In the Garden of the Feast

Before

Wendell Berry urges people to grow anything, even a tomato in a container, to better  connect people to their food. The Onion, America’s Finest News Source, tells me that for 100s of dollars in materials and endless hours of back breaking labor, I can grow vegetables that can be purchased in the store for a lot less. 

And there are the two poles of my life. 

Traditionally, I have had greater respect for growers and farmers because I kill things. Well maybe some of it is the soil and weather and pests and bad luck, but starts and seeds shiver in fear when I eye them in the store/nursery. Besides my black thumb, I admire farmers, because as ripping out sod yesterday not only connected me with my inner Irishman, it also reminded me and not to get all Levine about [stuff], what work is. The average age of farmers in the US is 57, that is hard work at any age, my dozen year younger body is cursing me today. And say what you will about access to 'tractors' and 'equipment', it is physically hard labor. 

After

Despite a history of failure in coaxing the smallest plum tomato from the soil, I completed putting in a small garden yesterday. Mostly herbs so I can have fresh flavors out of my backdoor. But there are tomatoes, beans, peas, and in the partial shade, wildflowers along with some corn, whose purchase may have been a folly or lark or the equivalent of burning $2. 

Dog Sitting. Make yourself
comfortable, Plum. 

The soil was horrible and clayee. I harvested a lot of broken glass and tin and plastic turning the soil. I think a little vermicomposting, mulch, beans and attention will improve the soil, and I hope the next person who rents this apartment in the future continues gardening. I’ll take the worms and the knowledge with me to my next home.

I’ll keep you up to speed on how my garden grows but for now a before and after picture. Root for the basil and mint, there are spring rolls depending on them. 

The Remembrance of Strawberries Past

Not Bergman Worth; Still Good

True story – I have never had a Wild Strawberry. I've tasted (cultivated) alpine strawberries and greedily picked blackberries growing next to a clean mountain Oregon river. Despite missing on out on the flavor of the Ur-berry, I'm going to come down on the side of cultivation, the knowledge and helping hand of humans almost always improves flavor and it certainly improves availability. Plus, I've seen Bergman's Wild Strawberries, and on a larger level, I understand the cultural significance of that treasured piece of innocence. Rosebud, Grandma's strawberry patch, whatever.

As I wrote on the Market Blog thisweek, strawberries are one of those things that cause people to claim “_________ doesn't taste the same as they used to. In his book, How to Pick a Peach, Russ Parsons reminds readers that there is a passage in Steinbeck's East of Eden, where two farmers complain strawberries don't taste the same as they used to. The multi-generational East of Eden was published in 1957, the growers are reminiscing about the turn of the 20^th Century. This complaint that things don't taste as good as they used to is now a 100 years old.

Of course, the chain smoking Steinbeck whose tastebuds were rendered useless by years of nicotine abuse, rather have his characters blame environment, technology, the passage of time, or the faulty relay of emotional memories that can imprint fresh and real passions on long expired events.

Sure we live in polluted cites, which has to affect how we taste as much as Steinbeck's beloved cigarettes messed with his perception. Many of us grew up in suburbs whose immediate family roots were urban rather than rural or the old country and we never had the experience of grandma's farmhouse. And for the most part, most of us have never tasted a berry straight off the runner. Berries come in pint containers from grocery stores.

Berries have been cultivated since the 17^th Century, when new world and old world strains were mixed by human hands, meaning everything that came after is due to the intervention of humans. So how is it that we have this feeling that what we are tasting isn't real, natural, innocent? Why do people swear heirloom tomatoes are better than others when there is no definition of what heirloom is. Sometimes older varieties taster better do but not always and when they do, it might be because they were hand picked, not packed in 1 ton boxes, raised with a minimum of inputs or grown with organic methods, it might have little to do with the variety. Why is it the most memorable wine not the one with the biggest price tag, it is the one that comes when we travel to far away places and order from that little restaurant near the beach after a day of sun and it tastes so good you want a bottle to bring back home, only to find the locals don't even bother to bottle it, or age it, only enjoy it.

I saw a tweet from one of the market growers this morning saying they were picking today's strawberries for Market at 5 am. They were probably chandlers rather than the foodies preferred hood variety. They are probably soft and fragrant and they might even be better than anything we ever had in our youth.

Pro-Yogurt

Almost every morning begins with a cupful of yogurt and a piece of fruit and add to that two cups of coffee as black as my soul. 

I like yogurt. Not in the I want to hold its hand type of way, I just like it in the same way in the same way I like sour cream, it's tangy, acidic and rounds out the flavor palate be the item that gets a dollop is bland like a baked potato or sweet like a strawberry. 

I struggle with the question of is yogurt just good or is it good for me as well. Generally I go with Nancy's yogurt, which promises me billions of live cultures, but I'm not above buying a different brand if it's on sale and if it contains live cultures - no flavored sweetened yogurt full of stabilizers for me.Yet, I cannot find any scientific claims that these live cultures, aka probiotics are good for people, other than they do convert lactose to lactic acid, helping lactose intolerant eat their dairy.  

  

Yogurt, predates the 60's quest for natural foods, it is one of the Ur-health foods, Dannone, the company that makes and markets activia, originally sold yogurt as a cure of indigestion. Kellogg's sanatorium offered a yogurt colonic 'cure'. Flavored yogurt can have as more carbohydrates than a candy bar per serving, probiotics, the belief that active bacterial cultures aid digestion are more of a hope than fact, low-fat yogurt adds sweeteners of dubious healthiness to make up for a lack of flavor from fat, yet the product shines a halo of health. 

I was watching YouTube videos for my food class this week, I wanted to see how health, or the idea of health is sold - using the search terms 'health', 'family' and 'mom'. I stumbled across a series of activia commercials. This campaign always seemed a little off, first of all women talking about irregularity seemed odd both odd in the sense Jamie Lee Curtis was facilitating a conversation about poo and odd because of the health claims. I wasn't the only one, Dannon, the US arm of the company, would go on to settle a $35 million dollar lawsuit concerning the over promise of activia's claim.

With activia, Dannon is packaging the possibility of regular bowel movements in a hipper vessel than prune juice and offering a magic pill – essentially reassuring women (and I never saw this ad during a basketball game, only on HGTV), they don't need to worry about what they eat, as long as they eat this. While the commercial's voiceover tout benefits only, 'as part of a healthy diet', personal experience tells me most people want to believe there are healthy foods (as opposed to healthy diets) and that there really is one specific, food/vitamin/additive that they should be eating but aren't. To that end all that activia is missing is an Omega 3, ginseng, anti-oxidant flavor. 

 

I don't know, I am more drawn to the phrase 'part of a healthy diet' than I likely to believe in a magic food. We are so disconnected from food, how it's grow, where it comes from, how to cook it's understandable that there is insecurity about what to eat. It's also understandable people would either try to manipulate this disconnect or sincerely offer their path to health (Sylvester Graham, Euell Gibbons, vegans). Is yogurt that magic pill, something that is good for me, I can't help giving myself props for my daily dose of yogurt, even if I struggle with the fact all these live cultures might not be able to survive the heat and ph of my gut.

Links, Links and What the Hell; More Links

Two weeks ago I wrote about radishes (and got my first ever photo credit. I took 166 pictures with my new fancy camera. 20 had the lens cap on, another 20 or so were out of focus and out of that first batch, one was a gem. Luck favors the shutter button) for FOODday, this week my topic was asparagus but more in get to know asparagus better than how to cook it type of way.

My brother Carl won the Oregon Book Award for poetry. You can watch here. Also in poetry, Michael McGriff had the New York Times write a love letter to his new book. A full page, non-twilight novels don't even get that.

I'm not saying the songs one chooses to listen to are autobiographical, but there are a few artists I feel could score my life, most boring movie ever BTW, but Joe Henry who seems to Picasso - refract details in a dozen different directions composing a fractured, yet unambiguous portrait of my emotional experiences. As much as I enjoy the bittersweet, baseball loving, ironic Mr. Henry, Alejandro Escovedo just does it for me. His career from proto-punker, member of Rank and File, alt-rocker, cello-serenading sadness, flirting up against glam rock and Les Paul, 3 chords and the truth anthem-y rockers has been the soundtrack to my life. Buy some of his music now, and if you don't trust my judgment, read more over on Slate.

When Did Pasteurization Become Bad?

There has an unfortunate outbreak of food-borne illness in my little corner of the country. 21 people have been made ill by the current outbreak. You can read the details here - Warning it might make you sick, not from specifics...the article doesn't detail the effects of e-coli, campylobacter, or cryptosporidium however the fact that children under age five were fed raw milk and one person continued to drink the milk after being warned of an outbreak may disgust you. 

Milk has not always been the symbol of purity and wholesomeness that it is today. Despite the fact we were more of a nation of farmers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we still were quickly moving into cities. Livestock was no exception, dairy cows lived in symbiosis with the brewing industry. The cows were fed on the spent grains of the brewing process, the milk was distributed along delivery routes. Descriptions of the dairy operations of that time make the Jungle and today's feed lot operations look like the clean room at the computer chip factory.

Many forces moved to change milk's standing. There was improved transportation, the sanitary revolution/movement/era from about 1850, the formation of agricultural cooperatives, the temperance movement and Pasteurization. From the Center for Disease Control's website:

Before the invention and acceptance of pasteurization, raw milk was a common source of the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, severe streptococcal infections, typhoid fever, and other foodborne illnesses.  These illnesses killed many people each year, especially young children.  In the 1900s many mothers recognized this risk and would boil milk (bringing it to a temperature of 212°F) before giving it to their infants and young children. 

As consumers we are generally removed from food production, one of the perils of having no idea where food comes from and how it arrives at our table is to fear it. People like Nina Planck push raw milk as alternative to mass produced food. What could be considered a good instinct - healthier, less processed foods. Again from the CDC's website:

Many studies have shown that pasteurization does not significantly change the nutritional value of milk – pasteurized milk is rich in proteins, carbohydrates, and other nutrients. Heat slightly affects a few of the vitamins found in milk--  thiamine, vitamin B12, and vitamin C-- but milk is only a minor source of these vitamins.

I have gone back and forth on this issue: I like raw cheese, accepting the risk (27 outbreaks since the CDC has tracked them), I hate the taste of burnt cream that comes with ultra-pastuerization, yet I have mocked the feds for raiding raw milk distributors, and regularly make fun of the "natural is better" trope that runs rampant in a strain of people who talk about the way they feel about food rather than trying to be informed consumers. After awhile our opinions have to be formed by the FACTS. And the facts show the number of people who drink raw milk compared to the number of people who get sick from drinking raw milk are not good, unless you're betting on illness. 

It gets worse if you willfully ignore the facts, enjoin your logic and feed risky products to children. Once more, the CDC: 

60% of people sickened in outbreaks caused by raw milk were under 20 years of age, versus 23% of people in outbreaks caused by pasteurized milk. 

In my fridge I have a bottle of cream that I am going to make butter out of. This is from the website of the dairy who supplied me with the goods...

Pasteurization is the heating of milk to remove any harmful bacteria and make it safer to drink. Garry’s Meadow Fresh Products are vat pasteurized at 145 degrees Fahrenheit and held for 30 minutes. This is the mildest form of pasteurization so the milk does not have the “cooked” or “burnt” taste that you experience from milk that has been ultra high temperature pasteurized.

Thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been stricken by the outbreak. A warning to the rest of us, how we feel is valid but not to the exclusion of ignoring the facts.