Dear Log,
Today is Thanksgiving Day for all Earthicans. I prefer to think of today as a great chance to collectively thank Native Americans, who have been spending millennia crafting some of the world's sanest and sauciest languages.
But their most famous undertaking has been how they've been making some of the best food on the planet: twisting genes to turn corn from a scrawny grass into a lucious sweet grain; turning potatoes from a marble-sized weed-root into a hundred varieties that you can happily live on (and get drunk on); and coaxing chili peppers from a weird acrid seed-pod into the world-wrapping glory that they are today. And that's to say nothing of the whole of Mexican (and New Mexican) cooking, or of the delights of thousands of weird drugs: Cocaine! Ayahuasca! Magic mushrooms! Maple syrup!
And that's just the stuff you've heard of, the stuff that got around. I've travelled here and there and I've stumbled on some great stuff that stayed local: sumac-berry punch; ooligan grease; rice with black seaweed; glasswort salad; blue atole; herring eggs on spruce branches; dried black seaweed, great just to chew on. Mmmmmm. Now I'm hungry.
