[RE]birth
May updates
This past month has been dominated by one big event: the birth of Wynn Jennings Upholt, who arrived on May 20, two days after my forty-second birthday. We feel blessed that everyone is healthy and happy.
There’s some professional news, too. Just hours after I sent out last month’s update, I learned that I am a finalist for a James Beard Award for feature reporting (for my story about fish fraud on the Gulf Coast, published collaboratively by Inc. and FERN). The winners will be announced at a ceremony next Saturday in Chicago. I will not be attending.
Then, a few days before Wynn’s arrival, the second issue of Southlands began shipping. (If you’re a subscriber, you should have received your copy! Let me know if not.) Next week, as I get back to work, I’ll be turning my attention to editing the magazine’s third issue. Months ago, I decided to give that issue a theme that felt like it would be relevant to my life: (RE)BIRTH.
Granted, I’m only two weeks into this new life, but the theme has already proved more salient than I expected. Because Wynn’s birth is feeling like a rebirth of my own, for varied reasons. One is that, from his earliest days of consciousness, I want him to feel rooted in this place we call home. I’ve never been much of a naturalist, or at least not much of a taxonomist—never known the call of the local birds, or the names of all the vines that thread up the New Orleans fencing. I’m beginning the process of learning these things, so I can pass them on. And while it’ll be a few years before Wynn is really in adventure mode, I’m excited to start working down my checklist of sites and sounds around Louisiana that has long been deferred by work.
Indeed, I’m hopeful, too, that those adventures will be a kind of redirection in my career. For several years, much of my reporting has been afield; I’m reluctant now to get very far from home, and miss the changes we’re already seeing in this little guy. But somehow that does not feel like a sacrifice. Through constraints come new ideas, right? Or, really, old ideas: when I first conceived of the book that became The Great River, I imagined I’d be writing little meditative essays about the batture in Mississippi; in order to sell the book, I had to get more ambitious. That worked, and now I have a much bigger platform. I’m happy to use it now to dig my roots more deeply into this muddy delta.
May interview
Common Appalachia: Who Owns Southern Stories?
May scenes
Meat in the news
Meat has been in the headlines this month, in interesting ways — especially in the Texas Senate race. Republicans are making much of James Talarico’s eating habits. He eats meat, as it turns out, but has a vegan girlfriend—oh the horror—and once aspired to run a political campaign that was all-vegan.
Also, Kenny Torella, one of the moment’s great critics of the meat industry, has a piece in Vox about the so-called “meat paradox.” Which specifically describes the fact that many people profess to love animals, and yet eat meat that comes out of a system that is cruel to animals. The meat paradox is a concept that’s bounced around since at least 2010, and, I’ll be frank, it’s a framing that’s always bugged me. It’s not wrong of course, but it feels slightly wrongheaded to me, beginning where we should end: assuming that eating meat is a paradox, a failure of our values, and calling all us meat-eaters hypocrites. It feels incurious.
Kenny’s article came on the occasion of musician Billie Eilish saying you can’t both love animals and eat them. (That caused quite a stir on social media.) But I think there’s a sleight of hand going on here. Is “animals” really a thing that you can love? It’s a category that includes tardigrades, tapeworms, and tuna. What people tend to love is what’s proximate: this dog in my house; this horse in my stable. Perhaps even this orca on the poster tacked to a bedroom wall. But “animals” are a taxonomic category, not an entity that our minds can really grasp. We are not wired to extend love toward such categories, but to actual, concrete creatures.
None of this justifies the existing meat industry, of course, which exploits precisely this fact — building a vast, deliberate gulf between the steak on the plate and the animal we might actually care about. But I think it reorients the question. How did we come to have a system that so thoroughly obscures the animal origins of our food? Is it possible to build a system that collapses that distance without collapsing under its own weight? Those are the questions I’m considering now.
Congratulations, dad! Cute kiddo!
On the Meat Eater front, I eat meat and LOVE animals, though as you pointed out that's mostly directed at my animals and wildlife. I do have a different take on livestock but also wish the meat industry wasn't so jacked up.
Who-whoop Boyce & Liz! Paddles up to Wynn Jennings!