Wherein We Favor You With a Menu Page From Our Forage-To-Table Restaurant
The Farm-To-Table Movement Is Fine. As Far As It Goes. If You’re Into Murder. At The Rustic Plank, We Know That You Know That We Can Do Better. For Your Meal. And The World.
Salutations. The furl of birch bark you hold in your hands tells a story. It is the story not just of a human couple, Molly and Jess, that cashed out of the tech startup they founded with inherited wealth to start a Restaurant Without Walls for people who think deeply about the way they eat and their impact on the world. Molly and Jess know that for people as mindful and discerning as you, it is not enough to eat an overpriced meal, it is at least as important to eat the story of that meal.
When Molly and Jess retired at the age of 37, they traveled the world to reflect and to gather the stories of other cultures where the plumbing is not as good, and cars are super-little, and the cooking smells are weird. When they got back (“I missed my garden too much!” laughs Molly, lapsing in and out of the British accent she picked up on her travels), they noticed that all their friends were obsessed with two things: 1) workouts that required them to flip truck tires, and 2) the so-called Farm-to-Table “movement”. After concluding that the truck tires were not for him (“I’ve always felt it was important for my shoulders and my hips and my ankles to all be the same width across,” shrugs Jess, sitting on a split rail fence and stroking Denali, recently retired from an Iditarod sled team. Jess tears up a little as he peers into Denali’s soulful eyes. “Sometimes I feel like he emancipated us,” Jess tells us.)
Molly and Jess quickly realized that so-called Farm-to-Table was really just industrialized murder on a small scale, and that, as admirable are the strides made in crafting the stories of the farmers who provide the food, the narratives of the animals themselves — “to say nothing of the plants!” adds Molly, now full-on British — were all but ignored.
They were also troubled by the fact that the animals in question had still been Raised in Captivity, and the vegetables and fruits still faced the Brutality of the Harvest. Molly and Jess wondered if there was a better way. A way that would honor the stories of our food, and let diners experience the delectable self-righteousness that comes of judging the meal of your neighbor — a meal soaked in innocent blood and echoing with terrified screams.
So they started The Rustic Plank, the world’s first FORAGE-To-Table restaurant(“we call it ‘dining with dignity,’” says Molly, who’s overshot the landing strip some and is now speaking in the Cockney accent of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins) . All the meat served at The Rustic Plank has died a natural death — whether from old age, or a lightning strike — after a Cage-Free life. At The Rustic Plank, you can get to know your meal as an individual — your lamb shank is not just some hunk of well-seasoned leg-flesh of some rando, it is the lower leg of Little Eunice, a Lamb Taken Too Soon, and survived by her brother Gerald, and her mother Emily, a Lamb who enjoyed meadow-cavorting and collected vintage film projectors. You will learn that Eunice was cut down by a passing Audi A4, and that she loved Shaun the Sheep and the later works of Kurosawa. You may read an interview with Eunice’s killer, and may post on her Facebook tribute page. On your way out, you can opt to scatter a handful of her bonemeal at the base of the lilac bushes she loved, or into the feed trough of Travis, a hog of whom she was fond.
You can enjoy a bowl of Hezekiah’s Hospice Mutton Stew, or Myrtle’s Courageous Battle With Cancer Turkey Pot Pie. You can sample the Special we call What the Fox Left — A Fritter Sampler Comprised of the Indistinguishable Predation Remains of the Chicks Leona, Jasper, Jeremy, and Fiona. In the spring, we’ll be serving our Flash Flood Platter In Honor Of Those Who Were Claimed By the Rushing Waters, That May or May Not Include the Slow-Footed Chickens Gwendolyn and Sarah, and Perhaps the Goat Maurice, Who Is Blind.
Now, at this point in the origin story of any menu, you’re likely saying “I feel pretty good about my choice, but is there any way this restaurant could feel MORE vainglorious about the unconstested virtuousness of my meal?” At The Rustic Plank, that we say “Fuck, yeah!”
At The Rustic Plank, we don’t stop at the Fulfilled-Life-and-Ethical-Death approach of other so-called farm-to-table murder bistros like, say, The Cherished Hen downtown, or The Saucy Butcherwench out by the interstate, we hold ourselves to a higher, smugger standard. Molly puts it best, especially since she’s reined it in some, and is back in the Gwyneth Patltrow-to-Kate-Winslet range of British-soundingness: “we believe, in a way that does not judge you for the slaughter you choose to perpetrate on your sibling species, in a very simple principle, namely that ‘if it casts a shadow, it has a soul.’”
Molly is what’s called a “deadfall vegan,” which means that she will only eat plant matter that has fallen to the ground of its own volition. When Molly twists off a sprig of mint from her window box herb garden, or pops the fiddlehead off a fern, she asks the plants permission and thanks it for its sacrifice. At harvest time, Molly becomes so stricken about the suffering of her plant-based companions, so overcome by her Radical Compassion® that she lies on the forest floor apologizing to the mosses. “I can’t bear to watch,” she says, salt rivulets winding down her grief-mottled face. “Lots of people, they think if it hasn’t got a face it hasn’t got feelings. And even though I would never, ever judge you for the atrocities you’re willing to shovel into your greedy, greedy mouth, I can hear the screaming of the beets. So you go on ahead and order up another Genocide Platter. You selfish fucking monster.” She fingers her “WWMD” (What Would Morrissey Do?) bracelet and dissolves into a fresh round of sobbing. “The orchard,” she says, faltering, her voice falling to a whisper. “The fruits are so afraid.”
Jess, who remembers they’re trying to run a business over here, leads her away. “She’s pretty weak from hunger,” he says. “She asks so much of herself. Can I tell you about our dairy?”
“I hate you!” shrieks Molly from a kind of fainting couch fashioned from corn husks.
Jess smiles expansively at her and murmurs “She’s been cutting again. Found her in a pasture last week, curled at the base of a birch, cradling some wilting asparagus. She’d also been eating poop again. ‘It’s what my plant sisters eat, Jess. I will become as they are.’ Not gonna lie. It’s getting pretty tough. Anyhoo.”
Unlatching a broad barn door, Jess gestures with pride at the Hazmat-looking cows and goats inside, chewing away at their cud with giant crinkling dirigible packs on their backs, connected by hoses to their buttholes.
“This is the latest in methane-recapture,” he beams. “We’ve been carbon-neutral for two years, now. But like six months back, when I read that DARPA had been funding research on fart-powered farming, I looked into it, and here we are.”
Lots of so-called farm-to-table places, like that Piebald Pig, near the Civic Center, or Artemis’ Bow, down by City Hall, CLAIM they care about the environment and their footprint, mostly they are but they’re basically like coal-fired slaughterhouses compared to The Rustic Plank. When guests first arrive here, lots of them ask “Where are the tables? This just looks like a rutted mud yard.”
And, yes, The Rustic Plank may lack certain of the “amenities” of a traditional “restaurant” — seating, for instance (“wood crime,” is what Molly calls furniture), and utensils (“earth raping mineral theft,” is how Jess, eyes darting to Molly to make sure he gets it right, characterizes metal mining — she mouths the words along with him in a super-intense way).
The upside? Of dining next to a hog wallow? Using only your hands while standing in puddle? You don’t have to pay. Jess explains: “Maybe four months ago, Molly disappeared for a few days. She showed up naked, covered in scratches. And told me the lettuces had decreed that ‘currency is complicity,’ so now we don’t take money. You can barter for your meal — a bale of hay is good for a round of apps, for example. Or… you can sing. With Jess. Down by the pond. She, like… will serenade a potato. They’re these improvised songs. That’re pretty atonal, frankly. She says the plants respond to different harmonic scales than we do. So. If you wanted to strip down with her and, I don’t know, naked-croon at some chives. That’s an option.”
“It’s going great,” concludes Jess, hustling over to a four-top along the fence line, where a mud-caked Molly was screaming at the patrons, urging them to “Heed the parsnip! Morrissey is watching! Beware the ides of kale!”
“How you folks doing tonight?” asks Jess, wrestle-walking Molly back toward the barn. “Be with you in a sec.” Jess is smiling so hard. So, so hard. While Molly brandishes some leeks at their guests, a vegan warning.
You can find longer essays, satire, fiction, and info on the workshops I teach in Chicago on my site: ianbelknap.com — also, check out the WRITE CLUB podcast
