I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Gaming the Game Yesterday, I spent a not inconsiderable amount of time messing about with roasting some game birds that I serendipitously picked up earlier in the week. I had two mallards and two pheasants, although one pheasant has not yet been roasted.1 I've not messed with small game birds much, mostly because they are not all that easy to find State-side - although I confess I did not spend a lot of time looking. Hereabouts, however, I find game - birds and otherwise - with great regularity. These birds came from the intermittent market which occurs on Parliament Street in York. Doubtless there is a schedule, but I've not figured it out yet, so when I was on my way to campus to take pictures of photocopies of 14th- and 15th-century wills, it was a pleasant surprise. The stall specializes in game and smoked bits and bobs, and what convinced me to pull my wallet out of my pocket was the four-kippers-for-five-quid special. The free sample was the deal-sealer; quite simply the best kipper I've ever tasted. They were hanging in an open rack and the smell was fantastic. Well, once I had my wallet out, the four-game-birds-for-ten-quid special was almost an inevitability, even without free samples. Feeling virtuous, I did not buy any crackling from the tent down the way. As I said, I had two mallards, and two pheasants. The mallards, to eyes accustomed to 'ranched' US ducks, were tiny. They were not much larger than my palm. The pheasants were somewhat larger. This made me worry about overcooking them, after all, they were so small. Still, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall provided some reassurance, via The River Cottage Meat Book, and I had at them. For the record, the pheasant with the cabbage underneath it, was spectacular. The point that stuck with me, though, was that these were wild, or at least semi-wild, birds. I had pretty good sources in NYC, and the ducks I got from them were very good, but they were the size of small chickens - they were farmed, or ranched, or whatever it is that you do with ducks. These are not. It seems to me that this is another facet of the difference between the way that USAicans and the English view and think about animals. To be sure, some of it is the difference between living in a big city and living in a village outside a medium-sized city, but I think it's deeper than that. Urbanization has contributed to the average American's disconnect with the sources of his or her food, but more than that, it's the monolithic miles of monoculture crops - animal and vegetable. Land here is, if not strictly speaking multi-use, in small enough chunks to appear multi-use. The sheep in the field next to the cabbage may not be rotated onto the cabbage field next year, but as you drive by, it's borne in on you that it's all part of a system. There are no endless Kansas cornfields here. The same thing shows up in the love of gardens and allotments. Gardening is huge. TV shows, radio shows, flower shows - they're everywhere. And my spring greens have started to come in! 1: Yes, it is Lent, and yes we are following our usual practice of Medieval Lent, i.e. no meat, dairy, or eggs for the duration, saving one feast day each week. Yesterday was that day. Luddite'sLog, 6 April 2014 © 2014 Jeff Berry

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