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Chapter6 a Few extra slices of Our Daily Bread Silly me. For years, I thought food was for eating. Or dining or snacking or munching or whatever term might best describe the process of sending vittles down the human “swallow pipe.” Little did I realize there are broader applications for our daily bread—along with our daily cheeseburgers, our daily barbecue , our daily hot dogs, our daily doughnuts, our daily pizza, our daily fries, our daily biscuits and gravy, our daily bacon-wrapped chicken livers, our daily ice cream, and other nutritious daily fare guaranteed to broaden the shadows cast by gourmands throughout Southern Appalachia. Self-defense, for instance. I discovered this rather unusual approach in the spring of 2009 after chatting with a Claiborne County woman named Wanda Bray. I had heard about her killer chili and called for the recipe. “You just put tomato juice, hamburger meat, chili powder, chili seasoning, and chili beans in a pot and cook it,” she said. “That’s all.” No, that’s not all. Seems it wasn’t necessarily the ingredients that made her chili so special. It was the delivery. Wanda put some real juice on it, that little “something extra” separating her dish from all the others. She served it hot. Very hot. And we ain’t talkin’ spices. “I had just took it off the stove,” Wanda told me from her home in Harrogate, Tennessee. “It hadn’t had time to cool off none.” That’s startling enough for an unprepared tongue, I suppose. But when the recipient of lava con carne is the entire face of an intruder, not just the mouth, it can be quite a hit. Indeed, a direct hit. A Few Extra Slices of Our Daily Bread 138 You see, Wanda took food delivery to new heights when she used her chili to fend off three would-be robbers. “I had just sat down on the couch to eat and watch TV when they come bustin ’ in,” she said. (“They,” according to Captain David Honeycutt of the Claiborne County Sheriff’s Office, are now three new guests of the government. No word if the Cross Bar Hotel serves chili for lunch or supper.) “They come runnin’ in here, shovin’ their fingers in my face like they had a gun,” said Wanda, who, by the way, throws right-handed. “I could tell it wasn’t no gun. It made me mad. I was too mad to be scared. I reckon it was just a reflex action. One of ’em, he got right up in my face, and I hit him with the chili. He got scared and run out th’door. Then my granddaughter threw me a broom handle, and I went t’beatin’ another fellow with it.” The intruders grabbed some of Wanda’s medicine as they hot-footed out. Their getaway was slowed somewhat when Wanda’s neighbors, alerted by her screams, began pelting them with rocks. Shortly thereafter, they were apprehended by Captain Honeycutt, who was investigating an earlier robbery at a nearby service station. I asked Wanda if she had a name for her crime-fighting concoction. “No, I reckon it’s just Grandmaw’s Chili,” she chuckled. “I can laugh about it now, but I sure couldn’t laugh then.” Captain Honeycutt clearly was impressed by Wanda’s spunk. “We might start a tactical chili defense class,” he quipped, “and we may get her to teach it.” One year after Wanda’s defensive chili toss, I realized food could also be used to perpetrate crime: A woman in Kingsport was arrested for domestic assault after she cold-cocked her boyfriend with a can of green beans. Police said she swung with such force it dented the can. (Which, as far as I’m concerned, showed the shallow level of police investigations and news reporting these days. Who’s to say this woman didn’t buy the can already dented, on sale in the discount aisle, and merely gave her beau a love tap? Inquiring minds want to know.) Anyhow, the story sent me to the canned veggie section of a Knoxville supermarket , where I spent a full two hours trying to find the perfect-sized container to carry into a fight. Ultimately, my search was in vain—illustrating how hopelessly out of touch with reality corporate America has become. Calories, carbs, sodium, and fat grams are fine. But doesn’t the food industry realize consumers also need “fightability” information on the...

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