Spring Reading

though you might want to add them to your list for summer.

The Upcycle by William McDonough and Michael Braungart was an inspiring read, taking up where their Cradle to Cradle left off.   It's not explicitly about the food system, but frankly I found its messages about  resilience and abundance applicable to many systems.   The two big take home ideas for me were

• Values are much more important than metrics.  We must begin any initiative by articulating what we value, not setting numerical goals.   For example, accessibility to fresh, healthful food for all, rather than 50% fewer outlets for sugary snacks and beverages in the neighborhood.   Then we can track progress toward that which we value.   Seems like there are ways this would be applicable in congregations, too.   
• Regulation indicates the need for redesign.   One of the things I think about a lot is that new regulations often cause new problems. With concern for health, NYC led the way in banning trans fats. But now the hunger for fats that are solid at room temperature has multiplied the number of palm oil plantations with the resultant destruction of tropical habitat and biodiversity.   In churches, the emphasis on "clergy boundaries" has caused a further distancing of ministry professionals from their communities, increasing the potential for abuses of power that the rules were meant to counter.   When we are tempted to create a new rule or regulation, we need to first step back and consider redesigning or reforming the system that calls for it.   

There are lots of inspiring examples in the book of values based planning and creative redesign.

An older book which I finally read is Patricia Klindienst's The Earth Knows My Name:  Food, Culture, and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans. The title pretty much says it.  Here are a collection of stories about farms, urban farms, backyards and community gardens where traditions are carried forward, as cultures are remembered and evolve by peoples indigenous and immigrant.  It's a charming book that reminds us of some of the reasons why we garden.   I found myself thinking about the horticultural beans I am going to plant when I harvest my garlic in a week or two - the beans were one of my grandfather's favorites, something he grew every year.   Then there are my frustration with a rhubarb failure, and all the little lessons in frugality I learned from my dad, particularly about selecting plant starts to set out. I'm guessing that anyone reading this book will find themselves reconnected to their own food and gardening traditions.  

Milk in science and culture

There's a fascinating article in the current Natural History magazine about lactase persistence. It's a story of independent evolution in different human populations, in Europe and in Africa, of the ability of adults to digest milk. It shows how we evolve with our food supply, and how those changes spread through populations. Lactase persistence seems to have developed between 7000 and 9000 years ago, depending on the locale.

It's also an account of the racism involved in speaking of "lactose intolerance" and indeed, in finding ways to speak about varying traits that are not disparaging of peoples not like us.

The article is not posted on the magazine's site, but if you google <"Follow the Drinking Gourd" natural history> you may be able to find it. I'm not linking to it because it's unclear to me who or what holds the copyright.

seeds of discontent

Harry Eyres, Slow Lane columnist for the Financial Times Life & Arts section, wrote on the weekend of June 13/June 14 2009 an extended review-essay of three new books on seeds - including a biography of Luther Burbank (1849-1926), who while working in a plough factory in Massachusetts found a two-year-old book by Charles Darwin on animal and plant breeding. The result is edible history - hybrids developed by Burbank in his 50 years in Santa Rosa, California, are still commercially important. Tho Monsanto seems to have taken some of his initiatives a bit farther and around a bend ...

An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds by Jonathan Silvertown (The University of Chicago Press)

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants by Jane S. Smith (The Penguin Press)

Forgotten Fruits: The Stories Behind Britain’s Traditional Fruit and Vegetables by Christopher Stocks (Windmill)


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b3340af8-56de-11de-9a1c-00144feabdc0.html

%^)

a tale of two loaves

Happy Easter!

But what happened to Lent?

It seems like only a few weeks ago that we were celebrating Dimanche Gras with a Kings Cake, the picture of which I never got around to publishing.

Basically these two things are the same. But the Kings Cake has a hidden object - coin, nut or plastic baby - and unpleasant purple, green and gold frosting - the carnival colors of New Orleans, while the Greek Easter Bread has red eggs embedded - red for the blood of Christ and eggs for new life (though not much new life once they are hard boiled!). The sesame seeds on the Easter version are a straightforward fertility symbol, I think.

But there's something basic about celebrating holidays - any holiday - with a festive sweetened bread. I'm sure that in between Mardi Gras and Easter the Sicilians have a similar recipe for St. Joseph's Day (my name day, March 19) and the English have buns that are hot and cross for Good Friday. (Irish soda bread on St. Patrick's Day - no yeast, no eggs, little fat - doesn't cut it - sorry!)

And who can forget panetone and stollen.

Portuguese sweet bread is a similar dough, too - but I'm not aware that it's associated with any particular holiday. Perhaps the Portuguese are more ad lib with their celebrations?

And of course the French brioche - not sweet, but richer - those French!

A serious account of What I Did for Lent This Year plus some updates on food issue reading will follow this post soon.

Is there such a thing as faux pho?

In catching up with emails and feeds I came across this fun article on fake foods

www.chicagotribune.com/features/food/chi-mock-food-1oct01,0,2298491.story

which raises all sorts of questions about what is fake and what is real and why that might lead to questions about much more than food.

The first fake food I remember eating as a child was mock cherry pie - which was a winter pie made with fresh cranberries and raisins.

Oh - but what about margarine? and when does a fake food become it's own reality?

I do eat soy simulations, for example, and find myself thinking of some as definite fakes and others as their own real thing. One eats soy burgers for the burger experience. At least I hope one does. Surely it is not for the taste, but for the bun and condiments? And tofurkey anything is really an ultra-processed food fantasy, because first the tofu needs to be made, and then all the distortions need to be wreaked on it to make it resemble meat. True confessions: I do eat tofurkey Italian sausage, again for the meat experience, which doesn't quite make it, but also for the spicy taste. But I think of soyrizo as a food with its own integrity. And you have to think of soy milk as something else, because if you compare it to milk, you will always be disappointed. But "soy beverage" is just too awkward.

The writer does mention Lent in passing - but there might be a fascinating project in searching old cookbooks for fast day deceivers.

And one has to wonder, prices being what they are and climbing while wealth and incomes fall, will there be new fake foods for this new era of belt tightening?

The article would have been even better with more attention to Japanese faux foods. I recall the first time I explored a vegan cookbook with all the clever fakes from the Buddhist tradition, with their emphasis on the visual.

As for Japanese inventions that are widely available, I have been known to say "It's not imitation anything, it's real surimi."

The Evolution of Healthful Diets

Last week I finished reading Why Some Like It Hot by Gary Paul Nabhan. Published in 2004, the book is a sound treatment of the adaptation of peoples to their local diets. I must say - it got off to a really slow start. But the latter chapters on the indigenous peoples of the American Southwest and Native Hawaiians were really interesting. Communities where obesity and diabetes were epidemic recovered health by returning to a diet of traditional crops and foraged wild foods. This book is not a platform for some wiggy blood type diet, or a pseudo-anthropological call for people to return to being hunter-gatherers. Rather, it's a reasoned treatment of science and culture, and their impact on human and environmental health.

Nabhan reasons that the increase in diabetes these days can be attributed to four things:
1) a loss of wild foods
2) a loss of diversity in crops and livestock
3) the unnecessary refining of so many foods, resulting in the loss of fiber
4) the development of so many additives to industrial foods, additives to which our bodies have no long term adaptation.

One of the things Nabhan points out is that human adaptation to local food stuffs does not seem to take hundreds of thousands of years, but more like just hundreds - fewer generations than many scholars have thought. (Let's hear it for evolution!)

In the chapter on the Waianae community on Oahu he quotes Dr. Terry Shintani:
"In traditional medicine it is recognized that there is really only one disease that all of us must learn to resist: arrogance. It is simply arrogant to think that we can violate the laws of nature and get away with it."

The implication is that we need to eat our native foods, the ones to which our people's bodies
have adapted over generations.

But this left me pondering - what about those of us who are dispersed and dislocated from the places where our ancestors lived? Surely that's a lot of the human community these days?
If you are Pima living in southern Arizona, or Hawaiian or hapa living in Hawaii - well fine. But what if you are from Africa via Jamaica living in Toronto? from Japan living in Sao Paolo? from Croatia living in Auckland? from Oaxaca in Chicago?

What if you are from assorted northern European tribes living in the Mediterranean climate of California? Some of the things that might be traditional foods for my sort of person would be grains that grow in crummy climates, like rye and oats - rhubarb and berries, particularly berries in the heath family - fish from the North Atlantic and Baltic - root vegetables native to Europe, turnips maybe? But that'd be racking up some food miles to eat that diet. While a few might be grown here, most aren't. And even when someone tries, they just aren't right somehow. You can keep California blueberries and Oregon cranberries as far as I'm concerned.

So to be healthy are we all supposed to go back where we came from?

Olympian eats

I'm not quite sure why I am so interested in the Olympics. Perhaps my life is less exciting than I thought.

Of course, I am paying attention to the food angle. There was a really culturally disparaging piece on NBC about Chinese food. The implication was that they'll eat any part of any creature - and the critic apparently just faked eating things, not really tasting them. When did making fun of another culture become acceptable again? Let's criticize China for the tiny underage gymnasts, but not trash their centuries of amazing food culture.

The ads would suggest that the successful athlete eats fried chicken sandwiches on white buns with pickles as a vegetable (MacDonald's), Coca-cola, and Pringles. Mmmm. Actually it might be tasty- but nutritious?

The little vignettes about American stars are pretty interesting from the food angle, too. I wonder what is going to happen to Michael Phelps when he stops training for six months given how much he eats. How long does it take for the metabolism to begin to drop? He commented in the biosnip that basically, he "just shovels it in." Sleeps, eats, trains, eats, plays with his dog, eats some more. An interesting contrast with Natalie Coughlin who was depicted - both by NBC and local news - as enjoying a variety of activities, not just competitive swimming. And - yea Natalie - though I'm sure that Berkeley influence helps - she enjoys a trip to her neighborhood farmers' market and cooking for her friends.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/swimming/news/newsid=100854.html#coughlin+photography+cooking

Here's my analysis: At any given time there are probably about 1 or 2 billion people alive of an age to compete in sports. Only one of them can be the most decorated - and it may be worth ignoring good health habits and being single-minded to the point of not worrying about later until later to get there. But our local girl Natalie has gold medals and the beginnings of a fun and well fed life - lifelong.

update: Natalie won six medals, the most of any American woman in swimming at any Olympics. But somehow the media didn't bother to celebrate the fact.

Meanwhile, Shawn Johnson's biosnip showed her in her West Des Moines supermarket, reviewing her image on packages of all sorts of processed industrial food. AND - they sculpted her in butter! But one of her sponsors is Orowheat (bread and butter!) and she reports eating only the occasional junk food item.

update: Iowa's woman track star was sculpted in ice at the State Fair. What does this difference say?

A new season

The season of cookies and fruitcake has passed, and the wave of diet ads and promos has crested. Time to get back to serious wintry eating. And to some serious food related reading. I note that the articles in papers and magazines are more interesting, less sentimental.

One of my resolutions for this year is to try to pay more attention to concerns and interesting stories of food and culture.

Who knew that fortune cookies were Japanese in origin.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16fort.html?ex=1358226000&en=bbec9d86850a21a3&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Be sure to check out the photos and video that accompany this story. I love the 19th century Japanese illustration of a baker making fortune cookies.

I have two favorite fortune cookie memories. One is of those years between college and seminary, when working for the Bank of California in downtown San Francisco. A few blocks away was a small cookie factory. Rather than the individual cookie irons shown in the Japanese illustration, they had a rotating apparatus, where the batter was poured, the lids went down, the cookie passed over flames, and on the other side a worker removed the hot flat cookie, and folded it and inserted the fortune in one deft movement. Actually, I used to buy the bags of almond cookies. I'm sure they were loaded with trans fats - and were they good!

My other fortune memory is of receiving one at restaurant in Reno which read, "A once in a lifetime adventure awaits you in the South Pacific." I'd been toying with the idea of a trip to follow up with colleagues in New Zealand, met at the Pacific Basin Roland Allen Conference - so I went home and started planning the trip that day.

On that same trip I did some consulting in Japan and then became a tourist in Kyoto. Now I wish I had known about the bakeries there - I would have made a pilgrimage, out of thanks for the impetus of a fortune.

I also plan, this year, to do more reading of fiction where food, eating it and/or preparing it and/or growing it, is a strong theme. I welcome suggestions.

Cultural Choices

I've been thinking even more about food and culture lately, though I think food and culture may be a bit redundant. Surely our behaviors and choices and taboos around eating are an integral part of culture, maybe even central.

It's easy to blame the big food manufacturers and the system of farm subsidies for our fascination with mixes and prefab and faux foods. But I realized in reading Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads (Sylvia Lovgren, 1995) how much of an influence World War II shortages, rationing and patriotic promotions had on our taste for Crisco, Bisquick, Karo and the like. Mixes contained rationed fats and sugar - and were not themselves rationed. And there is a reason most of my grandmother's recipes contained molasses: she cooked her way through two world wars and a depression on my grandfather's working man's salary.

Then today I heard the latest Hidden Kitchens story on NPR, about Nisei tastes and traditions influenced by foods available or grown in the internment camps.

Reading about the camps always makes me weep for shame for our country, but the recipe for Weenie Royale and the thought of Spam Sushi (or Spam Musubi as they call it in Hawaii) somehow lighten my thoughts.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17335538

The writers extend their reflection in a way that should give all of us pause about the way wars and colonialism destroy food cultures:
"Millions of people live in refugee camps around the world now, being fed commodities and surplus. It made us think about the impact on so many cultures within so many nations when they are denied their own food and traditions, when they are forcibly displaced and their land and homes taken from them."

Indeed.

culture and local food

The last line in this article on Tanka Bars tickled my fancy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/dining/10tank.html?ex=1349755200&en=1c15fed858853014&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

I suspect the word for the portable food varies from tribe to tribe, too.

Goals not shoulds

Some years back I was trying to sort out my alcoholic family legacy, and doing some bibliotherapy around codependency. Turned out I am not very co-dependent. But I recall one very important learning from Codependent No More. It was "Goals, not shoulds." Get away from blaming and shaming yourself, and work on positive goals, not the negative apodictic. ("Thou shalt not...")

I think this is why I was taken aback when a friend told me she was never going to read The Omnivore's Dilemma because everyone who does becomes a fanatic, and if she wants a banana she's going to have a banana.

Now there were several things going on here, as it turns out. One was a criticism of me, I think, though a pretty gentle one. Another was that kind of stubbornness we can all identify with - your standards will not rule my life, thank you very much. It is not nice to feel judged. The third, though, was pretty troubling to me, a tale of guests asking their host where the food came from - is this fresh, seasonal, local, sustainably harvested, etc. This last was pretty appalling. I guess I have just assumed that while reading Pollan's book might well change someone's perspective, it would be in terms of choices they made themselves, or organizing so that others could have better choices, but not in guilting others.

There is a world of difference between striking up a conversation about food sources and practices in a public place - at the market, for example - and criticizing someone who has invited you into their home, or is treating you to a meal out. But there is no end to rudeness, apparently, especially among those who are affluent enough to exercise the most choices.

And there does seem to be a blurring of lines between the goals we set for ourselves and our attitude toward others. The 'not shoulds' part means as well that we must not shame or blame or others.

How about the line we heard on Sunday from the letter to the Colossians:
"Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink"

And don't try doing it to them, either.

Purity codes had no place then, and have none now. Though I must say I have noted that we do have informal dietary codes in our popular culture, which shape shift as fats go out of style, and then carbs, and who knows what next. I have actually preached on the text "It's not what goes into his mouth that defiles a man."

We need to cut one another some slack on all this. We need to help one another find goals that build up, not rules that tear down. We need to be ready to explain our own disciplines, but not impose them on others. We need to be more flexible as guests. And frankly just polite. (There are few people I invite to dinner any more because of all the rules people set for themselves. Some tell me they will bring their own food - but then why am I, a good cook, bothering? Let them clean their house. Or maybe we could go on a brown bag byo picnic. )

When I began writing here, my thought was to move through the topics I had set for seven lessons in an on-line course that did not go. But somewhere along the line I got derailed by the latest news and recipes, the Farm Bill issues, etc., etc., etc.

This being Holy Week and Passover, though, seems a good time to pick up one thread from the course I haven't done much with, and that's food and culture.

One of the best ways to explore this, to stretch beyond one's own culture to others, and then move back to thinking about one's own ways with food with fresh eyes, is to watch a food movie.

You could begin by checking out the list here under "Yummy"
http://www.eatgrub.org/learn-films.cfm

To that list add Tortilla Soup. It's Eat, Drink, Man, Woman with a Mexican American flavor - truly, it’s exactly the same film with different accents.

Another film to consider is Avalon, a Barry Levinson film about a multi-generational Jewish family’s engagement with American Thanksgiving, a sad journey of trying to learn a new culture's feasts, and then over the generations losing all habits of shared meals.

Big Night is one of my favorite food movies, perhaps because I like Italian food. The struggle between integrity and success has great appeal as a theme, too. The last scene between the two brothers is a wonderful snap shot of reconciliation

I liked Mostly Martha, too - but it’s mostly not about food, but the young woman chef's neuroses.

Some of the more political films listed on the Eat Grub site also have a clear cultural context. Super Size Me certainly does, though we'd probably rather not think about it as "culture" unless we're anthropologists.

If you know of other films with food and culture themes, please post a comment with a thumbnail review.

Culture and Locale

One of the factors we sometimes forget when we think about eating locally is the influence of culture - particularly our birth culture, and the cultural heritage of our parents and grandparents.

I can easily live without bananas, not so easily without mangoes, but God forbid I should have to live without cranberries. My ancestors learned of this little berry from the heath family which grows in the wetlands of eastern North America from the peoples they met when they landed almost 400 years ago. Within a few miles of my childhood home there were many bogs, and cranberries, a good keeper, found their way into many winter meals. For me there is nothing quite like them - and that includes Oregon and Washington cranberries, which just aren't the same. And so on my list of non-local essentials, somewhere between chocolate and tea, are cranberries.

What got me thinking about this? Yesterday I read an article from the New York Times about a man in search of his family's spaghetti sauce. You can read "A grandchild of Italy cracks the spaghetti code" here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/dining/21sauce.html?ex=1329714000&en=b3386b5fecd9bfbf&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss

It seems a recurrent pattern that immigrants and children of immigrants adapt the recipes of the old country to the new locale's ingredients, but the grandchildren seek to recover authenticity. Why had it never occurred to me, for example, that the reason we find tomato paste in so many American spaghetti sauce recipes is that until recent years most readily available tomatoes here were more juicy than meaty? But I do think the author of the article could consider buying plum tomatoes at a farmer's market in season and canning his own, rather than buying canned tomatoes from Italy. But then I'd have to confess that I am fascinated by the food section at IKEA! That's the other side of my family's eating traditions.

And then today I remembered the article when I needed something for a potluck, not the main course, and decided to work with what was in the house. I used my maternal grandmother's recipe for an applesauce cake, one she made during WWII because it worked within financial and rationing restraints, and was sturdy enough to ship well in boxes to her nephews serving in the armed forces. What struck me about the recipe was that some of the ingredients - walnuts, raisins - were more local to me than they were to her. And I used applesauce made from my friend's backyard golden delicious.

The challenge here in California if one is sourcing locally is the flour. The grain we grow is rice, not wheat. I used the same brand of flour as my grandmother, King Arthur. I don't want to think about the environmental cost of grain moving from the prairies to New England and then back to California in its floury form.

Thinking about how mobile many of my friends have been in the course of their lives, I wonder what some of the interplays of culture and locale are for others in their cooking and eating... How about some comments?