The 2009 Beef Draft, pt. 4: The Main Event

More from the 2009 Beef Draft: (1) Predraft Camp (2) The Burger-off (3) Thoughts of Our Cow

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The Fedex guy was bitter.

Six massive boxes up two flights of stairs will do that to a man.  But our cow had arrived.  W, a 578-pound steer, had been butchered, put into vacuum packs, frozen, and shipped from upstate New York to my East Village apartment.  And it was finally time to divide the spoils. (more…)

When I Compost My Jalapeños, Am I Giving Worms a Burny Poo?

Iris with one of her indentured servants

Not exactly the most profound question I’d asked myself all year, or even all day; however, as I was bringing my load of organic, chemical-free, artisanal worm food over to the nice lady with spiky blond hair at the Union Square compost dropoff facility, the thought did occur to me. I’d just made a fantastic Oaxacan dish of ground beef, cabbage, cilantro, and a few hot peppers, and in my bag of vegetable scraps lurked a couple of morsels that’d pop a capsicum in your ass. Would the worms go for them? And if they did, would they be leaving a trail of fire?

I knew I couldn’t answer the questions myself. I immediately thought of Chris Patil, who wrote the Science Bug column in our college paper. There were lots of Science Bugs; the title was passed down every so often as Science Bugs left, kind of like actors playing James Bond, and Chris was Sean Connery. His explanation of why the moon appears smaller when it’s high in the sky than when it’s close to the horizon is the stuff of legend – equal parts informative and humorous, using, among other things, the child’s game where you look at someone else between your own thumb and index finger, held up near your eye, and say “SQUISH! SQUISH! I’M SQUISHING YOUR HEAD!” to demonstrate his point. And nearly twenty years later, I still remember why that happens with the moon. I knew he was the man for the job.

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