Food Communities

Rob Walker began his current NY Times column "Consumed" --

"For some, the old cliché that you are what you eat has taken on increasingly complex implications: food choices can be a stand-in for social, ideological, even political identity and beliefs. Eaters can form communities of a sort, and businesses are built catering to them."

I think this is a useful observation about one current view of food, and helped me to expand my recent thoughts on how we decide what to eat. I think this helps to understand the recent trend towards making arbitrary commitments that select food for a single reason (such as limiting one's diet to local food or so-called unprocessed food). Interesting idea.

Walker's article, Shared Tastes, continued with a discussion of "incubators," that is, communal kitchens where small-scale entrepreneurs can begin a business of food preparation and sales. He offers examples from a number of cities where women (especially) without investment capital can begin to produce and market food items. He makes the point that the usual motives for food purchases -- taste, familiarity, cost... -- are often more important to buyers than the theoretical ideas of the incubator founders: "the most successful food entrepreneurs put the least emphasis on the societal impact of their mission." For example, he cites one cook from such a project "telling an interviewer that she didn’t use organic ingredients. She finally admitted that, actually, she does — but avoids saying so because to many of her customers it simply 'sounds expensive.'"

Really good point about processing food

"I write to sing the praises of processed food... . Without food processed in traditional, healthy ways, mankind would have become extinct long ago."

So begins a post by Cynthia Harriman, Director of Food and Nutrition Strategies for Oldways, a Boston-based non-profit. Guest blogging for the promoter of "October: Unprocessed," she makes some really useful points that I think put the idea of "processed" food in perspective much better than most of the previous writers there have done. For millennia, perhaps even before settled agriculture, herdsmen processed fresh milk into yogurt and cheese harnessing natural and beneficial bacteria, she observes. Bacteria allowed processing of cabbage into Korean kimchi or German saurkraut.

"In fact," Harriman writes, "one of the common features of most traditional processing methods was this: they worked by encouraging the proliferation of good bacteria, which crowded out the dangerous bacteria that cause food to rot and that threaten our health and our lives."

I commented recently about October: Unprocessed -- people pledging to eat no processed food for 1 month. As I said here -- Why I'm not pledging anything about food -- arbitrarily limiting one's diet is a tricky thing. Processing food even with harmful chemicals has a long history -- consider the olive, cured in lye or else inedible. And the redefinition of beer, wine, and bread as "unprocessed" creates some questions in my mind.

I enjoyed reading Harriman's interpretation of traditional food processing, and respect her conclusion:

"It’s not realistic to sit in the middle of a field or orchard and eat foods just as they come off the stalk or the branch. We all love the convenience of modern foods, but we want – and need – them with the health benefits and good taste of the old ways of food processing. The food companies that figure out how to offer us all of this, in one neat package, will have my food dollar, and, I suspect, that of many other people reading this blog."

Good Local Food

Though the day was warm and beautiful, the sun sets early in October. So here is Lenny, grilling in the dark.



Chicken from Ernst Farm is available about once a month at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market -- and you have to order your chicken well in advance. Ernst Farm chicken has more flavor than any other chicken that I have found at the market or elsewhere (including Whole Foods' air-chilled chickens, which are good, but not that good). Some day I hope to visit the farm, which is around 45 minutes drive from here.

Today's chicken was quite large (over 4 lb.) and we spatchcocked it (that is, cut out the backbone and flattened it, using skewers to hold it in place on the grill and bring heat to the inside of the meat.

Fresh rosemary was available at another of my favorite market stalls this morning. I cut it up, inserted under the skin, and sprinkled the rest on the chicken along with a little orange juice and oil. Lenny patiently grilled the chicken, burning the rosemary stems and unused leaves -- this takes quite a while. He also grilled some eggplants that I used for baba ganoush.



The result was subtle and delicious.

The first frost seems to be rather late this year. Raspberries, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and other items that are often out of season by October are still on sale at the market. Besides chicken, herbs, eggplant, beautiful little raspberries, tomatoes, and peppers, I bought apples and a blue pumpkin -- though it looks greenish in the yellow indoor light in the photo. The woman who sold it to me said that her blue pumpkins were good to eat, as well as making unusual jack-o-lanterns. The orange pumpkin is also local, and sold as a "pie pumpkin."



Yes, that's a pomegranate in the basket too, mainly for decoration.

Green peppercorns are not local

Green peppercorns – the unripe form of black peppercorns -- originated in Madegascar, a former French colony, and from there made it to France where I first encountered them. Some time in the early 70s, my friend Michelle in France served us steak with green peppercorns. She had evidently learned about them on a trip to Africa, and they were at the time popular with French cooks.

Yesterday, I wrote about some of the goals and limitations of confining one's food choices to locally grown food (see Local Eating). One big advantage of a wider geographic scope for cooking, I think, is that food is a very interesting window into other cultures. Without visiting Michelle, I probably wouldn't have known about green peppercorns and their African-French connections. When I returned home, my experiments with this new spice continued to provide a sense of adventure, at least in cooking and eating. (In her blog Gherkins & Tomatoes, food writer Cynthia Bertelsen touched on this recently. See Is Cooking Necessary?)

People have been broadening their horizons with new foods for thousands of years. For example, the Romans had spice routes overland and by sea to obtain black peppercorns, which were then distributed all over their European empire. Pepper, oranges, lemons, chocolate, tea -- as common as they've become, these foods give us a connection to their exotic native lands. Eating in a Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Israeli, or even a French restaurant connects us to another place. While it might be silly to buy a Mexican tomato while Michigan tomatoes are in season, a pledge to eat nothing but local food would diminish my cultural awareness, I think.

Shortly after our dinner at Michelle's home in a Paris suburb, green peppercorns became a sort of fad among American cooking magazines and newspaper columns, and I collected several recipes using them. However, green peppercorns seem to have lost their popular edge recently. Last month I wanted to revisit some of those green peppercorn recipes, and could not find the kind I like in any local food shops (not even Zingerman's had the little cans or jars of green peppercorns in brine), so I bought a dozen cans from amazon.com. And I've been trying both old and new recipes, and giving my surplus cans to friends.

Two of my retro recipes from the seventies:

Michelle's Steak with Green Peppercorns

Broil or charcoal grill a steak. For each person allow about 6 oz of meat, and for each one, allow 1/2 tablespoon butter and 1 tsp. green peppercorns. In a mortar, crush the green peppercorns. (Green peppercorns are often preserved in vinegar or brine. In this form, they are rather soft: to use them, you normally start by draining and then crushing them in a mortar.) Add a few drops of cognac and mash. Then cream in the butter. Optionally add 1 tsp. French Dijon mustard such as Maille brand mustard. Spread the butter mixture on each steak, and serve quickly before all the butter melts.

Pork Chops with Mustard and Green Peppercorn Sauce

8 center-cut pork chops, about 1/2 lb. each
1/2 c. flour
1 tsp. paprika
1 Tbs. oil
2/3 c. finely diced carrots
1 bay leaf
2/3 c. finely diced onion
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 sprig fresh thyme or 1/2 tsp. dried
1 c. dry white wine
1 c. chicken broth
1 Tbs. Dijon mustard
1 Tbs. finely chopped parsley
1 Tbs. green peppercorns
2 Tbs. capers
Sprinkle the chops on both sides with salt and pepper to taste. Dredge in a mixture of the flour and paprika. Heat the oil in a heavy skillet and brown the chops, about 5 min to a side. Pour off fat and sprinkle chops with onion, carrots, garlic, bay leaf, thyme. Add wine and broth and cover. Cook over low heat 1 hour (for the newer, leaner pork, probably a shorter cooking time -- I last made this in the seventies and pork has changed). Remove chops. Stir mustard into pan drippings and bring just to boil, but do not boil. Add remaining ingredients and pour sauce over chops. Serves 8.

Other Uses for Green Peppercorns

• Add green peppercorns to vinaigrette dressing – crush a tsp. of peppercorns with salt, pepper, and mustard, then add 2 parts olive oil to 1 part wine vinegar; wisk together. Toss with green salad, tomatoes, or avocados.
  
• Use them with white wine, for poaching fish fillets. Make a poaching liquid by simmering wine and water with green peppercorns and some dried or fresh herbs like parsley or tarragon. After poaching the fish, finish the sauce with a swirl of butter.
  
• Crush the green peppercorns with garlic, a bit of oil, and fresh or dried herbs as a coating for a roast (see photo), or you can roll the mixture inside of a rolled roast such as a turkey roast. After the roast comes out of the oven, you can use the coating, pan drippings, and some wine to make a sauce for the meat.
  

Once you taste them, you’ll realize in which dishes you would like to replace black peppercorns with green peppercorns.

Local Eating

Support local agriculture. Eat fresher, better food. Reduce your carbon footprint. You can do virtuous things if you accept the promise of local food consumption and become a locavore. If we were all locavores, eating only what grows near our homes, what a wonderful world it would be -- except that there isn't enough local food for the entire population of most heavily populated areas. I've been thinking about the limitations and benefits of eating locally without going to extremes. I'm trying to understand the broader implications and tradeoffs.

The most obvious sacrifice for people who commit to all or mainly local eating in harsh climates like Michigan is that only a limited selection of foods is available. Dairies operate year-around. Most vegetables and fruits are seasonal and perishable, but you can store potatoes and onions for winter pretty easily. If you have a big freezer, you can store local spring lamb and summer chicken. If you have plenty of time, you can smoke your own bacon, make jam, and freeze or can vegetables or fruit (though I've always wondered, what is the advantage of home-canning or freezing over good-quality commercial products?) I don't know if you can get enough grain products in all local markets -- if you are strictly local, that's another compromise. In any case, by March you'll be in the traditional hard place that used to be the lot of everyone who lived in the north.



And, as everyone knows, up here in the north we don't grow chocolate, tropical fruit, coffee, olives, and so on. As totally committed locavores, we'll be back to hoping Santa will put an orange or a little package of dates in the toe of our stockings, as he did in the 19th century before railroads brought abundant citrus fruit to northern climates. Are people sure they want to return to the past so totally?

The limitations are easy to see, but the benefits you get from sticking to local food (and rejecting what seemed like such miracles to our ancestors: orange juice every day!) are also in need of analysis.

If you seek good-tasting local food, you will find it: no question, if you need to rediscover seasonal produce, you have a treat in store. An in-season Michigan apple of a variety you like always beats a Washington Delicious apple, which may have spent months in a warehouse. The trade-off comes in winter when lots of non-local food will tempt you. Olives, coffee, imported wine, pecans, and chocolate taste just as good in Michigan as they do closer to their origin. Bananas, pineapples, and papayas might be better if you are close to the trees, but they travel pretty well too. You might eventually find the limited diet monotonous and the winters overwhelming if you commit to a completely local diet.

If you want to eat healthfully, you can find good options among locally grown foods. If you buy from a local small-scale farmer, you may find very fresh fruit and vegetables grown without excesses of pesticides and other chemicals. The role of such food in ensuring good health is unproven, but other health benefits might be available. For example, fresher eggs from small-scale local chicken farmers seem to be less salmonella-prone, for reasons that are not entirely understood -- maybe the less-stressed chickens have better immune systems (speculative from various articles I've read). This is another very complex food issue, especially as "organic" is now a government-controlled term dictated by some of the big agriculture interests that the original organic food movement was fighting.

Does local food cost less? You might save money if you buy large baskets of local fruit or vegetables at the peak of the season and freeze or can them yourself, but it's challenging, takes time, and has high start-up costs. (I'm not prepared to tackle the economics of raising your own food in your backyard or a grow plot elsewhere.) Also, mass agriculture is often so efficient that its products are cheaper than anything else, even including shipping costs -- if you care about nothing but price, local food will be of little interest to you.

When people talk about local food they almost always mean small-scale production, even if they live close to giant industrial farming operations. Certainly, the farmers who sell their own produce at farmers' markets often raise food as a small family endeavor. As a result, you avoid both the ecological issues of mass agriculture and the issues of poorly-treated farm workers. If you buy directly from farmers, you often meet most of the people who were involved in raising your food. If you buy meat from them, they are most likely raising animals on a relatively small scale, avoiding all the issues of feedlots, crowded conditions, waste runoff, pollution of waterways, etc. Encouraging small-scale agriculture seems to be a good goal in itself, even if the products were shipped out of the neighborhood.

A big claim for local food is its smaller "carbon footprint" -- that is, the amount of carbon emissions produced to grow it and bring it to your table. A local tomato (for instance) might have a lower carbon footprint than a Mexican tomato that made a long diesel-fueled and refrigerated trek across the continent. But if the local weather isn't good and the local tomato grew in an artificially heated greenhouse, maybe not so much. Compare local apples with distantly-grown oranges (or with bananas or papayas) and you are in tricky territory. Compare emissions from organic farming to those from conventional agriculture and there are many problems. Food writers have expended reams of paper (or whatever the electronic equivalent is) debating whether local food is generally better for the global environment and even whether more efficient production in just the right climate can make up for the fuel used to transport the produce.

So much for the claimed benefits. They aren't all hype, clearly, though hype may play a role in some of the most flamboyant locavore antics. When a trendy restaurant claims to serve exclusively local food, it might be just a gimmick, ignoring the bigger issues or even ignoring any serious issues.

One final critique of locavorism is that it's a luxury for people with lots of choices and plenty of money. Inner city residents in many locales have no conveniently-located food markets of any kind, no access to fresh produce, and at times few options other than fast food. For the poorest people, processed and packaged foods provide more calories than any fresh fruit or vegetables, local or not. Americans using food stamps are often shut out of farmers' markets, because the farmers can't jump through all the hoops required to accept food stamps. (That might become a less important issue as the Republicans are promising to cut food stamps if elected next month.) Like many food decisions, the choice of eating local food is only relevant if you have money and options.

Some cities such as L.A. are attempting to bring local produce to inner city residents in an affordable way. A task force is advocating "the creation of a regional food system that would increase low-income residents' access to healthy food and outlets for farmers' products while keeping more food dollars in the local economy." I think this might be one of the most positive ideas to come out of the locavore movement.

The decision to favor local food -- or to eat it exclusively -- has been widely publicized and debated. In Animal Vegetable Miracle Barbara Kingsolver promoted such commitment describing how she spent a year eating only local food while living on a farm in Virginia. She and her family spent a lot of time putting food away for winter, they were willing to give up many favorite non-local products, and they owned their farm. When Alice Waters lined up local farmers to supply her restaurant with special produce and when she founded "The Edible Schoolyard," she inspired some real changes in the way at least a few people eat at least sometimes. In newspaper food sections and in blogs, the idea is debated or promoted constantly.

The message of the locavores has many promises beyond seeking good-tasting food with some sort of fundamental naturalness. Do you hope for less destruction of fragile environments? more responsible use of energy and natural resources? encouragement of smaller farms, fairer labor practices, better animal treatment, or more social responsibility? Opting for local food might seem a panacea for many social ills. Maybe a single idea can't solve all these problems, but I think the focus on local food might be a good start.

Why I'm not pledging anything about food

The food blog Eating Rules is the inventor of "October: Unprocessed" a movement for people to pledge to eat only unprocessed food during this month. Food writers at both the N.Y.Times (Blogger Kicks Off A Month Without Processed Foods) and the L.A.Times (Yea or nay: Are you taking the unprocessed challenge?) have featured this effort in their food blogs, and hundreds of individuals (bloggers or not) have pledged to make the effort.

I respect this blogger for his commitment to encouraging people to eat healthier food. I especially respect his flexible definition:

Unprocessed food is any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with readily available, whole-food ingredients.

Beer, wine, many sweets without refined sugar or HFCS, and many packaged foods are capable of fitting this definition, depending on how they are produced. In addition, he writes: "Maybe you’re not comfortable with my definition of 'unprocessed.' That’s okay, too. Decide what it means to you and take the pledge on your terms."

Recently, (Food Issues) I tried to summarize reasons for which people that choose food: taste, health, cost, and concerns of social justice, the global environment, animal welfare, and religious taboos. I believe that every theoretical food decision -- like buying only unprocessed food, not specific choices like do you want a tomato or a hamburger for lunch -- involves trade-offs.

Deciding to eat unprocessed food ignores many of the other principles for choosing one's diet. There's nothing wrong with it, and it may even be virtuous -- but I prefer to try to consider more of the tradeoffs when I make theoretical decisions.

Some examples:

• A particular type of tuna may fit a definition of unprocessed but hunting wild tuna may be extinguishing the species.
• If you cut down the rain forest or destroy a wetland to produce unprocessed beef or farmed shrimp, you may be doing more harm than is done by other means of production.
• An egg may be unprocessed but full of salmonella because of unscrupulous farming practices. And an egg labeled "organic" may come from chickens in henhouses that are as crowded and dirty as the henhouses that produce other eggs. Bad for chickens. Bad for workers. But unprocessed.
  
• Less-processed fruit sugars may not be any better for your health than refined white sugar in small quantities -- maybe a spoonful of sugar isn't the worst thing you can choose.
• A freshly-baked loaf of bread from a local bakery may have more appeal in taste and even in cost than one that's less-processed but from far away.
• Or to quote a recent article consider "... the myths that everyone who is complicit in the success of Big Agriculture -- from the Con Agras and the Smithfields of the world on down to the meat market manager who claims his products are local when they're clearly not, just to make a sale -- perpetrates on average folks who are just trying to eat well."

Every one of these is a complex issue with more than one reason for making a choice.

Playing games with pledging to eat a limited diet for a while also seems selfish. I think the inward-looking view about one's own welfare might detract from awareness of people who can't afford to make such indulgent choices. Recent research has suggested that children with access to good-tasting fresh fruit and vegetables are less likely statistically to suffer from obesity and its many health issues. Children in the "Edible Schoolyard" project showed several indications of better health than similar children in comparable school environments without such a program. Poverty is probably the most important reason why people eat badly, and if you aren't poor you are really lucky.

I'm not a perfect -- or even a good -- example of social responsibility, global environmental conscientiousness, or healthful eating. But I try to keep a wider perspective, and not get focused just on what I'm eating right now.

Food Issues

Why do we eat what we eat? As children, we learn what we like to eat and what we fear to eat. But growing up, we think of more and more reasons to choose one type of food over another. Every time I buy a can of tuna I worry about what I might be doing to the environment and whether my decision has an impact. Every time I choose between cage-free or ordinary eggs I wonder whether this is important. Do I go to the Farmers Market? Like most Americans, I seek out milk without hormones, and try to avoid beef or chicken treated with hormones. I find it sad that big, dishonest producers took over the term "organic" and then encouraged a diluted legal definition of it, leaving small honest farmers in the dust.

As I thought about all these issues, I tried to work out a list of categories for making food choices. Here is my list:

Taste is the first driver for what we want to eat. A few foods may taste good to everyone, or nearly everyone, but the old expressions "no accounting for taste" and "do not dispute taste" apply to food, so I'm not going to try to discuss this choice.

Health is a reason that everyone agrees on: food should promote good health and maybe even long life. Above all we want our food to be clean and wholesome so as not to cause disease. From there, not much agreement, except maybe that we should all eat our vegetables. Scientific studies to date are are not definitive in telling us what constitutes a good or balanced diet. Can you be healthy if you are fat, or should you limit your caloric intake? Do "natural" foods promote health more than "industrial" foods? How much sugar is too much? Which additives, industrially created foods (like HFCS), genetically modified plants or animals, and chemicals are safe, which are bad, which are truly toxic? Are organic foods better for us? Allergies are real, but fear of them may lead to irrational behavior. Also real: contamination of eggs with salmonella, spinach with e-coli, and Chinese milk with industrial poisons.

Cost of food is an issue for many people. In the extreme, people may even have to put cost concerns above issues of taste and health. All the choices on my list from here on are considered luxuries for people in our society who can't afford expensive preferences, such as fair-trade coffee, organic vegetables and fruits, or net-caught tuna fish. Unscrupulous industrial food producers have made the situation even worse by violating even the most basic laws to make foods cheaper (such as the recent Iowa egg debacle). In other countries, food scarcity is much worse than here.

Social justice is a food issue because farm workers in the US and abroad, employees of chicken-processing plants and similar industries, and many others who work on our food are poorly paid and badly treated. We may have a bad conscience about food insufficiency in the third world, while not being able to affect it through food choices. Similarly, political motivations and machinations have lead to over-fattening school lunches and have made unhealthy food the cheapest and easiest food to obtain.

The global environment, including climate change, is a major issue in food decisions. What is the impact of mass agriculture, transport of foods over long distances, attempts to grow foods in inappropriate environments, and potential exhaustion of resources? Major environmental issues:

• Big farms vs. small farms and eating local farm products instead of long-haul products are key issues for many people. The idea of a carbon footprint, or how much fuel does it take to raise food and bring an item to your table, is an effort to measure the impact on the environment and use of resources. The freshness, healthfulness, and tastiness of local and also of organic produce also plays a role in the choice of big-small or distant-local.
  
• Pollution from many types of agriculture is another part of the same problem. Pesticides, feed-lot runoff, cattle near the spinach fields, etc. are all recognized dangers both to the environment and to food production. Pollution of food from other eco-disasters is also an issue, such as the impact of the Gulf oil spill on shellfish.
  
• Genetically modified foods are beginning to be recognized as a danger to the environment -- for example, pesticide-resistant genes recently discovered to be escaping from GMO crops into nearby weeds.
  
• Overfishing and overuse of the oceans is a source of many possible risks to the world food supply and the environment. Choosing which fish to eat is becoming more and more fraught as we read of the impact of mass fisheries, irresponsible and greedy behavior (such as using huge nets that kill unwanted or disallowed species), and the near-extinction of more and more species.

Animal welfare worries vegetarians and also many meat eaters. What constitutes ill-treatment of animals? Should humans cage them, slaughter them, hunt them, or take their milk, honey, or eggs?

Religious taboos are among the oldest dietary issues. Jews may have the oldest and most complicated set of laws for what to eat, but Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Methodists, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and others also dictate dietary limitations. Some religious thinkers are combining religious food taboos with concerns for social justice, so this might be a more important issue in the future for religious people.

I only wish there were something so simple that I could do to make my own food choices easier and address at least some of these problems.

For $15 at the Farmers Market

Here you see this morning's purchases at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market.

I enjoyed my walk around the market and around Kerrytown as well.

Food from the Scarlet Letter

Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter is a tightly-constructed study of guilt and revenge, as anyone who went to high school more than around 30 years ago well knows. Before the main plot begins -- that of Hester Prynne, her ornate scarlet letter of shame, and the two men she was involved with -- Hawthorne provides a long and rather rambling introduction. He goes on about life in the old custom house at the time he was writing -- the 1840s. His sketches of custom-house workers are rather detailed, and I found myself rushing to get to the main story.

Nevertheless, I was struck with his long paragraph about an elderly man with a great "ability to recollect the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat." American food before the Civil War is an interesting subject, and this discourse offers quite a few specific examples of how Hawthorne and his contemporaries viewed the subject.

He writes of this old gentleman:

"His gourmandism was a highly agreeable trait; and to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster. ... it always pleased and satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher's meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savour of pig or turkey under one's very nostrils. There were flavours on his palate that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast. I have heard him smack his lips over dinners, every guest at which, except himself, had long been food for worms. ... ghosts of bygone meals were continually rising up before him ... : a tenderloin of beef, a hind-quarter of veal, a spare-rib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board in the days of the elder Adams, would be remembered ... . The chief tragic event of the old man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would make no impression on its carcase, and it could only be divided with an axe and handsaw."

Of particular interest here is the emphasis on meat. The old man seems never to have seen a vegetable he found memorable -- or at least Hawthorne sets his focus on meat alone. The CDC study I was reading yesterday about Americans skipping the produce aisle may reflect a deep American propensity!

Mark Twain's imagined favorite meals receive a lot of attention as primary descriptions of the best food from the end of the 19th century, for example: Twain's Feast: Forgotten Foods Worth Bringing Back. Hawthorn's passage takes us back another half-century, and in recollection as much as another 100 years.

Note: I read the Scarlet Letter on my new Kindle, and took the passage from Project Gutenberg, so I cannot provide a page number. What would my high school English teacher say? Maybe that I waited an awfully long time to reread this quite enjoyable classic.

Nutrition News

"Despite two decades of public health initiatives, stricter government dietary guidelines, record growth of farmers’ markets and the ease of products like salad in a bag, Americans still aren’t eating enough vegetables." So says the New York Times -- Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries.

How did they know? I wanted to see the original article and learn how they concluded that Americans were eating too few servings of vegetables and fruit, and that consumption had scarcely changed despite many efforts. I had a terrible time finding the article from the minimal reference information in the Times. Finally I located "State-Specific Trends in Fruit and Vegetable Consumption Among Adults -- United States, 2000--2009" dated September 10, 2010, in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC study is a report of an annual survey attempting to learn if the CDC's published nutritional guidelines are being met throughout the country. Random phone dialers call people in every state and then ask them "How often do you..."

1. "...drink fruit juices such as orange, grapefruit, or tomato?"
2. "Not counting juice, how often do you eat fruit?"
3. "...eat green salad?"
4. "...eat potatoes, not including French fries, fried potatoes, or potato chips?"
5. "...eat carrots?"
6. "Not counting carrots, potatoes, or salad, how many servings of vegetables do you usually eat?"

The article is a summary of these results for 2009 with a comparison to prior years. Only slight changes have been detected: "From 2000 to 2009, the overall prevalence of consuming fruit two or more times per day decreased slightly, but significantly, from 34.4% to 32.5%. Slight but significant increasing linear trends for fruit consumption were observed in four states, decreasing trends in 22 states and DC, and no significant change in 24 states."

Campaigns to encourage vegetable consumption, repackaging vegetables, and efforts to change children's views and habits have not moved the results of this survey. Note: the CDC goal is "increasing to 75% the proportion of persons aged ≥2 years who consume two or more servings of fruit daily and to 50% those who consume three or more servings of vegetables daily."

The article summarizes the various limitations to the conclusions, including the possibility that people without land lines have different consumption patterns and that people exaggerate their compliance with healthy norms. But there it is. I wish the Times would give references/links when they cite articles. But I can't fault their reporting.

Chocolate Mona Lisa

$24 is the price of a 6 oz. chocolate bar with Mona Lisa computer-printed onto it (or any art work, for that matter). A curiosity. If you have an extra $24 lying around you can get it here. I thank Aparna for the link!

There's a lot of Mona Lisa stuff on this blog from Birmingham, MI -- in fact, I shopped this gallery several years ago, and have purchased many of the items they are selling. The owner saw a Smithsonian article about the Mona Lisa fan club in Paris which mentioned one member in Ann Arbor MI (that would have been me). So the owner advertised in an Ann Arbor publication, and some friend (I wish I remembered who) saw the ad and sent me there. And here again is someone directing me to see it. Fate? Nooo.

For a couple of dollars at Wegman's you can get a cartoon version on a wrapper:


For more on this subject see: What Mona Lisa Didn't Eat.

What did Colombo eat?

Colombo, the 1970s TV detective played by Peter Falk, always seemed to be a bumbling and ineffective investigator -- but then, "Oh, just one more thing." With those words he'd ask the question that proved the guilt of his suspect or put key information in perspective. Now the series is a classic of TV detective fiction.

The episode "Murder Under Glass" begins with a look at a preposterously arrogant film critic and TV food star named Paul Girard. Besides posturing about his extensive food knowledge, Girard is obviously engaged in some type of dubious finances, and within minutes of the beginning of the episode, he prepares a vial of toxin from the notorious blowfish -- the Japanese fugu.

When a restaurant owner dies of poison, we -- and Colombo -- know that Girard did it. But HOW? The poison was in a bottle of wine that had not yet been opened when Girard left the victim. Why was the restaurant owner furiously angry with Girard just before his death? What was the motive? Colombo's job is to discover all.

Colombo's investigation involves interviews with a number of other restaurant owners, learning how they too were being victimized by the critic's extortion racket. At each step of the investigation, Colombo is offered delicious and showy delicacies. Galantine of duck with pistachios. A Chinese tea lunch (then unusual, now completely recognizable as Dim Sum.) A Japanese Kaiseki dinner complete with accompanying Geishas -- and then unusual sushi, including fugu. Mushrooms stuffed with crab and bechamel sauce. Eggs in aspic. A beautiful coffee cake. You get the picture: the most over-the-top restaurant dishes of the 1970s were recreated for this purpose. And Colombo appreciates every bite.

After all these interviews, the restaurateurs, Colombo (in a tux instead of his usual ratty raincoat), and Girard all attend a formal banquet for restaurant owners and food writers. A whole series of such dishes are paraded out of the kitchen: a suckling pig, a large platter of lobsters, whole small birds, fish in jellied sauce and many more. Pictures from this scene appear at left.

The final confrontation between Colombo and Girard takes place as Colombo himself prepares an elaborate veal scallopini, explaining each step as he tightens his case and Girard squirms suavely. Girard opens another bottle of wine and tries to repeat his murder scheme. Of course that scheme fails. Colombo switches the glasses and explains to him (and to us, the audience) exactly how the original murder was done.

It's a wonderful visual journey through high level restaurant culture of the 1970s. Before the Food Network. Before New Cuisine of all sorts. Before sushi was available in every small town in America. And before Anton Ego the critic as arrogant as Girard encountered Remy the Rat in Ratatouille. What fun!

Apple Crumble

Among the hundreds of recipes for apple crumble, I tried a slightly different one tonight.

Notable: I used my new vanilla powder in the topping -- vanilla extract is not suitable for dispersing into the dry ingredients, so this allows a slight flavor variation, meant to go with French Vanilla ice cream.

Using a fork and a sharp knife, I mixed/cut the topping ingredients together until the butter was in olive-sized pieces.

Then I filled up my baking dish with sliced apples and a few orphaned strawberries, sprinkled the fruit with lemon juice, and topped with the topping. I baked it for around 50 minutes at 375° -- after a bit of cooling, it thickened up nicely. My baking dish is an odd size, but this would work in a 9 by 9 inch pan.

For the topping, I used:

1 cup classic Quaker oats
1 cup brown sugar (compact)
1/3 cup flour
1 stick butter
1/2 tsp. vanilla powder
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
a handful of walnuts (around 1/2 cup)

Using Local Produce

Okra and peppers from the Farmers' Market:



Okra omelet recipe in The New Orleans Cookbook by Rima and Richard Collin:




Apple cake made with Michigan apples:

Thomas Jefferson's Vegetables

Exotic and ordinary vegetables grown at Monticello in Thomas Jefferson's lifetime included: "asparagus bean, sea kale, tomatoes, rutabaga, lima beans, okra, potato pumpkins, winter melons, tree onion, peanuts, 'sprout kale,' serpentine cucumbers, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussells sprouts, orach [a type of spinach], endive, peanuts, chick peas, cayenne pepper, 'esculent Rhubarb,' black salsify, sesame, eggplant." The grand total was "330 varieties of eighty-nine species of vegetables and herbs, 170 varieties of the finest fruit varieties known at the time."

So I learned in a recent article about Jefferson's agricultural activities: "Thomas Jefferson's Legacy in Gardening and Food" by Peter Hatch, Director of Gardens and Grounds for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Many new food preparations and traditions got a start in the Monticello kitchen and garden, possibly including: "French fries, peanuts, Johnny-cakes, gumbo, mashed potatoes, sweet potato pudding, sesame seed oil, fried eggplant, perhaps such American icons as potato chips, tomato catsup, and pumpkin pie."

According to the author, "The Jefferson legacy supporting small farmers, vegetable cuisine, and sustainable agriculture is poignantly topical today."

I had only a vague idea of Jefferson's work as a promoter of farming and wine culture. This article fills in some gaps about vegetables.

Cooking

At the farmers' market today I bought ingredients for trying out recipes from my new Dooky Chase Cookbook. (See my post on the book from a couple of days ago: Leah Chase, New Orleans Princess).

From Ernst Farm I bought chicken gizzards, from other favorite market stalls I bought green pepper, onion, and corn. I didn't find celery or other chicken at the market, but bought them elsewhere -- and above you can see that I made the very exotic dish "Giblet Stew" (p. 35). It was delicious, spiced with thyme, paprika, and parsley.






I have some okra from the market in reserve for another of Leah Chase's Creole recipes. And earlier in the day, for lunch we had a more usual salad of red and yellow tomatoes, basil, and yellow pepper from the market. We have apples, a disappointing melon, and some leeks that I already made into leeks vinaigrette. The Ann Arbor Farmers' Market strikes again!

Ann Arbor Farmer's Market Today

Here's the market stall for the famous Tantre Farms as seen in this weekend's New York Times magazine: Field Report: Will Work for Food By CHRISTINE MUHLKE.

Also, walking around the Ann Arbor Farmers Market this morning I saw lots of beautiful apples, squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, herbs, peppers, onions, potatoes, and one little basket of raspberries (which I didn't buy). Lots of people too:









Above: I didn't recognize these -- Chinese squash and bitter melon.

Leah Chase, New Orleans Princess

The Dooky Chase Cookbook documents the life and recipes of Leah Chase, owner of the Dooky Chase restaurant in New Orleans. Her father-in-law, "Dooky" Chase, founded the restaurant in 1941, at a time when black people in New Orleans had few places other than home where they could sit down to a meal -- after years of selling lottery tickets door-to-door, Dooky Chase opened a "meager po'boy stand" where he sold both lottery tickets and food. She writes:

"With 'Dooky,' Sr., being so popular with the lottery and his wife, Emily, being such a good cook, before long they were outgrowing the little corner. Five years later the lottery passed from the scene but the shop was still a popular place to go. It was the only place of its kind for black people at the time." (p. 7)

Leah Chase's involvement with the family business started years later, but eventually she became the soul of the restaurant: owner, chief cook, and important local personality. During the Civil Rights era, the restaurant became a meeting place for activists as well as being popular with New Orleans establishment figures. Recent high-profile visits to Leah at her Dooky Chase Restaurant by George Bush and Barack Obama, and her long struggle to reopen after Hurricane Katrina are part of the story, but those events were long after she wrote the book. I enjoyed reading her description of her girlhood and her food memories, which interspersed with detailed recipes, which I look forward to trying.

Vegetables, for example, were the main dish for most family meals in the country atmosphere where she grew up. The family just couldn't afford much meat, though her mother loved fishing for perch and similar fish in local waterways, which were far from the sea.

"Coming up in the depression days," she wrote, "Daddy always planted everything. He planted greens, okra, and onions." The kids in the family had a lot of work to do, and she was often unhappy when her Daddy insisted on giving away tomatoes or onions that she had worked hard to cultivate. She's anything but nostalgic for her early labor:

"If you have ever grown vegetables yourself, you don't care if you grow another one in your life. I'd just as soon go down to the French Market and buy it off some vendor. Some of my sisters still grow herbs for me, but I don't care if I never grow another thing. Farming has got to be the hardest thing in the world. Having grown vegetables does make you more conscious of the quality of the things you are buying, though. There is nothing like fresh vegetables." (p. 168)

Since the original publication in 1990, Leah Chase has written another cookbook and also has been interviewed as a model for Disney's Princess Tiana, whose dream of owning her own New Orleans restaurant is a key plot item in the movie. Leah Chase is credited with one of the recipes in the tie-in cookbook -- which to our great surprise is actually a fantastic source of recipes:


For my previous posts on New Orleans cooking see: New Orleans Cookbooks, Alice's Birthday Cake, and What do princesses eat?

My Parents' Markets

Recently, I've posted photos of some of the markets where I shop these days. I was browsing a collection of historic photos of places I've lived, and found two photos of the markets where my parents frequently shopped when I was in elementary school. Above is a market called Schenberg's. I don't recall quite so much merchandise stacked outside. My father (who did most of the grocery shopping) preferred it to most others, until later when he switched to A&P. In fact these small independent stores weren't really able to compete with the big chains.

Below is the Loop Market, which my parents definitely didn't like much, though I recall going in there from time to time when I was sent to buy something. In the background of this photo you can see the distinctive octagonal City Hall of University City. At right you can see the streetcar tracks and just a bit of a streetcar making the "loop" around the building, from which it would then return to downtown St.Louis.

I was also very excited to see a photo of the Dime Store that I shopped in as a child -- including a typically dressed family being helped by a friendly policeman, just like in the beginning readers. My friend Dorothy and I would go there and look at dolls and doll clothes. She had money for doll clothes, and so her dolls were better-dressed than mine were. Later, we shopped there for jewelry and for makeup.



UPDATE: Here is a photo of Moll's Market, where my mother shopped in my early childhood. We had no car, and I remember walking several blocks from our apartment with my sister in her Taylor-Tot (a type of stroller). This is the only photo I can find, and it's very little, but you can see the displays of produce on the sidewalk. It was quite a luxury market, with an in-store bakery with glass cases full of beautiful cakes. The family favorite was a really delicious lemon layer cake, sold by the slice. I've never had anything quite that good.

A Beautiful Fish