A podcast episode I liked

A few weeks ago now, the Ezra Klein Show interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the release of her latest book. I want to hold on to three things she said, one about beauty:

I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered.

And the idea of a “mind schooled to good attention”:

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.

But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.

We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well.

And her thoughts on God as she’s studied his portrayal in the book of Genesis:

[About the Ten Commandments] The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.

[About the ways in which the ‘chosen people’ in Genesis fail] In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.

I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are, in their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.

And then Robinson, in the interview, goes on to talk about how forgiveness is demonstrated in Genesis, with the story of Joseph, and how it contrasts to previous literature, like The Odyssey, in which the hero comes home and kills the strangers who’ve taken over his house. I love her concluding remarks on this:

It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.

I find Robinson’s voice and thoughts very calming to listen to. The episode can be found here.

Biographies

While I'm writing my thesis, I like checking people's names, to see if they have interesting biographies. 

Consider Adrien-Gabriel Morice. He wrote three volumes on church history in the West in which Aubigny's name is linked with vicomte Jacques d'Aubigny. But he was an insufferable man. He joined the Oblates but could not obey superiors. He was sent to a mission where there was one other priest, a Fr. Georges Blanchet. And this is what happened:

he made life so difficult for Blanchet, a gentle man much loved by the Carrier, that later that year the priest begged to be transferred before Morice’s perpetual disagreements drove him mad. That year Blanchet ceded supervision of the mission to Morice to avoid further conflict, but he would remain there, building churches and doing housework, until his retirement ten years later. A succession of priests, finding Morice impossible to work and live with, and refusing to become his servant, chose to leave.

What a character!

On another day, I checked this railroad contractor's name to discover that his daughter was more renowned than he was... Charlotte Whitehead Ross was the first female doctor in Montreal, having taken her medical education at Woman’s Medical College at Philadelphia in 1870, while also bearing children. She came to Manitoba in 1881 where she continued to practice medicine. Her biographer, Vera K. Fast, writes: 

After assisting at a birth she would often scrub the cabin floor and do the washing, the cooking, and the baking to help the mother and family. Her daughters looked after the Ross home in her absence, although she always did the baking, which she enjoyed, as she did embroidery, knitting, and music, especially the piano. 

She was never licenced in Manitoba, and a bill to authorize her to practice in 1888 was withdrawn. I like how Fast writes:  

Undeterred, Charlotte continued on her busy rounds by horse, sleigh, canoe, and train, not defiantly, for she was no social or political activist, but simply because there was a need.

Biographies are inspiring!

Happy Friday!

Listening

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and this is my favourite part… a fictional broadcast excerpt:

(And then he enthuses about coal.) "Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it children. That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fir or a reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe ten million or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light it could and transformed the sun's energy into itself, into bark, twigs, stems, because plants eat light in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years, eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like a stone and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight, sunlight one hundred million years old is heating your home tonight. [...] Open your eyes (concludes the man) and see what you can with them, before they close forever."

Eating

I’ve enjoyed making each one of the menus I’ve tried from Amy Theilen’s book Company. So far, they’ve been three: one Christmas-themed, with turkey, one called “More Time Than Money” kind of meal, with chicken, and one for Easter, featuring ham.

I like how when I pick a menu from this book, I’m surrendering my menu-planning decisions and letting her be the expert. I learn so much and the meal’s success turns out to be such a reward.

To use the leftover ham this week, I made this Ham and Tomato Penne, which sounds fancier in its original Italian: Penne al Baffo.

Reluctantly, I must sign off and get back to the real work… I leave you my dog as snack supplicant:

La friperie

The other day I took my son to the children’s thrift store. In French, it’s called a “friperie” and somehow, that letter arrangement sounds more delightful to my ear than does “thrift store”. But this isn’t about linguistics, rather, it’s about how that unassuming place is so often a secret source of happiness. I shopped an hour and a half, arms raised, going through tight racks while my son played the store monkey, filling a cart with options. When my son swung by, I’d tell him to separate the shirts hanging on the cart handle into yesses and nos. First I select things I like, then my son selects what he prefers, then we try on the shirts, working as if crunched for time in the store’s only bathroom. It’s a sort of dance really; removing the clothes from their hangers, putting it on the boy, pause for mirror-appraisal, taking it off, readying the next item, and making a triage of the clothes tried on: yes, no, maybe. All while keeping up cheerful banter.

The effort, even when I put it off, is usually worth the savings… I left the store with 34 items and paid a little over 150$. Once Upon A Child, even if the name is long, does organize their clothes nicely by size, gender, type and colour. I suppose the thing that makes me happy is how the boys’ closet can contain, after one of these trips, such a colourful variety of styles and brands. In one place I’ve gathered a collection of pants, shorts, t-shirts, and dress shirts, some from labels that don’t even have stores here in Winnipeg. The other thing is that while I like everything we select, if an accident happens, I don’t feel precious about the item, the way I sometimes do when paying for new things. I don’t condone recklessness, but the pang of regret felt when the puppy made a hole in a 4$ shirt compared to a 12$ shirt doesn’t have the recourse to imagining that money-with-the-wings emoji.

This is just to say that I’m grateful for thrift stores. Not all the kids’ clothes are sourced there, and it would be an unsustainable model if there weren’t parents buying new clothes. Nonetheless, when I do go, I’m usually really happy for having done so.

inspiration

Beau Miles has published a book. Now would you look at that cover photograph? I sigh. I admit, I’m a fan of his Youtube videos, my favourite being Run the Line: Retracing 43 km of hidden railway because it touches on history. But often, after watching any one of his videos, I want to go out and shoot my own adventure. I get a feeling akin to jealousy…

While thinking of this post, I started wondering why I found Beau Miles particularly inspiring, and thought of other YouTube videos I’ve enjoyed, a bit dismayed to come up with Casey Neistat’s channel, which I followed for awhile when he was living in New York. I panicked a bit… Aren’t there any women’s channels I like? Yes! In fact, Bernadette Banner’s vlogs on the subject of Victorian and Edwardian dress offered a fascinating glimpse into corsets, for example. And Ariel Bissett introduced me to “book tube” a few years ago. Liziqi blends a kind of tireless productivity with almost graceful romance in her vlogs, in which furniture is built, fields are sown and harvested, harvested materials are transformed and every day ends with an extraordinary meal.

So what is it about Beau Miles that I find so inspiring? I think there are two things: the first, is a sort of recklessness unfamiliar to me. I was raised with carefulness. That’s neither good nor bad, and I don’t mean Miles goes and risks his life for views. Rather, I think, I grew up feeling like things around me were fragile and that things had to be handled properly. This lent itself to ideas of perfectionism and scarcity. So, when Miles assembles things using found materials for example, the viewer gets to feel both the freedom of experimentation and a mastery of the tools that are handled. The results is therefore satisfying without being caught up in ideas of perfection. The older I get, the more I am intrigued by this idea of patina and lived-in spaces. (I mentioned that here.) Eventually, there comes a point, I think, when you’re not striving for an ideal image but rather, having acquired experience over the years, skill replaces self-consciousness. And this brings me to the second point. I think Beau Miles is an extraordinary storyteller. This is something you can glimpse in an interview he recently gave here, specifically, when he says: “As a storyteller, I know that you can come across a bit more loose and ad hoc and it’s just a bit more fun that way. But in my heart of hearts I kind of know what I’m doing.”

If you are unfamiliar with Beau Miles, I highly recommend his videos! See if you find them as inspiring!

Five stars

Brussel sprouts, boiled or roasted are inedible in my opinion. But buy them when they look good, take off their dusty outer leaves, chop the core off, cut them in half and slice them, thin, thin. When your pile of Brussel sprouts looks like a mass of green-yellow paper confetti, put them in a mixing bowl, drizzle olive oil over them, squeeze a fresh lemon over them too, for brightness and add salt and pepper and shave parmesan and mix everything with your hand, till the leaf-shreds glisten. Top with toasted walnuts and enjoy!

(This Brussel Sprout salad originally comes from the cookbook Six Seasons.)

Sound

The noise of geese flying over head has been a feature these past few weeks. I often think of them as waddling nuisances, but something about their call this morning gave me a feeling of nostalgia. Were the geese to be removed from the scene, were I to travel to a country without geese, I would feel their absence. Hearing them is a feature of spring and fall, across all the years I grew up and all the years I’ve lived here on the prairies as an adult.

Sound ties memory to a place. I picture a multi-lane bridge somewhere near Toronto as we listened to the rhythmic drumbeat of an album by the band Brulé on a family road trip. I see night sky when I hear “I Want to Spend my Lifetime Loving You”. I see my room in Saskatoon when I hear Strauss waltzes. I’m in a car in the province of Quebec when I hear Richard Abel. Yesterday, I remembered how much I enjoyed Steve Hackman’s compositions that mix classical and contemporary music: Beethoven and Coldplay; Brahms and Radiohead.

John Green reviewed Canada Geese in his podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, describing them as waterfowl “(…) with a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada Goose is hard to love, but then again, so are most of us.” He draws connections between the geese and humans, admits to considering them pests, like everyone else, but notes: “Even if geese have become mundane, there’s still something awe-inspiring about seeing them fly overhead in perfect formation.” He concludes by rating them less than five stars because of how they represent our species interference with nature. This morning though? I’d have given them five stars just for reminding me to appreciate sound.

In praise of TikTok

Until December of 2020 I had not given TikTok two minutes thought outside a cursory glance to the news stories it was the subject of. Then arrived an issue of McKinley Valentine’s newsletter The Whippet in my inbox with this delightful intro:

I suspect the majority of readers will be like me, in that for TikTok they were like “nup, I’ve reached my limit of new social media things I can be bothered understanding. The kids can have TikTok for themselves.” 

But I’m a new convert and I love it so I’m gonna tell you what the deal is with TikTok.

Her arguments for TikTok compelled me to download the app. Like Deb Perelman, I can say “it’s become my favourite time suck”. There is so much I enjoy! Recipes, mountain skiing, dancing, sea shanties, dog training, mini adventures, and on and on… I enjoyed discovering TikTok so much that I convinced my siblings to join, just so I could send them funny videos. I enjoy TikTok so much that in this season of repentance, I’ve made a sacrifice of it and content myself with the inferior Instagram.

If we were friends, I’d give McKinley Valentine a hug for introducing me to something so fun.

Watching period dramas

My husband and I have a weak spot for period dramas: Outlander, Bridgerton, Medici… I remember excitedly comparing plot twists in Medici with the textbook I had for a class on the Italian Renaissance. As the seasons go on, it often feels as though the initial excitement wears off: characters develop predictable habits, love scenes follow a worn-out pattern, the show relies on plot development alone to maintain interest.

Take Medici for example. Season 3 opens with Lorenzo off to try and protect Florence from war. A council (called Priori) votes against going to war and Lorenzo goes home to his pregnant wife (see here, she strokes her belly, and there, again). His accountant and mother inform him, just like that, that he has no money to go to war. Lorenzo feels he needs to defend Florence, but doesn’t want to assume power to do as he thinks best. He wants consensus. The shots of his face can all be classed into a single category: Lorenzo is pensive. A monastery is taking in wounded mercenaries and monks quibble about caring for non-believers in a decidedly 21st century way. Lorenzo sends his wife and children away from the city (obligatory goodbye scene), and Lorenzo resigns from the council. There is a sprinkling of scenes of artists painting things. In one, a young painter labours over a line of green paint on buckling paper. Lorenzo goes to visit Leonardo da Vinci who is dissecting a cadaver (nbd) and confidently (nay, with swagger!) expresses an agnostic point of view, telling Lorenzo to live his life as he sees fit.

At this point you might as well throw up your hands and just accept the fact that what you are watching is a 21st century drama with pretty Italian Renaissance set decor and pigeons bearing imitation-calligraphy messages for cellphones.

I suppose this is why I was reluctant to get into The Last Kingdom. However, episode 2 of the first season has the main character Uhtred hiding and crying after killing an enemy, a playful relationship between him and Brida, and scenes wherein the characters aren’t sure about what to do next as they grapple with the constraints of the period.

The writing is alive, and I’m surprised to discover how “show don’t tell” applies just as much to a visual medium as it does to writing. So here’s a love note to the writers of The Last Kingdom, season 1: I noticed your work and I’m enjoying it!

Things I don't get around to writing

1. I have a job doing research. I love it because I learn lots of random facts, and sometimes, for the space of a research paper, or a chapter, I get immersed in another world. Take for example the creation of the Catholic diocese of Winnipeg. Right now, it doesn’t feel like all that big of a deal. But in 1915, when it happened, it was in the tense atmosphere of Irish Catholics demanding more attention, a loss of power and finance for the French Catholics and the first time that Rome acted so decisively in creating an independent diocese.

2. Nellie McClung had no sympathy for the 1919 Winnipeg Strike. She visited the city, interviewed some strikers and took notes for an article she didn’t end up publishing. I wrote an essay proving that she was friends with J.S. Woodsworth but that they had very different views on the strike and the World War. Why didn’t McClung sympathize with the strikers? In part because she couldn’t understand how desperate their situation was, and in part because she came from a family of farmers. Authors have argued that the farmers and the workers on strike largely remained separate.

3. I’m starting to enjoy newsletters as much as blog posts… The two that spur me on to write are Austin Kleon and Craig Mod.

Year-end

I love year-end retrospectives, and so, joining in like a guest unafraid of water at a pool party, here’s mine!

I read about thirty books this year, some from a list of classics, including La Cousine Bette and Desperate Characters, and some specific self-help books including The Highly Sensitive Person, The Actor’s Life and The Business of Being a Writer. Some books went together, like Wuthering Heights and Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of the author. I got immersed in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle in March but came up for air after the first two books and decided not to plunge back in. I stuck a toe in graphic novels, including Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? and Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Light reads included Theft by Finding and Brunch is Hell. Because I liked Carol Shield’s advice on writing, I read Stone Diaries. I liked Sally Mann’s book Hold Still, a choice influenced by Austin Kleon’s advice. University course subjects lead me to read Halfbreed by Maria Campbell and a collection of biographies on and writings by Nellie McClung. 

On a whim I like to take out cookbooks at the library. These included How to Cook a Wolf, Six Seasons, Love and Lemons, My Kitchen Year, and Repertoire. I follow a menu plan for the year that is flexible enough to allow for new recipes and improvements, like when Jessica Battaliana’s Pork Saltimbocca surpassed all previous Chicken Saltimbocca attempts. And we’d probably adopt Jeanine Donofrio’s Vegan Carrot Waffles forever were it not our son’s aversion to carrots even in their sneakiest form. Food 52’s Fasoolya Khadra was deceptively delicious. We also liked their Rosy Chicken paired with Joy of Cooking Baked Polenta. Another delight was Cauliflower Ragu from Six Seasons. I’ve upped my salad repertoire thanks to the New York Times list of 101 Simple Salads of which the in-season peaches and tomato salad is a tasty memory. An August brunch stands out for its Plum Poppy-Seed Muffins and Mushroom and Shallot Quiche. Deb Perelman is a go-to for so many good recipes. Marie-Hélène’s birthday supper request was her Everyday Meatballs with fresh pasta. The Ice Cream Cake Roll was an impressive birthday dessert. Fresh strawberries still make Strawberry Shortcake one of my favourite desserts. In the summer we make Tomato Corn Pie. Around Christian’s birthday, we look forward to Butter Chicken. His favourite dessert is an Apple Crisp without oatmeal in the topping.

Still-young children make for a lot of nights in, but we did try out The Mitchell Block, Passero, and Nuburger at the Common on dates out. On weekends we’ll make a treat of a drink and Netflix. After watching Mindhunter, Rectify, Charité, Halt and Catch Fire, Ozark, Better Call Saul, the rest of Suits and most of Fargo, we’re looking forward to new seasons! On regular television Life in Pieces makes us laugh the most. 

And you? Do you have any recommendations?

Miscellany

• I’m a stay at home mom for the moment, and in this condition some things ring especially true. The beginning of Heidi Julavits The Folded Clock for one.

“Once, a day was long. It was bright and then it wasn’t, meals happened, and school happened, and sports practice, maybe, happened, and two days from this day there would be a test, or an English paper would be due, or there would be a party for which I’d been waiting, it would seem, for years. Days were ages. Love bloomed and died in a day. Rages flared and were forgotten and replaced by new rages, also forgotten. Within a day there were discernable hours, and clocks with hands that ticked out each new minute. I would think, Will this day never end? By nightfall, I’d feel like a war had been fought. I was wounded; sleep was not enough to heal me. Days would linger in my nerves, aftershocks registered on the electrical plain. Days made a physical impact. Days could hurt.”

• I bought Deb Perelman’s latest cookbook. I have re-read this paragraph from the introduction numerous times, awed by her ability to capture what cooking can mean:

“I like the way that when you make something new and awesome, the first thing you want to do is tell another friend about it so they can make it, too. I like the way following a recipe to the letter can feel like handing the reins over after a long day of having to make all the decisions, but also that pulling off a good meal when you least expected is the fastest way to feel triumphant, even if your day left you short of opportunities to. I like the way that when you sublimate your wanderlust in a dish – a cacio e pepe addiction you picked up in Rome or a Thai-ish salad with crispy shallots, lime, and fish sauce – it becomes a gateway, or an escape hatch, to so much more than dinner. I like the way that when you cook at home, you don’t actually have to compromise a thing; you get to make exactly what you want, exactly the way you want it, and then you get to invite all your favorite people over to pass the dish around. I like the way a great meal makes grouchy people ungrouchy or turns a thankless day filled with thankless stuff into a hilarious one.”

• Recently I’ve been puzzling over why some people don’t enjoy self-help subjects as much as I do. A friend helped me understand that self-knowledge can be painful. In an episode of Hidden Brain, the podcast host Shankar Vedantam, highlights and explains one experiment’s conclusion:

“Think of the deep irony (…); the folks who care the most about ethics might be most willing to turn a blind eye to unethical business practices because they know, if they found out about those practices, they would feel obliged to do something about it.” (This is 19 minutes into the podcast.)

So, say a person is raised with a strong moral code. Self-knowledge might be painful because of a preference for ambivalence.

“Clarity” writes Gretchen Rubin in Better Than Before, “requires us to acknowledge what we’re doing.”

Or, it might be painful because we cling to an identity. When the author gave up a habit she had of not owning a purse,

“being ‘the kind of woman who doesn’t own a purse’” the relinquishing “caused me a pang, even though it was such a tiny part of my identity.”

Understanding ourselves can also be painful because it forces us to confront our feelings of wanting to fit in by noticing how we are different. If a person has fragile self-esteem, this can be especially hard.

(About this, Gretchen Rubin writes, “surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly, I’ve found that the more matter-of-fact I am about my habits, the more readily people accept them – and me.”)

However, avoiding self-knowledge can lead to self-deception. If I can recognize how it can be painful, I can learn to see the ways in which I deceive myself and I can be more understanding of myself and of others. In this respect, I appreciated this School of Life video.

What I've learned about wheat so far...

I wrote an essay about wheat and here’s what I learned:

1. First, the wheat plant is self-pollinating and cross-breeding requires separating anthers and pistils. There are three main types of wheat; winter wheat, spring wheat and durum. The last two are what are mostly grown in the prairie provinces while winter wheat is mostly grown in Europe. Durum is used for pasta and has fewer chromosomes than the other two bread-making wheats. It also seems as if durum was always just durum; whereas spring wheat has all kinds of varieties. 
2. The development of new wheat varieties is interesting because, in the beginning, it was a pretty basic cross-breeding program. Successful wheat crops in Manitoba began with Red Fife which had been grown by a farmer in Ontario. The official effort to create new varieties began in 1886 with the institution of Experimental Farms whose goal was to create varieties that ripened earlier. The first success was Marquis wheat, the result of a cross between Red Fife and a variety of wheat from the Himalayas called Hard Red Calcutta. It ripened days earlier than Red Fife and produced beautiful bread. In a book published in 1918 called Essays on Wheat, its discovery was described with a lot of optimism.
3. Cross-breeding became important for rust-resistance. Rust would evolve and attack the wheat stems or leaves to the point that some years it was described as an epidemic. New rust-resistant cultivars in Manitoba included Thatcher in the 1930’s and Selkirk in the 1950’s. But that’s where I stopped looking at wheat agronomy and so I know relatively little about hybrid wheat, heritage varieties and genetically-modified wheat. I also suspect that climate change has had an effect on the amount of spring wheat Canada produces and I would like to know more about it.
4. I love the early stories about wheat being sown in Manitoba. First efforts were made by the Selkirk settlers. The prairies had been used for hunting and trapping so it wasn’t even a sure-thing that the land could produce wheat. The other thing was that the first settlers weren’t even farmers… they were mostly fishermen and they didn’t have good tools at their disposal; one account says they only had a hoe. Grain came from England. Early crops often failed for a variety of reasons, but the most interesting ones sound like Biblical plagues; flocks of passenger pigeons, clouds of locusts, an outbreak of mice, and flooding. Everything was so wild!
5. I get surprised about how much daily life is influenced by the economy. In my childhood bubble the world was run by values and money was a source of frustration. But successful crops of wheat were needed to expand development and development expanded when there were good crops. The railway is an example. The first railroad connected Winnipeg to St. Paul Minnesota and this encouraged trade with the United States. A railroad connecting Manitoba to the Great Lakes later opened the market to Great Britain.
6. I learned about the Canadian Wheat Board. The brief story is this: It was first put into place for a short time in 1919 and the idea came from Australia who had a similar model in 1915. The government control was meant to be temporary and so it lasted only a year. Farmers wanted it to be re-instituted in the 1920’s and this gave way to the provincial Pools. They worked in competition with private elevator companies and the Great Depression saw the end of the provincial Pools’ role in grain marketing. Prime Minister R. B. Bennett re-instituted the Wheat Board in 1935 and it was based on voluntary participation (like in 1919). Mackenzie King was re-elected in 1935 and his Liberal government realized that it was necessary to make it compulsory. So the Canadian Wheat Board became the single-desk marketer of wheat in Canada in 1943. Its role continued until legislation was passed in 2011 making it voluntary again.
7. The Canadian Wheat Board was Canada’s unique response to wheat marketing and differed from the way the United States marketed wheat. It was a necessary difference however, because Canada depended more on wheat exports than did the United States and couldn’t afford the subsidies the Americans put in place. My course was based on the relationship between Canada and the United States and so looking into the marketing of wheat I got to see just how competitive it could be… As much as some of the American wheat subsidy programs were causes of complaint for Canadian farmers (like the Public Law 480 program under Eisenhower), the Americans often viewed the Canadian Wheat Board with suspicion. 

I’m not done studying wheat, but for now this was the result of a few weeks of reading and note-taking. I want to know more about agronomy and how wheat compares to other grain crops. I only barely understand the marketing basics of wheat futures and what hedging means and realize economics are not my forte. I want to read more about the history of grain elevators, line elevator companies, milling, farm technology, farm practices, prime ministers and the wheat board. I got good marks on the essay even though it could have been more tightly focused. I get excited when my reading starts to connect to the lives of the farmers in my family. It a small way, books bridge the gap between generations and help me better understand my pet project in Aubigny.