Dining and Opining

Oh my! So many things I like all in the same place: Jonathan Safran Foer. Chipotle. Short stories. Literature. Chipotle will now be printing small pieces of writing from great writers on its cups and bags, based on an idea proposed by Jonathan Safran Foer. As he describes in this Vanity Fair piece : “...I got to know quite a bit about the company, not in the process of doing this, but in the process of Eating Animals ,” he continued. “Chipotle was pointed to quite often, as a model of what scaling good practices might look like. The truth is, that’s not really why I did this. I mean, I wouldn’t have done it if it was for another company like a McDonald’s, but what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this.” There will be stories by Foer himself, by Toni Morrison, Malcolm Gladwell, George Saunders,...

Below is a little story my college roommate Deepani wrote to me for my birthday. She lives in Tanzania, and writes evocatively about her first experience "sourcing" her own meat. Enjoy!  Kim and Deepani The first story I have is about our little farm that lives in the backyard garden. It's getting harder and harder to keep track now, but I think we have something like 2 hens, 3 cockerels, 6 ducks, 3 ducklings, a dog called Kim, and a cat called Mini. After many weeks of confident talking but with little action, a couple of weekends ago, Gary and I screwed up the nerve and sourced our own meat from our own backyard, all by ourselves. In more graphic terms, we caught, slaughtered, plucked, butchered, cooked, and ate a duck from our backyard flock. As meat eaters, we thought that it appropriate the we should involve ourselves in the process of what it means for an animal to become the food that we eat, and as caretakers of a flock of fowl, we finally had the chance. Sti...