Among my many jobs, one is as a food columnist for a social networking site named Gather.com where I publish article/recipes under the title "Paisano" focused on what I call "peasant" food. Essentially it's about family cooking from around the world. One column may cover pot roast and the next fondue which has a gourmet tinge in this country but in its original incarnation as bread dipped in melted cheese, fondue was what Swiss cowherds ate.
I like Gather. It has a strong intellectual bent and the level of discourse is fairly high, being one of the few paid columnists on the site is an honor of sorts. But Gather is a for-profit company and sometimes it devolves to the lowest common denominator as it works to sell ads and build traffic to its site. For example, it recently hosted this discussion that's pretty clearly advertiser-supported.
"The Gather team challenges you to try making a Stouffers meal for the family to help free up your time and then to answer the following question: By spending less time at the stove, how do you spend moments that matter with your family?"
Try making a Stouffers meal? This is only a challenge if you can't read and don't have a microwave. Nevertheless, this query brought out the idiots:
"We both have busy schedules, but it's great to have something like Stoffer's [sic] so we can not spend as much time slaving away at the stove."
"Stouffers meals bring out happy casual conversation during dinner in my family, and that is a difficult thing to achieve."
"This winter, while cooking the stouffer's Lasagna [sic], I will be teaching my 7 year old how to crochet and knit."
Give me a break! You can't have a happy casual conversation without TV dinners? You're going to teach your kid to crochet and knit - amusing but not particularly useful skills - and not teach them to cook? Don't you have a responsibility to teach them how to live in the real world?
Although the bulk of the 100-plus comments were along these lines, a few people objected as I did:
"The moments that matter most are the moments when all are gathered in the kitchen together. The children are learning one of life's most basic skills, how to cook from scratch - a time of togetherness, creativity and closeness!"
and...
"It doesn't take that much longer to prepare quick easy meals from scratch.... there are tons of cookbooks out there on cooking from scratch with few ingredients. They don't have to be fancy meals, but cooking with the family around you is more rewarding that when you feed them stuff full of preservatives."
I realize I sound a bit harsh; after all Stouffer's doesn't hurt anyone. But I simply can't imagine a world where people don't prepare their own food for themselves and their families. My siblings and I grew up cooking because my mother considered it an essential survival skill. She worked a full-time job and my father traveled a lot, adding to her burden, so we learned to cook and sew (far more useful than knitting).
There was nothing ideal about those days, Mom was often short on patience and Dad would have us out weeding the garden in the middle of August. We all had chores we were assigned, and pretty much hated. But there was never any discussion about "family time." We lived together and worked together to maintain a household. As kids we usually helped with dinner - no shortage of family time there - and have memories of pulling the strings off home-grown beans or shucking home-grown corn for dinner, all tasks that can be accomplished with your family as company.
Sometimes supper was actually breakfast - scrambled eggs, sausage, and biscuits. Sometimes it was a hamburger or ham sandwich. But in the summer there were almost always sliced tomatoes and cucumbers dressed with nothing fancier than a bit of salt and pepper. There was corn on the cob (What? You don't have 5 minutes to cook corn on the cob?). And in the dead of winter a beef stew or pot of soup takes almost no time to prepare and a crock-pot handles the slow-cooking requirement perfectly.
I do confess to eating the occasional frozen pot pie or ordering out for pizza. Sometimes time is in short supply. But if it's always in short supply (and you still have time to read this column) then your problem isn't lack of time but managing it. So don't give me any garbage about "not having time to cook." If you don't like cooking and don't care about your family's health, you're entitled to that choice, but don't lie to yourself. Living on carryout pizza and Stouffers lasagna is a choice.
And if a Swiss cowherd can melt cheese and dip bread in it how hard could it be, really?
I came home from the farmers' market last Tuesday with a couple of pounds of tomatoes. To some folks, that makes me a brave or foolish man.
So far more than 1,000 people have officially been sickened by the latest salmonella outbreak. But, health care professionals say that in such estimates, for every reported case of sickness, more than 30 go unreported. This means something close to 40,000 people have been sickened to some degree.
This event was originally attributed to tomatoes from somewhere - no one knew exactly where. That's reassuringly specific, isn't it? Now the Food and Drug Administration says the source may not be tomatoes but peppers - or maybe cilantro.
Whatever the source, the problem isn't willful disregard for our safety by a malevolent tomato poisoner. It's an organizational problem. The larger an organization - in this case, Big Agriculture and its buddies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture - grows the more it seeks to simplify and find one-size-fits-all solutions. Sometimes this leads to efficiencies of scale resulting in reduced costs to customers (if we're lucky) and greater profits for owners. But in the case of our food, something's gone very wrong.
Commercial tomatoes are often gathered together from many sources at centralized packing plants. Some tomatoes may come from Florida, others from California, and some from Mexico or Guatemala. At these plants they're sorted according to size and color (apparent degree of ripeness) and repackaged for shipping to supermarkets. This is quite efficient for the purveyors. And at the store you're presented with a collection of uniform red spheres to choose from. But without knowing the origin of a given tomato, tracing the source of contamination becomes extremely difficult.
The solution is pretty straightforward: produce should be labeled with it's point of origin. Toys and clothing are so why not food? This might make the supply chain a bit less efficient and a bit more expensive, but it would make tracking contamination quite efficient given the scale of the agricultural system that feeds us.
But in implementing such a policy we need to be careful not to introduce an inefficiency of scale.
Now, as I've suggested, I know where my tomatoes are from, I even know the name of the couple who grew them. There's no need to label them, and yet, in a search for efficiency, I worry that the F.D.A. might require that farmers Sam and Lorraine pick their tomatoes a day early so they can sit up half the night sticking little labels to each one by hand.
Actually, I can't see that. Sam and Lorraine would just quit faced with too much work and cost to deliver a poorer product; it would be the case of an inefficiency created to someone else's scale. But this is the sort of thing the F.D.A. and U.S. Department of Agriculture would go for. Why? Well, when it comes to livestock, they've come close with something called N.A.I.S., a single rule for tracking lambs, pigs and cows that's efficient for the bureaucracy and large farm operations but threatens to put smaller farmers (like the one where I buy my lamb) out of business.
This mis-mash of policies is positively schizophrenic and results from the often conflicting roles Congress has assigned these agencies. They are chartered to promote the business of agriculture on one side and protect the public on the other. But these goals constitute a genuine conflict of interest.
It's also absurd that the F.D.A. is responsible for tomatoes while the U.S.D.A. is responsible for hamburgers. There should be a single agency responsible for food safety and it shouldn't have any duties beyond safety. It shouldn't be promoting sales of pork to Canada or negotiating with South Korea over beef imports. Furthermore, it should have adequate funding. Dr. David Acheson, the F.D.A.'s food safety chief notes, that we can't inspect our way to a safer food supply chain, but budget cuts during the Bush administration have weakened even that fragile safety measure.
As much as I love the idea of everyone eating mostly locally-raised food, that's not realistic - we simply can't feed everyone that way. And so we need focused policies and programs and methods for ensuring that the bulk of our food, which will continue to be produced using industrial agricultural practices, is safe. This means we need efficiences of scale both in the supply chain and the system of safeguards. At the same time it would be a mistake to blindly apply policies that are intended to operate in the arena of industrial agriculture to small and medium, local and regional farm operations. In doing so we'd be throwing the tomatoes out with the bath water.
Some folks have a prediliction to addiction and others don't. Those of us who are somewhat obsessive/compulsive have a particular problem with addiction, let this be a warning to you cooks about letting the genie of kitchen gadgets out of the bottle.
I've moved seven times in the past ten years chasing jobs - four times across the width of the country. And with each move I reduced the amount of stuff I moved. Early in the process I got rid of easy stuff, sheets and towels I hadn't used in years, a futon that was simply taking up space, 20-year-old collections of bills and tax records. And a few cheap pots in the back of my kitchen cabinets.
On subsequent moves I dug deeper, disposing of my entire collection of science fiction and eventually almost all my fiction, pieces of furniture I'd rather replace than move, old computer parts, and kitchen equipment I used only once or twice a year. On my last cross-country move I even disposed of most my technical (programming) library, but by that time there was nothing else to get rid of. I was down to the bare essentials needed to recreate my home in a new abode and my kitchen was down to the bare essentials needed to comfortably and efficiently cook the way I cook.
Upon arriving here in Knoxville, I moved into an apartment and followed my usual move-in pattern: 1) Make the bed, 2) Set up the stereo, 3) Unpack the kitchen. Unpacking the kitchen is a three-day job both because I have loads of stuff and because it must be stored in the sanest, most-cooking-efficient way possible in that particular kitchen. This involves a lot of thinking about possible traffic patterns (yeah, it's just me, but I can get in my own way), convenience to work areas, and considering equipment-use patterns.
I was fortunate in my apartment choice in that it had an area under the stairs, right next to the kitchen, suitable for use as a pantry. Then I moved into this condo apartment and gave up another 30 square feet of kitchen space.
Over a two-year period I went from a 150 square foot kitchen in California to the 70 square foot kitchen I have now. My dining area is larger than my kitchen, which is a good thing because I had room in the dining area to install a large low-boy to store overflow equipment and things like tablecloths. Still not enough.
While I was moving so much I managed to find the discipline to avoid buying much new kitchen stuff - or to at least to primarily buy better versions of what I had and get rid of the old ones. So a cheap stock pot that tended to burn on the bottom was replaced with a better one and my haphazard collection of flour containers were replaced with better (and more space-efficient) plastic tubs.
Then I became a personal chef. This meant I needed a portable "kitchen" I could take to client homes and the genie escaped the bottle. I essentially needed two of everything - two sets of mixing bowls, two sets of knives, two sets of pots and pans...
You get the idea.
Fortunately these duplicates went into three large utility tubs that I kept in my car so they don't directly contribute to my kitchen space problems. But as I said, the kitchen djenn had been freed and has shown little sign of returning to its bottle.
Three days ago I bought a second grill pan. Why? It's smaller than the cast iron Lodge grill I've had for years and so more efficient when cooking in terms of heating and cleaning for one. But the truth is it was on sale and I wanted it.
I also recently bought a Cuisinart ice cream maker. I'm not particularly an ice cream fan but it was only $20 - and I can use it to make desserts for clients. In between I ran across a silicon spatula with a steel core that I thought would work better than the pure silicon spatula I've been using. Then there are the products I'm occasionally sent to review. The cheap ones (under $25) I keep if useful or throw away. The expensive ones I return to the manufacturer - unless I love it so much I have to buy it.
I don't anticipate moving again anytime soon, but before the summer is out I'm going to have to dig into that guest bedroom closet and find stuff I can throw away to make room for the genie's stuff. Addiction is a terrible thing.
Summers are marked, in my mind, by a triptych of grills. The first panel is centered on Memorial Day, the official opening of grilling season. This panel offers scenes of earlier efforts, when a planned late-April meal of grilled rack of lamb might turn into a cold, blustery, and miserable afternoon on the patio before admitting defeat and retreating to finish the lamb in the oven. But it also includes such treats as salads made with the spring's first lettuce, grilled asparagus, and strawberries.
The last panel is Labor Day, the true harvest celebration when everything is in season. Fresh tomatoes for slicing, corn for grilling, perhaps fire-roasted Cornish hens or even simple Steaks Florentine, and peach cobbler doled out in large bowls with homemade vanilla ice cream.
There would always be a few more days spent with fire and beer, wine, or cocktail on the patio or porch following Labor Day - good days - but still, at best, a lingering goodbye before the grill and smoker were wiped down for the last time, the ashes scrubbed out, and the covers pulled over them until the next season.
In the center, the place of honor, is the 4th of July. Could our forefathers and foremothers have picked a better date for a national holiday? First, unlike most holidays in this country, the date doesn't vary. It is the fourth. If it falls on a Wednesday then by God you get Wednesday off (unless you work at 7/11). As much as I love long weekends, I really don't approve of moving holidays - don't get me started on Easter, which wanders like a drunken sailor from date to date.
Since it's smack dab in the middle of summer, the weather on the 4th is usually (albeit not always) great for grilling. It's too hot, but that's what cold beverages, pools, patio umbrellas, and breezes are for. Tomatoes are usually beginning to arrive so gazpacho should be on the menu. Summer squash, perfect for grilling, hasn't yet become anathema of oversized zuchinni, best used for hitting baseballs. If you're lucky you might find some early corn and melons at a farm stand.
When I lived in Oregon I was a mile from the University of Oregon stadium, which featured a magnificent fireworks display on the 4th. So the two summers I lived there I invited friends over for a late picnic.
I'd spend the day slowly smoking pork ribs that had spent the previous 24 hours soaking up flavor from a dry rub. While the ribs smoked I'd make marinated mushrooms and artichoke hearts, potato salad, perhaps bake some sourdough rolls, maybe make a lime mousse and whip up some munchies.
My guests would begin arriving around 7:30 and paying their cost of entry: A bottle of dry sparkling wine. The 4th is a celebration and so something bubbly is required. (Besides, champagne is surprisingly good with barbequed pork: it cuts straight through the fat.) Once everyone had arrived we'd load the platters with food and adjourn to the lawn, a large courtyard behind my apartment: A courtyard festooned with blooming roses not unlike small, quiet, and still fireworks as a guest pointed out.
We'd settle on plaid, woolen blankets I'd spread on the grass, load our paper plates, wield our plastic utensils, and clink our glass champagne flutes (sparkling wine should never be served in plastic, it ruins the whole idea). Then we'd gorge. We'd finish eating just as it became a bit too dark to see. Plates and platters would be gathered up and taken inside, desserts would be distributed, and we'd return to the blankets outside for the climax - the bombs bursting in air.
Those backyard, 4th of July picnics occurred 15 years ago. But that's alright. This and other holidays and events have kept my memory stocked with good times and good food.
So do something special this 4th and grill something special. Such memories are better than sleeping pills when you're worrying about an insurance claim at 1 a.m. in January. They'll keep you warmer than a thermal blanket.
Against my better judgment I watched Hell's Kitchen the other night and. It contained:
- 3 times the recommended adult daily dose of nonsense
- 3 times the recommended adult daily dose of emotional garbage
- Twice the recommended adult daily dose of intellectual detritous
- And .05 percent of the recommended adult daily dose of real cooking
So much for "reality" TV.
Or perhaps it is reality in what passes for most commercial kitchens these days. But I understand Thomas Keller runs a quiet, focused, and phenomenally effective kitchen at The French Laundry. And probably because it makes great TV, the idea - instilled by many an egomaniacal cook - that abuse and teaching go hand-in-hand stays with us.
Judging from the show, Gordon Ramsay is a pig. A small-minded martinet far more interested in his power than in the food. I'm unimpressed with his skin-tight chefs' jackets and even less impressed with his ability to motivate cooks beyond anything but terror.
I did my homework. I watched a full episode and forced myself to watch half a dozen segments on YouTube. Ramsay complained recently on NightLine that, "Unfortunately, today at the age of 41, my persona gets judged over my substance, which is really frustrating." Poor baby. Did he think people would ignore his referring to people as "stupid cows?" In that same episode he balled out a customer who had the nerve to complain. Did he think we would assume he had ability when we don't see him cook but do hear him have tantrums?
He went on to say of his critics, "Have they actually spent a 16-hour shift cooking 70 to 80 lunches, 120 to 150 dinners short staffed, fish cook is not turning in, produce inconsistent because of the weather?" In one episode he screams at a contestant who talked back to him that the contestant is rude.
Sounds like a whiner to me. I have no doubt he could beat the crap out of me, and only a little more doubt that he would, given the opportunity. Hell, for all I know he's a decent cook, I just see no evidence of that in his show. And yes, I understand the reality show concept. But let me compare Hell's Kitchen with Bravo's Top Chef.
Watching Top Chef you get a genuine feeling for each chef's culinary personality, for how they think about food. Sure, Top Chef also is mostly about personality, but it's about everyone's personalities, not just the odious obscenity-filled rantings of an egomaniac. Watching the show you learn why the chefs make the choices they do in ingredients and techniques and you learn why the judges reach the conclusions they do. Food may not be the main point in Top Chef, but it is an important point.
I hadn't expected to like Top Chef, but a couple of fellow cooks talked me into watching it and I got hooked. The various contests are generally more realistic than I expected. They selected chefs who are good to begin with and over the course of the show you can see contestants getting even better.
The judging strikes me as knowledgeable and it's formed by consensus - unlike Hell's Kitchen where one madman's opinion is the only judgment. I'm well aware that in a professional kitchen the only opinion that does count is the chef's, but with no way of knowing whether I might be inclined to agree with the chef - or in Ramsay's case actively loathing him - I gain nothing from his pronouncements. When the last episode of Top Chef rolled around, though, I appreciated the quandary the judges faced. And for what it's worth, their choice of Stephanie Izard as the Top Chef made sense to me: I know I wanted to eat her food.
I don't know that I'll tune in to Top Chef again, I watched most of the last season and I suspect that was enough. But I do know I've seen enough Hell's Kitchen to last a lifetime. Recently, poor little Mr. Ramsay says he's going to avoid the telly in the future.
Apparently he can't take the heat.
I'm almost as fed up (pun intended) with writing about food recalls as I am learning about them. Some good news on the food front would really be nice, but I'm afraid that with 238 people reportedly sickened with salmonella from contaminated tomatoes there is none this week.
That 238 doesn't sound like very many but using the Center for Disease Control estimates - only one in 30 cases of salmonella poisoning is reported - you can figure over 7,000 people got sick.
Now, in all fairness, given a U.S. population of 304 million, 7,000 case of stomach cramps (and worse) isn't even a statistical blip. Besides, salmonella is seldom fatal in healthy people. So, if I lacked a sympathetic soul, I would suggest that anyone willing to eat a non-local, out of season, cardboard tomato shipped from God-knows-where and served in a fast-food joint probably deserves their fate. Fortunately I do have a sympathetic soul and have suffered from food poisoning myself I know that even if you don't die from contaminated food you may wish you would - just to end the misery.
What's really troubling about food poisoning is that the numbers are beginning to add up. Reported incidences have increased steadily over the past 30 years. Better reporting or more incidents? My bet is on both. And it's troubling. We know we take a risk every time we get into an automobile and we've become inured to it. Yeah, it's risky, but it's an acceptable risk. Risky food, though, is a different matter. We expect what we eat to be safe, comfortable, and nutritious. When something like a tomato goes bad it throws our sense of order out of whack.
This most recent case is unique in the recent spate of contamination stories because it involves tomatoes. Although according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest there have been some 24 cases of tomato contamination since 1990 with around 3,000 reported cases, tomatoes are a rather rare source of food poisoning. There's a good reason for this.
Salmonella, like e-Coli, lives primarily in the intestines of animals and the bacteria is usually passed on through feces. The initial contamination can come from animal waste from wild animals or from improperly processed manure used for fertilizer, or it can be passed on by poor worker hygiene. When contaminated products are processed with uncontaminated products as they often are in our increasingly industrial food system the contamination is spread from the dirty to the clean. As the old saying goes, one bad apple spoils the barrel.
But tomatoes have a tough, thick, impermeable skin, unlike lettuce or spinach that can absorb off-flavors. That's why they can go through a chlorine rinse after picking to kill any external contamination. The implication with this latest round of food poisoning is that the fruit's flesh - the inside - was contaminated. That raises two questions: 1) How can the salmonella get in to inflect the flesh? and 2) how can it get out to infect other tomatoes?
Obviously damage to the flesh can allow microbes to enter. But when was the last time you bought a tomato with an open wound except, possibly, from a farm stand where a recent rain has caused the tomato to split? And it's safe to assume that even at Wendy's or BurgerKing the produce buyers avoid cases where items are damaged.
So given that, how does contamination in one apparently pristine (albeit cardboard) tomato get into another? In an article by Barry Estabrooks in Gourmet, according to David Gombas at the United Fresh Produce Association, "the exact mechanism remains a food-safety mystery that the industry would dearly love to solve."
I'll bet they would. And in case they don't, Keith Warriner at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada has been working on a salmonella vaccine for tomatoes designed to make them resistant to the bacteria.
Actually, that last question doesn't really interest me - except intellectually. I only buy tomatoes when they're in-season (in about a month or so, here in the U.S.) and then only from local farms.
I might still get sick from one but I'll never get sick because of one contaminated tomato fell in with the 40,000 other clean tomatoes at the processing plant and spread its gut-wrenching microbes to my lunch-time BLT.
How to Choose a Tomato
The tomato should feel heavy for it's size. It should be firm but not hard - a light squeeze should give you the feeling that a hard a squeeze would bruise it. But as with almost all vegetables and fruits, smell it. If it doesn't smell like a tomato it probably never will and certatinly won't taste like a tomato. When buying at the supermarket, avoid flaws in the skin and choose tomatoes that still have a stem attached. Hopefully, this will allow you to avoid contaminated tomatoes even in a supermarket. When buying at a farmers market or farm stand you needn't be so picky about flaws in the skin (a heavy rain will cause tomatoes to split open) and a just-picked perfectly ripe tomato won't have a stem since it was - before picking ripe and ready to let go of the mother plant.
It's mind-boggling, but my parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary this year. Actually, they celebrated it twice. The first occasion was on the actual date and the second time was a weekend in May when we gathered a slew of relatives at my sister's farm in Virginia. As you might imagine, my task was cooking for the mob.
The "mob" in this case consisted of relatives from my mother's side of the family. My father is the black sheep in his family - a collection of nice but straight-laced people who would have been completely out of place at an event that featured loads of food, booze, and often off-color jokes. My mother's family is an occasionally rowdy and often profane group of liberal intellectuals and Dad's family isn't. So although we would have welcomed their presence in a familial sense, we would have felt constricted and they would have been uncomfortable.
My mother's side of the family also loves to eat. As everyone does, they have likes and dislikes, but most of them are willing to try new things, to explore exotic dishes, and they eat like trenchermen. It's not just my relations; people who make a point of celebrating with food always seem to know how to have a good time.
A couple of days ago I catered a small dinner party. I had just served the appetizers when a thunderstorm took the power out. But my clients just laughed and opened another bottle of wine. And because the cooking was forced on hold, I ended up joining them and we sat around chatting until the house lit up again.
Aside from the power outage, it was a pretty typical event: A family or group of friends gathering to celebrate some special occasion in someone's life. In this case, Rebecca's mother had just retired after 40 years as a school teacher. The party consisted Rebecca and her husband, her parents, and her sister and her husband. A small intimate affair and I was in essence a retirement gift to her mother.
I love doing these affairs. Since most Americans don't believe in servants so I have a unique status: I'm not hired help but not family either. Instead I become entertainment. My job is to be charming, knowledgeable, a competent cook, and have a store of self-deprecating anecdotes. In exchange for this service, I'm not only paid well, but actively welcomed into their lives for part of an evening. I consider it a privilege.
For me, food and cooking are as much about nurturing our souls and our bonds with friends and family as it is about feeding our bodies. And most of my catering clients feel the same way to at least some degree. They have decided to pay a lot of money to eat a specially prepared meal together in their homes. So I do everything I can to support that from printing out special menus to developing special recipes. This effort, in turn, nurtures me and when I slip out the door at the end of the evening I inevitably have a happy grin plastered across my face.
On this night though I received a special bonus. Rebecca gave me a big hug just before I left.
You can't beat that.
When I started writing about food I immediately started reading what other people wrote about food - primarily as a way to learn how to write about food myself. One of the first books I picked up was Best Food Writing 2001 and I was amazed at how many different ways there are to write about food, how many different ways there are to think about food, and how food can be such an easily conveyed metaphor for thinking about the rest of our lives. I've been studying the masters ever since.
At the moment I'm half-way through Best Food-Writing 2008 edited by Holly Hughes and with the lazy days of summer on the way, it seems to me that now is as good a time as any to contemplate those who contemplate food, cooking and everything else that goes on in a proper kitchen.
I've long been a fan of John Thorne, author of Serious Pig, Pot on the Fire, and Simple Cooking. This is great food writing with much the same sensibility as the best food blogs - focused on food and cooking and yet much more than that. He writes with marvelous evocativeness and a certain dourness - for this Southerner, anyway - that's reflective of his New England heritage. Best of all, I've learned a great deal about my cooking style and attitudes from reading about his and his focus on simplicity. A perfect clam chowder is about less rather than more.
I've been meaning to read America's first great food writer, M.F.K. Fisher for years. Last winter I finally began. Since January I've read The Gastronomical Me and How to Cook a Wolf. She really does deserve her reputation. In How to Cook a Wolf, Fisher's book on cooking - and living - well with very little, she writes: "There are many ways to love a vegetable. The most sensible way is to love it well-treated. Then you can eat it with the comfortable knowledge that you will be a better man for it, in your spirit and in your body too, and will ever have to worry about your own love being a vegetable".
You read Fisher, not so much for recipes, as for philosophies. You read a chapter, or a page, or a sentence, and then put the book down to ponder a moment. Sometimes to ponder what she wrote, and other times to ponder what might be fun or interesting or surprising to do with that last bit of hard salami in the refrigerator.
But when my head became too full of darkly ambitious thoughts about food and cooking, I turned to Jeffrey Steingarten, food writer for Vogue.
Why a magazine like Vogue needs a food writer, and how it ended up choosing a lawyer to do the writing baffles me. But Steingarten is tremendous fun to read. He combines passion for food and cooking with what I can only describe as a lawyerly sense of humor. His rants about things like food allergies and raves about things like blood sausage leave your jaws aching with a grin. The Man Who Ate Everything and It Must've Been Something I Ate are a perfect antidote to Fisher's more serious reflections.
Along the way I've read Jaques Pepin's The Apprentice. A genuine likeability shines through this famous chef's autobiography and leaves you very much wanting to have a meal and a glass of wine with him. And currently I'm reading Calvin Trillin's Feeding a Yen with The Tummy Trilogy yet to go. I've long been a fan of Trillin's wry and often acerbic political wit, but somehow I had never read his food musings which are more self-deprecating than passionate, mostly when it comes to his own tastes: "One morning, late in the week, I held out until almost eleven before I bought my first helping of macaroni pie, and found myself boasting to Alice about my willpower."
I first turned to these books to learn how the writing should be done. But since then I've grown to love the collections of essays. They stimulate far more than your appetite, although many of them do that as well, and they're perfect for reading in short bursts - say, at the beach.
Sustainability: of, relating to, or being a method of harvesting or using a resource so that the resource is not depleted or permanently damaged. - Meriam-Webster Online.
The definition above isn't wrong, but, it seems to me, it is incomplete, at least when it comes to food (and probably everything else) since it's too focused on micro-effects as opposed to macro-effects.
Take, for example, the industrial-scale production of crops (such as corn) that we're used to. It relies on man-made fertilizers, which are produced using petro-chemicals and we're running out of the "petro-" part of that equation. So it's not sustainable. Industrial-scale meat production relies on industrial-scale production of corn - also not sustainable. And the use of such products has a broader effect on the environment by contributing to climate change, another un-sustainable cost.
On a recent edition of NPR's Science Friday Ira Flatow interviewed Christopher Weber, an assistant research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, about a study he and co-author Scott Mathews published in Environmental Science and Technology on whether or not "food-miles" matter. "Food miles" are a way to measure the distance a food travels prior to consumption and the authors were specifically interested in the effects of eating, say, asparagus from Chile in January as opposed to asparagus grown next door in May. In short, what are the effects of "eating local."
They found that selecting locally grown food had relatively little effect on the impact that you, as a consumer, have on the environment. This study echoes the results of a New Zealand study that found that New Zealand lamb eaten in Great Britain had a lower environmental impact then British lamb eaten in Great Britain.
The Carnegie Mellon study also found that by simply giving up red meat and cheese one day a week and instead eating chicken, fish, or just vegetables you could have a more positive impact than by buying locally grown produce and meat all the time. Sounds simple, eh? You make Tuesday your dedicated chicken or fish night and you help the environment. Sorry, nope.
The study is flawed since it focused on large-scale agriculture. It assumed that my friends the Coles of West Wind Farms used the same methods for raising their cattle as ConAgra does. The Coles meat is grass fed. Their cattle still produce the methane and nitrous oxide (greenhouse gases) that ConAgra's cows do, but they don't use commercial fertilizer on their fields, instead they rely on the manure all their animals produce for fertilizer. By doing so they eliminate not only the direct costs of fertilizer for their fields, but also the indirect costs of the fertilizer used to grow grain and the transport costs for the fertilizer and grain.
Or, put more simply, actually determining effects - for better or worse - is incredibly complicated.
And determining effects is even more complicated because more than one area of expertise is involved. The Weber/Mathew study doesn't even attempt to account for the medical costs of using antibiotics in chickens or beef or the economic effects of hog manure ponds on real estate. In fact, it's focus was specifically on green-house gases. Important, yes, All-encompassing, no.
I'm not arguing against giving up beef and cheese one day each week nor that doing so won't have a mild effect if everyone does so, but I would argue against substituting fish for that mac-n-cheese because wild fish stocks are collapsing. The California, Oregon, and Washington salmon seasons were canceled this year because wild salmon stocks are in such bad condition. And I'll point out that even though chickens and hogs don't directly produce methane, their manure lagoons do.
The bottom line: choosing to buy from local producers using sustainable agricultural practices will almost certainly have more of a positive effect on the environment, even if that effect is harder to measure, than, say, giving up a cheese burger once a week.
I've known Nelson my entire life. He and his wife Bernie were friends of my parents and I have been part of my social landscape from the day I was born. Although my siblings were fond of them, I think I especially liked, even loved, them and the liking was mutual.
Last Friday Nelson died from cancer. He was pretty sick and at 82 had led a long and useful life and, I'm fairly sure, a generally happy life: There were too many smile lines in his face for him to have spent much time unhappy. I'll miss him just as I'll miss Bernie when her time comes. But life goes on and part of life is celebrating those who've died, so tomorrow I'll be going to a memorial service for Nelson.
Here in the South many of us celebrate deaths by cooking and eating. The custom isn't universal, but it is common. People bring bean casseroles, chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, and pots of greens. They fry chicken and make biscuits and mold jello salads. They bake brownies and cookies and cakes and pies. There's lots of sweet tea and coffee to wash the food down.
Folding tables are set up and paper plates and napkins and plastic forks and knives and spoons are laid out and the tables are loaded down with everything that is good and wholesome and gives us comfort.
People would stand about in couples and small groups, sometimes speaking soberly and sometimes laughing and joking and sometimes crying. Kids would run about under foot sneaking cookies and glad the service was over
These days, sadly, the fried chicken is too often the Colonel's and potato chips replace the potato salad. The cookies come in a plastic package and cokes are more common than tea.
But the core of the event remains - a gathering of friends and family to celebrate someone's past life and our own life with that most fundamental, elemental, and ancient of human social events. We gather to break bread.
So I made rolls.
Whole Wheat Beer Bread
2 tsp instant yeast
1 tbsp sugar
12 oz warm beer
2 1/4 c whole wheat flour
1 1/2 c bread flour -- separated
1 1/2 tbsp butter -- melted
2 tsp salt
1 ea egg
1 tbsp water
Using the paddle attachment on a stand mixer, thoroughly combine yeast, whole wheat flour, 1 1/4 cup bread flour, 2 teaspoons salt, and sugar. Add butter to warm beer and, with mixer running, pour beer into dry ingredients. As the dough forms swap paddle attachment for dough hook.
Knead for six minutes at medium speed. The dough should be slightly sticky but should clear the bowl. Add additional flour if needed. Dump dough onto a floured board and knead another minute or two until dough is fairly smooth (it won't be as smooth as a pure white bread) and resilient. Allow to rest 5 to 10 minutes.
Clean and dry mixing bowl and spray with a nonstick spray. Shape dough into a ball and place seam-side down in bowl. Spritz top lightly with cooking spray and cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let rise until doubled in bulk - 60 to 90 minutes.
Punch down dough and turn out onto floured board. Lightly knead dough and form into a flattened ball. Allow to rest five to 10 minutes.
To make a loaf, shape dough into a rectangle that will fit in a 9" x 4.25" greased loaf pan. Cover and allow to rise until doubled in bulk.
To make rolls, using a dough scraper cut dough in four equal quarters. Set three quarters aside and cover. Shape remaining quarter into a flattened ball and divide into four quarters. Shape each quarter in to a ball and place on a parchment-covered baking sheet. Flatten each ball. Repeat for remaining dough, cover, and allow to rise until rolls double in bulk.
Heat oven to 425F for loaf or 400F for rolls.
In small bowl, beat together egg and water. Brush loaf or rolls with egg mixture and bake on middle oven rack. Rolls will need about 25 minutes, the loaf will need about 40 minutes. Monitor closely to avoid overcooking.
Cool on a wire rack.
