#jack hitt

Well, it all began at Christmas two years ago when my daughter was four years old. And it was the first time that she had ever asked about what did this holiday mean. And so I explained to her that this was celebrating the birth of Jesus. And she wanted to know more about that, and we went out and bought a kid's Bible and had these readings at night. She loved them, wanted to know everything about Jesus.

So we read a lot about his birth and about his teaching. And she would ask constantly what that phrase was, and I would explain to her that it was "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." And we would talk about those old words and what that all meant.

And then one day we were driving past a big church, and out front was an enormous crucifix. She said, who is that? And I guess I'd never really told that part of the story. [LAUGHS] So I had to sort of, "yeah, well, that's Jesus, and I forgot to tell you the ending. Yeah, well, he ran afoul of the Roman government. This message that he had was so radical and unnerving to the prevailing authorities at the time that they had to kill him. They came to the conclusion that he would have to die. That message was too troublesome."

It was about a month later after that Christmas, we had gone through the whole story of what Christmas meant. And it was mid-January, and her preschool celebrates the same holidays as the local schools, so Martin Luther King Day was off. So I knocked off work that day, and I decided we'd play and I'd take her out to lunch.

And we were sitting in there, and right on the table where we happened to plop down was the art section of the local newspaper, and there, big-as-life, was a huge drawing by a 10-year-old kid in the local schools of Martin Luther King. And she said, "who's that?" And I said, "Well, as it happens, that's Martin Luther King, and he's why you're not in school today. So we're celebrating his birthday. This is the day we celebrate his life."

And she said, "so who is he?" I said, "well, he was a preacher." And she looks up at me and goes, "for Jesus?" And I said, "yeah, actually he was. But there was another thing that he was really famous for, which is that he had a message."

And you're trying to say this to a four-year-old. This is the first time they ever hear anything, so you're just very careful about how you phrase everything. So I said, well, yeah, he was a preacher and he had a message. And she said, "what was his message?" I said, "well, he said that you should treat everybody the same, no matter what they look like."

I (Monica) have been loving watching the Netflix adaptation of Michael Pollan’s “Cooked” this week.

https://www.netflix.com/watch/80022456

When I was in Berkeley on the Pollan-run 11th Hour Fellowship, they told us there would be a camera crew at our closing night dinner but I had no idea how much we’d all be in the final documentary.

To hear what was happening in Pollan’s basement while they were filming upstairs, check out our Last Meal “Chewing the Fat” episode where I talk to Jack Hitt, Bernardo Lopez and Michael Pollan about how to roast a pig--and the delicacy known as boiled peanuts.

By Jack Hitt, Lapham's Quarterly (May 27, 2013)

Precisely when the ancient primates who preceded us Homo sapiens actually turned the corner to become human is one of those running battles in anthropology. Theorists scrutinize the long arc of gradual evolution to find a slight nick in the curve and there, it’s argued, our glorious ascent begins: when we began to walk upright, when we grunted out the first phonemes of speech, when we fabricated the earliest tools. Simply invoke the phrase “savannas of Africa” and inside our minds blooms a tiny movie, the tale of humanity’s bloody contest with and eventual triumph over nature somewhere around the time we left the security of dense jungles for the more progressive world flourishing at the forest’s edge.

This little drama, our secular genesis myth, divides early humanity into male hunter-gatherers and fireside female domestics. The men boldly marched out each morning with their spears and clubs to bring down a mammoth, while the women tended the fire and kept up the stores of food and clothing. Some twenty thousand years ago, life was basically the painting Neanderthal by Frank Frazetta. It’s so easy to flatter ourselves with this cartoon—hunting aurochs and taking down mammoths sounds strong and macho, but alternate theories have long suggested that a great deal of early protein probably came from more manageable prey, like vermin or deer. Spearing rabbits wouldn’t inspire Frazetta, nor, apparently, the Paleolithic artists at Lascaux, either. Which is why we’ve been spinning some version of this PR story ever since the Aurignacian-Perigordian people of southern France first scratched the smooth walls of a cave with a piece of bone.

A recent theory from Robert Sussman and Donna Hart holds that perhaps a great deal of our finest human traits may well have been refined by our ability to “evade predators.” According to scientific estimates, Sussman and Hart argue, some “6 percent to 10 percent of early humans were preyed upon according to evidence that includes teeth marks on bones, talon marks on skulls, and holes in a fossil cranium into which sabertooth cat fangs fit,” and so we were under intense evolutionary pressure to develop a different kind of skill: running away. “Many of our modern human traits, including those of cooperation and socialization,” may have come from escaping predators, not hunting them. The glorious history of Homo sapiens may have less in common with the feral troglodytes found in The Clan of the Cave Bear than with Brave Sir Robin from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Artist Nathan Gelgud brings Jack Hitt's Bunch of Amateurs to life.