Posing as a Locavore

Do I get credit for buying local when I bring home a bag of sweet corn foisted on me by a neighbor?

All I was trying to do was take a walk, but I rounded the last corner and there the young man stood, blinking at a truck bed full of ripened ears. "My parents grow this not far from here and I said I could take a dozen or so. But Mom brought me all this."

I took pity on him. "I could take a half dozen."

He gave me a huge bag, proving that over-giving in hard-wired in that clan.

I'm just gonna take locavore credit for it anyway, so I can join in the vibe of Doug Fine's Farewell, My Subaru It's a quick read, a classic fish-out-of-water account of a Long Island-born boy who decides to live off the land.

He buys a ranch in New Mexico and, from the sound of things, I'll bet the sellers snickered quietly when they walked away with Fine's money.

He busies himself buying a pair of goats, installing solar panels and hunting down used fry oil for his retrofitted truck. He starts raising chickens--amazingly easy (until he learns about coyotes).

There are floods, but no famine. There are girlfriends. There is surely a mighty big checkbook somewhere to pay for all this set-up.

Fine's goal was to enjoy all the perks of his cell-phone-carrying, movie-watching, ice-cream-eating life without hurting Mother Earth. I had fun, even if he didn't really convert me.

Next up, Screen Plays by David Cohen is a collection of his Script Magazine interviews with with screen writers. It's a fascinating look into the writing process. When adapting a novel, what do you leave in? What do you take out? Do you add characters that never appeared in the book? How do you take pages of talky narrative and turn it into scenes?

Cohen's book covers twenty-five movies, only one of which I might have seen. Some of them were hits. Others simply baffled audiences. Some of the screenwriters, I might add, were baffling. To read about a man defending the humanity and relevance of his NC-17-rated screenplay is to witness an expert round of self-justification.

However, once you have hawked up that part and gotten it out of your system, perhaps you will be hungry for:

Blue-Ribbon Beef Nachos

Sadly, I do not have the ingredients to make this tonight. Nor does this qualify as locavore eating, but I already admitted I was a poser, didn't I?