How to Cook a Moose by Kate Christensen Page A

it’s a smooth batter. Fold in the egg whites, then stir in the melted butter.
    Drop spoonfuls of batter into very hot butter in a skillet to make small, thick, round pancakes. As soon as you drop the dough in, turn the heat down to low and let the pancakes sit until they bubble on top, then turn and cook them till browned. Slather crème fraîche on top and garnish with plenty of salmon roe and chopped chives. Serve them 3 to a plate.
    Serves 4, with a few blini left over for snacking on later with cheese.

    One day, on our way back to the farmhouse, we stopped in at the Portland Whole Foods for a week’s worth of groceries. At the checkout, I said jokingly to the cashier, “Did you notice how healthy our food is?”
    Instead of joining my self-mocking incredulousness at the heap of organic produce, the organic free-range eggs, the organic red rice and gluten-free organic pasta and organic steel-cut gluten-free oats, locally caught monkfish, free-range bison, organic free-range chicken thighs, and so forth, he said earnestly, “Oh my God, yes—doesn’t it feel good to buy a bunch of food like this and go home and eat it?”
    Caught off guard by his fervor, I laughed.
    â€œYes,” I admitted, “it does.”
    The same cognitive dissonance I feel on those beautiful, pristine mornings in New Hampshire, when my thoughts turn to dire environmental crises, also intrudes naturally into every decision I make about food. Food is not a simple thing. Deciding what to eat carries implications that go far beyond our own mouths and stomachs. Grocery shoppinghas become possibly more powerful than voting. And I am resolutely, unquestioningly nonjudgmental in almost all things, except other people’s shopping carts. I can’t help it. When I see a conveyer belt heading for the cashier loaded with individual plastic-wrapped, high fructose corn syrup–laden, GMO-heavy, processed, corporate-stamped dreck, I blanch like a Victorian maiden aunt whose niece is running out of the house in rouge and a plunging neckline. “There goes the world,” I gasp to myself with the hand-fluttering futility of the overly well-informed first-world consumer.
    I’m not judging the people—just the terrible food, and the corporations that make it, and the political systems that give them so much power.
    Even now, good, healthful food is scarce for many; money is tight; the environment is degraded and changing fast; sea levels are rising and the oceans are acidifying and warming and polluted with plastic and emptied of life by wide-scale dragnet fishing. Agribusiness pollutes the earth with pesticides and herbicides; Monsanto’s genetically modified monocrops crowd out diversity and threaten organic farmers. Likely because of the widespread use of industrial-strength agricultural pesticides, bee colonies are dying out, which threatens food production, since much of the produce we eat depends on bees for pollination. It takes a hell of a lot of oil and gas to fuel the trucks and ships that transport great quantities of food vast distances, around the globe. And so on, and so on.
    As catastrophe appears to loom ever closer, and in many ways feels as if it’s already arrived, the question I keep coming back to time and again, the one I find myself wrestling with constantly, is: How should we eat in such a world? And what should we eat? For example, I try to buy so-called sustainable and non-threatened wild-caught fish—monkfish, mackerel, sardines, Alaskan salmon—but who knows if they’re really okay, given the state of the oceans? It’s terrible that something assimple as buying fresh fish has become so fraught, but there it is. Farmed salmon? Full of PCBs. Tuna, swordfish? Loaded with mercury, and endangered. Sea bass? Endangered. Haddock, hake, cod? Overfished. What the hell? Who knows if anything is okay anymore? And who knows how much longer our infrastructure can