we waited until the tile literally started falling off the walls – which was back in the fall. Before we left, we picked out tile and fixtures, and we came home to a room that was unrecognizable. The only problem is that we now want to bring the rest of the house up to the new standard set by our bathroom. Which could be expensive.

Bathroom before

Bathroom after

While we were relieved by the oysters, encouraged by the guanciale, and delighted by the bathroom, we also took real pleasure in the same old stuff. There are eggs, right there for the taking, in the chicken coop’s nest boxes. There are clams out there in the harbor, accessible at every low tide. There are the first hints that the strawberry plants are going to come up again, as advertised.

There is the potential in the empty raised beds, and the promise of the spring striper run. Somewhere out there is a tuna we’re going to catch and – because this year is not going to be like the previous three – a deer we’re going to shoot. And there are meals to make out of all these things.

I’ve had vacations where the first day after I came home felt disappointingly similar to the last day before I left, but this wasn’t one of them. Both of us came back rested and refreshed, and what’s satisfying, constructive, and joyful in what we do here is back in focus.

It’s good to be home.

But it is also partly because we didn’t think we could be so close to Savannah and not stop by to check it out.  That is where we are now, and we’ll be staying for a week.  I want you to understand, though, that this isn’t, strictly speaking, a vacation.  Kevin and I both have portable jobs, and we have simply ported them to Savannah.  He is trading, and I am writing.

To prove it, I will you point you in the direction of a piece I have over at the Huffington Post.  I’m sure most of you saw that report that found about a third of fish in restaurants and markets was mislabeled.  I did, too, and I decided, what with being on vacation and all (okay, it’s still kinda vacation), I had time to read the whole report.  When you read the whole report, you find out that the scary headlines are overblown. Way overblown. But you don’t have to read the whole report — you can get away with reading my synopsis.

But back to my vacation.  Those of you who’ve been following Starving for a while may know that, although I have a perfectly legitimate excuse to not be at home right now, I also have a much less legitimate one — I hate March on Cape Cod. There’s no fishing yet, there’s no spring greenery, and it’s still way too cold.  And it goes on forever. The joke here is that the Cape Cod calendar goes: January, February, March, March, March, June.

At least now I know what to expect.  That first year, though, it took me by surprise: The Long March.