Garden is, of course, over against the life ways of the hunter-gatherers, who, in a sense, saw the whole world, or at least the part they could reach on foot, as their garden. \u00a0But not exactly. \u00a0Yes, they saw it as their garden, a physical place which produced food for their consumption; but no, not a garden in the horticultural meaning, that is, a cultivated (cultured) place where plants no longer grew as they would, but as a gardener wanted them to grow.<\/p>\n
It was this horticultural understanding of garden that split us off from those early nomads and found us more or less rooted to a particular place so we could, as Voltaire recommended, tend our garden. \u00a0It’s that sense of a place chosen and planted, rather than one identified and harvested, that is behind the garden on our property.<\/p>\n
In that garden, a human defined and cared for instance of the earth’s most basic life Cooking too is a marker of one era of human evolution from another. \u00a0Levi Strauss, the French anthropologist wrote a famous book, “The Raw and the Cooked,” which explored this binary. \u00a0Cooking helps detoxify food, makes it more flavorful and allows for the mixing of ingredients. \u00a0We don’t bring the leeks in, chop them up and eat them. \u00a0Most of the allium family shallots, onions, garlic, leeks aren’t considered raw vegetables (except in salads and on sandwiches) by most Westerners, but here again we enter the domain of culture, choosing which food will be eaten in which way.<\/p>\n And the chicken. \u00a0Well. \u00a0Once the gardens got going, the domestication of animals was not far behind, probably led by the dog, but followed later by fowl, hogs, cattle, sheep and all the others that now find their place primarily in human defined environments. Early folks gathered a few scrawny birds and enclosed them somehow, perhaps initially for their eggs. \u00a0Later, they ate them. \u00a0Or, the reverse. \u00a0I don’t know.<\/p>\n (Gallus_gallus ancestor of the domestic chicken)<\/p>\n In Wales, and I imagine in other Celtic countries, poverty made chicken a primary meat, if any meat was available at all. \u00a0In Wales it’s perhaps no surprise that someone decided to cook chicken and leeks together. \u00a0Tasty. \u00a0Just when that combination became a pie, again, I don’t know. \u00a0But I do know that 8 instances of its most recent incarnation are on the counter upstairs, one of which will be cut open tonight for supper.<\/p>\n Lots more could be added here to a thick description of chicken-leek pie. \u00a0We could, for example, explore gender roles, the chicken industry, the Viking stove folks, the domestic natural gas industry, the lights that allowed the cooking to go on after the sun went down. There’s flour milling and grain cultivation, too. \u00a0Not to mention the corn and peas, frozen, in this instance which brings up refrigeration. This idea has some legs, I think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fall \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Samhain Moon Spent most of the day making chicken-leek pot pies. \u00a0Reading a French scholar named Bruno Latour today, for Modern … Continue reading Thick<\/span> ![\"400_late](\"http:\/\/www.ancientrails.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/400_late-summer-2010_0175-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>sustaining work, the growing of food, this Welsh descended man chose a plant regarded by his genetic ancestors as central somehow to their identity. \u00a0“According to legend,\u00a0Saint David<\/a>\u00a0(the\u00a0patron saint<\/a>\u00a0of Wales[2]<\/a><\/sup>) ordered his Welsh soldiers to identify themselves by wearing the vegetable on their helmets in an ancient battle against the\u00a0Saxons<\/a>\u00a0that took place in a leek field.” \u00a0Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n