Food Friday on Wednesday: I just found a stem in my blueberry muffin.

It was kind of poignant, actually, and a little subversive. Think about it: food that we buy is so processed and uniform that the odds of finding stray odds and ends in a piece of it are really quite low. But it isn't even about a reminder of the "good old days" before factory fooding (the good old days that I'm too young to remember or talk about with any authority), it's about the reminder of where our food comes from. I'd be a lot less happy if I had found some stray cowhide in my hamburger, but the effect would have been the same—and maybe my unwillingness to confront it should have broader implications on my behavior.

We're at a place in American society where it's completely feasible, in most places, not ever to make food from scratch. When we do make food "from scratch," we are still often many steps away from the source of those ingredients. Let's imagine I make blueberry pancakes. I will likely use unbleached flour, cornmeal, eggs, buttermilk and blueberries (plus a few other spices and some baking powder/soda), all bought in bulk at my grocery store. I didn't interact with the source of a single one of those ingredients: in this case, the wheat, corn, chicken, cow, or blueberry bush. In some cases, I'm more than one step removed: I did not grind the wheat or the corn, and I did not churn the buttermilk.

I don't want to harvest and grind wheat and corn every time I make pancakes. But doing that kind of thing every now and then can be kind of profound. I shelled pomegranates tonight, which is something I don't need to do anymore, ever. If I need the seeds, they're available shelled at my local grocery store (albeit at a premium) and if I need the juice, I can get it all over the place (also at a premium). But I miss out by doing that, just as I'd miss out by eating out every night, even if the cook where I ate out made better food than I can. I'd miss out on the quiet lapping of water against my sink's edge, the warm water under which my relaxed hands pry out the luscious blood-colored seeds, and the seeds' slow, contemplative drop to the bottom of the basin. I wouldn't know that pomegranate seeds will barely float on water's surface tension.

That might not sound like a lot to lose. But it's a beautiful, sensual experience. And it has some practical implications. I know more about pomegranate seeds for having shelled them—I know that they can float, that they are redder when bunched together at the tip, and that they are difficult to accidentally pop. That could all be useful one day in designing a dish or a drink. The political implications are broader. Michael Pollen's work in the politics of food reveals that the distance our food travels can actually be more significant than its original source, not least in terms of carbon footprint. Serving a loyal local population allows farmers to diversify because they have to compete less with a national and global food market. They can grow chickens, beef, grass, and corn, not just corn. Contrary to what the free marketers would argue, specialization in the farm industry hurts the quality of the final product because organisms just don't exist well in a monoculture. Millions of years of evolution—or the hand of God, if you're an idiot—have wired plants and animals to rely on each other, and short-circuiting that reliance makes for all kinds of problems. Feed cows corn and you need to pump them full of antibiotics. Pump them full of antibiotics and you produce antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Feed chickens a protein-free diet, and it makes their eggs less tasty. Stop growing beef because your corn is more profitable, and now you need to buy fertilizer. That fertilizer runs off, ruining perfectly good fresh water for swimming and fishing.*

Pollen spends a lot of time talking about a Virginia farm that doesn't qualify for organic status, but nevertheless uses a tremendously sustainable way of producing food. Their cows graze on grass. They rotate pastures frequently to make the grass grow faster. When they leave a pasture, it's covered in manure, which quickly develops maggots. Their chickens eat those maggots, spreading the manure, fertilizing the paster. The chickens then require less food, get more protein, and produce healthier eggs, all for doing a job that needed to be done anyway. The farm sells only locally.

I wish I knew that much about the lives of the food I eat.



*I'm obviously taking a completely anthropocentric approach here, since a non-anthropocentric approach makes not mistreating our animals in food production a foregone conclusion.

Can we take it too far?

I tend to agree almost uniformly with the opinions expressed in the feminist blogosphere (with the obvious exception of issues like porn where, even in the most homogeneous community, civil blood makes civil hands unclean). So I always end up a little surprised when I run across a post where I think the author is completely off the mark. They tend to be knee-jerk "blame patriarchy" posts, where I have to wonder if the chip we feminists inevitably carry on our shoulder hasn't gotten a bit too easy to knock off.

Here's a good example: Pandagon's post a couple weeks back on the pixar film, Ratatouille. I'll quote it in full, because it's short.

Ratatouille in brief: a male rodent makes a better French chef than the female human who’s been slaving away at the restaurant for years.

Huh? Let me get this straight. Any film that features a prodigious male character is sexist, just because there are hard-working women out there? Or is it only if it also features the struggles of a woman in a male-dominated profession? Feminist critics of Ratatouille who point out that, for example, all the rats in the film were male are on better ground. But the suggestion that every film about a male-dominated profession kowtows to patriarchy unless it has a female lead seems like holding the good hostage to the perfect, especially when the film in question goes out of its way to draw attention to gender inequalities. (The comments section of that post is a good read, especially if you're interested in the Ayn Rand connection to Brad Bird's movies).

The recent example of knee-jerk patriarchy blaming that I came across was one of bean's posts on LGM, about a new clothing line for women in labor. Weird? Sure. Oppressive? Bean thinks so:

The end result is to focus attention on women's appearances and to continue their sexualization....I mean, if a woman still has to worry about her appearance when pushing a bowling ball through her vagina, what hope is there for us to escape an appearance-focused sexualizing and objectifying society?

This line of thought is deeply troubling for me, because it assumes that women's clothing is inherently sexualizing and androcentric. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that was the argument made by rape apologists—"She was wearing attractive clothing, and there's only one thing that can mean." Now, I'm not an expert, being a man, but every straight woman I have ever heard from on the subject of clothes has told me that she dresses in attractive clothing for herself, not for men who might look at her.

We can't have it both ways. Either clothing inherently says something about sex (EDIT: and can only possibly say something about sex), in which case women who dress provocatively are responsible for harassment and men control yet another sphere of women's lives, or clothing is personal, in which case there's nothing wrong with someone wanting to look good (and consequently feel good) during what is otherwise a pretty stressful time. I'd much rather live in world two, and I think it checks out with the way most women see the way they dress.

What do we do about unreasonable patriarchy blaming? I'd certainly rather we blame patriarchy for too much than too little, and interrogating systems of power is never a bad thing. Except that I suspect that taking unreasonable stances alienates people from feminism, and feminism doesn't need any bad press that it deserves—it gets enough already that it don't deserve. We should be careful not to become wingnuts—even if something's really bad, it isn't responsible for all bad ever. And, as the folks at Pandagon did, we should remind each other to pick the right battles: there are plenty out there.

Food Friday—Cooking Vegan

I am not a vegan. I am not even a vegetarian. A large part of that is selfish—I simply enjoy the possibilities meat, fish, dairy, and eggs give my cooking and eating. But I also think a focus on limiting factory farming and on buying local, small-organic food is an important first priority before we can understand where animals fit into human diets. It's kind of like the logic that gets applied to women in the workplace. Sure, a greater percentage of women may prefer to stay at home than men, but we won't know until they get equal access to the workplace. Similarly, it may be unsustainable and cruel to use animals for food, but it's hard to know until we arrive back at a system that isn't completely broken.

One of my best friends just turned vegan. He read a bunch of Peter Singer, and found himself agreeing with too much of it to ignore its implications. That gave me the opportunity, last time he came over for dinner, to cook an entirely vegan meal. And it's actually a fun constraint. I immediately established that I would take veganism on it's own terms, not try to make vegan "versions" of non-vegan food. I have had too many floppy, boring soyburgers and dry, floury baked goods to take that road. Instead, I looked for vegan dishes that existed in meat-eating traditions, and built everything else from the ground up, as if non-vegan food had never existed.

Chips and Guacamole were an easy decision to start. Readers who know me know that I am a huge lime whore. The avocado is a great vehicle for a tight balance of onions, lime, tomatillos, and chiles. Thinking back, I would have done well to throw some thin slices of jicama on the plate for dipping as well.

I'm proud of the next dish, a little amuse-bouche that went around before we sat down. I fried green plantains with plenty of garlic until they were crisp on the outside and oozing on the inside, then topped them with a raspberry-cayenne coulis. If I had known how easy coulis is to make, I would have made it before—you just toss fruit in a blender, transfer to a sauté pan, add sugar over heat, and then strain in a sieve. The cayenne was to-taste, to offset the sweetness of the raspberries.

Harire, a thick Moroccan soup with tomatoes and chickpeas, was the main plate of the night. Depending on the recipe, it can have pasta. We left it out, because of the veganism constraint and because it's really not necessary once you have chickpeas doing their starchy thing.

Dessert was "turtles" of pecans, dark chocolate, and caramel. I am terrified of sugar. Honest to god, terrified. It changes so quickly, and is so easy to ruin, that, short of a dark roux (that'll be another post), it has to be the most stressful thing I know to cook. But the caramel turned out alright, if a little hard (no milk). I should have oiled my waxed paper before laying down the caramel and pecans. Chocolate wants butter and caramel wants cream, but both work fine without.

I will continue to make Friday a food-themed entry. Other day-themed entries are coming. I considered giving each day a theme, but decided that would be cheesy beyond words. But I think the weekends may be themed, with weekdays left for news and other posts.