The single oyster is engineered by offering to them a single grain of sand to attach to at the moment they looking for a live oyster reef on which to attach. The 30,000 baby oysters we planted last week will grow as singles. They are safe from predators, cozy in floating bags, but they would rather be a reef. The animal is the reef., stony dragons, acres long, stretching out along the bottom of the bay. In the West End (ATL) Krispy Kreme last night, there was a line of humans waiting for the single cashier to pull their hot donuts off the conveyor belt, an eager patience humming through the line. As the oyster reef is animal, this line was the creature, breathing in warm sweetness, breathing out goodwill.        

On the day after Thanksgiving, it’s been a tradition that Santa comes in on a shrimp boat, docks at the riverfront, and comes out to say ho ho, what young lady do you want for Christmas? The “tradition” is in fact only 20 or so years old, having started right around the time local shrimping started losing ground to international competition, both wild caught and farmed. Where two dozen shrimp boats a day once left out of Mill Pond, one or two now head out once or twice a week. They come back and sell straight off the boat for $4 a pound to locals on the secret text chains .That’s one third the price at the market down the street, so we’re happy. But it’s the same price as the restaurants can buy off the Sysco truck, head off, cleaned, identically shaped and sized, breaded, ready to drop into the fryer. Those come from a farm in southeast Asia. They are $4 a pound. And so the shrimp boat that Santa came in on today is for show, as are nearly all the shrimp boats now docked at Mill Pond. Picturesque, idle.

…that Europeans and their descendants would have the chance to actually colonize the vast continent of the Americas.”

Native Nations: A Millunium in North America, by Kathleen DuVal (2024) takes the long view, and finds there was nothing inevitable about our current state of affairs—it was, in fact, unlikely. Writing Begin the World Over, one of the surprising things I learned was just how tenacious is the belief that the present state of affairs is the only world that could have ever been. By tenacious, I mean how deeply and persistently I believed this, in my bones, even while I was intellectually committed to testing out to the opposite belief, that another world could have been possible. Buddhist wisdom suggests the tenacity of this belief has something to do the reification of self. Perhaps we can shed this (paralyzing) belief of inevitability through meditation on anattā (Pali: 𑀅𑀦𑀢𑁆𑀢𑀸), the doctrine of no-self. There is no unchanging, permanent self or essence. There is no inevitable timeline bringing us to this here now.

No, the opposite of a bunker.

Make a large pot of coffee. Prep the boat: plugs in, motor up, tram saver on, bags tied down, engine, starts, hitch to truck. Open the coop door and apologize to the chickens for disturbing their sleep but the tides today make it so we have to be out on the water at sunrise. Crossing the bridge to the island, notice how this particular sliver of yellow orange red of the not yet risen sun—a band of color that stretches horizontally across the horizon, dark blue above, blue green below—will never be captured by humans, who know as much, yet cannot help but try. At the boat launch, let your palms greet the water, and notice it’s cool again, finally. On the ride out, say good morning to the great blue herons. At the oyster farm, the swells driven by a northwest wind, a steady 16 mph, gusts of 24 or so, pick up the line, the boat, the bags, roll them all over the back of the water’s knuckles. Ruddy Turnstones peck at the barnacles growing on the bags. When the sandbar coming off the spit of land emerges, hightail it back to shore.           

Years ago, my grandmother’s narration turned the Georgia Aquarium into a cafeteria. Grilled with a black bean sauce (bignose unicornfish). Braised, in a ginger soup (green sea turtle). Fried, with a chili and garlic sauce (big bellied seahorse). I thought of her as I gathered acorns today from the front yard. There is so much food all around — in this case, literally under my feet: three buckets of acorns from a single oak tree. Maybe, taking after my grandmother, we should grant everything alive a presumption of edibility. Suddenly, abundance.

It was never a real fight, between a 58 year old and a social media star, but 50 million people watched anyway, because that what we’ve been trained to do—when a spectacle is offered up, watch. The real fight happened in the bout before, an absolutely brilliant rematch between Katie Taylor, who landed 217 punches, and Amanda Serrano, who landed 324. Compare this to the main event: Mike Tyson landed 18 punches. Jake Paul landed 78. It’s not that Tyson and Paul weren’t fighting—one landed punch makes it a fight—but that Tyson and Paul were a performance piece. For which Paul will take home $40 million, as producer of the spectacle. Something about how this fake, derivative, spectacle fight (Tyson-Paul) rubbed up against a real real real fight (Taylor-Serrano) is metaphorical of how we fight nowadays. Of which fight precisely is not yet clear.

State of Paradise, Laura van den Berg
Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer, Bren Smith
Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Native Nations, Kathleen Duval
Oyster: A Gastronomic History (with recipes), Drew Smith
Panhandle to Pan: Recipes and Stories from Florida’s New Redneck Riviera, Irv Miller
What if We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

…but everyone can help build a local food system; everyone can be a part of local food production. Grow something you want to eat—one basil plant—and there you go. Because, well, here we go.

Kali Akuno yesterday saying: “…we need to be honest that the type of preparation that was required did not happen…our organizing did not show why food sovereignty is necessary; why local food production is necessary…” reminded me of the recent Atlantic cover story about crossing Darien Gap, which mentioned a group of people from Venezuela trying to make the crossing together. At the beginning of this (previously considered) impossible 70 mile jungle hike from Columbia into Panama, the group made vows to help one another, sharing food and good will. The relationships started to break down with the first missed meal. The group was completely dissolved by day 4, when hunger set in. It’s a reminder that the flip side of Leah Penniman’s inspirational “to free ourselves we must feed ourselves” is the reality “when the food runs out, the knives come out.” Inspirational as well, in a different way. People get ready, there’s no food truck coming.