The gate in the high fence that surrounds the Montauk Coast Guard Station was shut tight on Tuesday morning -- the station's people and the crew of the 87-foot cutter Ridley on high alert like all of this nation's military. Without radio and television, the closed fence would have been about the only indication that something terrible had happened 118 miles to the west.
War news, which increasingly comes in curt briefings from the Pentagon, rivets the country's attention and also serves to distract citizens from what is either a recession or a depression depending on whose ox is being gored. Sales of yellow ribbon may be up around here but nothing much else is. And February. Can't something be done about this wretched month — like shortening it to 10 days?
"The older it is, sourdough fanciers say, the better bread it makes; some Alaskan families have sour dough 50 years old." — Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, “Eating in America”
Pioneer women carried leaven “mothers” across the plains to California, where sourdough bread has remained popular to this day. Sourdough got started in places where no yeast could be brought so had to be made naturally, capturing whatever wild yeasts were ini the air. Hops and beer helped, but plain flour and water ferment after 18 to 24 hours at normal room temperature.
“By the beginning of the 18th century . . . all the arguments which were to sustain modem vegetarianism were in circulation.” — Keith Thomas, “Man and the Natural World,” 1983
These arguments were: that slaughtering animals has a brutalizing effect on human behavior; that consuming meat is bad for the health; that it inflicts untold suffering on humans’ fellow creatures; that it is simply wrong to kill any animals at all (the dominant view of theologians from the Renaissance on was, and I believe still is, that animals were created by God for the benefit of mankind).
