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You know you are on a loopy track when you see the dedication of The Ghost of Craven Snuggs—it’s to a decrepit International pickup truck. When is the last time you read a murder mystery where the lead investigator was dead 15 years? You will find that novel in the collection of the Grand Marais Public Library.
A retired Grinnell College theater professor, Sandy Moffett, gives us a darkly comedic tour of Iowa and its huge corporate farms, corrupt politics, and faint reasons for hope. The owners of the three largest pork and chicken producers end up very dead, mixed with animal waste. A hunky, frustrated biology professor, his attractive former student, and a small-town Sheriff ’s office combine to investigate— aided by that pickup truck….
Most of us have to choose continually to “forget” the origin of all that food we consume. Many eggs, and chickens, and pork pieces come from animals penned in full time, slaughtered on inhumane production lines by poorly paid workers with no benefits. (The COVID-19 pandemic revealed some of that with sick workers employed by sicker corporations avoiding government enforcements.) The corn and soybeans to feed us and those animals are grown on great, dead prairies whose grasses have no roots and, for the last 40 years, have been “protected” by Round Up, an herbicide and also a known carcinogen.
So, I shop at the Co-op for free range chicken eggs but have not found bacon that does not come from penned sows whose piglets eat each other’s tails.
Character development in this first novel is a bit thin: the story moves along led by that damned pickup truck. We are treated to trophy widows with their lives in transition. The Governor is a boob. The small-town Sheriff ’s office is a funny place. The story gets a tad preachy, but there are a few lines that stopped me dead to appreciate:
“Chief Charles Hinman, Chief of the State Department of Criminal Investigation, is beside himself. No, he has completely surrounded himself.”
“JJ used to drink that (Pappy Van Winkle whiskey) to impress people,” Connie says. “He drank it with ginger ale.” (No whiskey snob, him.)
“You’ve gotta show people how they can stop looking at our land like a bank account that they can spend down to nothing, then move to someplace warm.”
“It was a dark and snowy Saturday night.” (The American Book Review ranked the phrase Moffett parodied as No. 22 on its “Best first lines from novels” list. No apologies to Bulwer-Lytton needed.)
The book will be back in the library’s collection by the time this column appears. At 200 pages, you will not spend more than a day on it unless you stop to sleep or do something else. Or you can buy it through Amazon, Walmart, Target, Thrift Books, E-Bay, and elsewhere.
If you are curious about the novel or its author, go to Sandy Moffett: The Ghost of Craven Snuggs | Grinnell College. I was disappointed to discover that the Storm Lake Times, that paragon of small-city journalism, has no mention of Snuggs. It seems right up Editor Art Cullen’s alley. Snuggs was reviewed in the Des Moines Register. Book review: Grinnell College professor’s … Moffett wrote, “I wrote the book to see if humor and satire might be more effective than my diatribe. It has certainly gotten more attention. And it was a lot more fun to write.”
After reading the novel and “penning” this column, it was time to read this week’s chapter from Inhabiting Eden: Christians, the Bible and the Ecological Crisis for our Lenten reading. The author is Patricia K. Tull, a teacher at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss where our food and meat come from. It is even less pretty than Snuggs suggests.
We have plenty of world food, but the poor everywhere are ill-fed. Food borne illnesses are on the rise. We buy water in plastic bottles for 800 percent more than tap water; 40 percent of bottled water is tap water. Why when we get our water from Lake Superior, e,g,?
Four corporations control 80 percent of the world’s beef and two control ¾ of the world’s grain. One of the latter is Minnesota’s Cargill. Corporate and rich folk own huge swaths of American farmland; except for a few experiments, small family farms have been swallowed up.
Inhabiting Eden includes this quotation from The Long-Legged House by Wendell Barry: “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what is good for us would be good for the world…. We have been wrong.”
The question for all of us is what do we do, by ourselves and as communities? And how can it be effective? Is composting enough? Do we e-mail Bill Gates about his plans for the 250,000 acres he owns? Do we ask Gene’s and Johnson’s groceries, and Buck’s and the Home Center to be more like the Coop, product by product? Do we ask Cargill what it is doing about all this consolidation and commodification? Should the Anti-trust divisions consider breaking up those titans? Senators Klobuchar and Smith take notice. Pete Stauber, too.
Or?
Steve Aldrich is a retired Hennepin County lawyer, judge, and mediator. He and Myrna moved here in 2016. He likes to remember that he was a Minnesota Super Family Lawyer before being elected to the bench. Steve writes this column to learn more about his new home area, to share his learnings with others—and to indulge his curiosities. He has not served in any military. He loves to perform weddings. Bouquets and brickbats to the editor or stevealdrich41@gmail.com. © Stephen C. Aldrich and News Herald, 2022.
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