The Nature of Slims – Food for Thought – An Explication
At the Ballymaloe Cookery School midst the verdant, feckin’ fecund rock and rolling countryside of southeast Ireland, in a corner of Co. Cork, peopled by Catholics, Quakers, hipsters, fisher-folk, farmers, potters, great and estimable barmen, true drunks and lechers, boxers, and poteen-makers, said cookery school gave leave to Yanks, Spaniards, Brits, Celts, Scots, the Orange, Japanese, Taiwanese, Republican Irish themselves, and the pretenders to mingle for three months and cook in sylvan bliss.
An Australian woman, distant, solid, had been dispatched to this alien place to learn a trade because the home place no longer afforded her a future. Asked about that place she spoke of her father, a stockman, who was about to retire after prowling and managing the 39,000 hectare station inherited from his father with its 5000 ewes, hundreds of cows and calves, goats (Oh, the goats, she said.) alone with his horse and two dogs. One dog was carried across the pommel while the other dog worked. When the working dog tired, they switched.
The father was retiring at an early age for a stockman in the family business, in his mid-fifties, he’d sold the station, and when asked why he would do so, she replied, “the tyranny of distance.”
I stood gob-struck.
That bloody simple.
When we shipped the iced Fresno crates of fresh-picked watercress lined with yesterday’s SF Chronicle I’d wish I’d saved (that was some writing back then) to the Oakland or San Francisco docks, I’d consider the tyranny of distance fleetingly as the delivery van spun Napa dust and worked its way up the drive and onto the highway beyond, though I didn’t know “its” name at that time.
A decade later our own watercress was shipped from the back of beyond, Coshocton Co., Ohio, to Cleveland two hours distant and we endured the tyranny of distance personally twice weekly. “It” was our demise.
But the tyranny of distance (lovely sibilants, eh?) can have many meanings. Walking the Appalachian Trail barefoot can certainly teach the truth of the phrase but so can the distance from your wheelchair to your bed were you in need of help.
It’s relative.
Run our of fuel in a loaner car at rush-hour at the base of the viaduct on the down side of Northside and you’ll soon be learning the first definition of both tyranny and distance,
With food it can have myriad meanings.
For this farmer, Archie Clare, it meant “…Archie had to do a lot of driving in order to farm. The distance of his farmland from home and the remoteness of the tracts from each other prevented Archie from diversifying. He felt that he couldn’t raise livestock because he didn’t live close enough to give cows, hogs, or chickens the attention they required. Moreover, a lot of time that might have gone into mending fences, experimenting with new crops, or working with produce was lost in commuting to the various farms.” (from Waiting for Rain, Dan Butterworth, 1992)
Archie Clare went out of business, another victim of “It”.
Ask the Ginnochios about the sad scene in East of Eden, in the sere Sierras, the train to the east halted, the cars weeping dying lettuce, avarice rewarded by nature, the scene screaming, “that goddam tyranny of distance—again!
The peak of perfection is just a moment. To deliver that moment consistently is a gift and a responsibility; an achievement. To fail is to fail.
To preserve that moment one must freeze, dry, smoke, cure, ferment, pickle, vout, or eliminate the tyranny of distance.
Ohio Maiden does that by locating the forage preserve in the city, blocks from Slims & Vout , so there is no question about freshness nor transparency. Mello-roonie. Solid.