On a clear sunny below-zero morning a few months ago, I found two mice trapped in an old bucket in our barn, both quite dead. One was only a skeleton, intact but literally nothing left but bones; the other one, belly fat, eyes bright, looked like he could scurry away at any moment. He had bright red blood frozen in his whiskers and on his paws. The bottom of the bucket was covered with pink tracks from the blood on his hands. I felt a moment of sadness at their plight, then took the bucket over to the woods out back, shook their frozen remains into last years leaves, and went on about my day. But as the day wore on, my thoughts kept returning to them. What had happened here? Or more to the point, how had it happened? I couldn’t help wondering about what had happened between the two as hunger and desperation set in. Did the fat mouse lay with the weaker mouse as he slowly faded, sharing their warmth and comforting each other against the inevitable? How long did he wait until he finally started to eat the other mouse, as any sensible creature eventually would? No matter the morals of propriety, the instinct for survival supersedes all else, and rightly so. Or was the fat mouse a tyrant, attacking and killing the weaker mouse as soon as he grasped the gravity of the situation? Or maybe Ive got it all wrong. Maybe the skeleton mouse was the aggressive one, and the fat mouse fought for his life against the tyrant, winning a few more precious hours of life against the odds. If so, I hope he had a hot meal when it was over.
I offer this morbid little meditation about hunger and desperation as simply a different view of something we all take for granted: food. No people have ever been as well-fed as the first-world countries of the world are today; it is safe to say that America is the first society in the history of mankind where the rich got skinny and the poor got fat. The machinery of corporate agribusiness keeps the supermarket shelves stocked with a greater variety of edibles than ever available to any people in history. Admittedly, much of it is barely classifiable as food, and nearly as much of it is completely devoid of the ancient ritual of cooking, but I confess I was giddy as a schoolgirl to find fresh cherimoyas at the local Kroger last week. This is something that simply did not happen outside the biggest cities before the last decade, and rarely then. When I was a kid, we got oranges in our Christmas stockings; fresh fruit in winter was still a rarity here only forty years ago. In short, we aren’t just lucky, we are spoiled. And like the most spoiled and privileged, we have no idea just how fortunate we are until something puts it into perspective.
As I lay in bed that night, one question kept me awake for hours, turning over and over in my mind. Which mouse would I be? We are all, I suppose, just mice in a really big bucket. Without food, if the chips were down, all options exhausted, would I be the weak one who died first? Or would I be the compassionate survivor, helping my friend on his final journey. Would I be the victorious underdog, eating the tyrant without a trace of guilt? Or would I be the tyrant?
Artist Bio
A twelfth generation West Virginian, Marion Ohlinger was born and raised on his family's ancestral farm in Mason County. His thirty-year career as a chef has carried him to nearly fifty countries, five continents, all fifty states, and to helm kitchens in such diverse locales as Vail, Scottsdale, Seattle, and backcountry Alaska. In 2003, Chef Marion returned to West Virginia to open Solera, the regions first Spanish/Latin American restaurant, introducing the concept of modern molecular gastronomic theory and Appalachia's first cevicheria. In 2009, Solera joined the budding farm-to-table movement and evolved into Richwood Grill, to better utilize the variety of local ingredients available and to explore Appalachia's role in global culinary culture. His Appalachian Global Dinner Series, a pop-kitchen concept now in its sixteenth year, continues to break new culinary ground by adapting modern Appalachian ideas and ingredients to such regional cuisines as Maori, Surinamese, and Zanzibari, and has been called "...the most ambitious expansion of Appalachian cuisine in decades." His latest restaurant, Hill & Hollow, a continuation of the themes and philosophy established at Richwood Grill with a deeper focus on the exploration of Appalachian culinary history, opened in Morgantown in 2015.