I awake to wind. “Its the bad wind,” they tell me over breakfast: “The Spanish wind. The Levant.”
The wind rumbles out of the east and enters our small valley farm with a constant dirt-churning rush. The eucalyptus trees roll like the waves of the ocean, the chickens and turkeys hide within their roosts, and the plants of the farm bend under an energy and fury that seems both impossible to resist and destined never to end.
What groups of people around the world eat meat on a regular basis? What groups of people are vegetarian? Or how about countries? Which countries eat lots of meat and which countries have large populations of vegetarians? Before going to India, I always felt confident about where and why people did not eat meat, but India proved to be a major outlier that did not fit with my preconceived notions of vegetarianism. In India, I found a country with a thousand year old history of not eating meat independent of wealth or modernity. Why? How had this come to be? And why only India?
The first time I walked through a city in South Korea, the conglomerations of identical retail stores changing from street to street seemed so extreme that at times I felt it could not be real or “natural”. In one case in particular, I felt like I was in a dream landscape because I turned a corner in downtown Daegu and was confronted with store upon store, cart upon cart, alley upon alley, of nothing but apples. Not even apple products or different types of apples or apple picking equipment, or apple seeds, or apple trees or ingredients to accompany apple recipes, but merely apples. Thousands upon thousands of them.
Continue reading
Brain Trips 