Down and Dirty

      It’s all well and good to ride the local food movement bandwagon.  You support a farmer from just down the road, you probably shake their hand or at least hand them the cash for the tomato they grew, and you may even get to know them on a first name basis after a few trips to the market.  You hear from them about purple peppers, yellow-fleshed watermelons, golden beets, and funny-shaped mushrooms.  You hear about how this 14^th season of their farm has been the hardest of them all, rain ebbing away at their crops and their optimism.  You learn about muscadines, figs, radishes and roots.  You feel kind of earthy, seeing all the hand-written chalkboards with the freshest produce listed differently every week scrawled out in very human and humble markings. 
           And then the rubber meets the road.             
           One day last month, my toddler and I brought home our locally acquired ingredients for a meal of Quail in Peach-Ginger Reduction.  The four tiny birds were packaged from Manchester Farms, and we were going to try a new protein.  No big deal, really.  I’ve cooked chicken, beef, pork, and fish my whole life long.  Surely quail isn’t that different.  Except when I was washing these petite birds under cold water with their little bones protruding, I felt little pricks now and then.  As I dabbed them off with paper towels, there they were – um.  Feathers.  Little bitty follicles that didn’t get steamed off in the initial de-feathering.  
          Ok, this was better in theory.  I would like to support the local food movement without having to pluck my own dinner.  But when God provides manna and quail, the least I can do is buck up and learn how to fix it for dinner.  By the time I was done removing the last stray feathers from the fourth bird, I wasn’t squeamish anymore.  I was far better acquainted with my feathered friend.  And my daughter was all about stuffing them with the garlic, the shallot, and the parsley.  By the end of dinner prep, I was thinking:  bring on the emu.  Not really, we live in Georgia.  But something bizarre happens when you encounter a new level of intimacy with the food you eat.  There is something very civil, maybe even sacred, about poultry sans cellophane.
         Despite the feathers on my quail, worms in my virgin-from-pesticides corn, and trying for the 5^th time in a month to make okra, tomatoes, and squash look different on our family’s dinner dishes, we feel healthier.  And we feel more connected to the community around us; and oddly, more connected to the very food that we are consuming.  I’m ok with the nitty gritty.  I think it’s worth it.