Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for March 05, 2013

Fancy feasting?

Yeah, farmers put a lot of artistry into their hay-baling!

I wounder what is a good year for hay?

Hmm, I need more fancy fruit snacks…

I laughed out loud because I was just saying to someone yesterday how silly the overuse of the word artisanal has gotten.

My horse prefers natural forage when he can get it. The artisnal farmer is probably upset about the vanishing hay bales. With this years hay shortage they are expensive.

A few years ago we had a long cool spring and a delightful summer. I stopped at the hamburger stand in Dorris, CA, and listened to a couple hay growers talking about the mild weather. One of them was complaining that he had to do a fifth cutting instead of the usual three. Two extra cuttings off of one planting. Poor baby. The next year the market went nuts because of shortages mentioned above and people were going around stealing truckloads of hay from isolated hay barns. Crazy!

“Artisanal” is all about marketing.

“Artisanal” bread was originally bread that peasants made and ate.

“Artisanal” originally meant “crafted by artisans” — indicating that it was carefully made by skilled hands from carefully selected ingedients. Sadly, DDrazen is generally correct. “Artisanal” has become too often nothing more than a marketing gimmick — and that is the heart of Phoebe’s statement.

It doesn’t look very “artisanal” to me. It looks like you just picked it up off the ground.

Hee hee hee!

Well, hay does take work. It has to be harvested at just the right point of development, and carefully dried so that it isn’t prone to spontaneous combustion, and protected from fungus. But the main point is that it’s a lot easier in the winter to eat hay than to dig in the snow for last season’s grasses.

Sounds like something is going to be created. Fancy hay in. Anally artis out. (Probably thinks that’s fancy too!)

“Artisanal hay”, that must be what champions of Kentucky deby eats.