THE OMNIVORE'S DIALOG

Crossing the Line

 

     The line I want to talk about crossing is one described in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which he pointed out that a major problem with “modern” food is that the food is first broken down into component chemicals in a factory, and then reconstructed into something not quite resembling food (such as Twinkies), in a different factory.  He said that in eating such things we were losing touch with something important about the food chain, and in later work he associated this process with a variety of health, environmental and economic problems. I began wondering exactly how long we have been doing that, and whether it was quite as much of a problem as described.  In fact, just what separates “cooking” food, a procedure he would describe as wholesome, from “processing” food, which sounds in some way industrial and corrupted?

 

   I’d like to look at a couple of historical examples of food processing, and then compare them to the more modern mischief behind Ho-Ho’s and Cocoa Pebbles. About three thousand years ago, when agriculture started to yield certain types of food surpluses, it became obvious that storing food was at least as important a problem as growing food.  Grain was produced in abundance in the Nile and Tigris valleys, and animal husbandry assured a decent supply of meat, at least for the wealthy, but grain rots in storage, and even dry baked bread corrupts after a few days. Flour does little better in hot weather, and there are always rodents and insects in the storage areas.  Meat can be cured, but without refrigeration is a risk in warm weather. Dried it lasts a while longer.  The processes of baking, curing, smoking and drying probably count as cooking rather than processing, but the intent is the same, and fish were dried before distribution (i.e. by a processor), to make the transportation easier.  Socrates wrote that you had to be very rich to eat fresh fish. The usual commodity was dried.

 

     Edging closer to the line is fermentation.  Here food (grain) is definitely broken down into component chemicals (carbohydrates) and these are converted to other chemicals (alcohol) for enhanced shelf life. Beer is made from roughly the same ingredients as bread, but sealed beer can be stored for months, while bread… well maybe a week. The Celts used to refer to beer as “liquid bread”. To sell this product further, much like modern marketing, a number of health advantages of dubious validity were attached to beer.  Ancient texts describe it as providing courage in battle (though I doubt if it made you more likely to survive the fight).  It was widely believed to be an aphrodisiac, though even Shakespeare observed it was more helpful to the desire than the performance.  It was thought to be a digestive aid, to the same Romans who coined the term “vomitorium”.  And it was used in medicine as a soporific and analgesic, by doctors who failed to notice the addictive properties. Beer preserved the grain the way wine preserved the grapes, which otherwise could only be eaten at the end of summer.

 

     Animal husbandry also gave us something hunter-gatherers had never known – milk.  It is extremely nutritious, and provides essential nutrients hard to get elsewhere.  But before refrigeration, it was a huge risk after 24 hours.    Thousands of years ago we learned how to break milk down into components with increased shelf life, calling the parts cream, and curds and whey, millennia before these would be called lipids and proteins and the aqueous phase. Butter keeps for weeks, if cool, and cheese for an entire season or more. A desperate farmer with lots of cheap labor could make these on his own, but in cities, these products came from dairies, where a savings of scale could appear.  Remember, nature has no “food” similar to beer, or cheese or sour cream – these are from factories, not kitchens.  You could make these things at home, just like you could shoe a horse or dig a well, but they come from processing, not cooking.

 

     The domestication of the soy bean in Asia provides another example of ancient food processing on an elaborate scale.  Soy beans can be mashed, separated into oil and protein meal portions, and then reassembled into myriad products, all discovered hundreds or thousands of years ago.  Bean curd resembles no natural food, but it is awfully good for you, and tastes a lot better than boiled soy beans. Add soy sauce if it seems bland. But don’t try to make it at home; that would involve a long and complex process.

 

     To return to the original question, what separates Chateau Margeaux from Budweiser, or Kraft American singles from Stilton, or a Saint Honore cake from a Ding-Dong?  Are dried matzoth from a factory, Saltine crackers or potato chips really different? Matzoth was once made in homes, crackers resemble hardtack, which used to be made in homes, while potato chips resemble, I don’t know, overcooked potatoes? I think the differences are more in form than substance, and some of my answer is food elitism.  Preparing food should be a highly skilled art, done by individual artists. Like the difference between hand made and factory furniture, removing the artist reduces the value, though not necessarily the utility and substance.  Factories are gauche because they are factories, but not evil because of it. There is no spiritual difference between mass producing beer and converting food into sweetened pastry-esque objects with a moist soft (notice I didn’t say cream) filling and an infinite shelf life.  Stilton cheese crafted by hand from milk happens to taste better (to me, my latest date won’t eat it) than Kraft cheese made from corn oil. But they use similar methods to increase the storage life of food products.  I could quibble and say that Kraft makes an artificial cheese, but we have already agreed that cheese is an artificial chemical construct made from milk solids, albeit a time honored one. It would be just quibbling.

 

    And finally, I would debunk the “grandmother test”.  Eat only what your grandmother would have recognized as food.  My grandmother ate freely of Sugar Frosted Flakes and Oreo cookies, both around from before her birth at the turn of the century. She would not have known tofu from laundry soap. She also saved up all cooking fat into a big jar, and reused it for frying – homemade lard. Surprisingly, she lived a very long time.

 

    I think what I’m trying to say is this. Processing food to increase its usefulness is not always bad, when the purpose is to avoid waste, prevent famine, or for a little bit of fun, like beer and soy sauce.  It becomes evil when the fake imitates the real, and is passed off as such.  Beer isn’t fake bread, it’s something new.  Bean curd isn’t fake soybeans, it’s something new.  Velveeta processed cheese spread is fake cheese, and it’s sold to the public as cheese. Twinkies are fake pastry. Potato chips are fake snack crackers for dipping, which in turn are fake pastry. Corn chips are fake potato chips, and so on.  Cold breakfast cereals, in the old days, were legitimate new forms of corn and grain.  Clearly marketed for convenience rather than economic need, they were still legitimate food.  Granola was the earliest form, and it doesn’t bother me.  Unsweetened corn flakes were a high fiber health food made in factories in the 1870’s, and not having to fire up a wood stove at 5 AM to make breakfast is more than a little convenient. It allowed families to have two wage earners.  But when they started adding sugar and shapes, marshmallows and chocolate, it started being desert in breakfast disguise; when they added vitamins, then it became a junk food passed off as a health food. Truly execrable. They even shape children’s cereals to look like deserts. One looks like chocolate chip cookies, another like donuts. Fake, fake, fake. This is over the line.

 

     Greensgal would add that making unwholesome changes in food, not for storage or variety or even convenience, but for increasing sales, compounds the felony.  The company that makes Cocoa Pebbles knows eating pure sugar before school is bad for kids. They put the sugar in because it’s addictive, and it increases sales. They disguise the corn flakes as donuts to increase sales.  I’m not suggesting that Anheuser-Busch changes bread into alcohol as a humanitarian gesture of good will. But at least the people who buy beer aren’t lured into it because they think it will be good for them. Or that it’s more nutritious than ordinary bread. They wanted beer, and presumably couldn’t afford the better tasting varieties from abroad. People who buy Twinkies think they’re food, whereas they are just non-toxic chemical glop disguised as food. They are clearly more than one toke over that line.

Armageddon Revisited

I'm going to offend a lot of sensibilities, and maybe cause a few people to pause for thought, by suggesting everyone should read "A Friend of the Earth" by noted humorist, very black humorist, T. Coraghessan Boyle, available from Viking.  This novel details living conditions in the year 2025 along the "highest probability curve" as currently predicted.  The characters in the story are environmental radicals from the turn of the millennium, who "fought the good fight, and lost".  Readers gradually come to realize that the motives and understanding of all of us, radical environmentalist or DAR republican, currently living, are so convoluted and blinded by short term self interest that we wouldn't recognize Armageddon if it were held tomorrow. And Armageddon, when described by such an illustrious author, is way worse than we suppose.

I'm not referring to the deaths of tens of millions from civil unrest and climate change in impoverished countries at sea level, because that happens early on, is happening, and nobody among the privileged of North America really gives a damn.  These places are depopulated by 2025. I'm talking about irritating shortages, lousy weather, plumbing that won't work from endless rain and rising water, food that won't grow, and transportation that breaks down when the energy runs out. The West Coast is sinking into rising muddy water, very slowly, and the Midwest is a dust bowl of baking heat and desert climate.  This all comes true as predicted, by 2025, and the baby boomers, who continue in control because of more effective geriatric drugs and a drastically lower birth rate, are still around to howl that the government doesn't do enough.

I'm going to share a quote about food options. This passage comes after we learn the only fish remaining after the oceans died are tilapia, crappie, carp and catfish - all pond raised.  The favorite sushi is a crappy roll, which I presume is a double entendre. "...the kind of gut you used to see a lot more of around the turn of the century, when junk food was a staple. Now people crave meat and fish and broccoli, sweet potatoes, chard, wheat germ, the things they can't get the way they used to, and forget the Ho-Ho's and Pop Tarts and Doritos Extra-Spicy Meat-Flavored Tortilla Chips - that crap they can't give away."

You see, it turns out they can make that stuff from recycled chemicals, yeast raised in tanks, or any food that happens along.  So the shelves remain well stocked, even in famine. And the things that require sunshine (or rain) or other moderate weather, and then have to be transported, are what "only computer scientists and rock stars can afford".

The thing I most admire about this book is that the author, as all good satirists do, defends all points of view.  Even as the loggers beat up the protesters, while the police stand idly by, you get an explanation of points of view.  These are so rationally revealed that they leave no doubt that the future is sealed, and it's way too late to change anything. The protesters march in vain, the politicians argue and blame in vain, and the rural laborers of the California north woods protect their vanishing jobs in vain. The end, science tells us, is inevitable.

This book is doubly gloomy because it not only has a convincing ring of truth, as though the author has actually been to the future and is reporting back, but because it leaves no way out.  Few of the characters in a Boyle novel do more than float with the stream, perhaps because the author really doesn't see much hope in struggle.  But is this masochistic view so really far off the mark?  I read yesterday that the North Polar Cap has it's thinnest ice cover in six thousand years.  If the trend continues, the pole will be ice free in five years. This revised the estimates of global warming again, and now it appears we passed some sort of threshold where the process feeds on itself and accelerates.  The most annoying thing about science fiction is that it has tended to anticipate science fact.  Better check on your umbrella and find the galoshes.

Listen and Learn

This is an excellent one hour audio of a panel of noted luminaries in the Real Food movement.  Authors of some of our favorite tomes on the American food system are on this panel.

An Unlikely Source

You read it here, a Takoma Park resident referring you to an article in a Conservative Magazine!  This came by way of a diligent and thoughtful member of the Slow Food Listserve.  Alice Waters' recent book, The Art of Simple Food, which encourages us to eat locally, in season, and sustainably, is frequently referenced in developing school food programs and a way of life centered around the dinner table.  Alice is far from a conservative when it comes to politics, but to see her so well quoted in a conservative magazine does give one hope!  Please enjoy this article – very thoughtful, very well written.

Kudos to VA, What About MD?

Virginia has decided to take some responsibility for the health of its children by introducing local organic produce in the schools.  Hopefully, this will set a precedent for DC and MD.  The following is a reprint from the Washington Post's Sandhya Somashekhar.  It was distributed on the SlowFood DC list serve.

Fresh off the Farm: Va. Program Connects Schools to Homegrown Food

By Sandhya Somashekhar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 26, 2008; Page LZ03
State officials have launched a program designed to connect small Virginia farmers with schools in hopes of boosting the agricultural economy and encouraging children to eat organic, locally grown food.

The Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services announced June 18 the creation of a Web site devoted to the Farm-to-School program ( http://www.vdacs.virginia.gov/marketing/farm.shtml).

Officials plan to use the site to link local producers of milk, eggs, meat and produce with colleges, universities, and public and private grade schools that are interested in purchasing those goods, many of which are organic, to feed students.

"We are essentially offering a matchmaking service here," said Elaine Lidholm, a spokeswoman for the agriculture department. "If a farmer or a group of farmers says, 'Yes, we can provide apples and whatever for your school and deliver it right to your door,' we want to be able to connect them with a school that wants that service."

Virginia schools spend more than $6 million a year on fresh produce, Lidholm said. The aim is to encourage schools to turn to local producers for more of what cafeterias serve, such as apples in the fall or salad greens in the spring.

The department hopes to capitalize on the rising popularity of locally grown food, which is prized for its environmental benefits. Some consumers say it is healthier and tastes better, and farmers have noted that crops grown closer to markets are more economical as gas prices soar.

The program also could link schools with food from farms in places such as Loudoun County, the Shenandoah Valley or Southside Virginia.

Several states have adopted Farm-to-School programs, including Maryland and Pennsylvania, said Tegan Hagy, the mid-Atlantic coordinator for the national program.

In the past, federal regulations prohibited government agencies from giving preferential treatment to local businesses, but some of those barriers were lifted under farm legislation Congress passed this year, she said.

The programs not only have economic and nutritional benefits, but also educational ones, Hagy said.

"It's not just about getting the food into the child's mouth," she said. "While obviously that's important, we really want them to internalize and understand where their food comes from. People have gotten really disconnected from that."

Some schools in the state have been forging relationships with area farmers. Students in Rappahannock County, which "probably has one of the highest farmer-to-student ratios in the state," joked resident Amy Silver O'Leary, have been growing and cooking crops donated by local farmers as part of a program called Farm-to-Table.

The connection not only has enriched school lunches, but also has helped students understand the connection between the land and what they eat, said O'Leary, coordinator of grants and partnerships for Headwaters, the education group in charge of the program.

"One of the things our program does is raise children's awareness of where their food comes from and what it takes to produce food," she said.

And The Winner Is. . .

Maybe agribusiness won't get the upper hand on all things related to the global food crisis.  Maybe good old common sense and working with and not against nature will prevail.  In today's New York Times there appears an article on startling results increasing rice yields, NOT with genetic engineering, NOT with an agribusiness terminator super seed,  NOT with applications of golden (price!) chemicals and fertilizers, but with good old common sense and an understanding of how rice plants thrive: System of Rice Intensification or SRI.

Kudos to Norman T. Uphoff, a Cornell scientist who dared to go against the commercially profitable (for the fertilizer and seed conglomerates)  farming trends.  It takes courage to persevere in an atmosphere so tainted by commercial interests.  After this exposure, I can only imagine the rumbles in the halls of greedy conglomerates!

Nutrient per Calorie Thinking

A very well-referenced article in the New York Times by renowned chef Dan Barber outlines the necessity for a change in the way we think about growing food.  Chefs have long realized that the best tasting food results from the most sustainable, least fuel-based farming practices.  The lovely result, great sustainability equals great taste and energy efficient production. 

Barber talks about nutrient content per calorie, a concept prevalent in one of the most effective diet books by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, praised by many doctors sporting spectacular credentials.  Nutrients per calorie reveals how much actual health benefits we are getting out of the food we eat.  This type of measurement is shunned by the mega-industries of dairy, meat, and processed foods for obvious reasons - they can't measure up!   

Look Carefully as You Drive Through the City

We make dire assumptions about "those" neighborhoods where many suburbanites and small town dwellers fear to tread.  Take a closer look and you will see verdant vegetable gardens hidden in empty lots, behind abandoned buildings, local residents toiling to raise healthy food for themselves and often times to sell to their neighbors at local markets. 
You will stumble upon youth gardens, school gardens, community gardens - simple plots of land which unites neighbors, generations, and families.  It is a very hopeful sign of the power of the people.  And that wisdom, thanks to the pinch of rising food and fuel prices, is spreading to more affluent areas.  New vegetable gardens are replacing Chemlawns, and not only in the rear of the house.  Apartment buildings are offering little garden plots as an incentive to future residents. 

Most of these gardens are organic - an encouraging sign in a society hooked on commercial processed food.  In neighborhoods served by nothing but a convenience store, riddled with rampant obesity and diabetes, an organic vegetable garden offers hope and the nutrients and exercise so necessary for improved health.   Since our medical system does so little in terms of prevention, how fitting that people are taking steps to improve their own health - we have no alternative!

Finding our Terroir

At a recent meeting of a new organization called: RAFT - Renewing America's Food Traditions, Gary Nabhan, noted ethnobotanist and author,  gave a speech on redefining America in terms of its food traditions.  Founding members of the organization include:  American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, Center for Sustainable Environments at Nothern Arizona University, Chefs Collaborative, Cultural Conservancy, Native Seed/SEARCH, Seed Savers Exchange and Slow Food USA.  More information is found here.  Mr. Nabhan concluded his speech with a poem that says it all.

A Terroir-ist Manifesto for Eating in Place

Know where your food has come from
through knowing those who produced it for you,
from farmer to forager, rancher or fisher
to earthworms building a deeper, richer soil,
to the heirloom vegetable, the nitrogen-fixing legume,
the pollinator, the heritage breed of livestock,
& the sourdough culture rising in your flour.

Know where your food has come from
by the very way it tastes:
its freshness telling you
how far it may have traveled,
the hint of mint in the cheese
suggesting what the goat has eaten,
the terroir of the wine
reminding you of the lime
in the stone you stand upon,
so that you can stand up for the land
that has offered it to you.

Know where your food has come from
by ascertaining the health & wealth
of those who picked & processed it,
by the fertility of the soil that is left
in the patch where it once grew,
by the traces of pesticides
found in the birds & the bees there.
Know whether the bays & shoals
where your shrimp & fish once swam
were left richer or poorer than before
you & your kin ate from them.

Know where your food comes from
by the richness of stories told around the table
recalling all that was harvested nearby
during the years that came before you,
when your predecessors & ancestors,
roamed the same woods & neighborhoods
where you & yours now roam.   
Know them by the songs sung to praise them,
by the handmade tools kept to harvest them,
by the rites & feasts held to celebrate them,
by the laughter let loose to show them our affection.

Know where your foods come from
by the patience displayed while putting them up ,
while peeling, skinning, coring or gutting them,
while pit-roasting, poaching or fermenting them,
while canning, salting or smoking them,      
while arranging them on a plate for our eyes to behold.
Know where your food comes from
by the slow savoring of each and every morsel,
by letting their fragrances lodge in your memory
reminding you of just exactly where you were the very day
that you became blessed by each of their distinctive flavors.

When you know where your food comes from
you can give something back to those lands & waters,
that rural culture, that migrant harvester,
curer, smoker, poacher, roaster or vinyer.
You can give something back to that soil,
something fecund & fleeting like compost
or something lasting & legal like protection.
We, as humans, have not been given
roots as obvious as those of plants.
The surest way we have to lodge ourselves
within this blessed earth is by knowing
where our food comes from.

Gary Paul Nabhan

Sustainable Misery

Armageddon seems to be upon us. In Haiti, little girls are eating cakes made of mud because there is no grain that anyone can afford. Food riots there have claimed the lives of four UN aid workers guarding a warehouse that was overrun by a mob. There have also been food riots in China and Pakistan, which is doubly troubling because these are places thought to have rapidly prospering economies, and because they both have nuclear arsenals and huge armies. Famine is threatening to bring down the governments of the Philippines and India.

The FAO meanwhile, a UN based organization for agricultural policy, has called for more technological support for third world agriculture, including seed, pesticides and fertilizer, to be donated by the West. Their solution, at least for the short term, being more high tech grain farming distributed more deeply into Africa and South America.

As I’ve pointed out before, we’ve become addicted to high tech production as a panacea for unlimited population growth, which forces us always to look at short term emergencies rather than long term solutions. Dealing with the ecological effects of stripping rain forest to plant horizons of corn and flooding the Amazon with fertilizer always takes a back seat to the political instability caused by world famine. And of course the population grows Malthusianly on.

Part of the tragedy is that this recent grain shortage was created by short sighted Westerners, in both the US and Europe, so concerned about losing political clout to oil producing dictatorships that they started burning food in their cars. While this has taken almost no pressure off the oil reserves or fuel prices, even this tiny percentage of diversion has thrown grain prices through the roof, and diverted grain from Haitian stew pots to American SUVs. So all that destroyed rain forest isn’t really feeding anyone new, it just adds soybean oil to the European biofuel program, and profits that fuel Brazilian appetites for pork, where rice and beans used to suffice.  Nuclear powered production of electricity and electric transportation isn’t being considered anywhere, even though it has zero carbon emission, because we are afraid of what our hungry neighbors might do if they get this technology for themselves, or even our radioactive waste.

When we see this in the headlines every day we are looking at the worst that human existence has to offer:  deadly competition for resources between nations with a total disregard for the suffering inflicted on our neighbors, or our future generations. We want the gas even if it causes African famine. China wants to eat more pork, even if it uses its newfound economic clout to buy the grain its neighbors, like Korea, used to depend on. Each nation uses its wealth to grab what it can from its neighbor’s tables, while the poorest plot military revenge, and sell what little aid they get to buy guns for local warlords.

If that visitor from outer space (from The Day the Earth Stood Still) comes back to pass judgement on us, all we can say is “Klattu, berada nicto”. Which is to say “mea maxima culpa”.