The food debate continues

I see that Mrs. Dashwood has responded to my post about the importance of good food. She has delivered a scattering of arguments, so I will take them on one by one and try to hammer a unifying factor out of them.

First she accuses me of finding evil in those food articles that I do not like. If I were to call hard-cooked eggs evil, she would have a point (although they do smell closer to fire and brimstone than anything I care to encounter on my table). However, my attack is on a whole philosophy of food that supplants quality with uniform banality. Satanway does not exist in a vacuum, rather it is part of a whole factory food marketing phenomenon that is dependent on government subsides and low wages at every step: from the field workers, to the grocery workers, and increasingly to the consumers, who have been conditioned by a half century of intensive marketing to buy increasingly processed food from the likes of ADM (remember them? Supermarket to the world, makers of high fructose corn syrup and the like, providing completely empty calories that are as much a product of the factory as the land). But that will get addressed further down, when we discuss “small is better.”

In her first red herring, she throws in a little jab at la fiesta brava, so let us begin by addressing the treatment of animals caused by the factory farming that produces pork so bland it has to be brined to be acceptable. A pig is raised in deplorable conditions for its entire life. It is bred and fed to produce lean meat at a rapid rate. Its movements are restricted, especially if it is a breeding sow, which is rendered almost completely immobile, so that its piglets can suckle non-stop. The only humane thing about the process is the killing itself.

Contrast this with the four to six years of a fighting bull. The toro bravo lives on the range, with ample opportunities for movement, eats grass, which is natural to a ruminant, has a lot of social interaction with the herd, and has a life closer to a wild animal than any other product of breeding. Until one week before its final moments it probably never has been inside a box car or a trailer. When it enters the ring for its last half hour, it is full of adrenaline. It gets some fairly superficial wounds, which, in its state simply do not cause a lot of pain (if you watch a particularly good bull take the pic, it will return for more several times, until the final quite is performed). A good half hour before it would really start to feel pain the bull is dead of a sword thrust (a remarkably efficient way of killing). Note that it is not “tortured to death.” It does not die of the pic or the banderillas (which barely prick the skin, considering that a bull’s hide is leather).

In terms of dignity (although I hate using that word to describe a lower animal), the bull dies a fighting death. It is not loaded into trains and transferred to a feedlot to wallow in its own excrement until it is led into a factory for a killing that is fairly close to the sword. If a bull (or any other mammal) were left in nature, it would get old, arthritic, and succumb to cold, disease or predation. There are cases when an incompetent matador botches the job (although the bull will still be finished off before those wounds start to ache), but mistakes happen in slaughterhouses as well, like the case a few years back when a factory slaughterhouse was videotaped flaying live cattle because the killing mechanism did not work effectively enough, and no one on the assembly line seemed to care.

Mrs. Dashwood’s second red herring is about the folly of her possibly learning anything from me. Well, she is the one who is “tired of cooking,” not me. She has been cooking for about twenty years, and so have I (we start young in fiercely competitive Italian food families). We start with making pasta then move to soup and sautéing, finally being allowed to make the ragù. We all have calluses on the index finger of our knife hands. I had one period of nine months in the last twenty years that I was not cooking pretty close to daily, and that was when I had dining commons food inflicted on me. It was such an awful experience that to this day I shudder to think of the undercooked chicken and overcooked beef that was passed off as food.

In my family we cook well into our eighties, usually for small armies. It is not enough to feed our families and friends, but we take charge of the parish’s feasts, the ICF dinners, the Sons of Italy celebrations, etc. A very few even ended up in the restaurant business. There is a pecking order, and everyone knows what it is (and which generation slacked off – they are the ones who also are tired of cooking, but my generation has returned to our traditions with full fury). Are we superhuman? No. We keep at it because we don’t see cooking as a chore.

As far as our way of applying small is better, we live it. In the days before regular good farmers’ markets we traded with each other the fruits of our gardens (one of the drawbacks of Italian culture is that we almost completely misunderstand the notion of an ornamental garden – even in the smallest of spaces we raise some food. Note that I stopped doing this only because I could finally get superior produce on a daily basis in the Bay Area and I want to learn how to treat a garden as an ornamental space, not just my fattoria). For those ingredients we could not grow, we imported them (back before the rest of the world discovered our food things like dried porcini were cheap) from small producers via small importers (generally family, because they could be trusted better). We are talking about strictly blue collar Italians here. My parents’ generation was the first to go beyond high school (or even to complete high school in some cases).

The key to cooking this way is to buy strictly seasonally. If something is too early or too late, it is better to skip it altogether. When things are good and cheap in season, we buy a ton and preserve them for the rest of the year. That is why I pay an average of $1.50 a pound for organic, heirloom tomatoes (a brief note about organic here – I have absolutely no worries about the health effects of pesticide residue, a bunch of baloney for the most part (although there are environmental issues that are real). The advantage to organic is the methods of farming tend to yield produce that is bred and picked for flavor over appearance and transportability). If I had more patience and held out another three weeks each year, that would drop to about $1. A bit more than the $.69 cents a pound that I could pay for the bland red mushballs that are sold at the Satanway, but how many pounds do I need to go through to make that an issue? Also, with better flavored produce, I don’t need to use as many enhancements.

Now we can get to the meat of all of this, which is Mrs. Dashwood’s argument, which is a tired out populism that sees Small is Good as elitist. Do I want the poor to have chevre instead of Velveeta? Absolutely. It was good enough for my peasant ancestors for centuries (in our case it was pecorino – more sheep than goats in Tuscany). Why would anyone prefer Velveeta? It provides nothing that heated corn starch, milk and salt cannot provide (seriously, heat cornstarch in water to gelatinization point, add a splash of milk, and salt it, not much difference and a lot cheaper). Velveeta has little useful nutrition, offers nothing in the way of experiencing a connection with the land, with the bounty that God has provided us. It exists solely to replace food at profit to the Kraft company. To help with that noble endeavor, Kraft keeps coming up with fun and exciting packaging for Velveeta including unconscionable pre-made box lunches for children (and I say that if you can afford those nutritional wastebins, you can afford a good local cheese).

How did this become the status quo in a few decades, in startling contrast to thousands of years of Judeo-Christian emphasis on connecting our food with the seasons (so strong that the language of much of our liturgy is based on it)?

First let’s look at the way agriculture works in this country. The supply and demand issue is completely blurred by subsides and advertising. Factory farming is dependent upon a subsidy structure that favors large scale farming. Small farms cannot make it on set aside land payments, simply because they do not have enough land to put into set aside. Since the major agribusiness concerns have used advertising to create demand for an increasingly narrow range of raw materials, which are used in an increasingly wide array of substitute food products, the small farmers have had to sell out to agribusiness. As a result the status quo rolls on, making it easier to make a profit as a large agribusiness, but not as a small farmer.

In post-war America, the entire cultural emphasis has been on assimilation. Wonderful variety meats like tripe, pork liver, oxtails, lamb tongue, etc., were marginalized as ethnic or rural. If one was a real American, one ate steak (prime cuts only) and potatoes. We just beat Hitler so we wouldn’t have to eat tripe anymore, dadnabbit! And to make it all easier, the intensive sales pitch was on convenience. Cake mix, margarine (talk about fraud in a tub – ersatz butter sold as tasting “just like the real thing”), TV dinners, the list of offenders is endless. Obviously cattle still have stomachs, so what happened to them? Processed into meat food products, bearing only a passing resemblance to the food they replaced.

Fortunately Julia Child introduced Americans to real cooking and that led to Alice Waters and the tide is slowly changing. We now have small farms that compete by offering produce that the large outfits have neglected, and the market for those products is increasing, to the point that the large concerns are casting an eye at things like spring salad greens.

Now that we finally have an opportunity to support small family farms it is more imperative than ever that we do so. We can create demand for good food and that demand will be met. By supporting small farms we really do not spend more money, if we are smart about our shopping, and by cutting out the megamarket a higher percentage of our food dollar goes directly to the family farmers. If the megamarkets see this, they will be forced to follow (as they have slowly been doing in the Bay Area), and will have to pay better wages for more knowledgeable employees (again, we are seeing this in some of the mass market places here). If the prices of some foods go up it will be more than compensated for by less money going to high value-added processed junk.

We should look to food as a source of contemplation, as a source of community (that includes the farmers), indeed as a focal point of the community, and we should spread our enthusiasm first by praxis, then by words, but if we only spread the gospel of food we miss the mark. It has to go hand in hand with the Gospel. I might seem a bit harsh on Mrs. Dashwood (look, I have the stubborness of a Kraut combined with the hotheadedness of an Italian, and I have found that when I try to beat around the bush I end up insulting people more than when I am truthful and undiplomatic), but have no doubt that she is a good person, a good mother, wife, daughter, and most importantly (the thing that undoubtedly structures it all), a good Catholic. I would rather sit down to a brined pork roast with her than for seared foie gras with some hedonist foodie who lives for his own pleasure alone. I especially dislike the hedonist who uses food as a badge of his social status, who chokes down a shot of Laphroaig even though he cannot stomach the peatiness, simply because that is what the in-crowd drinks.

One final point is that Mrs. Dashwood states that skill is the important thing in cooking. I agree, but consider the shopping part of that skill. I have seen virtuoso shoppers in the form of octogenarian Italian nonne making the butcher cut meat to specifications so demanding that they would make lesser men cry. Watching them at public markets in Italy is one of the few things that rates higher than Grand Opera for passion, with their squinted eyes, twitching noses, and facial expressions scrutinizing the farmer’s every move (in Italy, one does not pick up the produce, but asks for it, bringing in the chance that the farmer will dare to pass off one unripe tomato in a bag of fifty). I have chosen a more collaborative route, working with a small number of farmers who know what I like and know that I will take a chance on their recommendations (or as my friend Ann said regarding fava greens, “ha ha, she has you buying her compost”). Some day, when I am eighty and have grandchildren who know better than to stir sauce into pasta in my kitchen, I hope to attain the level of shopping virtuosity my Great Aunt Sarah had (she was the notorious nitpicker, who my butcher/grocer cousin Mario learned to fear).

I also offer to Mrs. Dashwood and Cacciaguida the open invitation to come to Oakland to discuss this stuff the way it should be discussed: at the table, over good wine and food. If you show up, you will be guaranteed of three good meals a day, and we are in walking distance to a great parish (with a Latin Novus Ordo mass as well as the indult Tridentine). I also give great tours of the Bay Area to our out of town visitors (with the caveat that Amália always insists that a little part of each day is spent either riding on a choo choo or looking at choo choos. She might grow out of this, but I haven’t, so streetcars and regional transit will probably have to be part of the tour).