Food in Aspen

All the most famous food TV and journalism writers and sellers of chi-chi products are in Aspen right now for the Aspen Food and Wine Classic, which starts today or tomorrow. Huge white tents full of chairs, demo booths, or tables have been under construction all week in every open, level space in town. At the foot of the Gondola, in the main parks, in front of the Art Museum, and in little spaces all over busy worker-bees are setting up things for the arrival of all the stars of the foodie world.

The nice quiet atmosphere that we enjoyed for our first two weeks here is shattered. There's no place to park. Even the bike racks are pretty full!

My Bike Friday had to be on the wrong side of the bike rack.
Though most of the bikes probably don't belong to Foodies.

We're leaving tomorrow, luckily, so we don't have to deal with the Food and Wine Classic very much. Both the admission price (e.g. hundreds of dollars just to taste a few desserts, plus registration fees) and the philosophy (sell sell sell) of the event fail to attract me; despite being very interested in food and wine, I would not want to go -- I felt the same way 2 years ago when we were here during the same event.

  

Tents Everywhere!

As for ourselves, we have been eating rather simple food while here, going on picnics and to the weekly Tuesday BBQ at the Physics Center, and joined the other workshop participants for a meal out once. Also, we enjoyed several restaurants in Aspen, though we have not eaten out a great deal. I've posted on one or two meals out, and here are a few photos to wrap up what we ate:

Food at the Little Nell Restaurant "Element 47"
L to R, top to bottom --Fois gras with lots of decorations;
mixed vegetable salad; salmon; ravioli with various mushrooms;
cheesecake with lots of decorations.
All the food was over-presented though not bad. Service was very disappointing.

Breakfast at a cafe near our apartment yesterday:
crowding was a result of people getting ready to set up the Food & Wine Classic!

    

Red Onion Restaurant for Lunch

Maria at Red Onion

Sandwiches at the restaurant at the top of the gondola:
Tuna melt and turkey with bacon, aioli, cheese, and more

Whole fish at the Wild Fig restaurant.
A truly delicious dish
Background: my veal dish!

Pacifica Restaurant Lunch:
Very expensive tuna salad

Our shared sashimi at Asie: followed by a seafood dish and moo-shu duck:
a very nice meal at a quite good Asian fusion restaurant.

Three workshop participants at Asie for group dinner

Annette's Bakery: a good French-style macaron
She said it took her months to figure out how to make the recipe work at high altitude.

I took lots of photos in Aspen restaurants last time we were here, too. See this Flickr set.

The Trail to Woody Creek Tavern

Beside the trail snowmelt drips from the rocks

So much to look at (but the trail on the other side drops precipitously so one tries to skip the distractions)

Maria, my riding companion

A lemonade stand beside the trail

Not very far past the lemonade stand is the hamlet of Woody Creek, and our goal the Woody Creek Tavern. My menu choice: house-made tortilla chips with guac and salsa followed by green chili with posole. Maria and I arrived by bike; her husband Mark and Len met us after attending a talk, and we all had a fun lunch. Maria cycled back up the trail. My bike and I came back in the car.

 Note: I posted a lot of photos of food and decor of the Woody Creek Tavern before. Here's one food photo from our visit a couple years ago (click on photo to see more on Flickr):

In June 2011, Len had the pulled pork -- Maria had it today
ALL good!

The Physics of Cooking

Len introducing Dave Weitz

Yesterday we attended a public lecture on The Physics of Cooking sponsored by the Aspen Center for Physics, held at one of the veneus of the Aspen Institute. Speaker Dave Weitz began with  a detailed description of the course he teaches at Harvard on science and cooking, and on the various collaborators he has worked with, beginning with very famous chef Ferran Adria of Barcelona.

Weitz then discussed and demonstrated several topics in the physics of cooking, including brief summaries of egg-cooking; using a pressure cooker (which was invented, he said, by the British Royal Society); distilling and super-cooling a liquid to make a sort of tower of ice; measuring the elasticity of boiled eggs or broiled steaks; using gels in post-modern cooking processes; understanding foams; and finally, a bit of the physics of mixing a drink.

Freezing an egg in liquid nitrogen: Carolyn Boyd, student helper with Dave Weitz

Using three sous-vide cookers Dave demonstrated the difference between eggs cooked precisely to three very close temperatures -- 61, 63, and 65 degrees Celsius, and how the protein in the egg reacted to the different temperatures. Results: a watery egg, an semi-watery egg, and an egg that looked like a regular poached egg with a soft but solid white and oozy yolk. Caroline Boyd walked two of the eggs around the audience in the fairly large hall so that we could see the difference.

Aspen Chef Robert McCormick demonstrates how to encapsulate cucumber juice in
a thin membrane using agar and Ca2. Result "cucumber caviar."

After McCormick's demo of cucumber caviar, a gel, Dave briefly discussed foams like beer foam, whipped cream, and ice cream, pointing out that whipping cream with a whisk made a more stable foam than the faster method of injecting gas, using a device that appears in the photo above (in front of McCormick's apron).

Local bartender Jimmy Yaeger gave the final demonstration of how to mix a Negroni and how to make a perfectly clear and spherical ice cube (using very elaborate though low-tech equipment).  Yaeger uses a water-circulating ice freezer to make giant blocks of perfectly clear ice -- the circulating device removes the air bubbles that make ordinary ice cubes cloudy. He saws up the big ice block into various-sized ice cubes to provide a distinctive touch for the drinks in his bar. I was very interested in the copper pressure device used for processing a 3 inch cube of ice into a spherical ice cube. The heat-conducting property of copper causes the corners of the cube to just melt away!

After the end of the talk was an outdoor demo of making ice cream in sealed plastic bags surrounded by another baggie of ice and salt.

Aspen Physics Center Picnic

The physics center has several gas grills and lots of picnic tables, which are all in use at the Tuesday night picnic. All the current workshop participants and their families are invited; I think most show up. Steak, chicken, vegetables, veggie patties, and lots of other grilled things are all cooked at once; people bring dinner for themselves or occasionally to share in small groups. The center offers paper and tableware, nice grilling tools, beverages (for purchase), potato chips, and watermelon. If they ever serve anything except potato chips and watermelon, I'm not aware of it.

Aspen Physics Center Tuesday Night Picnic

After dinner conversations

Aromas and Flavors from Jeanie

My blogger friend Jeanie recently wrote about her visit to Grand Oak Herb Farm in mid-Michigan to enjoy a flavorful tea and learn some new aromatherapy ideas. Her blog post about the farm had lots of thoughts on delightful aromas and flavors that contrast with the reading I've been doing, and especially because she included a number of ideas for crafting sachets and other aromatic items. I'm not much into crafting, but I thought it was a wonderful way to think more about the world of fragrance and flavor.

Jeanie kindly gave me permission to make a long excerpt from her blog post, "Taking Tea at Grand Oak Herb Farm." She wrote:

We arrived a little early -- with a bit of time to walk around the grounds and check out the greenhouse, where fairy gardens were plentiful!

Numerous flights of fancy passed through our minds as we enjoyed the wee gardens and the soon-to-be larger plants within.

Then on to tea, ...and entering the tea room.

The table was lovely with easy-to-make tiered sandwich/dessert trays, ...

They were packed with sandwiches and sweets. We learned that the savory flavors were at the bottom, the saltier bits might be on the next level and at the top, the sweets! And, that you eat from the bottom up!

My plate included Beulah's wonderful basil-curry chicken salad, ham with orange marmelade and dill on pumpernickel, a potato quesadilla and the most divine crostini with an herb butter that included herbs and parmesan cheese. (I could have eaten the whole plate of that!) Other sandwiches included an open face corned beef with horshradish and mint and wee cucumber sandwich rounds.

We were most captivated by her candles. Here's how to do it: In jars, put lemon verbena and orange wedges at the bottom, add a few more fragrant greens if you like. Add water and add a floating candle. What sweet fragrance! 

We had an iced and hot tea. Beulah makes her own teas and both were delicious!

 

After we worked our way up the tray, Beulah and Peg offered a variety of demonstrations and sharing of products they make and sell at the shop -- and were generous in sharing their. Because I don't sew, 

 

I bought one of the micro-or-freezer sinus pillows, made from lavender, eucalyptus, rosemary and mint. Lavender brings with it healing properties -- and of course it smells wonderful!

My favorite was the firestarters and I will be collecting pine cones to do this. 

 

Start with a dried pine cone and tie a long wick around the middle and knot it, so it has two ends. With twine or curling ribbon, tie dried lavender stems and if need be, a drop of lavender oil. Then melt wax -- soy wax is recommended over paraffin, but I suppose both would work. drip that on the knot. Then using a piece of pretty fabric, tie a knot. (The one I bought as a sample at the shop also had a blob of the wax on the bottom of the firestarter, too.) Light both ends of the wicks and off you go! (I suppose you could use wheat or raffia in place of the fabric for a different look.) 

 

Another easy idea -- buy or make muslin tie bags, fill them with dried lavender buds and use in the dryer.

 

Peg showed us how to make bath bags -- use epsom salts, lavender, ice cream salts, baking soda and a few drops of lavender and bergemot essential oils. Put into a bag to hand over the shower nozzle or  hang over the faucet/float in the tub.

(With all items, using a cellophane bag is better than a poly one or baggie because the fragrance will leak.

Another idea -- a hankie pillow. Instead of tossing Grandma's tatted hankie, fold in half, stitch along two sides, fill with fragrance (they used lavender, lemon verbena, bergemot and mint) and stitch the top. Place between your pillows for a healing sleep!

...

They also discussed tinctures -- the importance of essential oils which are pure and so much more! They make their own moth repellent with cedar shavings, dried cedar, rosemary, lavender, cloves and bay along with eucalyptus oil. No chemicals. No moths, either!

...

I think our tea with Peg and Beulah was over too soon -- so much to learn, to savor, to sniff, to see! We wrapped up our visit exploring the grounds a bit more...

For those who live in the mid-Michigan area, Grand Oak Herb Farm is well worth the drive to Bancroft, a small town easily accessible by I-69. To give you an idea how popular this spot is, we had guests at our table from as far as Detroit! Please check out the website HERE for additional teas and workshops this summer and return for ones this fall.

Again, I thank Jeanie for allowing me to excerpt this from her blog, The Marmelade Gypsy.

Claudia Roden Portrait

Roden as seen in More Intelligent Life

The magazine More Intelligent Life today offers an overview of the work of Claudia Roden: "Claudia Roden's Succinct Taste."

I'm fond of Roden's cookbooks, both as works of cooking literature and as sources to cook from. My favorite is A Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day. I agree with the article's author, Josie Delap, that "Roden channels a thousand years of Middle Eastern and Jewish cooks, from the medieval palaces of Baghdad to the shtetls of eastern Europe."

How we smell and taste

A recent article in the Guardian -- "What makes eating so satisfying?" -- summarized some of the research on how the brain and sensory organs work together to create flavor and enjoyment in eating and drinking. This fit very well with my recent project to learn more about human responses to aromas and smells as I have been writing here.

The author had several things to say about the complex pleasure of smelling and tasting wine.When you sniff a wine, the article points out, you perceive the most volatile aromas first, followed by those that are stirred up when you swirl the contents of your glass.

From the article: With wine, it is easy to confuse the two separate
entities of taste and smell. Photograph: David Levene 

The complexity of the taste receptors on the tongue isn't quite what one learned in the past: the old "map" of taste buds has been superseded by recent research, says the Guardian. "The current consensus is that tastebuds all over the mouth carry receptors for all the basic tastes, it's just that there are higher concentrations of those four tastes in their designated areas."

The following example illustrates the article's point that perceptions of flavors in fact reside in the brain and on memories and learned reactions, citing Professor Barry Smith of London University's Centre for the Study of the Senses:

It is easy to confuse the two separate entities of taste and smell, and the latter holds great sway over how something will taste when it reaches your mouth. For example, westerners associate the aroma vanilla with sweetness (which is a taste – we can't actually smell sweet) so strongly that if vanilla is added to food, we'll think it tastes sweeter than it really is. But connections such as this are, adds Smith, "learned by the brain, not by you". If you are given a drink that has traces of sugar and vanilla that you wouldn't detect if they were on their own, the two together will taste sweet to you. Unless you're from Asia, where vanilla tends to be associated with salty food. 

The role of the brain in creating flavor is the subject of an entire book that I read in the course of my project: Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters by Gordon Shepherd. The connection made me find this example especially interesting.

Enjoyment of food also depends on visual cues, especially color, and on the sounds one hears while eating, says the Guardian:

In 2008, the Oxford professor Charles Spence won the Ig Nobel prize for proving the importance of noise when eating crunchy snacks. The study showed that people think Pringles "taste" stale when they're less crunchy, even though the taste and smell remain normal. He then put headphones on his munching participants, amplifying the sounds of their own crunching. The louder the crunch, the fresher and crisper the Pringles were reported to be. This is why, says Smith, "they make bags of crisps so noisy, to get the brain to think: fresh fresh fresh." 

Quite a fascinating article!

A Food Artist

In today's Diner's Journal in the New York Times: a reference to the work of Pedro Diego Alvarado-Rivera, a nephew of the famous Diego Rivera. Alvarado-Rivera was born in 1956, and studied in France and his native Mexico.

 "Alvarado-Rivera has devoted most of his pictorial work to the representation of fruits, flowers, and vegetables blooming and ripening," says his brief biography on the webpage of a gallery where his works are on display (and where I found these images). While still-life works aren't always exactly food works, I think these images are appetizing.

Easy as boiling eggs?

I've always thought it was easy to hard-boil eggs and I've been dubious about long complicated explanations. I always put them in cold water, bring them to a boil, and leave them for 12 minutes.

Yesterday I had a shock when I started peeling the eggs I had boiled according to this method earlier in the day -- they were still soft, though done enough to eat. I forgot that I'm up here on a mountain at 8000 feet where water boils at a much lower temperature -- in the 190s not at around 212 like at home. Seems as though I should let them spend longer with the water at a rolling boil, and also leave them longer after turning off the burner. I'll give it a try.

I wonder what else is different, and I wonder why I never noticed this during prior trips. I guess I didn't happen to boil any eggs.

UPDATE: on my second try, I left the eggs for 5 mins on a slow boil and then 20 mins on simmer and they were perfect for making egg salad. No greenish rim around the yolk, either.

In Aspen

First dinner at the apartment where we'll be staying for the next 3 weeks in Aspen, Colorado.
Same apartment where we stayed in June, 2011

Cheers! 

Looking forward to Paris

I read here and here (with illustrations) and lots of other places that beginning in 2009 you could get a Big Mac in the shopping center where you wait in line to get into the Louvre Museum. We are planning a trip, but will probably skip the burger.

Or as a cartoonist from San Diego put it:

Garlic Smells

"Can I smell the pickles?" I used to ask when I was a small child and my father took me to a delicatessan. I only vaguely remember the deli, which we must have walked to (no car), but I remember the wooden pickle barrel, which was almost as tall as I was. The deli man would take off the barrel's lid, and I would put my nose near but not too near to the curing cucumbers and green tomatoes in greenish brine, and sniff -- garlic, dill, vinegar.

My father would ask for a half-sour pickle or pickled tomato and buy half a pound of corned beef, if my memory is right. The deli man knew which pickles had been in the barrel just the right amount of time. I think he and my father knew each other from some other time or place, but my memories are vague, except for the delicious smell from the pickles. Kosher-garlic-pickle smell is still noticeable in the blend of smells in a deli, along with the garlic from the pastrami.

Smell-resistant American culture in the past, like proper British culture, classified garlic as foreign and offensive, but Americans slowly got used to garlic as group after group of immigrants enjoyed it and then popularized it along with their cuisines. I guess garlic came in by a back door near the famous "golden door." Americans looked down on Italians at first, but soon learned to love pizza, spaghetti, and garlic bread, getting used to the cheesy, yeasty, herbal and garlicy aroma of Italian restaurants in the early 20th century.

Chinese restaurants became trendy in America several times, beginning, surprisingly, as early as the mid-19th century. Fresh garlic and ginger sauteed in hot oil are the now-familiar start of many stir-fried Chinese dishes, so the smell of garlic is definitely a component of the characteristic Chinese-restaurant aroma. Korean restaurants, which also use lots of garlic in strong-flavored dishes like kim chee, are growing in popularity now. Though I've never tried any of the famous foods from a Korean taco truck, I imagine a powerful aroma that's partly garlic and fermented cabbage and partly tortillas, maybe with a whiff of hot lard for frying as I would expect in a taqueria.

"The first thing you smell at the Huy Fong Foods factory in suburban Los Angeles is the overwhelming aroma of garlic, a key ingredient in the company’s signature product: Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce," wrote Caleb Hannan in "Sriracha Hot Sauce Catches Fire, Yet 'There's Only One Rooster,'" in Bloomberg Business week recently. "Last year, the company sold 20 million bottles." Originally part of Thai cuisine, sriracha sauce in America has become synonymous with the Huy Fong LA version and its rooster logo. The popularity of garlic-heavy Thai food and above all sriracha sauce is a recent thing in America.

Japanese cooking isn't known for garlic, but a Japanese friend told me that families there use garlic in cooking only on Friday and Saturday night to avoid offensive garlic breath when they go to work or to school on weekdays. Though not a traditional flavor in the type of sushi that's very popular here, garlic is used in raw beef dishes in Japan and in a few other foods. Similarly, garlic isn't a dominant flavor in the Indian food that Americans are accustomed to, but has its place in some regions. Maybe the garlic-flavored preparations from these cultures will reach American diners some day.

French cuisine dominated fine dining in America in the 19th and much of the 20th century. Garlic was a pretty muted element in French haute cuisine, and I suspect that even chefs who trained in France tended to avoid garlic aromas when adapting their cuisine to America or England. But maybe not completely -- consider this:

 "La Cuisine Pratique [a recipe collection from 1902 used at the cooking classes held at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris] occasionally contains stories about chefs. One, 'Le Secret de Francatelli,' discusses the salads he prepared during his tenure at the Reform Club in London. A customer commented on the wonderful aroma that wafted from the salad when it arrived at the table. The secret? Garlic, crushed in the chef's teeth while he tossed the salad. The smell of his breath helped create that indefinable aroma. The piece ends by saying that the customer thanked Francatelli profusely, but remarked that perhaps he would not admire the salads as much in the future." (from Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession by Amy B. Trubek, p. 28)

The smell of garlic has a complicated reputation. If you eat garlic, some people believe, mosquitos will avoid you; maybe this works. Italian mothers once burdened their children with necklaces of garlic. This made the children unpopular, but the mothers insisted because they thought the smell prevented colds or other diseases. In Eastern European folklore, garlic cloves and garlic breath or body odor functioned not only as an effective vampire repellant, but also as a charm against the evil eye and other malicious spirits or devils. (The Andaman Islanders that I wrote about aren't the only ones whose spirits can smell you. For lots more garlic superstitions and history, check this American Folklore page.)

Garlic can be loved or hated. If your mother ate garlic before you were born, you probably like it better than if she did not: garlic, in a prenatal diet, can be detected in the amniotic fluid, as can other types of flavor/aroma. The presence of garlic has an influence on "after-birth preference lasting into childhood. ... the neural system for the basic hedonic responses to taste, in terms of attraction or repulsion, is in the brain stem and is active in the newborn. The learning of these preferences in utero and their emotional expression are therefore incorporated into this hardwired system." (from Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why it Matters by Gordon M. Shepherd,  p. 234)

Photo from Wikimedia commons. This post also appears on my travel blog.

The Spirits Can Smell You

Illustration from Radcliffe-Brown's
The Andaman Islanders

Note: My project on aromas and smells and how we perceive them has themes that match both my food blog and my travel blog, so I have decided to post in both places.

Andaman islanders around 100 years ago lived in tropical forests and on the shore. They located their camps seasonally, according to what food was available: prey like turtles, wild pigs, and dugongs, and plants like yams and taro. In the forests, they believed, lived various spirits; some of these were what remained of dead people, and some were the controllers of natural phenomena like lightening, storms, earthquakes.

Between 1906 and 1908, anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown lived in the Andaman Islands which at the time belonged to British India. He reported his observations and interpretations of Andaman culture in the book The Andaman Islanders, published originally in 1922, and reissued several times since then. It's a fascinating classic study from what I believe to be the early days of anthropology, and I loved reading it. I was especially searching for information on aromas and odors and what they meant to the islanders -- a topic for which this book is noted. This blog post is based on my reading.

Forest spirits, like the islanders themselves, were extremely responsive to odors, and the islanders were very careful not to allow inappropriate odors to anger the spirits. In addition to being conscious of odors, the islanders were also highly aware of the colors of flowers and fish and of the changes in light and darkness at night and in the forest.

Radcliffe-Brown recorded many stories that illustrated the spirits' reactions to odors. One story concerned Pulaga, a spirit of wind, who caused violent storms that came from the sea. Pulaga hated the smell of burning wax from beehives where the islanders gathered honey. The smell or sight of burning wax could cause cyclones so violent that jungle trees could be uprooted for miles, destroying paths and hunting grounds. At times islanders also used techniques for burning wax to placate Pulaga and stop a storm. The season for gathering and burning wax was just before cyclone season, so Pulaga's behavior was somewhat predictable. (p. 153-157, 357)

Radcliffe-Brown writes of the ferocity of these storms:

"The wind is sometimes so violent as to tear every leaf from the trees in its path. While the storm lasts there is danger to the lives of the natives. An old man recounted to me how on the occasion of a violent cyclone he and the others of his village took refuge in the sea and on the open shore from the danger of falling trees, and remained there till the violence of the storm had abated. ... If a storm lasts for any length of time the natives, who are unable or afraid to go out hunting, have to do without food until it is over." (p. 352)

In early times, a spirit named Bilika had smelled the mouths of the islanders' ancestors to see if they had been eating his food. If he discovered the smell of his food he slit their throats. Another spirit named Nila could smell a human being who came near his tree and would come out and kill him with his knife. Smells were always associated with danger, magic, ancestors, and spirits. The smell of a certain red paint could cure disease, so a sick person would paint his upper lip in order to inhale the aroma. (pp. 200, 163, 268, 179)

Some spirits were especially sensitive to the smell of a particular green plant. A person who handled the plant or prepared it by scraping it while it was in contact with his thigh acquired its smell. This smell could cause him to get rheumatism. Also, a person who wanted to hunt sea turtles would avoid this plant as the turtles would be frightened by the smell. Other trees had helpful smells: one small tree's leaves could be used as a bed for a sick person; in inhaling the aromas of these leaves he would be cured. (p. 180-182, 268)

Spirits also reacted to cooking odors and body odors. Jungle spirits hated the smell of roasting pork, but didn't mind the smell of boiling pork. They could detect the odor of a person who had eaten either turtle or pork -- the smell was, in their view, a heated smell, and could be disguised or made unrecognizable by certain techniques of body painting with a special white clay that cooled off the person who had eaten the offensive food. (Radcliffe-Brown himself said he couldn't detect the difference in body odor of people who had eaten different meats.) (p. 161, 312)

The odor of the body was connected to the "virtue or energy of the person" and with manifestations of the food being eaten -- thus was a source of danger. Foods conveyed a variety of dangers to those who ate them; the most dangerous foods were dugong, a particular fish, certain snakes, and fats from several animals. Pork, turtle and turtle eggs and a few others were less dangerous. Vegetables were safest. (p. 312, 269)

The islanders were aware of many sensory variations in the seasons, which included hot seasons, a rainy season, and a season of cyclones. They named the seasons for the trees and plants that flower at that time. (p. 119)

"In the jungles of the Andamans it is possible to recognize a distinct succession of odours during a considerable part of the year as one after another the commoner trees and lianas come into flower. when, for example, the species of Sterculia called ... jeru comes into blossom it is almost impossible to get away from the smell of it except on the seashore when the wind is from the sea. Moreover these various flowers give their scent to the honey that is made from them, so that there is also a succession of differently flavoured kinds of honey. The Andamanese have therefore adopted an original method of marking the different periods of the year by means of the different odoriferous flowers that are in bloom at different times. Their calendar is a calendar of scents." (p. 311-312) 

Each season offered different foods, which contributed to the overall sensory perception of the seasons. When "important roots and some of the most prized fruits" were in season, during the cool season and the following hot time, the natives did not consider lizards, snakes and civet-cats to be in season; the pigs were breeding and thus also not eaten. Honey was abundant in the hot season. Jungle animals and fish were more plentiful in the rainy season when vegetables and honey were scarcer. Certain spirits were associated with these seasons, during which the winds blew predominantly from a particular direction. All these factors affected the way the islanders categorize and named their seasons. (p. 353)

Cultural variation in categories of aromas and perception of them are a topic of most writers who explore the topic of smells. Radcliffe-Brown gave a fascinating account of the aromatic and sensory world of the Andaman Islands and the people who lived there.

Bread and Milk Politics

 

This week I read White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf by Aaron Bobrow-Strain and Milk: A Local and Global History by Deborah Valenze.  While both books have a vast amount of important and interesting history and cultural information, I found White Bread by far the more enjoyable reading.

I had to force myself to finish Milk. Normally I like histories of foods that begin in ancient times and go into lots of detail about the Middle Ages etc. But this one seemed to choose rather tedious aspects of the development of milk-drinking, the constant tension about the best foods for newborns and infants, and the dangers of poorly handled milk and how, often adulterated or spoiled, milk even could kill consumers, especially children.

I could hardly put down White Bread. So I think I'll mainly talk about this, the book I liked. The focus on the politics of bread, which in the past provided a substantial percent of people's daily nutrition, energizes the book, and motivates the historical material. Although bread is no longer the crucial dietary element it once was, the author makes clear how it still plays an enormous symbolic role, including in the recent fad of eliminating it from the diet on the basis that it has either carbohydrate or gluten which faddish theories have determined are dangerous despite a lack of scientific evidence.

You would have to be culturally tone-deaf to be unaware of the use of the term "white bread" as an accusation casually thrown at groups of people one doesn't like or approve of. The context in which this insult emerged is carefully described, bringing out the ironies of the fact that many people of color in fact are fond of white bread, while the advocates of artisanal bread tend to be upper class and mainly white.

Bobrow-Strain explores the historical emergence of white bread and its promise in various eras, mainly in 20th century America. He shows that the development of industrial -- and thus admired -- baking began with scientific diet advocates who deplored the unsanitary conditions and unreliable products of artisan bakers in urban areas. (He explicitly expands on the topics in the book Perfection Salad, which I also read recently.)

A hundred years or so ago, well-meaning nutrition advocates frequently characterized bakers and small-bakery owners as dark-skinned immigrants lacking knowledge of hygiene; the neighborhood bakeries where they worked were usually in cellars, contrasting to the emerging factories where tens of thousands of loaves a day were baked with virtually no contamination from human hands. Advertising of the newer and more modern bread stressed how sterile it was; many such bakeries had windows opening on the production lines and invited the public, including school children on field trips, to come watch. (I distinctly remember going on such a trip in around 4th grade to see packaged white bread being baked.)

A major extension to the propaganda that white bread was purer and more healthful than dark breads was the requirement to use vitamin-fortified flour in all bread. The requirement was a response to the unfit physical state of military recruits at the beginning of World War II -- the damage done by food insecurity during the Great Depression had produced skinny, weak youth. Merk pharmaceuticals and the baking industry found the recent discovery of fortifying vitamins, especially thiamine to be a great money-making opportunity, and allied with the FDA to create enriched bread.

Further chapters explore the introduction of industrial white bread to various third-world countries (such as Bimbo bread in Mexico). The book becomes really fascinating as it describes the backlash against industrial white bread that became part of the 60s counterculture. Bobrow-Strain doesn't just tell this story as a myth, as often happens. Rather, he gets into a variety of issues and questions about the people who advocate for home baking, revolt against industrialized food, and self-sufficiency. Most interestingly, he points out how both left and right wing ideologies have become advocates for some of the same issues of self-sufficiency, living off the grid, and revolt against certain types of conformity and government regulation.

My favorite question, as he expresses it, asks who has "the power to declare things 'natural' or 'unnatural.' If we honestly and passionately love the taste of store-bought white bread, why isn't that a natural craving? ... what -- and who -- gets left out of this picture?" (p. 87)

Five seductive dreams about food, the author says in his conclusion, are the repeating themes of the book: "dreams of purity, naturalness, scientific control, perfect health, and national security and vitality. Each of these dreams rose to prominence because it crystallized deep currents of longing and anxiety -- and thus galvanized action." Seemingly innocent dreams, yet they "framed the problems of society and the food system in dubious ways."  (p. 190)