It has come to my attention that within the dog-eat-dog underworld of the culinary industry, there is a clandestine movement afoot to discredit my food writing. The chief criticisms are that I don’t actually cook and my essays aren’t about food. This has gotten on my last nerve! I put forth that any creature in possession of an alimentary canal knows plenty about food. The basics are simple: If you don’t eat, you will die, and bacon tastes better than rice cakes. Nutrition is for the food writer as ornithology is for the birds!
To reassure the skeptics, my bona fides are as follows. For more than a decade I worked in seventeen different restaurants, cafés, and bars. My career began in Morehead, Kentucky, at a Burger Queen and ended at Doyle’s Cafe in Boston, Massachusetts. I worked as a dishwasher, busboy, prep cook, steward, breakfast cook, soda pop pourer, sandwich maker, barista, and waiter. I got fired often, although never for reasons related to job performance. The most common reason was a mysterious word—“insubordination”—essentially a pretext used by power-mad bosses to shed themselves of people they didn’t like. Or in my case, a person who resisted the lure of kissing the boss’s b-hole. Of all the professional sadness in the world, the most poignant is that of assistant managers at a restaurant. Their priority is scheduling shifts for a waitstaff that makes more money than managers. Their only recourse is firing people.
A deeply personal matter led to my decade in the restaurant business and subsequent “career” as a food writer. At age fifteen I met a girl. Nothing is as powerful as the extraordinary jolt of a teenager’s first love. It’s like seeing the world after a double-cataract surgery. Life is suddenly exquisite. Each leaf becomes the bearer of unbearable beauty. Romeo and Juliet were so deliriously happy that they embraced murder and suicide as an ideal solution. I didn’t go that far, but I fell deeply and totally in love with Kim. She was smart, pretty, and laughed at my jokes. I spent all my waking hours trying to talk to her, eventually moving up to walking around holding hands. Our six-week romance was the best of my life—virtuous, finite, and gloriously unprecedented. I never again knew such an all-encompassing joy.
We met doing summer stock theatre as part of a college recruitment program for promising high school students. This occurred before the advent of portable music devices, which meant we listened to the radio. Every lyric seemed to be about us, directed exclusively at the impermeable dome in which we lived. Our favorite song was “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band, in which he spoke of the pompitous of love. Neither Kim nor I knew exactly what the phrase meant, but we felt it described what we had, a kind of purity and truth. We were pompitous. Our love embodied pompitousness. We sought pompity.
In mid-August Kim returned home to western Kentucky, two hours away. We wrote each other daily, a pace that dwindled in frequency to weekly, then monthly. We called each other a few times, long spells with each of us clutching the receiver silently, content to know the other person was on the line. She visited me once, driving with a couple of her friends who clearly evaluated me as deficient: too short, too poor, non-athletic. Plus I was from the hills and looked it. I didn’t even own a car to reciprocate her visit. We stopped writing. I never saw Kim again, but I never forgot her.
Her grandfather was Fred Purnell, a former railroad man who founded Purnell’s “Old Folks” Sausage company in Simpsonville, Kentucky. According to family lore, Fred loved listening to the elderly talk, a trait that earned him the phenomenal nickname of “Old Folks.” I deeply envy his sobriquet. As a child I also enjoyed hearing tales of the old days. This has evolved into a secret desire that young people would be interested in hearing me talk. As it is, I can’t even get my wife to listen to a word I say. My nickname could readily be “Husby Ignored” or “He Who Talks Too Much.”
Purnell’s Sausage began as a family company and still maintains that status, which is quite unusual in the corporate era of Big Pork. For example, Smithfield Foods began as a family operation in Virginia and was America’s biggest pork company until it was bought by a Chinese corporation for seven billion dollars. (Yes, that’s 7,000,000,000 bucks!) Industrialized pork created a lucrative side business, the never-ending disposal of hog feces. If you can withstand the dreadful smell, it’s a wide-open field for a “manure entrepreneur.”
The packaging of Purnell’s sausage features a drawing of a cheerfully grinning pig’s face. It’s a great design: simple, bold, and memorable. At least as long as you ignore the obvious—what the hell does that pig have to be happy about? His entire family is encased in frozen wrappers for sale! Setting aside the complex emotional life of a hog, what enthralled me most was the slogan: “The Country Sausage that’s Going to Town!”
When I was a child living on a dirt road in the country, there was nothing better than going to the nearest town. Morehead had paved streets, multiple two-story buildings, and sidewalks. One building was rumored to contain an elevator. A ten-cent store sold model cars and Hot Wheels. The corner drugstore had comic books and nickel Cokes. The prospect of going to Morehead on Saturday sustained me throughout the tedious week of attending school. My mother’s greatest punishment was forbidding her kids from accompanying her to town. Merely the threat impelled me to prompt obedience. (The worst period of my life was being banned from Morehead for a month. After reading that Daniel Boone had stained his skin with walnut juice to pass as a Shawnee, I smeared the brown inner oil all over my body. It didn’t wash out.)
The phrase “going to town” has another, more generalized and colloquial definition. It means to carry out something with great enthusiasm, fully committed and doing the best you can—such as eating. That boy is going to town on that sausage! As a food slogan, it connotes the ambition of a country staple that’s heading out, putting the farm behind, eager for the bright lights. Maybe that’s why the pig was so happy. The enthusiasm for departure was a form of ignorance at the true destination—the bloody fate of a slaughterhouse. Like me in later years, that pig would often wish it had stayed home, safe in the hills.
I recently learned that the Purnell motto was discontinued sometime in the mid-1970s. The new slogan, currently in use on all their products, is bland and innocuous: “It’s Gooo-od.” The phrase is better utilized in a verbal fashion, drawing out the syllable for emphasis. Written, it’s harder to comprehend, leading one to mentally pronounce it as “gew-odd.” Still, it sounds less old-fashioned and is faster to say on TV and radio. (I guess they had to go with an elongated form of “good” because Tony the Tiger had already appropriated “They’re Gr-r-reat!” to endorse Frosted Flakes.) Most important, it’s true. Purnell’s sausage is the best sausage in the world.
I began wondering if the new motto was a business decision or a family mandate due to Kim’s interest in me around the same time. Maybe the Purnells didn’t want my country sausage coming to Louisville. It’s gooo-od that we got rid of that bumpkin early! Feeling rejected, I realized I could simply call Kim and ask her what motivated the new motto. I immediately became terrified that she wouldn’t remember me, or that she’d consider me a stalker with a forty-year delay. The best-case scenario would be if we talked for hours, met in person, fell in love, and I left my wife to move to Louisville and eat sausage forever. That would also be the worst-case scenario.
by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: "Alice,” by Kevin Horan
To reassure the skeptics, my bona fides are as follows. For more than a decade I worked in seventeen different restaurants, cafés, and bars. My career began in Morehead, Kentucky, at a Burger Queen and ended at Doyle’s Cafe in Boston, Massachusetts. I worked as a dishwasher, busboy, prep cook, steward, breakfast cook, soda pop pourer, sandwich maker, barista, and waiter. I got fired often, although never for reasons related to job performance. The most common reason was a mysterious word—“insubordination”—essentially a pretext used by power-mad bosses to shed themselves of people they didn’t like. Or in my case, a person who resisted the lure of kissing the boss’s b-hole. Of all the professional sadness in the world, the most poignant is that of assistant managers at a restaurant. Their priority is scheduling shifts for a waitstaff that makes more money than managers. Their only recourse is firing people.
A deeply personal matter led to my decade in the restaurant business and subsequent “career” as a food writer. At age fifteen I met a girl. Nothing is as powerful as the extraordinary jolt of a teenager’s first love. It’s like seeing the world after a double-cataract surgery. Life is suddenly exquisite. Each leaf becomes the bearer of unbearable beauty. Romeo and Juliet were so deliriously happy that they embraced murder and suicide as an ideal solution. I didn’t go that far, but I fell deeply and totally in love with Kim. She was smart, pretty, and laughed at my jokes. I spent all my waking hours trying to talk to her, eventually moving up to walking around holding hands. Our six-week romance was the best of my life—virtuous, finite, and gloriously unprecedented. I never again knew such an all-encompassing joy. We met doing summer stock theatre as part of a college recruitment program for promising high school students. This occurred before the advent of portable music devices, which meant we listened to the radio. Every lyric seemed to be about us, directed exclusively at the impermeable dome in which we lived. Our favorite song was “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band, in which he spoke of the pompitous of love. Neither Kim nor I knew exactly what the phrase meant, but we felt it described what we had, a kind of purity and truth. We were pompitous. Our love embodied pompitousness. We sought pompity.
In mid-August Kim returned home to western Kentucky, two hours away. We wrote each other daily, a pace that dwindled in frequency to weekly, then monthly. We called each other a few times, long spells with each of us clutching the receiver silently, content to know the other person was on the line. She visited me once, driving with a couple of her friends who clearly evaluated me as deficient: too short, too poor, non-athletic. Plus I was from the hills and looked it. I didn’t even own a car to reciprocate her visit. We stopped writing. I never saw Kim again, but I never forgot her.
Her grandfather was Fred Purnell, a former railroad man who founded Purnell’s “Old Folks” Sausage company in Simpsonville, Kentucky. According to family lore, Fred loved listening to the elderly talk, a trait that earned him the phenomenal nickname of “Old Folks.” I deeply envy his sobriquet. As a child I also enjoyed hearing tales of the old days. This has evolved into a secret desire that young people would be interested in hearing me talk. As it is, I can’t even get my wife to listen to a word I say. My nickname could readily be “Husby Ignored” or “He Who Talks Too Much.”
Purnell’s Sausage began as a family company and still maintains that status, which is quite unusual in the corporate era of Big Pork. For example, Smithfield Foods began as a family operation in Virginia and was America’s biggest pork company until it was bought by a Chinese corporation for seven billion dollars. (Yes, that’s 7,000,000,000 bucks!) Industrialized pork created a lucrative side business, the never-ending disposal of hog feces. If you can withstand the dreadful smell, it’s a wide-open field for a “manure entrepreneur.”
The packaging of Purnell’s sausage features a drawing of a cheerfully grinning pig’s face. It’s a great design: simple, bold, and memorable. At least as long as you ignore the obvious—what the hell does that pig have to be happy about? His entire family is encased in frozen wrappers for sale! Setting aside the complex emotional life of a hog, what enthralled me most was the slogan: “The Country Sausage that’s Going to Town!”
When I was a child living on a dirt road in the country, there was nothing better than going to the nearest town. Morehead had paved streets, multiple two-story buildings, and sidewalks. One building was rumored to contain an elevator. A ten-cent store sold model cars and Hot Wheels. The corner drugstore had comic books and nickel Cokes. The prospect of going to Morehead on Saturday sustained me throughout the tedious week of attending school. My mother’s greatest punishment was forbidding her kids from accompanying her to town. Merely the threat impelled me to prompt obedience. (The worst period of my life was being banned from Morehead for a month. After reading that Daniel Boone had stained his skin with walnut juice to pass as a Shawnee, I smeared the brown inner oil all over my body. It didn’t wash out.)
The phrase “going to town” has another, more generalized and colloquial definition. It means to carry out something with great enthusiasm, fully committed and doing the best you can—such as eating. That boy is going to town on that sausage! As a food slogan, it connotes the ambition of a country staple that’s heading out, putting the farm behind, eager for the bright lights. Maybe that’s why the pig was so happy. The enthusiasm for departure was a form of ignorance at the true destination—the bloody fate of a slaughterhouse. Like me in later years, that pig would often wish it had stayed home, safe in the hills.
I recently learned that the Purnell motto was discontinued sometime in the mid-1970s. The new slogan, currently in use on all their products, is bland and innocuous: “It’s Gooo-od.” The phrase is better utilized in a verbal fashion, drawing out the syllable for emphasis. Written, it’s harder to comprehend, leading one to mentally pronounce it as “gew-odd.” Still, it sounds less old-fashioned and is faster to say on TV and radio. (I guess they had to go with an elongated form of “good” because Tony the Tiger had already appropriated “They’re Gr-r-reat!” to endorse Frosted Flakes.) Most important, it’s true. Purnell’s sausage is the best sausage in the world.
I began wondering if the new motto was a business decision or a family mandate due to Kim’s interest in me around the same time. Maybe the Purnells didn’t want my country sausage coming to Louisville. It’s gooo-od that we got rid of that bumpkin early! Feeling rejected, I realized I could simply call Kim and ask her what motivated the new motto. I immediately became terrified that she wouldn’t remember me, or that she’d consider me a stalker with a forty-year delay. The best-case scenario would be if we talked for hours, met in person, fell in love, and I left my wife to move to Louisville and eat sausage forever. That would also be the worst-case scenario.
by Chris Offutt, Oxford American | Read more:
Image: "Alice,” by Kevin Horan
