Michael Pollan's Latest

Before I get to today's post, I should apologize for there being no post yesterday. I briefly contemplated back-dating a post so it would appear that we hadn't missed a day, but that seemed like cheating. Suffice to say there was a sick child involved and a post just wasn't in the cards.

So, moving on.

I recently (as in, this morning) finished reading Michael Pollan's latest, Cooked. I'm not entirely sure why, but I had been avoiding it for a while. Part of it was that I was worried that his conceit of breaking his books into very distinct larger-than-chapter chunks might get old. Not every single subject can be broken down like that. 

I still believe that, but I think it worked out ok for this one. I see where his thinking was, even if I don't completely agree.

But let me back up.

Cooked is about the human ability to transform raw, whole foods into something new and greater than the sum of its parts. Pollan tackles this one cooking technique at a time, focusing each segment of the book on Fire, Water, Air, or Earth. Fire comes first and is about the art of the grill, specifically, the art of barbecue. Water is about slow-braised foods, such as stews, hearty sauces, and just about anything else that can be cooked slowly in liquids. Bread and the magic of yeast is at the heart of Air. And Earth is about the foods created by the same microbes found in the soil: fermentation. 

(And the Earth section is where this four-part harmony breaks down a little. The subject is so complex that it doesn't fit the "one recipe for each element" theme of the book; it's broken down into three smaller sections, one for fermented veggies, one for cheese, and one for beer.)

In the end, I enjoyed the whole book and loved parts of it. The microbiology of cheese? Loved it. The entire section about cooking whole pigs? Not for me, so much. If you like reading and thinking about cooking and the chemistry and biology behind some of our most-favorite food categories, this is a great book to add to your wish-list.

Grandmothers!

Years ago, I remember reading about a program in New York City that allowed a person to go to an immigrant grandmother's house and take cooking lessons from them. I was reminded of that this morning and tried to find the original article (I'm pretty sure it was in the New York Times), but failed. I did find the League of Kitchens, which may or may not be the same thing I read about. While not promising grandmothers, they organize cooking and cultural experiences in the kitchens of immigrants across the city, which I think is just awesome.

What reminded me of the article was this photo spread of grandmothers around the world posing first with the ingredients for their "signature dish" and then with the finished product. It's a lovely photo series, taken by Gabriele Galimberti during a world wide couch-surfing trip. You can see all his photos on his website and get much more background about the dish, but I had some trouble getting things to load properly using the site's navigation tools. He calls the series "Delicatessen with love".

Just as with our earlier post about food around the world, I am struck by how much variation there is in the number of ingredients, and particularly, the difference in how many vegetables are in the dish. There are some that are mostly vegetable, a few that look completely vegetarian, and many that are mostly meat. Part of the meat-focus is probably that the women were asked to prepare a signature dish, which might be interpreted as a festive dish, much more likely to highlight meat.

But the truth is that many people around the world are switching from mostly-vegetarian diets to eating more meat, as incomes rise and people are able to adopt a more western diet. This has huge implications for global food needs in the coming decades and will be the subject of tomorrow's post.

On This Veterans Day

On this Veterans Day, we should all be thankful to those who have served in our armed forces and those who currently serve.

In all wars, soldiers sacrifice: time with their families; health and well-being; sleep and comfort; and far too often, their lives. But in wars past, there was a greater sense of shared sacrifice than there is today, with the family and community members left behind finding their own role in what was called the "war effort". 

During World War II, women were called to work for the war effort. They took on non-combat roles, they worked in the munitions factories, and they became heads of households as husbands and fathers were conscripted.

 But the war effort was bigger than the army and munitions plants during the world wars, both here and abroad. In both the US and England, food was a huge part of the war effort as massive armies require massive amounts of food. With men being pulled off the farms, not just out of the factories, women and children stepped in there, too.

Victory Gardens were encouraged to increase production of fresh vegetables. Women were urged to "can all you can" to provide winter food for the household. Victory Gardens were seen as a way to stretch ration cards, free up food supplies for the troops, and reduce the need to transport food by increasing local production, thereby saving fuel.

According to the National WWII Museum website (linked above), at the height of WWII, there were 20,000,000 Victory Gardens producing 40% of all fresh vegetables grown in the United States. Over the course of the war, that was the equivalent of more than a million tons of fresh produce.

The home front mentality, the sense that we are all part of the war effort, seems largely absent from our country during our current decade of war. Without the draft, fewer families have loved ones serving in the armed forces and there is no organized national effort to save or conserve resources in order to support our troops. Yet in a world where war is increasingly about shrinking resources -- oil, gas, and yes, food -- the war effort on the home front could radically decrease our dependence on foreign oil and imported foods. So today, thank a veteran, drive a little less, and start looking for a sunny spot in your yard for a spring Victory Garden. We can all be superheroes in this fight:

"It All Turns On Affection"

Most readers of this blog have probably heard about the Building Healthy Communities work happening in Del Norte and the Adjacent Tribal Lands (DNATL). The BHC initiative is a project of The California Endowment, a private foundation dedicated to improving health in California. After many years of funding clinic initiatives and other one-time investments in many communities across the state, The California Endowment decided to try something different. What if, they asked, we invested heavily in a place for ten years? What if we worked with people living in that place to help them take ownership and view their place in a new way? What if a healthy community was built from the bottom up? What if, in other words, health became part of daily life in this place: of the people, by the people, and for the people? That is what Building Healthy Communities is all about: creating healthy places and healthy people.

One of the longtime champions of healthy people and places is the poet and essayist, Wendell Berry. In his essays extolling the love of a place and the people who care for it, Wendell Berry follows the path of one of his mentors, the writer Wallace Stegner. While Stegner created iconic works of the American West peopled by ranchers, miners, and pioneers, Berry's place is rural Kentucky and the people closest to his heart are small farmers tied to land for generations stretching back through time. His writings about the effects on community when small farmers are put out of business have affected my own understanding of farm communities for a couple of decades.

This is a very long way of saying that my heart skipped a beat this morning when I saw a headline that read, "Wendell Berry, American Hero". It sounded too much like a headline for an obituary. I'm not ready for Wendell Berry to die and, luckily, it was not the title of an obituary, but an article praising his ideas, his body of work, and the man himself.

In reading it, I learned that Wendell Berry was recently honored by being named the 2012 Jefferson Lecturer by the National Endowment of the Humanities. His lecture, entitled It All Turns on Affection, was delivered earlier this month. I have been reading it in between other tasks this morning and am in awe of his ability to weave so many ideas, literary and ecological works, and histories into a single, coherent argument for the need for more affection in our lives.

In arguing for more affection, Berry does not just mean affection between people, although he does argue that we will more readily solve our community's problems when we have genuine empathy and caring for our neighbors. But he also means affection for our place and the trees, rocks, animals, and soil that create our place. In his Jefferson Lecture, he writes:

"For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy."

No-one could argue that DNATL doesn't have a unique character. How many places in the world bring together our beautiful rocky coast, redwood forests, wild rivers, and the spaces that live in between these habitats? For many decades, the economy in DNATL did, in part, survive by destroying a part of its unique character: the cutting down of the redwood forests. Through the Building Healthy Communities work, will we be able to imagine a new way of making a living from this place without destroying it?

Wendell Berry consistently makes a case for long-term caretaking of the earth, one small place at a time. His generations-old family farm tenure no doubt informs this view and he speaks in his lecture about the difference between "boomers" and "stickers". Boomers, in his view, are people who are always looking for the next prospect, always on the move, always searching for profit for the bottom line. Stickers, in contrast, "are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it."

I have only been in DNATL for about two and a half years, but I have met a lot of stickers here. People who smile at the ceaseless rain. People who can tuna, smoke salmon, gather and dry or freeze wild mushrooms. People who fight to keep Point St. George lighthouse from crumbling into the sea. People who work to make this place better for themselves and for their children. Some people are stickers because they have chosen this life because of their love of this place and the life it offers. I have met many others who are stickers because they have no escape; people who have lived in poverty for so long that leaving the county is financially unimaginable.

Our community will be stronger, better, and healthier when all the "stickers" are stickers by choice. If we can build a healthy community that offers opportunities for all residents, then our young people can stay here because they want to live HERE. Health can happen here, but "it all turns on affection". Can we, as a community, come together with enough affection for each other, for this place, and for our communities that we can build a local economy that honors that affection and creates a place for everyone?

That is the challenge of Building Healthy Communities. For decades, Wendell Berry has written about what healthy communities are and need and provide. As he nears the end of his eighth decade, if he has decided that affection is the key, I will walk down that path with him. In his lecture, he quotes his mentor Wallace Stegner to define stickers as "those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in." That is surely what we want here: that everyone loves the life the make and love that their life is made in DNATL.

May it be many more years before I really do see a headline for Wendell Berry's obituary.

Food On Film

In my previous life as a chronic academic, I taught a class called Anthropology Through Film and Fiction. We took four major cultural topics and viewed them through a variety of lenses, including films. Food is a central concern in anthropology -- from how it's produced to the rules governing when, where, and how it can be cooked and eaten -- and it was my favorite of our subjects.

There are so many great films and books about food. We watched Babette's Feast and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. We read Like Water for Chocolate and Farmer Boy, a great view of the tremendous work involved food self-sufficiency. One year, we also watched Tampopo, which is a wonderful movie about food obsessions, but the raw egg scene freaks me out too much, so after the first year it was on a list of films they could watch on their own if they wanted more. I chalk that up to my years in food service, which were pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the Northeast's salmonella scare when over-easy eggs were featured in nightmares.

Today, there is a vast cultural shift taking place on the screen. Movie after movie is vilifying industrial agriculture; celebrating the local, the organic, the small; and shining a spotlight on how we eat. After decades of growth in industrial agriculture following World War II, people are starting to say no and the movement is being both documented in and driven by films that inform and/or expose industrial agriculture and the diet it supports. We have seen our national government resisting these changes, in the fight to continue to count pizza sauce as a serving of vegetables, for instance. This cultural shift, like so many, is being driven by grassroots action and even grassroots documentation.

There are too many films to name, but here are links for many of the films that have crossed my radar and that I've either seen or want to see:

King Corn
Forks Over Knives
Food, Inc.
Supersize Me
Fridays at the Farm
Dirt: The Movie
Fresh
Food Stamped
The Garden
As We Sow
Food Matters
In Search of Good Food

There are many others out there. Have you seen any of these? Do you have a review to share? Do you know of other movies that should be on this list? Use our comments section to share!

Chocolate Beet Cake with Orange Glaze

Beet Cake. Sounds strange, doesn't it? Then, maybe it doesn't when you consider the carrot cake or the sweet potato pie. Featuring root vegetables or tubers in confectionary treats isn't exactly new. Beets, much like carrots, supply a special sweetness, texture and color to a cake.

Root vegetables are essential. They comfort and sustain during dreary, water-logged, winter months. They've got a long shelf life, and they're full of vitamins and sugars. And they're in season now - they can be grown and enjoyed locally (Check Harvest Natural Foods for locally grown foods. They might have that something you didn't know you were looking for).

This beet cake is still a cake. It's not a well-balanced meal. But it is a comforting, hardy addition to a winter meal. Try this recipe with other root vegetables: carrot, parsnip, fennel. Add a half-teaspoon of nutmeg or cinnamon to the dry ingredients for extra flavor.


The Cake:

2 medium beets, peeled and quartered

12 tbs butter, softened, plus extra for pan

1 ½ c granulated sugar

2 ½ c all purpose flour

½ c cocoa

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

4 eggs, room temperature

½ c milk or plain yogurt

Place beets with just enough water to cover them in a small sauce pan, and cover. Bring to a boil, and cook for a few minutes till the beets are just beginning to soften. Preheat oven to 350˚F. Grease a 9 x 13 pan with a little butter. Put the beets with ½ cup of the sugar in a blender or food processor and pulse a few times to purée.

Combine flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt in a bowl. In a separate large bowl, use an electric mixer to beat the butter and remaining sugar until creamy. Add in eggs one at a time; beat until light and smooth. Beat in the beet purée. Mix in about a third of the flour mixture, followed by half of the milk or yogurt. Alternate between the two, stirring gently, until the batter just evens out.

Turn the batter into the prepared pan and bake until set (35 to 40 minutes). Let cool, then top with glaze.

The Glaze:

½ c freshly squeezed orange juice

1 tbs grated orange zest

½ tsp vanilla extract (optional)

2-3 c confectioner’s sugar

Combine all the ingredients and beat till combined and smooth. Adjust the consistency with liquid or sugar - it should be just pourable.

- adapted from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, 2007

Discovering Del Norte through Mealtime

Let me introduce myself. I'm Laura Jo, the new girl, CAN's newest AmeriCorps VISTA.

I was worried when I arrived in Crescent City. Worried there wouldn’t be any young people. Worried there wouldn’t be much in-town diversion. Worried, ultimately, that I’d be spending my evenings at home alone with stir-fried vegetables and rice while the rain came down in torrents outside my window.

Then I met a young person, another VISTA. I asked her what they did – was there a place to dance? Well, no. Not really. But I’d spend a lot of time at people’s houses, eating. And we could dance there, too, if we wanted.

She was right. First it was a small group of three in a white apartment. We shared pizza and salad. They shared with me, the good spots to eat, the good spots to see local music. Meantime, the group was growing. By the end we were nine. We were sharing travel experiences along with our pizza until talk moved on to the coming weekend and future meals to be had. That weekend it was ale and barbeque beef and oven roasted vegetables shared in a fire-warmed cabin on the Smith. We talked of chemistry and botany, of good hiking, of family and holidays. We talked about the next thing at the next house, the next meal.

 I had a couple nights of pasta after the pool, with old records playing in the background, cats and dogs snuggling up to my legs. I heard about what happened in which public meeting and who was heading up which thing.  We had a Sunday morning brunch of quiche and empanadas. We sipped our coffee and mimosas as we looked out at the river from large picture windows. We had a Sunday night “family dinner” of vegetable curry and flat bread. Then we took turns reading aloud in the orange glow of the woodstove.

She was right, that VISTA. I’ve been here for a mere three weeks, and I already feel a community is growing. Or rather, that I am being admitted into one that’s already alive, already here. Already I know there are places for me to visit, things to get involved in, people to share meals with. I discovered all this through mealtime.

Left: Connor Caldwell, Rachel McCain and Aaron Valley, a part of my new community, sharing pizza

A Bountiful Lenten Season

Many cultures around the world have periods of time when people give something up, whether it is the day-time fasts of Ramadan, fasting on Yom Kippur, or the current season of Lent, the 40 days leading up to Easter Sunday. Mardi Gras, celebrated just yesterday, is a raucous celebration before the 40 days of abstension begins.

The idea of "giving something up for Lent" has spread past church walls. Many people whose cultural traditions don't specifically include the concept use this time as an excuse to give up sugar, coffee, alcohol, internet (!!), and other things in life sometimes viewed as indulgences or even vices.

Here at Growing Tables, we thought we would take Lent in the opposite direction. Instead of giving up, we are adding on to our workload by promising a post at least every work day in Lent (and maybe the weekends, too). We have a few things in our back pocket to get things rolling, but if any of you have suggestions, we'll take them!