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Inspired by Grains

Long, short, whole, refined. Fourth place in most food group Olympics –just out of the hardware. This week on Salted and Styled we mill around the topic of grains. Today photographer, Chia Chong, shares some of her travel memories of the quiet rice fields in Vietnam.

Bee Calm and Carry On

If you drive far enough away from civilization you come upon something that feels more authentically like life. It’s not a life with which I’m familiar, and yet the wide-open space, the simplicity of sprawling fields cut into perfect right angles, feels just right.

We descend upon the Lee Family Farm in Bulloch County at sunrise, the sleep still in the corners of our citified eyes as the bright sun cuts across the horizon. It’s eerie and beautiful—in the distance, a few workers dot the fields in meditative labor, looking like solitary statues emerging from a thick blanket of silencing fog.

grain-fed

Legs. That’s what they called her. She packed the grinder, her six kids and a bag of barley and headed for a hollow in the hills of Kentucky. Three thousand miles and no food save for some milk souring in her oft-trampled bosom. On arrival, she clamped the metal contraption to a beam that held up the dirt floor cabin, fattened the fire. Her upright children whipped the handle one by one to see who could fill a bread pan full of flour fastest. Pancakes griddled on the wood stove. Legs boiled down sorghum from the cane she had harvested in the fields. After feasting, her heavily biceped offspring hoisted themselves through the glassless windows and leapt into the woods.