When Vered turned one, we offered her a taste of ice cream at Sparky’s in Columbia, Missouri. As the spoon left her tongue, she thought about the taste in her mouth, looked at us, and then head bobbed for the cone in Jenny’s hand. Since then, she has been very vocal about her love of ice cream (or dessert, in general). In the last five years,  as I (and she as well) have been to many breweries and brewpubs across the country, she also has been to many ice cream places. In addition to Sparky’s, she’s visited Glacier’s in Boulder, Chocolate Shoppe in Madison, a place in Petaluma whose name I forget, the Homemade Ice Cream and Pie Kitchen in Louisville (not homemade, by the way), and even, the other day, the only ice cream place in Lexington, the Ohio based Graeter’s chain (not my preference).  Her world consists of princesses and ice cream. She hardly cares where the ice cream comes from. Homemade. Chain. Jeni’s or Breyers or mine. Doesn’t matter. Just make sure it’s chocolate. That’s all she asks.

It’s hardly uncommon to like ice cream. While foodies declare that everything tastes better with bacon (everything does not taste better with bacon), most people believe ice cream tastes fine on its own. Dairy Queen. Ben and Jerry’s. When I was a kid, Sweden was the marker (or tag) of good ice cream. Häagen-Dazs  was considered exotic. Frusen Glädjé came in a plastic tube. Neither was from Sweden. We were fooled by the tags.

I might think that Vered’s love is born with the bond of an ice cream machine given to us as a wedding present. She was, after all, born nine months after our wedding. Obviously, the presence of the machine in the house while Jenny was pregnant, and the taste of homemade ice cream while sitting in Jenny’s belly,  made Vered a quick admirer of the dessert.  For some reason, however, the same process of consumption osmosis did not affect her 19 month old brother, Judah, who failed the one year old ice cream experiment (wouldn’t touch it) and shows no interest in ice cream still. I guess it is uncommon after all, to not like ice cream. He’s the only one I know who doesn’t. And I know him pretty well. He often kicks me in the head in the middle of the night. That, in itself, is a sign of our close relationship. His favorite type of food is what he can throw on the floor.

The lure of ice cream, which I feel as well, is masked by its simplicity. David Lebovitz, in The Perfect Scoop, reduces ice cream making to easy to manipulate formulas whose results produce intense flavor. The simplicity is in ingredients: cup of milk, cup of heavy cream, five egg yolks, three quarter cup of sugar, and you are ready to roll. Ice cream is simple to make but complicated in its ice cream shop configuration where ice cream makers often are obligated by outdated law to buy pre-made mixes. States fear some sort of break down of society and law if ice cream makers actually mix cream and milk on their own. Thus, while I, the common professor making ice cream on a $30 Cuisinart machine, has unlimited choice of local milk and local fat rich cream and the combination of the two, the average ice cream shop doesn’t. It is bound by law. And law has no mercy regarding food.

But images show mercy. They appeal in ways the original moment didn’t. Any yelling, pleading, promising, bribing that might have preceded the ice cream moment vanishes. The image, such as those I present here, only presents the pleasure of eating.  I imagined this post as a collection of such images of pleasure, images of Vered eating ice cream at various moments of her five year old existence. Of course, I, the digital person, do a terrible job tagging my photos and thus I complicate my ability to retrieve the images I want at will. I have to rely on memory and a set of folders on my computers labeled by date. What year did we visit X, I ask myself? Maybe in April 2009, I’ll find a picture of my daughter eating ice cream. In real life, I have excellent organizational skills. In digital photography, I don’t.

My Flickr account, for instance, tags photos of my daughter as “Vered.” So much for nuance, or a David Weinberger attempt at classifying the complexity of ideas. I’ve basically limited all photographs of my daughter to her name. The same account dumps all of my other photos as “beer.” I seem to see the world in generics and constants.  You can basically search for three things in my Flickr collection: Beer, Vered, Judah. My interests are reduced to three simple categories. Three simple ingredients. Three simple images.

The ingredients reflect and reveal our vacation strategies: Cities. Food. Children activities. Beer.  They also reveal spaces: Chicago, Louisville, California, Missouri. A pretty simple formula for discovering ice cream. We, in a way, tag our vacations as such. Other families tag their trips as “theme park” or “fast food” along a highway. I keep bringing up Sweden as a possible destination (though pickled fish is my objective, not ice cream). Most of us, in the end, are limited in our approaches to food, work, pleasure, home. We prefer one type of limitation, however, to another. Limitations do not eliminate pleasure. They merely ask us to take sides.  Just as Vered typically tags her ice cream “chocolate,” she has her own limitations regarding ice cream gastronomy, a sense developed over the last four years. Ice cream, for her, is ice cream. One tag is needed. She does not care how many flavors Baskin Robbins boasts that its factories make. She only needs one flavor. She needs one tag.

Cuisinart sounds like a Swedish appliance. If I were to tag it as such, of course, I’d be wrong. It’s American. Tags show no mercy. They allure. They seduce. They make us feel we are naming one thing in place of the other.  On the other hand, we’ve been told that taxonomies gone digital – folksonomies – can never be wrong. Ours is the age of naming and labeling! Ours is the age of word seduction.  I like ice cream and making ice cream for such reasons: the flavor profiles are endless as long as I have my base ingredients.  My daughter feels chocolate is enough, and no other ingredients are needed (she likely imagines ice cream as only chocolate; no cream, no egg, no milk). No one in our house has appreciated my paw paw ice cream. My flourless chocolate cake ice cream is what I would serve if I owned an ice cream shop where I could use my own mix.  My wife loves peanut butter and chocolate ice cream when I make it. These are just tags, of course. Mixes of labels. Images of dessert. Pleasures five years old partake in. And 43 year olds as well.

I’ll interrupt my Eating with Children posts (and desire to publish a non-academic book) with some thoughts on the continuing crisis in the university. I’m doing so because I’ve been with this crisis previously (Missouri) and I’m seeing it follow us to our current place of employment (Kentucky).

On the one hand, we are “surprised” that the age of the subsidy has ended. We are surprised even thought state funding for higher education has been on a downward spiral for some time. We are also surprised even though the housing/economic crisis, which has greatly affected the current incarnation of the university crisis, happened years ago. As sales, property, and capital gains taxes dried up, universities have known that state resource shortfalls from these loses would trickle down (people don’t vote politicians out of office for cutting higher education funding). And the universities who benefited from stimulus money knew that such funds were limited and would eventually be gone.

So, how have such universities prepared?  On the surface, to someone like myself not actively involved in upper administration, not very well. We have come up with few responses to a crisis that has been obviously present for some time. Either “it can’t happen here” or half baked schemes or something else has contributed to this lack of response. When we do come up with a response, it is fairly cliche and not very helpful.

One such response is the myth of online teaching. The belief is that if we offer a bunch of online courses in the summer, we will get massive enrollments, and such enrollments will provide the needed revenue. That has been true for some schools. But for big R1 schools with no ethos in this market nor experience in what to offer, how to offer,  and what to offer to whom, the anticipated windfall never occurs. School X, who has spent years building an online audience and reputation, is doing well. A school like Kentucky or Missouri, completely out of the loop for years,  is not.

Related, there is the myth that tons of new customers are sitting idly by waiting for us. What often happens, however, is that with online education at a school such as the one I work for, you get the same students you already have. You aren’t increasing revenue as much as shifting it from fall or spring to summer. We are also assuming that X amount of expendable income is waiting for us to grab it. Students, already taxed heavily for their education with tuition, fees, course adopted books, and such, don’t necessarily have additional dollars for summer education. In the summer, many go to work.

We have many other cliche or commonplace schemes:

• Consulting. Like a Doonesbury cartoon, we imagine our humanities skills as worth hiring out for consultation. Not that various industries, too, have economic concerns in the current market and are not all looking to drop five figures on someone lecturing how to write a proposal, but that we assume such instruction is in high demand as is.
• Summer camps/continuing education. Many people want continuing education. But who is, at this point in time, paying on a large scale? Will public schools pay for their teachers? Aren’t they suffering from cuts as well? Kids? Do they want to spend summer studying humanities based topics? Maybe. But for how much? Can one run a big time program (not to mention, develop it and build it throughout the year) in order to support such a program and make a profit?

Finally, to generate money, you need capital to invest. To run a summer program (assuming it will be profitable), you need money to develop it and promote it throughout the year.  To build and support online courses, you need to maintain the proper infrastructure. To attract and retain students (whose tuition is still a major bread winner), you need to attract and support faculty. When universities ask their faculty to “get creative” in generating new revenue, they don’t:

• Offer capital to do so
• Offer appropriate training to do so

However valuable our PhDs in the humanities are, they didn’t come up with much expertise in being an entrepreneur.  My knowing where to start, without assistance, is like asking me to be in control of my building’s plumbing. I know nothing about plumbing, and I’m likely to make a bigger mess than I started with.

And that is what we see right now. We are more likely to make a bigger mess with hodge-podge everyone for his/herself mentality than a coordinated effort with specific goals in mind. I already see it: one department offers 14 online courses in the same subject my department offers 4. Historically, only a few courses make in summer. Now, 18 courses can fail as students are distributed thin. We cannibalize each other in an atmosphere of panic and anarchy.

All is not hopeless, of course, But all is not carefully thought out either. We are supposedly the experts at the mythic notion of “critical thinking.” Whatever that may be, it’s time to start enacting it.  No doubt painful decisions will be made. But creative ones, too, can be made when we abandon tradition or the commonplace in favor of other types of thinking. What is that thinking? I am one person. I don’t claim that all knowledge is on to me. But in a faculty of 800- 1,000 or so, we would think that creativity and critical thought could occur. Of course, the lack of such thought got us into this mess in the first place, but that is another matter.

Maybe more later. I wrote this quickly, so I’m sure I’ve left out a lot of ideas I’ve had lately.

I have nothing against Uncle Kenny nor his turnovers. When my daughter and I came across him yesterday at Good Foods proudly displaying his turnovers, turnovers which he promised to have been baked two hours earlier, I felt I had to buy one. I find it difficult to pass up any kind of food accompanied by the promise of its recent (meaning within hours) creation. Such a promise also comes with the connotation of “freshness” or “quality,” two key words in any act of food consumption.  Who can pass up fresh baked goods in an age dominated by stale, factory made baked goods? Who can pass up the promise of a baked good that came out of this man’s oven? Plus, my daughter had sampled the turnover from a tiny paper cup and had declared it, “good.”

I’m sure I’m not the first to declare that everything tastes good in the moment. The on the spot doughnuts my daughter and I ate in Pike Market in Seattle, I’m sure, would taste very differently if I had them in an office, at a party, at home, or elsewhere. They would taste different because, while I do eat in markets, I never eat doughnuts.  A. I don’t like doughnuts. B. Being in a market makes you think that you are eating market food, whether or not you are. That is how I ended up eating a doughnut with my daughter. I was in a market.  Markets are my favorite kind of eating moment.

When we visit the Lexington Farmers’ Market, it doesn’t even matter to me who has a stand with food being made on the spot. The fact that I can get food on the spot, in the moment of shopping in an outdoor market, that alone makes me desire whatever it is that is on display. I have consumed many baked goods this way. Market + baked good = purchase. My daughter also knows this about me. She knows that I buy her the blueberry muffin from the Sunrise stand in the Lexington Farmers’ Market not because I like Sunrise and think they make good blueberry muffins (they do). I buy it for her because we are in a market.

And being in a coop (a type of market, only indoor and where they also sell such non-farmers market items such as craft beer, fancy shaving cream, and duck eggs) makes you think you are eating wholesome food, organic food, good for you food. Maybe, then, I should have read the ingredients before buying Kenny’s turnover, ingredients that include high fructose corn syrup and red dye #9. If I had enacted my academic ability to read ingredients on a package and know what they mean (I do, after all, have a PhD), I am sure I would have smiled at Kenny, politely declined, and continued with my decision to buy yet more cheese (even though we have cheese at home). One can never have too much cheese, I say. I’m also very glad we can buy cheese in the Lexington Farmers’ Market too.

But I didn’t smile or read the ingredients. In addition to more cheese, I bought a product that contains high fructose corn syrup and red dye #9, two items I always make sure not to purchase. I broke my shopping rule. I ignored the ingredients on something that was presented as “homemade.” In other words, I was caught in a food shopping moment. For my daughter, being in the moment at the Good Foods Coop means only thing: the samples. She doesn’t care what is under a plastic bin with tongs sticking out. She wants it. Fruit? Fine. Popcorn that comes out of a bag and that is premade? Fine. Spicy potato chips. Bring them on. Food she might not normally eat she wants if it is placed out in a sample. The cheese I serve at home she won’t eat; but the same cheese sold by its maker at the Lexington Farmers’ Market she will eat because it’s presented as a sample. She is a product of the culture of sampling. I, too, am a product of such a culture. I did, after all, buy the turnover made with high fructose corn syrup and red dye #9. When I got home and put away the groceries, I went down to the basement and said to my wife: “You are going to laugh at me.” I already knew that I had made a big mistake. I got caught in a moment.

Of course, my daughter has no problems with such moments. She experiences no grief or guilt at having made a bad purchasing decision because a man was handing out samples of something promised to have been baked hours earlier in an oven. She doesn’t imagine the man at his oven, making turnovers, being an artisan who also happens to use high fructose corn syrup and red dye #9 as part of his craft. She is a different kind of consumer, one who adores the moment. Of course, she is also the type of kid who sits through a sushi meal in a Seattle restaurant where the sushi is delivered on a conveyor belt only because she has quickly spotted the promise of a cupcake. This, in particular, is the kind of moment she lives for: the cupcake moment. The cupcake moment is the belief that every meal, no matter what is served, will be followed by a cupcake. She believes very strongly in the power of this type of moment.

I don’t blame her. Such moments promise so much even if all they deliver is a poorly made cupcake in a bad Seattle sushi restaurant. None of that, of course, matters much to her. She got her moment, after all. She got her cupcake. And yesterday she got her cherry turnover, which, tonight, she ate part of as desert. The high fructose corn syrup and red dye #9 did not bother her one bit. It only bothered me, me who took a small bite of the turnover this afternoon in the secret belief that I could create another moment. This moment would be the middle of the day moment, the moment occurring the day after I made a purchase, in which I revisit that purpose to see if maybe I was wrong about the ingredients. Maybe, I tell myself, I won’t be able to tell that those ingredients are present, and maybe I can enjoy the turnover anyway. Maybe it is, indeed, good. I tried to make this moment happen. I took a bite.

I’m sorry, Kenny. I’m sure I really like you, as well. But my moment never happened. And my wife, who did laugh at me, I caught her just a few minutes ago taking a bite of the turnover as well. She was having her own moment.

I would like to write a memoir, but I can barely remember anything. I remember in fragments, not in narratives. I remember bits and pieces: I remember tricking my parents into taking my 4th grade birthday party to see Saturday Night Fever. I remember driving along the Lebanon border, freezing because I had not bothered with gloves or a coat, my first night on patrol. I remember my mother’s chicken dish: chicken breast, egg wash, can of bread crumbs, baked for an hour.  I remember taking my daughter last year to Bruisin Ales, a stopover to buy beer before driving down to Flat Rock to see my parents, and she pooped in their bathroom while I made my purchase. I have no big picture narrative to tell as memoir. I only have moments. I collect these moments for but a minute, in the hope that I can weave them into something other than scattered thoughts.

One such thought: I buy too much beer. I am a collector of beer. I spend a great deal of time collecting via trades, purchases, family visits, travels.  A collection is a worthy topic for a memoir. But unlike, for example, William Davis King’s memoir of collecting odds and ends, I collect what is meant to be consumed: beer. I collect less for rarity (though sometimes I acquire a rare beer), and more for the sake of consumption. I want to consume it all. My collection is an obsession with consumption, an obsession critiqued within cultural studies as problematic (in the way cultural studies totalizes experience). So often we are told that consumption is bad, that it minimizes the personal, that it distracts us from the real issues surrounding us, that it divides culture by class. We are told to overcome consumption. Personal consumption, however, never vanishes despite being critiqued. It can be surface level (buying to survive) or obsessive (buying to consume).  Personal consumption is a need, a necessity for being a part of a world of things and moments and ideas. “Collecting is a constant reassertion of the power to own,” Davis King writes, and following the term often associated with beer writer Michael Jackson, my collecting is wanting to own a type of consumption known as  beer hunting. Maybe I’m not a collector of beer, then, but a collector of purchasing beer. I am a collector of the purchase since the thing itself will not last for long. It has to be consumed to have any value for me.

My daughter, if she collects at all, collects princess and fairy items. Of course, it’s not really her who is doing the collecting. We are doing the collecting for her. We are tapping into or encouraging an interest, and with that interest comes the accumulation of material items: dolls, high heel shoes, books, castles. This is typically how collections or collection type mentalities begin. With things. She has her things the way all children have some type of thing.

In that way, I guess I’m like a child. All of us beer hunters – whether we consume with or without children – are a bit like children. We showoff our trades and finds online with pictures. We grandstand. We make each other jealous. We feel our collections are worthless if not posted on a message board, in Google +, on Facebook, in a Twitter update, and so on. In fact, this is more than childish because a child lacks the tools of social media to broadcast such interests or collections.

When my daughter tries to read the words on my Bruisin Ales shirt, I remind her of the time she pooped in their potty. “Are we at a beer store?” she may ask when we pull into parking lots. Other times, as she did recently in North Carolina, she plays beer shop. “Hi!” she says and hands you a book (it’s supposed to be a menu). “We have IPAs. Would you like an IPA?” Collections seep in. They contaminate. I was contaminated by all of the showing off online when I first became interested in craft beer. I want that, too, I thought. My daughter is contaminated in a different way. Through play. Through imagination. A collection is, after all, merely the manifestation of an imagination, the imagined state of owning enough of one thing.

And in that moment of imagining, a memoir, or personal story develops.

The default kids’ menu item is the sandwich. And even though I can say this with a hint of critique, it’s also a home default item, or one I try to make into a default food item. For many households, default food items include mac n cheese out of a box or something frozen. When I was a kid, the default food item was either Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza, or Steak-Umms. If those items were served, that meant my parents were going out. Since we don’t go out, the default only means: I’m not sure what else to serve you.

Cheese is a default item I don’t mind, and neither do many other parents. Don’t know what to give the kid? A sandwich. Preferably, a cheese sandwich. Cheese is the universal kid’s language. If you develop a love of cheese as a child, you will hopefully carry this love into an expensive adult habit every time you pass by a quality cheese counter in Whole Foods where Cowgirl Creamery calls your name, or, if you are lucky, a local cheese shop where everything calls your name. For this reason, restaurants such as Wallace Station in Midway offer the kid’s cheese sandwich. These type of restaurants are pushers. Beautiful, beautiful cheese pushers. Not that I don’t want my daughter to order the Sardou egg panini. I do. But she enjoys the cheese sandwich pushed on her as well.

I love sandwiches. I have said that one of my proudest culinary moments was inventing the lamb bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich served on my Le Creuset baked butter infused bread. A  Le Creuset baked butter infused bread is my idea of baking a regular loaf of bread with butter jammed throughout. The result is a mix of sourdough and croissant. And while many on Facebook doubted this invention as being mine, I still claim it as my own. As an academic, I have few opportunities to invent anything beyond a writing theory. I will not yield on my claim to have invented the lamb bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich.

When I was a kid, I ate a cheese sandwich for breakfast. That is, I ate a cheese sandwich for breakfast everyday. I didn’t know what cereal was until I had kids, and we bought them cereal.  Once, during an elementary school field trip to the Miami Planetarium when I was in second grade, we were treated to a lesson/discussion on nutrition. “What did you have today for breakfast, kids,” the host asked. I raised my hand. “A cheese sandwich,” I said. Everyone laughed.

But a sandwich, and in particular, a cheese sandwich, is no laughing matter. A sandwich takes thought, patience to make, and proper ingredients. There is such thing as sandwich ritual: what kind of bread at what kind of moment with what kind of food items with what kind of condiments that will make up the sandwich. I have little respect for people – including the English – who cut crusts off their sandwich bread. I have little respect for celebrities in training, like Top Chef”s Fabio – who make a big deal out of making a fried egg sandwich. And I have little respect for delis – or places that call themselves delis – whose primary selection is a sandwich made with Boar’s Head meat products. It is hardly a skill to put together a sandwich with the same ingredients any Joe with a credit card can purchase at the local Krogers.

I do have respect for anyone who can construct a sandwich out of locally roasted ingredients (tomato, red pepper), pickled items (cucumbers, onions), or house cured or smoked meats. David Sax documents such sandwiches in Save the Deli, his ode to the vanishing Jewish tradition of making sandwiches. Indeed, if our house is to teach our children some form of culinary and ethnic tradition, it should be the Jewish sandwich. Something smoked. Something pickled. Big, fresh made bread. Love of mustard.

Ethnicity is about what is made at home more than what is eaten in a restaurant. For most assimilated Americans, ethnic cooking at home has vanished or been reduced to take out from a fast food (Taco Bell) or upscale fast food (Olive Garden) establishment. Our home is somewhat ethnic, but not – despite my collection of Joan Nathan and Claudia Roden books, food ethnic. The Jewish ritual I need to focus on is the sandwich. I’m starting slowly with this quest. First, the default: cheese sandwich. Grilled cheese (or what my daughter used to call “girl” cheese). My grandmother’s grilled cheese was basically big chunks of cheddar fried in a ton of butter. Mine could be that as well. Or it could be some kind of variety my daughter will like: Blue cheese and tomato? Feta and herring? Smoked brisket without the cheese? To get there, I will be abandoning the default, of course. And with a four year old, the default is needed for a bit longer.

What is interesting about Forks Over Knives is not the film itself. It drags. It repeats its premise too much without substance (“a whole foods and plant based diet is healthy”).  It fails to juxtapose the personal (the filmmaker’s quest to change diet) with the broader issue (cultural eating habits) well. It fails to differentiate between types of meat and the different approaches to raising animals (industrial vs local, grass fed). It fails to differentiate between different types of practices regarding the raising of and distribution of foods that make up a plant based diet (industrial vs local).  The film lacks Morgan Spurlock’s sensationalist and stylist breakdown of fast food. There is no equivalent of Spurlock vomiting outside of his car after eating a super sized meal.  Instead, an elderly man claims he can still get erections because his diet is better. A useful point, no doubt, but hardly enough to sustain the film’s narrative as something more than a sermon about eating habits.

The film is good at posing an idea, but not really making that idea realistic. There is a lot of posing. A lot of posturing. Narrative, the ways we shape stories, has to be more than posturing. Posing is preaching. Narrative is telling a story. The differences are important; either we are lectured are entertained. I’m a professor; I don’t want to be lectured. I want to be entertained. I get enough lecture at work.

Still, the film’s focus sits with me. It sits with me because I believe the message. Limited meat consumption is good for you; vegetables, fruits, beans, and grains are good for you. We should eat less meat, I said to myself and forgot about my new sausage stuffer sitting in the closet.

The day after watching Forks Over Knives, we ate at Heirloom, a restaurant located 20 minutes away from Lexington in Midway. To get there, we have to drive through horse country – elegant farms where animals are raised for sport and show, not for food. In a state where horse farms are plenty, horse meat is rare. A horse can be rode, put on display, bet on, but not eaten. “A horse! Look, a horse!” my wife called out to the kids as we drove down windy roads and fenced estates. My son had fallen asleep, and my daughter was busying reading a Gerald and Piggie book.

Even with Forks Over Knives still playing in my head, I ordered the hamburger at Heirloom, a $9 piece of meat called The Mary Burger. And while I have been told by at least one place in Lexington that medium rare is illegal in Kentucky, thankfully this law is not known by most eating establishments. My burger was fairly raw in the middle. I like meat that is fairly raw. One way to avoid the supposed carcinogens of cooked beef is to, as the old Japanese Iron Chefs preferred, leave the food raw.  My daughter ordered the fish and chips. My wife ordered the crab cake sandwich. My son ate from all of our plates. So much for a plant based diet. We were too busy consuming meat to remember.

Instead of re-enforcing the importance of a plant based diet, the trip to Heirloom supposedly will help create  for our children an identification with “good” eating practices. Heirloom is one of the best restaurants in our area. It qualifies for, what I might call, the secret formula of how to raise your children to eat well when you brave the elements and eat out with them:

• Nice restaurant.
• High end food.
• An eating experience that is far above fast food or semi fast food – what I call elegant fast food (everything from Applebee’s to P.F. Changs) – American eating experiences.
• A place where menus are usually on the table and not up above the cash register.
• A place where a crying kid will likely annoy everyone.

I try very hard to meet these criteria, and particularly when the last item kicks in, have succeed in exposing my children to places that fulfill the secret formula. Sometimes, restaurants that fulfill the secret formula, like Heirloom, serve meat.  If there is, indeed, a problem with mass consumption of meat in the American diet, it would seem that a great deal of that problem stems not just from ordering at places where crying kids fail to raise an eyebrow, but also from ordering both fast food processed hamburgers at McDonald’s AND the over advertised two for one dinners at such elegant fast food places such as Ruby Tuesday or Chili’s. We’re better than parents who patronize such places, I like to think.  We would never order a two for one steak dinner. We take our kids to Heirloom. We order hamburgers for $9.  We annoy fellow diners with a 17 month old crying kid. And our kids, we believe, are the better for this trip 20 miles out into the country. The picture below, however, is deceptive.

The boy and the menu. The boy reads the menu, the photograph claims. With my daughter as well, I love taking these kinds of pictures. The suggestion is that our kids, too, decide what they will eat and are capable of reading the available options. Of course, he’s only 17 months old. He can’t read. And even if he could read, it wouldn’t matter. He prefers to throw food on the floor and say “Uh oh” than actually eat it. Though, at this meal, he consumed enough french fries to make us feel that we had totally failed as lunch providing parents. “We’ll make up for it at dinner,” my wife assured herself. Of course, at dinner, he threw food on the floor as well.

What we have, then, is a posed idea. The posed idea is one where my kids are a part of a food experience and are not just a situated piece within a photographic moment. I pose the idea to pretend something is happening when it likely isn’t. Still, whatever it is I want to do with these photographs (put them in a blog post, use them as part of an academic essay, which I’ve done, make myself look like a forward thinker, or otherwise), they have to be more than mere posturing or posing.

That’s not to say there are no positive consequences to photographing children with menus. The pose can encourage a type of healthy role play. I like to think that my daughter’s love of playing restaurant is based on her restaurant experiences that I photographed and showed her.  For a long time, “Hi, welcome to Sycamore” was how every play game began (Sycamore was our regular restaurant in Columbia, Missouri). “Would you like crab cakes?” She is showing off, of course. She is posing. I sometimes tell my wife that this posing will lead to our daughter being so food oriented that she will one day own a brewery or become a famous chef. My fantasy is not popular in our house.

This is the problem of food writing: Either we pose or we show off (i.e., I eat local only; I don’t buy into the hype of local). We spend an inordinate amount of time displaying what we are proud of: our habits. Beer nerds video themselves drinking and rating beers. Many of us go on Yelp and display our ability to review a plate of food.  Some of us blog stories about eating with our children. We pose and showcase ourselves as ideal consumers. When we do so, consumption lacks grey areas. We act as if everything is a matter of right or wrong; meat based diets, plant based diets, some kind of holy based diet.

And that is the problem that hurts Forks Over Knives. The film doesn’t seem capable of discovering grey areas. Michael Pollan can follow a cow throughout its life, from being raised until its slaughter and still find himself eating Argentinian beef.

So how does grass-fed beef taste? Uneven, just as you might expect the meat of a nonindustrial animal to taste. One grass-fed tenderloin from Argentina that I sampled turned out to be the best steak I’ve ever eaten

Pollan is caught in a grey area. When I photograph my kids with menus, I want to be in that grey area as well. The scene is posed. But the posture is not necessarily one of a solid or steadfast idea. There are many ideas in the posture. I want to tease some of them out.

There is nothing unique about parents writing about children. There is nothing unique about parents writing about food experiences shared with their children. And in the vast and growing literature of food writing, we encounter few  unique ideas about eating. Kitchen exposes. Wayward chefs. Consumption that is bad or good for you. Bad farming practices. Good farming practices. Food writing is a commonplace expression. And yet, people like me still want to write about food and want to write about eating with their children. Even though we know we will border on the cliche in such writing, we are still drawn to it. We still believe something will stick out enough to make our story unique. Thus, two yogurt bites on a brewpub’s menu (above)  are my exigence. What can be unique about the most common experience we often have with children, eating? Two yogurt bites might be my metaphoric answer.

Overall, I’m looking for a response that will allow me to write about my children in a unique way. Part of that uniqueness might come from our own, as parents, interests. My interest, as is obvious to anyone who reads my other blog, is beer. I drink a lot of craft beer, and I write (sort of) about it. I obsess over beer, and my family (including my daughter who every night reads “The Lost Abbey” off of my favorite drinking glass) knows it.   I often say that my daughter has been to more brewpubs by four than I had been to by 34.  As I wrote on that other blog, my sharing of this experience is not based on wanting my child to drink beer (I don’t) but wanting to share something that is meaningful to me (as I hope she will do later in life when her ability to share is more profound). Part of what I want to write about is that sense of sharing that extends to food experiences.

This sharing focuses on a family activity beyond playing board games, going for walks, or visiting a themed park. The brewpub experience, at times more so than the restaurant experience, has recognized the importance of families. Brewpubs want families to visit. Gone is the targeting of “sit by yourself by the bar.” In its place are kids’ menus, coloring books, early hours, high chairs, changing tables,  and other features that accommodate families.

Still,  because we want to eat “good” food, we often find ourselves in situations where such items cannot be found. When restaurants do not oblige with such accommodations, we sit our children in “regular” chairs, pass them back and forth for lap sitting, or move on to a place that will accommodate. Our memories of these dining moments, no doubt, will outlast our kids’ memories. Will my daughter remember the cow hearts she ate at the Publican when she was 3? Will she remember waiting in line at Hot Doug’s? Will she remember all the sweet breads she consumed at Sycamore when we lived in Columbia?  The fresh edamame from Chert Hollow that we would buy at the Farmers Market in Columbia? Chicken feet at the Lexington Panda Cuisine buffet? Ice cream at Bear Republic? Will she remember the hot and delicious fried fish and chips at Pike Street Fish Fry in Seattle? Maybe not. My Miami, Florida childhood eating experiences are limited by both memory and exposure: Sorrentos (what our family imagined as upscale Italian), Shorty’s, The Big Cheese, New Chinatown. After that, I struggle to remember our family eating out, except for Denny’s when we went on trips, and the Denny’s was in the hotel we stayed at. Those moments, though, can only be memories because we did not eat with cameras by our side, we had no social media, Internet, or camera phones, and we weren’t part of an age of immediate sharing of personal experience. Even if my children forget where we’ve eaten and what we’ve eaten, they will still (hopefully) have the blog post (online or cached), the picture, the status update, or some other preserved digital moment to rely upon.

When I’m not trying to write academically, I imagine myself writing about my kids. All of my writing has been based on some kind of passion I had at the moment: my discipline’s 1963 historical moment, Detroit, pedagogy, networks, now beer. Some of these passions fade as I move to new interests. But for all of us, our passion for our children remain, and I feel that urge to write about this passion as it regards to eating. In two recent publications, for instance, I included photographs of my daughter eating. Can I do more than that?

We are part of an academic generation who had children later in life. I was 37 when my daughter was born; I was 40 when my son was born. We like to think that we are more mature parents for having children later in life than our own were (my parents were 23 when I was born). We’ve experienced more. We’ve learned more. We understand more. We like to think that.

Whether or not we are more mature, what many parents my age do is foreground and share their experiences with their children, and they do so in social media spaces: Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Google Plus, Flickr, and so on. From the embarrassing to the proud, we want others to know about our experiences or understand what these experiences mean to us. We have found meaning in both our kids and our digital lives. We juxtapose these moments eagerly. Add food, and maybe a worthwhile project awaits.

I imagine a series of blog posts to start my thinking about how I could compose a project about eating with my kids. Can these posts trigger a larger book project or will I exhaust my imagination early and fail to find something unique to us, something unique whose primary focus is still generalizable to a wider audience? Can I navigate the familiar and expected with something unexpected and worth telling?

And a larger question both Jenny and I have asked recently: Can we write for non-academic audiences? She is more confident about this task than I am, even though I have imagined my other blog as non-academic. I want to broaden my ability to write to non-academics. I am less confident about this part of the experiential than describing meals with my kids.

Not that I don’t have other writing projects: A collection devoted to Florida spaces, my craft beer book I’m starting, a digital humanities symposium with accompanying book project. But in the spirit of distributed work, multitasking, and other catch phrases that describe the desire to do multiple projects at once (while also searching the intersection of such projects), I might slowly try my hand at this as well.

And for now, I call this idea: Eating with Children.

Our CCCC panel is entitled “Everyone Knows This is Nowhere: Writing in the Musical Age.”

What we imagined, it seems, is a mix of the digital and music. When I thought up what I might do, I wanted something outside of a grand or or totalizing narrative. I wanted the opposite of Greil Marcus – no hyperbole. I didn’t want my interest in my subject to overshadow an interest in the digital. My contribution is “Useless Archives.”

Useless Archives

In composition studies, the archives have long served as gateway between writing and research. The archives – in a university library, on a university website, in a university special collection – provides access to knowledge. Teaching the archives teaches a method for acquiring ideas, contextualizing ideas, and framing ideas anew. In the age of new media, archives, however, are institutional practices, and thus, they shape what is or is not important to a given research project. What about the peripheral items not featured in a given archive? How important are they to research? In music, the institutional archives might include albums, saved manuscripts, and recorded performances. The peripheral items might include anecdotes, liner notes, gossip, and assorted parts of songs; i.e., the musical contributions we pay little attention to regarding a composition. Pedagogy might benefit from exploring such “useless” musical archives. To do so might mean expanding concepts of research to include what is found on the margins. Speaker A will explore such a pedagogy via the idea of the useless, musical archive.

As I sketch the project out for what will be a presentation and a fall class I’ll teach, I find my focus is Bob Dylan.  My useless archive will be a useless Dylan archive. My moment of exigence is the outtake from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan I once blogged about.

Outtakes are somewhat useless, unless, as Columbia Records did, they are found and represented as a moment of historical preservation. For this project, I am not interested in the archive as a space of digital presentation. Instead, I want a useless archive, one that makes no claim on recapturing a forgotten moment in order to better understand a specific moment. I am making no claim whatsoever when I return to this lost Dylan photograph.

How can I call “useless” what I value? Value is the wrong way to look at subject matter, whether musical, political, or some other item. Instead of value, I want the scraps, the outtakes, the speculation, the guesswork.  If I am to understand anything when I assemble a useless archive (and I do not promise any understanding), it is how the fragments of experience, when juxtaposed, allow insight previously prevented by what Vilem Flusser called the programmability of the political experience in the age of media.  A programmable Dylan would be the story of Bob Dylan or my story of liking/disliking Bob Dylan or the story of how Bob Dylan represents something important about American culture or about music in general.  The useless archive is useless because it makes no such promise. And even “insight” may be the wrong word here. The useless archive merely brings together. What I get from that combination, juxtaposition, linking, etc. depends. I may get a series of patterns. I may get a surface level “cute.” I may get affective response. I may get nothing. Whichever I get, that doesn’t mean that useless is “no good.” My archive is virtual. It is based on arrangement.

As preview so that you will want to come and hear us; archive snippets put out for preview.  Some of the arrangements, of course, will work better when the entire uselessness of the archive is displayed.

Archive Three: North Carolina

When I was 15,  my parents repeated to me the story told to them that, at the foot of the mountain where our house was, lived Bob Dylan’s parents. The sign at the mailbox read: Zimmermans. In fact, one circulated story was that during a summer visit, Dylan’s wife had been so bored in Hendersonville, that she worked as a cashier at the local grocery. I often imagined myself hanging out front of the house, with my guitar, hoping to catch a visiting Dylan’s attention. Later, we learned that the Zimmermans were not Dylan’s parents, but rather locals who liked to hunt.

In 1964, Dylan traveled to Hendersonville , NC to meet one of his heroes, Carl Sandburg. Mrs. Sandburg greeted the stoned-out Dylan with Appalachian warmth. “I am a poet,” is how Dylan introduced himself to her. “My name is Robert Dylan, and I would like to see Mr. Sandburg.” The 86-year-old Sandburg had collected more than 280 ballads in The American Songbag, and Dylan wanted to discuss them. “I had three records out at the time,” Dylan says. “The Times They Are a-Changin’ record was the one I gave him a copy of. Of course he had never heard of me.” After just 20 minutes, Sandburg excused himself. While Dylan felt it was a pleasant exchange, he didn’t get to discuss “I’m a-Ridin’ Old Paint” or “Frankie & Albert” with the bard. When asked  whether it was worth the drive to North Carolina, Dylan said: “Oh, yeah. It was worth meeting him. He was the Grand Ol’ Man at the time. I always liked his poetry because it was so simple and poignant. You didn’t need reference books to read him.”

 

Archive Four

Weddings,, Women, Parents

It turns out, Mavis Staples turned down Bob Dylan’s marriage proposal.

After I got married, I wanted the epigraph to The Rhetoric of Cool to be: “Early one morning the sun was shining/I was laying in bed/Wondering if she changed at all/if her hair was still red.” Due to fear of copyright violation, the publisher made me remove it. I replaced it with a quote from the comic strip Krazy Kat.

In a 1986 Seventeen Magazine article, Molly Ringwald interviews John Hughes who credits Bringing it All Back Home with changing his “whole life.” “Thursday I was one person,” he says, “and Friday I was another.”

On the cover of Bringing it All Back Home, Dylan is reading a magazine. The back cover features Jean Harlow, who was known as the Blond Bombshell.

When I was 13, for some reason, my parents were gong to a record store. “Would you like us to bring you back something,” they asked. Blood on the Tracks, I answered. They brought back instead Blonde on Blonde.  “oh shit,” I thought. On the album’s last track, “Visions of Johanna,” Dylan signs: “We can hear the night watchmen.”