work 16 hour days and have not been outside in weeks.” To be honest, I work 16-hour days three times a week, and during the winter I rarely go outside Saturday through Tuesday, but my other days are free to spend on non-cooking projects. If I didn’t have my volunteer projects, garden, cockamamie crafting ideas, cats and my boychik to keep me balanced, cooking for a living would tire me out in less than a year. I don’t believe that anyone, no matter how much they love their work, will be fulfilled if they work every minute.

sweet and I scraped together enough for a down payment on a sweet retro mod house in the very progressive, very green, very farm-friendly (important for a cook like me!) small town of New Paltz, NY.

So I find myself in a community, one of those things liberals like me are always trying to preserve and strengthen. When the independent bookstore on main street closed last month and rumors of another Starbucks moving into its spot started circulating, I was rightfully angered. I also run my meal delivery service from New Paltz, so I think about the town from two perspectives, that of the resident and that of the business owner. I want my business to be good for the town, good for my bank account, and good for my life. I want to have time to explore and enjoy my community. So I have had to learn how to balance.

Think globally, work locally

It’s important not to get too big because if we are really to have long lasting solutions to the problems currently facing our communities like facelessness, sustainability, etc, those solutions must be local. What works in one area will not work in another. Just because you have a great business idea, it is much more sustainable in the long run to help local people

and whenever I go to a new restaurant it seems that all the excitement and promise I had put into the experience is turned into a desire for home cooking by the end of the meal. The best cooks don’t open the best restaurants. Operating a restaurant is a combination of financial resources, luck, savvy, and No-Doz. The people who cook like true artists don’t usually have that combination because so much of their brain is taken up with being artists. Of course some, maybe most, restaurants just hire a chef who doesn’t have to deal with the day-to-day operations, but I think even with that factored into account it is still the case that the best cooks are home cooks, and I would argue that this is the same in many professions.

The ones who “make it” are never, or very rarely ever, the ones with any real genius. In the music industry this is obvious to the point of not needing to be said – the minute a band I like starts to get any recognition in the mainstream world I start distrusting them and my ability to judge good music. There are of course exceptions (Radiohead being the best one I can think of). If you think this is snotty, all I can say is that I am all in favor of snottiness if it means distrusting the herd mentality. If something is universally loved, it behooves us to distrust it. The best musicians are the ones who are too shy to play on stage or the ones for whom living the life of a successful musician, with all the lies and

sadnesses this entails, eats them up from the inside out, and in my experience this applies to almost all fields.

Wider vs. deeper

What we can take from this is that if you’re really, really good at something it isn’t wise to commodify it, to sell it off the highest bidder, because then maybe you don’t have enough left for yourself – metaphorically or literally. Of course it is right to share our particular gifts and talents with the world. But I am wary of the branding of the self that artists seem increasingly to put themselves through in order to survive. It is assumed that we must distribute our talents as widely as possible in order to create the most income and notoriety, but this inevitably cheapens them. When I was struggling to make a profit from my business, I did everything – catering, private cooking, baking, chocolate truffles. It made me very unhappy because I really just wanted to focus on my meal delivery business, but it did make me a little money, and of course I am in favor of artists doing what they have to do to survive. But now that the business is going a little better, everyone is telling me now is the time to expand, write a cookbook, even – nonexistent god forbid! – franchise. We’re always taught that if our businesses are doing well we need to keep pushing, get our products in more stores, reach more markets, etc.

Network that introduced vegan food gently to them, or a color-coded, large-print, non-judgmental vegan cookbook that was written especially for the fatass mainstream American housewife in mind, preferably using a lot of hideously refined soy protein products so easily found in our fluorescent, hygienic supermarkets?

Fuck them. That’s really all I can say to that. That argument is the means-justify-the-ends argument, and I just can’t stand it. When good cooks start writing baby cookbooks for the baby cooks of America, there will be nothing left for us good cooks who prefer interesting recipes. If we all turn our art into a commercial-friendly family-fun show, there will be no real art left. Mainstream Americans are a dying breed. Either they will come to our side, or they will breed themselves into oblivion. I care not either way.

But I do care about us as artists. And the consequence of everything I’m saying is that us artists will just make less money.

How to survive financially in a small world

Perhaps this is not the worst thing.  Because of the particular circumstances surrounding my household (namely, drug addictions), I grew up in a very modest household. Of course, I yearned for the things that

This is where bartering comes in. I’ve found that if you have a useful or artistic skill to share, the bartering world is vast and deep. Sites like craigslist are perfect for barters. On your business’ website, fliers, business cards, etc., make sure that you mention that you accept barters. Most of the time you will get offers for crap you never wanted, but once in a while you will get an offer for something great. I contact other small business owners about barters all the time, and usually find them more than willing to trade for often 100% or at least a portion of their rates.

The other benefit of staying small is that we have time for volunteer work. We can all agree on the fact that our country and world are getting shittier by the day. It makes no sense to continue to debate this fact. I believe that the Catholic church or some similar cult suggests that its followers devote a portion (usually 10%) of their income of the church, called a tithe. I think this is an excellent idea (sometimes those crazy God people have an OK idea), and have committed to donating 5% of my income and 5% of my time to stopping the global apocalypse we seem to be always on the precipice of. I figure if I have enough to go to a nice restaurant once in a while, I have enough to

spare, so I sponsor a sheep at Farm Sanctuary and give money to Moveon.org and Greenpeace and NOW and Alternatives to Marriage Project when they send me pleading emails, and I donate my time. This year I’ve been typing a cookbook and writing an essay for the luddite cooks at the restaurant where I work once in a while. The cookbook should be out there in the world, the recipes are great and the restaurant is an institution more people should know about, and I feel good about helping them.

The other great thing about keeping things micro is that you don’t have to feel like you’re shooting yourself in the foot if you help out other business owners. If you are determined to keep it small, you’re freed from the bonds of competition because you don’t feel like you have to hold back any good ideas or tricks in case you want to profit from them later. I have no secret recipes and no business secrets. If someone wanted to open up a meal delivery service in my same community I wouldn’t be overjoyed, but because I limit my client base I am confident I would still be fine. Once in a while I get calls from people starting up similar services around the country, and it’s a good feeling to support them. I try to keep myself honest and transparent. This saves a lot of time and wasted energy and forced niceness used to cover up a terror of others who do the same sort of work you do.

. It’s just distasteful to me how much shit we seem to be pumping out these days, and I wish we (me included, you should have seen the horrid essays I deleted from this site during it’s recent revamp) would take a breath and ask ourselves if our art contributes anything to our overstuffed society, or if it’s just self-promotion?

Let’s keep it small, keep it beautiful and precious and intimate, and keep it pure.

Sparrow

As these thoughts were percolating in my head, I happened to read an article in Utne (March-April 2006 issue) that dovetailed in a tidy and pleasant way with my own ideas on small is beautiful. It was a profile of a man named Sparrow, and that fact enough was enough to almost make me stop reading. I am not overly fond of men in general, and don’t usually make it a point to read about their lives. In addition, like many children of hippies I have an internalized distrust of people with hippie names. But I was on a plane and therefore in the absolute middle of the horror of America – people reading their supermarket thrillers, babies squalling because their parents just fed them entire packets of M&Ms, high school girls wearing those appalling tight fleecy sweatsuits with brand names written on the asses and Ugg boots, loud

bird feeder, visit lobbies of famous hotels…I spend three dollars a day, and my life is plentiful. I can teach this to America.” The profile on him included a bit about his ice recipes: “For a number of years, my primary recipe project was the cookbook Cooking with Ice…I began to think about cooking with ice, as, of course, a paradox. You cook with ice, and the ice (almost immediately)disappears. No one will ever find ice in your food. Similarly, most meaningful subjects in life are invisible. Time can’t be seen. Love is invisible…Cooking with ice became a way for me to discuss the Eternal invisibilities."