Won't You Be My Galantine?

Even though I love the work of M.F.K. Fisher or Ruth Reichl, longtime readers know The Hunger is never going to be a space where I rhapsodize about the beauty of a pristine sun-dappled Honeycrisp apple as a metaphor for the fleeting glimpses of godliness present in everyday life.

Until, it is.

Which is to say I just ate a fresh raspberry from my backyard, and since I live in Chicago, by “backyard” I mean a modern-Astroturf-clad former parking pad for what was previously a multi-unit building. Prior to that, it was probably a brown field and my actual soil is poison.

This is why I container garden, and also because real gardening and farming is kind of hard if it’s not done in a controlled pot. A better or more detailed person would also probably use organic compost and mulch exclusively. In my heart I’d like to, but my mulch is sometimes spent burnt wood chips from my smoker box that I used to make the food cooked on my Weber gas grill taste like it was cooked in the actual Japanese-lump charcoal burning kamado grill next to it that I’m too lazy to fire up.

In other words, I’m the Joe Jackson of gardeners, no matter how abusive or disregarding I am of my children, or in this case my fruits and vegetables, they still somehow turn out to be miraculous stars. Obviously Michael Jackson turned out to be problematic. Thankfully my raspberries aren’t sentient.