NEVER STARVING ARTISTS.
I once read that dreaming is your mind reorganizing all of the images you absorb in a day. For me, writing is a chance to reorganize all the ideas. It's my therapy and it's my art––admittedly often better therapy than art––but I need it. As a painter, Hannah too has her therapy, a way for her to slip into the right brain and peek around for a while.In terms of pursuing a career as farmers we decided early on that we didn't want to leave behind our art. Lucky for us there is a lot of room to be creative on the farm, to decorate, construct, catalogue and design; plenty of reasons to paint; plenty of ideas to record. Employing our crafts has been important for sanity as we wait for the farm details to work themselves out, but we don't want for art to disappear once the season gets going. No matter how busy we are, we try and create time for our art. It's important to us to integrate it into our everyday lives. Every artist dreams of getting paid to do what they love––we feel if we can be successful farmers who actively pursue their art, we can consider ourselves successful artists as well.- Jesse.
VEGETABLE PLATE.
Hannah and I have a somewhat unspoken rule of only eating meat we either, 1) raised ourselves, or 2) trust/know the farmer who did. This does not bode well for us in 99% of the restaurants that exist in the middle of the country where the menu is three pages of meaty fare and one vegetable option: The vegetable plate––a convenient selection of the sides they already offer, most of which are cooked with meat, or come from a can. There are a lot of terrible things involved with a vast majority of the meat available––that's no secret––especially the type of meat that ends up in the restaurants we're talking about. And these restaurants make no bones about the glut of chicken, fish pork and beef offered, nor do the patrons really care, even if they are well-aware of the issues involved with conventional meat-operations. I haven't always been particularly discriminating about my own meat consumption, so naturally I never noticed the lack of vegetarian options. They didn't concern me. The farm changed all that. Having raised an animal, killed it and ate it, my relationship with food has changed dramatically. I simply don't much want to eat animals not treated like animals, not treated humanely. Even though the vegetables aren't great either, as the adage goes, we'd rather eat inhumanely treated vegetables than inhumanely treated animals. So often, when we have to eat out, the vegetable plate is our only alternative. I am not unaware that menus are a product of demand, either. In fact, that is what's most notable about the vegetable plate, that it exists so ubiquitously because vegetables are flat-out not as popular as meat. Or more precisely, they are not popular at all. This may seem obvious, but there are simply not not enough people concerned with meatless meals to necessitate an actual vegetarian dish in these restaurants, so the restaurants themselves chose not to bother spending time and money creating one. You either eat a salad ("hold the bacon please") ask them to leave the steak off your pasta, or you get a plate with four or five sides piled on with no real order or care. The vegetable plate is a microcosm of the apathy our "Where's the Beef" nation still holds towards the vegetarian: join us, or learn to survive in our world. And that's fine, I'm not complaining, I just wish that instead of "Vegetable Plate" the menu would be more honest and read, "The dietary concerns of vegetarians are not recognized by this establishment," and I could just guiltlessly order a plate of french fries like I want to do anyway.- Jesse.
BUGTUSSLE BOUND.
We are making our way down to Nashville tomorrow, visiting with some good friends and picking up the remainder of Jesse's things. On our way, we are making a much-needed detour to our dear Bugtussle! We cannot wait to get back to what still very much feels like our home. That being said, we will be absent from phones and internets and general electricity for a bit. But fear not! We will be back, probably with bellies full of wonderful food and lots of love from our favorite farmers.If you have no idea what I am talking about, here and here is a little bit of info on Bugtussle and why we love it so. And below are some pictures to make you wish you were coming with us!- Hannah.
