Finding Food and Solace in the Intertidal
November 20, 2024 at 07:41AMWhile digging for clams, Sophie McBain reflects on how we treat the food we gather for ourselves differently. She argues that “all purchased food is at some level alienating; the economic transaction is salient and central, while the essential transaction—the moral and ecological transaction—between two groups, the eaters and the eaten, is elided.”
I worry that because it happened so quickly, we didn’t fully experience the harvest together. But we make up for it by cooking together slowly at the cabin while catching up. We purge the clams in salt water for hours, then scrub and rinse them. My friend Cedar is highly fastidious, but her vigilance ensures our clam bucatini is 100 percent sandless. The clams are buttery, firm, and oceanic but assertively meaty. We invite our host, who has never gone clamming himself, to eat with us. He sits on the stairs and tells us about his life.
It would not have remotely occurred to us to share our dinner with this man if we had picked up sandwiches or even purchased the clams from a fishmonger. It was because they were acquired outside of the cash economy, because they were just generously given to us by the Ocean herself, that we felt the urge to share.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/19/finding-food-and-solace-in-the-intertidal/
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