You Pay For What You Get

When I first saw this story from the New York Times about 2 mothers from California who are suing General Mills because ” the giant food company has deceptively marketed its Nature Valley products as natural when they contain highly processed ingredients,” I had what I would consider to be a normal response (well, normal for me anyway). I thought “Well duh, you fucking idiot. When’s the last time you saw a high fructose corn syrup tree?”

But then I calmed the hell down, clambered down off my soapbox and remembered a time where I didn’t know as much about food as I know now.

I’m the cook in our house, but it wasn’t always that way. When my fiance and I first started dating, he was the one in charge in the kitchen, mostly because my culinary skills involved pretty extensive use of the microwave. I grew up in a house with a single mom who worked any job she could find in order to keep us clothed, housed and fed. There wasn’t a lot of food exploration in our house, because there wasn’t time for it. Food was something that kept you alive, and that was it. I carried that philosophy with me to college and for years after that.

I remember one night when J was coming over to my apartment for dinner. We had only been dating for a few months, and I was still looking for ways to wow him. A nice, home cooked meal always does that for guys, right? That was my thinking anyway, so off I skipped to my local Trader Joe’s. The only food I’d really been familiar with up to that point in my life was Italian. That was my wheelhouse, and I was sticking to it. I loaded up my cart with pasta, chicken, bread, garlic and a jar of Trader Joe’s Piccata Simmer Sauce. I got home, fried the chicken in what I can now recall was a truly ungodly amount of oil, boiled the pasta and threw the whole affair together in a bowl with about half a jar of the piccata simmer sauce. I had Giada on the ropes.

Little did I know that, 5 years later, J would be regaling groups of friends with the story of that dinner. It’s his go to “look-how-much-we’ve-grown-up” tale.

“So I walk into her kitchen, and she’s got these two big bowls of pasta in them and I’m thinking ‘Oh, ok. This is actually gonna be pretty good.’ I should’ve waited until I tasted it before I made that call!” (exit to uproarious laughter because Kay used to be a terrible cook. Curtain)

This is not meant to defame Trader Joe’s. They have some excellent products. This is meant to defame me. I didn’t know how to shop, how to cook or how to find pride and joy in the things that came out of my kitchen. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t being begged to take 5 Michelin stars for my inspired combo of jarred piccata sauce and pan-fried chicken over heavily boiled pasta.

Eventually, however, I did learn about food. I learned how to cook. I learned about food. I learned where food came from. What I did not do, however was to sue the companies who made my food because they had deceived me into thinking that what I was eating was good or healthy. Yeah, they fooled me. But they fooled me because I let them. At that point in my life, I didn’t care enough about what I was putting into my body to put any research into it. I counted on the government and food safety agencies to protect me from food that wasn’t good for me. It was only once I started to educate myself that I realized that the onus was on me to know about what I was cooking and eating. This is growing up, boys and girls.

It’s definitely a rude awakening to realize that food companies don’t have your best interests at heart when they’re creating & marketing their products. They’re merchants, and their job is to sell food. Your job is to educate yourself about where your food comes from & make your own choices based on what matters most to you, not to run off to the courthouse with papers in hand. Don’t blame someone else for the fact that you were too lazy to do your own research. Blame yourself.

 

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

Oooh a look behind the curtain! Bring on the dirt!

Wellllllll not really.

There isn’t isn’t as much titillating material in this article as you’re expecting. You’ll recognize the basic themes of “there isn’t as much good stuff in your food as you thought, and there’s probably more bad stuff than you anticipated” & “understand what a serving size is.” As far as shocking revelations go, you’ll have to talk to someone else to find them. So yeah, I was half-asleep, drooling on my keyboard whilst reading through this article. And then I came upon this gem:

“I’m not trying to be a food vigilante here. I don’t think you should grow all your own corn or join a CSA or purge all forms of sugar from your cupboard.”

 Um….why not? What’s wrong with growing your own corn or joining a CSA? And people live stellar lives without sugar, just so you know. There was something that really stuck in my craw about this quip, but I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. So, like a good little nerdling, I went to my dictionary and started looking up words, trying to put my finger on what wasn’t working about this. And then I found it. Dear reader, a vigilante, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is “a member of an unauthorized group that takes on itself such powers as persuing and punishing those suspected of being criminals or offenders.” The last time I checked, home gardeners and those eschewing sugar are not ‘unauthorized groups.’ They’re just people who do things that most other people don’t do.

This is the problem. Anything that’s out of the norm is considered excessive. If it’s not what everyone else is doing, then it’s too much and it’s crazy and you’ll be made a pariah for doing so. And god forbid that you do something different from what everyone else is doing.

Obviously, there are people who take their beliefs to an extreme. But if you choose to plant a garden in your front yard, or say “Gee, I think that, this month, I’m going to stop eating anything that has corn in it, so I can really understand where my food comes from,” does that make you an extremist? As far as the average American is concerned, yeah, you’re probably pretty extreme. But considering the state of the health of the average American, maybe we need a touch of that extreme behavior. I’m hoping to publish a post next week about how people are far too willing to emulate the majestic ostrich and stick their heads in the sand whenever the conversation about where their food comes from arises (and yes, I know that ostriches don’t actually stick their heads in the sand. Calm the hell down.) But just because it isn’t done, doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done. Maybe we’ve gotten to this point because there hasn’t been enough extremism.

I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating. Awareness is necessary, not only for vegans, but for everyone, of what you’re putting into your body. Do you want to let some random stranger control that, or do you want to hitch up your pants, step up to the plate and do it your goddamned self? Are you really so terribly busy in your 21st century life that the thought of taking an extra 18 seconds to read the label and figure out what’s in your food is just too daunting a task? No wonder these huge news articles about things like pink slime break and everyone gets themselves all into a shocked tizzy. For those of us who are actually concerned about our food, we knew to stay away from ammoniated beef before it was cool, man. But when we tried to tell people, we were written off as lefty hippie commie whackjobs. Well who’s laughing into their grass-fed, pasture-finished steak now? (I know, I know, the steak reference doesn’t really fit with the whole vegan blog thing. But I couldn’t think of an appropriate tofu metaphor! Sue me!)

When In The Kitchen, Do As Julia Does

My roommate in college used to do a rib-crakingly hysterical impersonation of Julia Child. She’d waltz into our room at 3 in the morning, drunk as a sailor, jauntily declare “Aaand we’re back!” and collapse into a stupor on her bed. I have carried that love of Julia and her idiosyncrasies into the rest of my life.

It may seem odd, as a vegan, to have such a love and respect for someone who probably used more animal-based products in her culinary career than had been previously recorded in history.  But, before Julia, the kitchen was something to be managed, not enjoyed. There were several manuals written by very genteel ladies on the proper management of the kitchen, its staff and its products. Very often, food-related duties were left to other hands. But then Julia invited us behind the curtain. She gave us permission to enter that gustatory sanctuary with  “The Joy of French Cooking.” Imagine putting the very emotion of the thing into the title of your tome. You don’t pick that book up and expect drudgery. You select that book and you expect euphoria. And hot damn, does she deliver!

“Certainly one of the most important requirements for learning how to cook is that you also learn how to eat.” No matter your dietary choices, this rings true. I made the choice to be vegan based on a desire to not have any living creature suffer for what I want. I keep making the choice to be vegan, every day, based not only on that original desire, but also for love of the food. It was only once I became a vegan and liberated myself from the shackles of overly-processed convenience foods, that I really and truly learned how to cook. I used to stare, slack jawed, in utter awe of the people who could go into a kitchen, pull random ingredients out of a refrigerator, and create an amazing meal. Now I am one of those people. I know about my food. I know where it comes from. I know how to cook it, how to pair it and, most importantly of all, how to enjoy it. And although I don’t follow her exact methodology, Julia taught me that. She taught me how to have confidence in the kitchen, to cook with “the courage of my convictions” and how to truly take joy in the process and the result.

No, I don’t make boeuf borginon or luxuriate in butter. And I certainly don’t share her belief that “health food is something you eat while you’re waiting for the steak.” But a difference of method doesn’t necessarily equal a difference in theory. Joy in the kitchen can be achieved no matter who you are or what you believe in.

So thank you, Julia. Thank you for your smile, your enthusiasm and your honesty. Once we met you, we knew that there was no drama in the kitchen that could not be overcome. You made it ok for dishes to fail. You made it ok for things to be dropped.  You showed us how to deal with the unexpected. And, best of all, you made it ok to drink while you cooked. Thank you for inviting us in. We are, as a whole, better for it.

The Eager Gardener

No, it’s not your imagination. Yes, it is calling your name.

One of the things that I truly cherish about a vegan lifestyle is the overwhelming awareness of food, its role in people’s lives and, most importantly, where it comes from.

Now, this is not to say that you simply must be a vegan, a vegetarian or have other dietary restrictions in order to have an appreciation for the origins of your victuals. There are plenty of people out there who subscribe to nothing more than a joyful investigation of the starting point of the items that end up on their plates. That in and of itself can inform the way you make your food choices. But this isn’t their blog. It’s mine, so you’re going to listen to me wax philosophic about my garden for a while.

Or not. It’s still a free country.

This year was the very first year I had the opportunity to plant my own garden. I’d always been interested in it, in an “I wonder what will happen if I put this seed in some dirt?” kind of way. But up until this point in my life, I’d always lived in apartment buildings with not so much as a porch on which to grow a tomato plant. The best I was ever able to do was some windowsill herbs (which my cat ate without abandon, resulting in some pretty intense kitty morning breath).

Then, I had the opportunity to rent a house. Not a condo. Not a big apartment with a porch. An actual house. With a yard. A big yard. So once the days started to get a little bit longer and the weather wasn’t quite so terribly frigid, I eagerly started planning my very first vegetable garden. And let me tell you, dear reader. I had high hopes.

I used a website I StumbledUpon called Smart Gardener. If you’ve never done a garden before, I highly suggest this website. You basically fill in all your information for your area of the world, what you want to grow and how much space you have. Then Smart Gardener lays out your garden plots for you and sends you weekly updates about what you need to be doing for your garden (plant this, transfer that, harvest those). I haven’t had it this easy since naptime was a given.

So with visions of bounty dancing in my head, I started to imagine my ideal garden. I eventually ended up planting red onions, yellow onions, shallots, garlic, lettuce, peppers, sugar snap peas, carrots, tomatoes and broccoli. And, one by one, I watched them all die. The pepper plants succumbed to my eagerness to watch my babies grow that was so overwhelming, I put several things in the ground when they were simply not ready. My black krim tomatoes were brutally murdered by an unexpected frost. I can’t even tell you what happened to my broccoli, but now it’s approximately 5 feet tall and has pretty white flowers all over it. And my poor, glorious sugar snap peas, which formed a lush green fence all down one 8-foot side of one of my raised beds, turned to a dry brown sheet one hydration-deprived weekend while I was out of town. I was ready to turn in my gardening clogs.

However, somehow, my beefsteak tomatoes survived. The one plant that I had been told would give me the most heartache, be the most persnickety to take care of and probably yield nothing, has been my saving grace this gardening season. If it weren’t for these brave little dudes, I’d rip up those beds tomorrow and replace them with a Slip ‘N Slide.

But every day when I come home and I pull into my driveway, those tomato plants greet me. They say “Welcome home! We were growing and getting ripe for you all day! Come see!” I track their growth and change in color the same way a parent marks new heights on the doorjamb on each child’s birthday. And this is the difference, my friends. Going to the local grocery store and picking up mealy, watery tomatoes in the dead of winter kills a little bit of your soul, whether you realize it or not. Your body doesn’t want any part of that. Not the sub-par nutritional content, not the lackluster taste and certainly not the disconnect between the season you should be eating in and the season you’re trying to eat in. But when you plant and tend something with your own hands, watch it grow, fret about it, see it blossom and know that you’ve done something that links you to your very most ancient ancestors, even to the earth itself, that tastes pretty damned good.

So I had a couple of nice, red ripe babies on the vine the other day that were just aching to be put to good use. Accordingly, I chopped them up, covered them in garlic and smeared them on toasted bread!

Garden Fresh Tomato Bruschetta

(I’m telling you, if you use out-of-season tomatoes in this dish, you are going to hate yourself and your choices and your life for the rest of your time on this earth. The tomatoes are the star here. Don’t give your mouth a B-list hack. You deserve Oscar winners, all the way.)

• 2 – 3 ripe tomatoes in season (heirlooms if you have/can get them)

• 3 – 4 cloves crushed garlic (use powder if you must)

• 1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper

• 1/4 tsp sea salt

• 1/4 cup chopped fresh basil (God save your soul if you use dried)

• Oil of your choice

• 3 – 4 pieces of good, crusty bread

– Dice tomatoes into 1/4 – 1/2 inch pieces (getting rid of as many of the seeds as you can in the process)

– Combine diced tomatoes in a bowl with garlic, pepper, salt, basil and 1 tbsp oil. Mix gently, so as not to crush tomatoes

– While you let the tomatoes luxuriate in their garlic and basil bath, spread one side of each piece of bread with the oil you chose (I used a garlic-infused oil for extra kiss-me-breath goodness). Toast the bread in a toaster oven on high for approximately 4 – 5 minutes

– Remove bread from toaster, top with heaping spoonfuls of tomato mixture and return to toaster over on high for another 1 – 2 minutes.

– Impress your guests with your casual culinary prowess or, do like I did, and stuff your face in the most attractive manner possible.

Ew, It’s Covered In Dirt!

Anyone here read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver? If not, go out and get it right now. No, don’t surf over to Hulu and put on an episode of a TV show to watch while you fall asleep. I’m talking get your ass up and get thee to a bookstore or a library and get this fricken book, like, yesterday.

Recently, I was reminded of a specific passage in the above-mentioned book where Barbara Kingsolver talks about how no one really knows where their food comes from any more. She referenced a situation where, as a farm kid, she pulled a carrot out of her family’s garden & offered it to a school mate who happened to be visiting her house. Said school mate recoiled in utter disgust and sneered “I’m not going to eat that! It came out of the ground!”

……………wait, what?

These days, we can hardly blame the poor child. We’re so far removed from the process of food that it’s not difficult to realize that most children, hell, most people, are happy to operate under the assumption that the food that they eat magically springs into existence within the confines of their local supermarket. Sure, they might have an idyllic daydream about rolling, verdant hills being meticulously plowed by a handsome, rugged farmer. In the late haze of a burning sunset, the farmer tips back his hat and plucks a scarlet tomato from a three foot tall plant, and gazes at it thoughtfully and smiles in contentment. That same tomato ends up in the can of tomato paste that you will use to make a lovely marinara sauce to serve to the smiling, cooperative family seated around the dining table, hands washed, faces gleaming. Nice, no?

Newsflash: farms don’t work like that. They’re soaked with the blood, sweat and tears of overworked, underpaid laborers who will be worked to the bone with little to no thanks from the people that they’re feeding. And that’s just vegetables. Many people who eat meat have a blind spot a mile wide about where their food comes from. They’re content to buy into the ideal that the burger they’re eating was once a a bright eyed, happy cow who wandered those same verdant, rolling hills, munching on tasty looking patches of grass until the day came when he was taken off to fulfill his ultimate destiny.

I don’t think I have to tell anyone who follows this blog that this sweet picture is so far from the truth that the two may as well have not been conceived in the same galaxy.

I’m glad I’m able to think about where my food comes from, and I’m able to make a conscious choice regarding what I’ll participate in. I shudder to think that the majority of the people I know don’t have the same awareness.