flattery: don't export your best peaches

If you haven't figured it out by now, I do my best work when I am simply plagiarizing someone else' best work.

Or, if I am feeling not particularly lazy, I will use it as my canvas or reflecting pool. My own thoughts emerge take shape in social co-generation, so when blogging I just pretend these other amazing people are having a conversation with me.

Since they are pretending that I am in the audience when they write, I consider it a fair exchange.

My friend Patti over at 37days was talking about "don't export your best peaches."

And it reminded me of Sarah Hempel's blogging on eating locally.

In a literal way, eating locally is about tasting the goodness from your area instead of buying things imported from others. It is a goodness and it promotes many goodnesses.

Not exporting your best peaches is about cultivating goodness and beauty where you are. And learning to appreciate what is around you. Same themes.

For my own part, I love hand-made food. There is a pride and joy in making it. One controls the ingredients. And the sharing of it is a personal act of giving. I am giving you the vessel of my creativity, my skill and my caring.

Taste is more about scent and memory than it is about salt, sour, sweet, bitter and umami. Eating is more than simply about buying and swallowing.

Our sense of smell gives meaning to the combinations that flow over our taste buds. And our sense of place and communion gives us affiliation and belonging.

Eating good and well and locally becomes a celebration of who we are. (Try eating in any part of France or Italy without getting a dose of that!)

So value good food, give your patronage to purveyors of good food and lay your table with good food.

This Thanksgiving, remember that as we come together around good food.

And don't forget to brine your bird using the Martha Stewart 2004 recipe. With local carrots, onion, and celery it is a very. good. thing.