Daniel Berrigan, SJ (1921-2016)

Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ has died at the age of 94. In 1969, I ran across this photograph in a newspaper. I had no idea who he was, I wasn't even Catholic at the time, but I was gripped by the irony of the photo. I understood from the caption that he had just been arrested (in connection with Vietnam War protests), but I was struck by the look on his face.

"That," I remember saying to myself, "is the free man in the photo. He may have on the handcuffs, but he is the one who is free."

Today he is indeed free. May the lessons he taught with his words, his actions and his life go out into the world and bear fruit for freedom and justice everywhere.

He had a cameo role in the wonderful 1986 movie, The Mission, written by Robert Bolt. The personal character of the priest portrayed by Jeremy Irons always seemed to me to reflect Daniel Berrigan's best qualities.

The dangers of being a librarian

Librarians, even some of us retired ones, cannot leave well enough alone. Some poor kid asks for an article on soybeans for a middle school essay she is writing, and we pull up thousands of things online, pile stacks of plant books and encyclopedias on the counter and try to explain that if she is going to write about soybeans, she really should read up on Far East cuisine in general and that will make no sense unless she knows something about the history of the Chen Dynasty. We can't just say, "Here, this should help" and hand her a five page article from National Geographic.

I do this to myself. After posting about kale and greens and making snide remarks about people creating anything as ridiculous as collard green chips, I had to go look it up. And that led to this little item: "Like Kale Chips? Try Collard Chips!" Click on the title to learn more and to get a recipe. Spoiler alert: There is something in there about baseball, I think, but I skipped that part.

If you do a search, you will find recipes for spicy Parmesan collard chips and Cajun collard chips and ... Well, I will let you have the fun of doing the research and finding out how far you can go by yourself.

But I do have some interesting books here on the Chen Dynasty that may prove helpful.

Eat your greens!

When I was a wee bairn* in East Texas, one of the foods that we had on occasion and that I hated almost every time, was something called greens. They might be mustard greens or turnip greens (the leafy parts of mustard or turnip) or collard greens (the leafy parts of ... well, the whole thing, I suppose.) That is a picture of prepared collard greens, but IMHO, it could have been any of them. There was a difference in taste, but not enough to make any of them desirable at the time.My foggy recollection is that we had this toward the end of the month before the paychecks had come through and when the food budget was tight.

I can't recall the last time I ate any of those things. Probably in the cafeteria at university, where every year the Black Student Alliance treated us to a soul food dinner. Soul food, it turned out, consisted of pretty much what we ate in East Texas a lot of the time anyway. It was an oddity to lots of folks in the Midwest, who thought that things like black-eyed peas were for cattle.

At any rate, this morning as I ate my allegedly shockingly healthy breakfast sandwich of egg white, kale, roasted tomato and goat cheese on flatbread, something niggled in my brain and asked, "Is kale just fancy collard greens?"

Turns out they are related. (They are also all related to broccoli and cabbage.) I won't say that this discovery turned the kale to ashes in my mouth, but it does just go to show. What was once a semi-staple for the poor has become a darling of the fitness foodies. Our local market carries fresh kale in huge batches. We are encouraged to toss it into any and everything to add something or other. Not, I think, deliciosity, but things like anti-oxidants, vitamins A/K/C, fiber and something ominously called isothiocyanates. It has a lot of sulfur, too, which cannot be good. They even have kale chips -- barbecue-flavored and cool ranch and nacho. Baked or air-dried. Imagine someone over-processing and over-seasoning collard greens for the masses like this. My mind boggles.

I don't mind fresh spinach in my food, but I am going to be very suspicious of any greens in the future. Some of it may even turn out to be poke salad. AKA poke salat, poke sallet, etc. Look it up. It can be deadly if not properly prepared. There are those who say it is deadly under any circumstances. If it is anything like the collard greens of my vanished youth, I believe it.

*I was never a wee bairn, I suppose, although some Scottish blood flows through the veins from my mother's Mitchum family. My brother's middle name is Byron, after my father, and so I suppose he was once -- but definitely not now -- a wee Byron.

Only kidding! Love ya, kid, you know that.

Whew, how much coffee did I have with that kale? Or maybe it's just those isothiocyanates kicking in.