Simple Pleasures: Thoughts on Food, Friendship, and Life

By Stephanie Mills

In Simple Pleasures: Thoughts on Food, Friendship, and Life we have highlighted two chapters from Stephanie Mill’s reflection the pleasures, as well as the virtues and difficulties, of a perhaps simpler than average North American life. It is a thoughtful paean to living, like Thoreau, a deliberate life.  Mill’s writing is beautifully crafted, fluid, inspiring, and enlightening, and these chapters encourage you to take a moment to reflect on your own life. It celebrates the pleasures, beauty, and fulfillment of a simple life, a goal well worth striving for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Nov 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781610914512

Book preview

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Simple

Pleasures

Thoughts on Food,

Friendship, and Life

An Excerpt from Epicurean Simplicity

Stephanie Mills

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Washington | Covelo | London

Copyright © 2012 Stephanie Mills

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M St NW, Suite 650, Washington DC 20036

ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics.

978-1-61091-451-2

Cover design by Maureen Gately

Cover image by Luis Albuquerque, iStockphoto.com

Contents

About the Island Press E-ssentials Program

Thoughts on Conviviality

Thoughts on Our Common Fate

About the Author

Learn More | Further Reading

Island Press | Board of Directors

About Island Press

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About the Island Press E-ssentials Program

Since 1984, Island Press has been working with innovative thinkers to stimulate, shape, and communicate essential ideas. As a nonprofit organization committed to advancing sustainability, we publish widely in the fields of ecosystem conservation and management, urban design and community development, energy, economics, environmental policy, and health. The Island Press E-ssentials Program is a series of electronic-only works that complement our book program. These timely examinations of important issues are intended to be readable in a couple of hours yet illuminate genuine complexity, and inspire readers to take action to foster a healthy planet. Learn more about Island Press E-ssentials at www.islandpress.org/essentials.

Thoughts on Conviviality

by Stephanie Mills

Onions and butter; flour, celery, and salt:

all the makings of the soup except for the well water came from the co-op. There were no ingredients that couldn’t have been grown here given the right farms, farmers, and markets. Even the dill and caraway seed that flavored it could have been the produce of somebody’s garden.

Even in America, even in an information age, food is not something to take for granted but a matter of life and death. It’s strange to live in a time that has alienated almost all of us from direct participation in providing our food. It takes good land and a lot of work and skill to produce food well and in salable quantity. For most of us, even the more-successful gardeners, the farmer is the woman or man who keeps us fed. I know some of the organic farmers in these parts. They combine entrepreneurial acumen, soil nurturing, plant and animal husbandry, mechanical skill, and fortitude to encourage the land to sustain the people. These are the folks who should be getting the genius grants. My farmer friends, I notice, live in their bodies, articulating their intelligence and creativity physically. They seem less deluded by the culture’s departmentalization of physical and mental than anyone else I know.

Hunger, too, unifies and focuses the being. To be able to reply to its demands through the pleasure of cooking has become one of those ancient everyday activities for which few people have the time. There are even prefabricated peanut-butter sandwiches for busy schoolchildren. Puttering in the kitchen to make myself a meal, using simple foods, tools, and skills, could be regarded as a luxury in a world where fast food, junk food, or insufficient food are the commoner portion.

Celery is such a polysensory foodstuff, with its unassertive but lingering flavor, with all those strings and all that crunch. After dicing the celery, I chop the onion as quickly as I can and still keep my fingertips, blinking back the tears. Working with onions must be nearly as old as cooking itself. An onion’s bulb