Gourmet Gypsy

As the Kimchi Ferments: Days Five Through Seven

2012-01-08T17:46:00.004-05:00

Alright, things got a little away from me... what with the Saints game and all, but the kimchi is done! I've been nurturing it along by twisting the lid every day, and as you'll see, it's doing great.

Today I simply removed the spacer jar, inhaled deeply, and ate. It's a really nice, crunchy and spicy ferment. It's also a lot different than many kimchis because it has no fish sauce in it. For you vegetarians out there this is the recipe for you! Personally, I like the funki-ness of the fish sauce, but this is a really fresh, light taste that will keep me going for about a month.

(Sorry about the double videos... someone called me while I was taste-testing... how rude!)

Well, that's the end of the story for now. I hope you-all try this. It's easy, cheap and incredibly healthy.

Rot on!

As the Kimchi Ferments: Day Four

2012-01-05T20:49:00.002-05:00

Ah, it bubbles forth! It's been a glorious 45 degrees (outside) on The Frozen Tundra today, which means it's been warm enough in the yurt to move fermentation with the kimchi along more quickly.

It's tough to see in the picture, but if you look closely you'll see the formation of liquid on the bottom. If you sit and watch it (pretty exciting stuff), you'll see that it is bubbling.

Oooooh, fizzy fermentation! Oh, joyful lactic-acid!

So, again... twist the cap a bit to let off some of that gas, and inhale deeply when you do - it's a beautiful smell!

Alrighty, tomorrow I'll be deciding whether or not to ferment the kimchi for a fifth day (day six of the process). Until then my fair fermenters!

As the Kimchi Ferments: Day Three

2012-01-04T17:13:00.001-05:00

The kimchi has been resting in my (turned off) oven for almost twenty-four hours, and when I opened the door this afternoon I was greeted with the lovely smell of kimchi! The most notable thing at this point is the odor of fermentation. It's a sort of pungent and sour smell, and it lets me know fermentation is happening.

Which is good, because not much else is. There's a little condensation on the inside of the jar, but so far we don't have a lot of liquid... which, I think, is due to the rather chilly temperature in here! However, it's up to a balmy 38 degrees outside, so I expect things will speed up a bit here.

Release the Gases!
The only real activity today is to slightly loosen the jar lid to release the Co2 gases. Again... this is not rocket science, so don't over think it. Just a little twist and you can go about your business, rest assured that there will be no kimchi explosion on your watch!

Alrighty folks, that's it for this installment of As the Kimchi Ferments. I'll post some additional pictures tomorrow and some final video on day four (or five) when all is said and done. Go out there and ferment you some veggies!

As the Kimchi Ferments: Day Two

2012-01-02T23:03:00.000-05:00

Cordito and Sourdough: Fermentation's Finest

I realize that in my haste to post my kimchi kitchen exploits yesterday I slightly glossed over what lacto-fermentation actually is, and why anyone would ever want to do it. After all, in its most elementary definition, lacto-fermentation is a process of controlled decomposition; and, as Jimmy Buffet so kindly reminds us: "there is a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning."

It's the same with fermentation: a thin line between fermented and funky.

Age is Beauty: Life, Death, and Fermentation

When things die they decompose and bacteria comes to eat them (for more information and a fun video check out the Michigan Environmental Education Curriculum website). I know death is a bummer, but it's part of what we deal with when we talk about food. Chefs work really hard to keep things from decomposing, and technology has helped us out with things like canning and refrigeration. But long before those modern conveniences our ancestors still had to deal with preserving food so they could survive... one of the ways they did this was to ferment foods.

Grain was fermented into beer (yeah, beer!) and bread (yeah, sourdough!), grapes into wine (yeah, wine!), cucumbers into pickles, milk into yogurt and cheese, eggs... even meats are pickled - like herring and pigs trotters. You name it and human beings have fermented it. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has a nifty little article on this topic, called Fermented Fruits and Vegetables: A Global Perspective. Check it.

I am presently making kimchi, which is a Korean pickled cabbage. There are lots of ways to make this dish; as many kimchis as cooks... and the Korean government wants to tell you all about it on their website. I fell in love with kimchi when I lived in Germany and was fortunate enough to be asked to dinner by one of the Korean students in my dorm. I think we had six different kinds, and I was immediately hooked. In the traditional version fish sauce (also a fermented... actually putrefied food) is used in place of salt to kick start the process of fermentation.

But, I digress...

Fermentation is a "slow decomposition process of organic substances induced by micro-organisms, or by complex nitrogenous substances (enzymes) of plant or animal origin" (Walker, 1988 on the FAO). The idea is to slow down the process and allow the bacteria to develop to a point where it is benefiting the food. Bacteria is not evil... at least not all of it. There's lots of bacteria in our bodies and some of it really helps make us healthy (there's a great website called The Virtual Museum of Bacteria that has all the information you'd ever want on the subject).

I'm no biologist, I'm just a cook, so I'll let the experts explain it to you:

It may seem strange to us that, in earlier times, people knew how to preserve vegetables for long periods without the use of freezers or canning machines. This was done through the process of lacto-fermentation. Lactic acid is a natural preservative that inhibits putrefying bacteria. Starches and sugars in vegetables and fruits are converted into lactic acid by the many species of lactic-acid-producing bacteria. These lactobacilli are ubiquitous, present on the surface of all living things and especially numerous on leaves and roots of plants growing in or near the ground. Man needs only to learn the techniques for controlling and encouraging their proliferation to put them to his own use, just as he has learned to put certain yeasts to use in converting the sugars in grape juice to alcohol in wine. (Taken from: Weston A. Price Foundation website. Written by: Sally Fallon and Mary G. Enig, PhD)

I know that in contemporary Western society (specifically, the United States) we have issues with decomposition, but it's a natural part of the life cycle so get over it... it's good for you.

Sterilization: The Fine Art of Fermentation Versus Putrefaction

Okay, I'll get off my soap box and acknowledge - no, plead - that with all of that being said, one does not want to cross the line between fermentation and putrefaction (the final stage of decomposition after death). The way to avoid this is to be sure that the tools you are using (from your hands to your jars) are clean to the point of sterilization. Now, again some of the flavor of fermented foods comes from the salt in the hands of the cook... or the tears (we all remember the movie Like Water for Chocolate), but you need to control it by cleaning your things properly, which is really not very hard to do.

Can It

The last part of the process is "putting it up," or jaring it. This is not rocket science... you put the vegetables into the jar, insert the spacer, and put the lid on. I leave it in a bowl because as the veggies ferment they release gas (Co2), which pushes the juice up and out of the jar.

One final note on this... my apartment on The Frozen Tundra is rather cold, which inhibits fermentation. This can slow down the process, but you can help insulate your veggies by placing the entire thing (jar, bowl and all) into the oven. Obviously you want the oven to be off, and you don't want to forget they're in there! Not that I would ever do that...

So, now we've got it in its sterile home... all that's left is to watch the bacteria do their thing - bit like watching paint dry really, but check back for progress as another episode of As the Kimchi Ferments unfolds tomorrow.

As the Kimchi Ferments: Day One

2012-01-02T19:52:00.000-05:00

Here I go, playing with my food again. This time it's lacto-fermentation and kimchi!

My best friend requested that I give her more detailed directions in how I make my fermented vegetables, so I've put together the following little video and procedural bits showing how I make Kimchi.

I need to begin by saying that I learned how to make lacto-fermented vegetables from Mike Bieser of Fizzeology fame in a workshop at Willy Street Cooperative Grocery Store in Middleton, Wisconsin. This is his general procedure (not a recipe... a procedure). Of course, I add my own ingredients and generally do it my way... as with most things.

Step One: Mise en Place, Mise en Place, Mise en Place, or Get Your Sheet Ready!

So, the produce I used this time around was:

2 heads of cabbage (amount 5 pounds)
3 scallions
2 ounces of ginger
4 cloves of garlic
4 pieces of pickled burdock root (couldn't find any fresh)
1 green pepper
Half an onion
1 carrot
1 parsnip
1 cup of bean sprouts
1/2 pound of diakon radish
1 heaping tablespoon of grey sea salt
1 tablespoon of garlic hot sauce
1 tablespoon of ancho chili

You will also need some equipment, here's the list:

Food processor, knife or mandoline (to chop the veggies)
Large mixing bowl or tub (to mash the veggies)
Potato masher or something to smash them with
1 gallon jar
1 Spacer jar

I bake my gallon jar and spacer jar in the oven at 350 degrees for about ten minutes. This is an alternative way to sterilize them. While I'm doing this I get all the other ingredients and equipment together and ready.

Step Two: Process your Produce

The basic process is:

Cut the veg
Mix the veg
Mash the veg
Rest the veg at room temperature over night

I use a food processor for the first part of the process because you are aiming for 6 pounds of vegetables and at this point in my life I just don't want to hand cut those. I also have the smallest kitchen known to human-kind so it's just not feasible. I'm a busy woman, what do you want?

I would use the slicing blade, but somehow I've lost it, so I just use the mincing blade. I did this when I made cortido last month and it produced a really lovely soft product. However, for kimchi I'm used to sliced vegetables, so we'll see how I like this version.

Step Three: Mash Dat Thing Up!

At this point you need to put everything into a large bowl or tub. To the vegetables you add the spice (in this case ancho chile and garlic hot sauce), and one heaping tablespoon of sea salt (I used French grey). This is critical for all fermentation because it starts to "cook" the vegetables.

The idea here is to break down the fibers in the veggies so that they release their juice and begin to decompose. As they decompose they create bacteria... the good kind, and that is what makes these power veg. The veg stays in the tub covered but exposed to oxygen to kick-start that process.

Join us tomorrow on As the Kimchi Ferments when we will put the veg into a sealed jar to continue the process in a more sterile environment, and answer some of these pressing questions... Is it warm enough in Claire's apartment on the Frozen Tundra to allow fermentation to occur? Will the bacteria show up and do their duty? Will Claire have combed her hair?

2012-01-01T00:13:00.003-05:00

On January 31st of every year we always hope for the best in the new year, and say f-off to the old, but chances are good that next year will bring bad things, and good things; stuff we planned for, and things we never expected... just like every other year we’ve lived, and just like every other year we will live.

If you are reading this you are alive, and that is what truly matters.

Every morning,when you open your eyes, who knows what you’ll be faced with: the most unexpected greatness, the worst imaginable event, or just another day of mild annoyance and silly moments of shared smiles.

Every day you get the opportunity to see all of those things: good and bad, and you get the chance to wonder... what happens tomorrow? How will I change this? How can I make it better? Who might show up? Who might go away?

Right now, in these last moments of this year, check where you are in life, and think about where you want to be. Now, what do you need to close that gap?

It’s my hope that you go after whatever that is in 2012.

It’s also my hope that you live every day like it’s a new beginning, because every day is a new life that only you decide on how to live: the worst, the best, and the in-between.

Pickled herring, black-eyed peas, collards, and peace to you in 2012,

Claire

Saying Grace

2011-12-15T19:50:00.004-05:00

It's the time of year in my country when we are all confronted with "The Holidays." In popular media this translates into family, friends, shopping, eating - preferably all together. Consume and rejoice!

Last week I was sent a promo copy of Lidia Bastianich's new holiday special for PBS; its main themes are family, community, food, and ritual. These are noble things, and they are well represented in the show but, as with most food documentaries, I am often left feeling a slightly saccharine taste in my mouth. Food + community = joy... yeah, not always. Let's face it, relationships are often fraught with drama and pain. So, the holidays can feel like a big 'meh' for a lot of folks.

But I liked Lidia's show... in fact, it made me cry; or, I should say, it started me crying. For the last week I've been crying a lot when confronted with food and my own memories. I cried today when I went to Clasen's European Bakery because it instantly transported me back to my childhood in suburban Chicago. I also began tearing up when I was eating bao dumplings because they tasted so much like the ones a dear friend made and gave to me at a particularly critical moment in my life. And later I cried when I ate the cortido that I had spent five days fermenting... the recipe passed on to me by a complete stranger who decided to spend some time with me explaining why this particular dish was so important to him.

Food transcends time... it links the narrative of your life to those of others. Regardless of how fucked-up things might be, when I sit down to a platter of bao or a loaf of Bavarian rye I can still commune with my people, even if I'm by myself and they are scattered to the four winds.

Those tears I have been crying when I eat, their origins are years in the making... they are for all of us.

This particular batch of tears began almost four years ago. It has something to do with food, but more about grace. It's about going to a place between here and there, "a suspension of the living situation." It's just a story, that's all... imperfect, and incomplete.

In February of 2009 I left my job teaching at a small culinary school in the Northeast U.S. and started on a journey I thought would take me a year or two at the most. I left Vermont for New Orleans to do the fieldwork for my dissertation in leadership and change. I wanted to look at food and how people make meaning out of traumatic experiences and critical change... New Orleans seemed to fit the bill on all counts.

I didn’t make it to the Crescent City until August. I paused in that time to be with my father when he died after more than forty years of battle with multiple sclerosis. Those months I spent with him (and my mom and my sister) were not pretty. They were filled with pain on many levels that found expression in dozens of strange, and even beautiful ways. Ultimately though, my father died as he lived... with grace.

He was a graceful man: handsome, honest, overly-serious, sometimes stern, and eventually kind and sensitive. In me he instilled a deeply ingrained sense of self-worth. His little girl could do anything, he often told me. I grew up believing that, and to this day I run at the things I fear, not away from them, because of the sense of self-worth he instilled in me. I truly hold that in my heart, and for that I am eternally thankful.

My father’s death was painful for him, physically and emotionally, but not spiritually. In the days I spent with him in the last month of his life he talked to me about his faith, and what had allowed him not just to live in a completely paralyzed body, but to rejoice in it, and find real happiness. ‘Always take advantage of your opportunities,’ he told me. ‘And do the best you can.’ Those were the secrets... they keys to living happily.

In August of 2009 I moved to New Orleans. I was completely unprepared to be in that place. The emotion I encountered there was fierce in good and bad ways. The injustice I found was abundant and wrapped back around on itself like a double helix. From New Orleans East to the Lower Ninth Ward, and up through Central City... I went to places that scared me, and I kept going, and they reduced me to tears time and again.

But there was infinite beauty there too. The Mardi Gras Indians with their resplendent colors, rituals, and music came originally from a heritage of violence... the songs teach how to engage it. But it has evolved into this thing, this beautiful peaceful thing that represents deep cultural meaning, and opens the avenue for healing the immense wounds of life - rejoicing in them. There was this conflict I found - the most beautiful things came from the most painful and evil sources.

I struggled for months to understand it, and finally I just gave in to it. One day I just said: “Fuck it, I don’t get it, but I’m going with it or I’m going to go insane.” That day I became a New Orleanian, and a better human being. I released myself into the place: its ambiguity, its joy, and its contradiction.

Trungpa Rinpoche, the Buddhist scholar, tells the story of the night before Buddha achieved enlightenment. He sat under the Bodhi tree and met Mara, the evil one. The Buddha had learned though: “He had discovered that trying to achieve something by force was not the answer, and in fact for the first time he accepted that there was nothing to achieve. He completely abandoned all ambition.”

I think it’s easy to mis-interpret that... and there are plenty of examples of how one might do so in the world today. But, for me, in New Orleans I was faced with so much failure (my own and that of others), and so much grief that abandoning the ambition to control it, to “fix it” was the key to living with it, loving it. ‘Yes, it is fucked up. No, you probably can’t change it, or if you can, not by very much. But you can live with it, you can find peace with it, and you can enjoy it for all its fuck-uped-ness.’

I moved to Wisconsin in 2010 to digest my time in the field and write my dissertation. I spent a year battling my demons. Writing was hard. Making sense of the “data” was like untangling a box of Christmas lights only to find that half of them didn’t work. Trying to weave a narrative that wasn’t just academic, but was also poetic... It tore at me physically and emotionally. I felt a deep responsibility to represent the stories I had heard and seen with justice and beauty, and I did not feel capable or skilled enough for the task.

There were few times when I felt that I had succeeded. I wrote alone with no audience. There were often painfully critical (and absolutely accurate) responses from the chair of my committee. For a year I just kept going because there was no other alternative. I had gone too far to turn back, even though I had no idea what my final destination was, or how I would get there.

At the time I started a yoga practice again, and my teacher told me something one day that stuck with me: “release within the discomfort, not to it.” I think this is what the Buddha did under the Bodhi tree. He could not release the pain of the Mara, but he could let go of his grasping onto the suffering he felt in the face of it. Pain is unavoidable, suffering is not... we choose to suffer when things don’t go right, but we can relax into the uncertainty of change brought about by painful events like disaster, or the loss of a loved one, or a job, or any critical change.

It is the grasping onto what we feel we need to be right, or comfortable, or secure that induces suffering. The Buddhists call this the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, and it’s part of the Bardo. The Bardo is the in-between state, a “suspension in the living situation.” It’s not just between life and death, it is within life’s process. Critical change is the Bardo... disaster is the Bardo... not getting what we want is the Bardo.

The Hungry Ghosts live in the Bardo. They are those things we want but can never get enough of: peace, security, love, happiness. We find them and then we struggle to hold on to them... that grasping is what brings us suffering because: “once you hold something you want to possess it, you no longer have the enjoyment of holding it, but you do not want to let go.” You hold on tighter and tighter because the fear of losing it is too much, and you suffer because of that fear. Safety, security, control... impossible states we want to make permanent even though our rational mind knows we can’t.

At some point in that year of writing I just stopped grasping onto my expectation for the work. I didn’t write for a future book publication, but for the people I was writing about. I stopped caring about the eternal life of the work and I just did the work the best I could. And when I was done I was satisfied. I didn’t care if anyone ever read it, I didn’t care if anyone outside of the people I wrote about liked it. I abandoned all ambition for the work. I didn’t abandon the work... I just let go of what I felt it had to be. I stopped grasping.

This past August I defended my dissertation, and even the most curmudgeonly member of my committee applauded it. No major changes required... beauty in form and function. Publish, publish, publish. Congratulations Dr. Menck. The moment I let the work move through me, and not be influenced by my expectation for it... that moment of release freed me, and the work, to simply be what it was.

In her book Perseverance Margaret Wheatley retells the Hopi Indian prophecy about a tribe of people desperately grasping to the shore of a fast running river that threatens them. The elders say that if you hold on to the shore you will be torn by the currents and the rocks. They instruct that to live you must let go of the shore and flow with the current. It is the fear of letting go, losing ground, being swept away that will paralyze and kill you, not the current. I think my father finally found his state of grace when he accepted his life for what it was, and let go to the current of what might be, not his expectation of what could have been.

It is within each of us to decide how we respond to those things that happen in our lives. We can decide that "there will be no battle here" between the imaginary 'us' and 'them,' because we know what Buddha learned: “Mara was his own projection.”

The bad we see in others is only a reflection of what we see in our own self.

In The Brothers Karamazov the eldest brother, Ivan, falls into a feverish sleep and meets the devil. He is prepared to face a huge monster of a man with firey breath, a thousand swords, and the intelligence of a guru. Instead, he is confronted with a short, sniveling drunk of a man... he immediately recognizes himself.

The evil one, the devil, Mara... whatever you want to call it, that is in us, not out there. The things that cause us the most pain when we see them in others are the things we battle most against within our own self. We are the Mara, and that is the key. If we can see those things, learn them, and accept them within our own self we release within pain, not to it.

There is great beauty in seeing weakness in our self and others. It is human. It is painful. It is also deeply sensual, sweet, and loving, because it allows us to forgive and accept, and it also allows us to love and feel happiness - not just when things are good, but more especially in the difficult times of our lives. This, I believe, is what it means to live gracefully.

So as this year winds down I am saying grace, for myself and for you. If you decide to let go of the shore in this new year, take a look around... I’ll be right there.

Peace to you.

Works Cited:

Meditation in Action, Chogyam Trungpa, Shambala Publications, 1996.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Francesca Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa, Shambala Publications, 2000.
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Bantam Publishing, 1984.
Perseverance, Margaret Wheatley, Berrett-Koehler Publications, 2010.
Battlefield, The Seventh Doctor - Story 152, the BBC.

Lidia Bastianich's show: Lidia Celebrates America: Holiday Tables and Traditions airs on PBS on Tuesday December 20th at 8pm.

The Sleep of Reason

2010-08-04T00:10:00.007-04:00

When I got to the airport this morning and hunted through the two dozen or so flights on the departure board only one had no gate listed, mine. It was early, so I sat down and waited, and watched the blinking display. As the time to board approached I realized my gate was never going to be up there. ‘Fine,’ I thought, ‘after all, this is New Orleans.’

I started poking around gates asking passengers where they were headed, anyone know where the Minneapolis flight leaves out from? I even ran into the former mayor of the city, Ray Nagin. He did not help me find my gate, no surprise there.

Eventually I found my gate. There was no sign indicating any flight was leaving from that gate, just one woman pecking at a broken computer, right next to a broken monitor. When I asked her if that was my gate she assured me it was. When the next twenty people asked her the same question she finally got pissed and yelled into the crowd: “This is your gate. Everyone just sit down!”

Well, this is New Orleans.

I got on the plane and sat down, covered myself in a sleep mask, plugged in earphones, and checked out of the world. I hadn’t slept very well that night, so when I fell asleep it was no surprise. I was a bit surprised when I woke myself up in tears, my stomach loudly unknotting itself as we chugged away from the beautiful Crescent City. I was having a Chris Rose moment.

New Orleans is my present home. I came here to research food and meaning in disaster. I am a chef by training, and an anthropologist in persistent worldview. I’m in New Orleans doing fieldwork for my dissertation so that I can become a “real” anthropologist, the one with the letters behind her name.

When I got to New Orleans it was the year before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina- 2009. I assumed food was one of the happy respites in that on going mire. I was a chef and we tend to assume that food is the epicenter of the universe. What I found was completely different. Food had cultural meaning, sort of- at least it did in the city marketing material. However, I have come to understand there is a greater meaning behind food here, or a more complex one at least. When you go outside of the French Quarter food is also wrapped in the reality of economy, politics, and biology.

As my fieldwork continued I became aware of increasing personal issues. I’ve never been a depressed or anxious person. Even in my most sardonic, gothic years I’ve always retained a central core of happiness. For the most part I sleep well at night, and look forward to the days ahead… even as I plot them out in my over-ambitious mind. When depression comes it is not a lengthy visitor. I like my life, and reflect on it with happiness.

But in New Orleans a new anxiety began to take hold. Initially, I could more easily control the emotional manifestations, but the physical ones bothered me. I am a sensualist at the very core of my being. I perceive the world through all of my senses, but it’s my stomach where this particular soul lives. So, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me when my anxiety took up residence there.

Constant stomachaches escalated into physical knots. Knots that I had to work at through hours of meditation. I would calmly, logically talk to myself about the pain. “You’re fine Claire. Everything is fine. There is nothing wrong. Actually, everything is going really well. This is so much better than it’s been in the past. This is temporary, you are leaving. Wake up, Claire. Go do your work.” I walked and swam miles. I read every book or paper my committee threw my way. I cleaned my house, organizing things into boxes, over and over again. Eventually it would stop and the knots would disappear. For the time being, but as I began fieldwork they came back with increasing frequency and intensity.

In May when the oil struck, I also left the primary writing stage of my dissertation work and began active fieldwork. I was working closely with four groups in the city, but I found that I couldn’t ignore the oil. The oil touched every part of the food system. The seafood from Louisiana is completely safe to eat, please don’t misread me. What I found was the depth with which this crisis had hit an already compromised and bifurcated community. It wasn’t just the Lower 9th Ward, or New Orleans east any more, now it was also the oyster seller I’d gone to hear speak six months before whose family had been selling bi-valves in New Orleans for 136 years and was now going out of business. It was the celebrity chef I heard speak at the culinary school I had taught at and was now suing British Petroleum because of long-term “externalities” of cost in her business that would not be covered by the company in the quiet, media-free years that promise to unfold in front of us. It was the shrimper I had been buying seafood from at the farmers market who had increasingly empty coolers and stooped shoulders.

So, I did what I had to do, what made sense to do, what I felt unconditionally drawn to… I asked people in the food system if I could interview them. As those interviews have gone on I have witnessed things that have repetitively broken my heart. I’ve offered over lots of tissue, and I’ve watched a fair number of responsible, normally happy, prosperous business people reduced to a puddle of tears in front of me; folks who made it through Katrina, and now were stopped in their tracks. One of their biggest fears was that people would forget, just like had done after Katrina, only worse this time. People were scared that people would intentionally turn away because they were sick of the Gulf Coast. It became my mission to ensure that people would know their stories. My witnessing could be some kind of insurance policy in human compassion, if not compensation.

Through this all I have tried to be calm and do what I was taught in my Buddhist Tonglen practice: breathe in the pain, and breathe out strength and loving-kindness. I sucked it up and did what I thought a researcher was supposed to do: record the experience and ask the questions. But I forgot the first rule of Tonglen: first practice loving-kindness on yourself, and then move on to others.

*******

Last night, before I was leaving New Orleans on the flight with no gate, I lay in bed, absolutely unable to sleep. For hours I just lay there, thinking about the trip ahead of me. Thinking about all the things left to do in the city. Wanting so much to not be there. I even lapsed into memories of the night the Saints won the Super Bowl, when I danced in the streets with some of the Mardi Gras Indians. I was being an average, if adopted, New Orleanian in the darkness of triple digit heat, on the first day of the fifth August after Katrina, with dispersants and oil swirling a few miles down bayou, wondering if my car with the roof rack on top would fit into the parking garage at the airport so that I could park it high enough up so that “if anything might happen” while I was gone it would be safe. My stomach clinched tighter with every passing revelation.

Finally, a series of thoughts came to me. Actually, it was a series of people. It was the young activist I had met working at a school with a food based curriculum in the Lower 9th Ward; it was one of my most beloved mentors who opened my mind to the idea of a sensual scholarship that functions from the epistemology of the body in the first place; it was my father who passed away just months before I moved to the city; it was the Latino I had interviewed about discrimination and access to food in the city as we were harassed by a drunk black man yelling “get out of my city Migo”; it was the oysterman who laughed at me when I couldn’t get the oyster as big as my fist into my mouth, sloppy guts and hot sauce smashed all over my face from the bi-valve he’d just pulled from the Gulf in the days immediately before they closed his lease because of the oil. They all came to me one after another until I got so confused they simply became one person. And that person just put his arms around me. I felt his breath on mine and very slowly I felt myself fall into the sleep you only ever have in the arms of someone who truly loves you when you are so sick and tired you don’t know what to do anymore.

That is one of the most sensual experiences I have ever had, and the least sexual. It simply was a person, or rather; a manifestation of many people, caring for someone who desperately needed it. Sometimes touch is physical, sometimes it is a word, and sometimes it is a dream. Maybe that is just the sensualist in me talking again, but it is what stopped me and held me when I couldn’t hold myself. It’s what I try to do when I listen to people: hold them in a space and touch their words with my attention and love so that they know at least one other person will not forget their story as they tell it to me.

*****

When my flight from New Orleans finally landed in Minnesota I emerged into a well-controlled airport with impeccable amenities: displays worked, my connecting flight had an assigned gate, and there were a thousand stores and restaurants, even a policeman on a bike. This was the world I had grown up in- controlled, expectable, apparently calm.

And it’s the world I have left, and I don’t think I can ever fully inhabit again.

New Orleans is now my second home. I realized the day before I lefton this trip that I can never completely leave the city now. In some way I will always be either coming or going there from some place else. New Orleans will be a constant in the remainder of my life. Like most things in New Orleans I love that and I hate it at the same time. When I came to the city and opened myself up to the sensuality, the beauty, and the pain in that place I had no idea how much it would hurt me. But I love it there. I love the people who face constant threats, some they construct themselves others that are thrust upon them, and regardless chose to revel in the life they have. They are loud, but man do they know how to hold you when you need it.

As my final flight chugs on toward Missoula, Montana, where I’m going to spend ten days with one of the groups I am working with for my PhD, I find myself sitting among mostly happy folks who aren’t worried about oil or hurricanes or a city that care forgot. The guy with the fishing rod next to me probably doesn’t understand why stray tears are falling on my keyboard as I write this. But I know when I get off the plane and meet the people from New Orleans… they will.

Facebook: This is Dumb

2010-04-22T11:15:00.005-04:00

Well, it appears I've been locked out of Facebook. That's a drag for about one million reasons, some of which have to do with communicating with people about business issues. More importantly... I miss my friends!

I'm in a particularly tender point of writing the first three chapters of my dissertation for a hearing scheduled on May 3. Facebook is a distraction from 12 hour writing days, but it's also a way to get support from folks who share in some of the same tasks.

So tisk, tisk Facebook. You've abandoned me in my time of need. Poo upon you.

In The Freezer

2009-11-15T21:02:00.005-05:00

The following is an inventory of my freezer... take it for what it is, and make of it what you will.

Jalapeno Sausage Bread (Bourgue's)
Duck Stuffed with Pork (Bubba Frey)
Bacon (Bubba Frey)
Bacon (unlabelled)
Pork Tasso (Bubba Frey)
Beef Tasso (Pauls' Meat Market)
Andouille (Bubba Frey)
Ox Tail ( Paul's Meat Market)
Venison Sausage (Paul's Meat Market)
Bacon Wrapped Quail (Paul's Meat Market)
Pork Grillades (Poche's)
Crawfish Boudin (Poche's)
Peaches (Best Yet)
Strawberries (Best Yet)
Quail (Paul's Meat Market)
"Seasoning Blend" (Jefferson Food's)
1x Pie Crust (Mrs. Smith's)
2x Chaudin (Poche's)
Smoked Charice (Poche's)
Boudin (Poche's)
Stuffed Beef Tongue (Bubba Frey)
Chicken Thighs
Rabbit (Bubba Frey)
A.P. Flour (Dixie Mills)
Vodka (Pinnacle)
Mesophilic-M Bacterial Starter (Leeners)
Flora Danica Bacterial Starter (Leeners)
Ice Packs

Slowly these will be defrosted, cooked, shared... loved. It is my hope that your freezer bear as much fruit. Peace to us all as we embark on this holiday season.

May your belly be full, your soul free of worries, and your mind overflowing with ideas!

I'm From Nowhere

2009-11-10T19:43:00.011-05:00

A lot of people have been asking me where I'm from lately... and I have struggled every time with an answer.

I'm from nowhere.

The consummate gypsy, I never lay my head in any one place too long, which makes it hard to say where I'm from, but there is a bigger implication in that question. Where you are from also tacitly suggests what you are influenced by- what has defined you. Place defines us because it indicates what we've been exposed to, understand, love, accept, and abhor. When we know where a person comes from we can begin to make some kind of assessment of what they know and what they like - that's a normal, human behavior - a way to make sense of the unknown.

So, where am I from? I grew up outside of Chicago... but not in Chicago. I left and went to the following places for more or less time, for varying lengths of time, and often one or two times: Wisconsin, Germany, much of Europe (East and West), Russia, Kansas, South Africa, Massachusetts, Virginia & Washington D.C., Vermont... and Louisiana - New Orleans, to be exact. All of those places influenced me in distinct and profound ways. So which one am I from?

The place we "come from" is a self-defined space. Where we come from is a place inside of us, a place that we know in intimate ways... the streets we drive intuitively when we are too tired to think; the foods we cook when we are sick, lonely, or scared; the smells we know as indicators of seasons... these are the ways we know we belong to a place. When these places are removed, by force or choice, we learn them even more intimately. Is it true that we love a place more when it has been taken from us? I think it might be so.

As a true gypsy I know many places, many foods, many smells, many seasons... and I love so many of them, but none of them tell me where I am from. Perhaps I still wait for that space to open itself up to me, or maybe I am from all of them and they are all reconciled in my heart and soul. Until I am called home -to one place- I will continue to question my response every time you ask me where I am from.

So, I wonder... where are you from? Where is that secret spot that calls you home, and how do you know it when you see, smell, taste, or feel it?

I Come From This Pot: The Intersection of Culture and Cuisine in the Food System of Acadiana - Part 1

2009-11-05T16:25:00.002-05:00

In its most transactional sense food is energy, a resource required for life to exist. If we leave the discussion at this point however, we risk missing a more profound aspect of what food means in the larger cultural sense. Food is a signifier of cultural status, inclusion, and class, but it helps us to understand who we are through a deep systemic set of activities and spaces. Wendell Berry reminds us:

A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption invokes calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other. It assures that the necessary restraints are observed, that the necessary work is done, and that it is done well (Berry, 1977, p.43).

In this definition culture is more than a way of making meaning, it provides a social function that clarifies and edifies both behaviors and objects. Culture in this sense is woven deeply into the matrix of the social system, and cannot be extracted from it without damaging it in a fundamental way. Food in this sense is more than a set of social signifiers; it is also a set of practices, spaces, and outcomes all of which speak to the larger structural value system of the social system.

[O]ne cannot fully understand cultural practices unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage is brought back into ‘culture’ in the anthropological sense, and the elaborate taste for the most refined objects is reconnected with the elementary taste for the flavors of food (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 1).

Bourdieu calls us to see past the normative aspect of culture and move into a more nuanced understanding of the permeation of culture in all that we do. In this sense food cannot be reduced to a set of ingredients or procedures, rather, it must be gauged in how it is set within the activities of social life. Not only are we concerned with what is eaten, when it is eaten, and with whom, but also we must extend our vision to see how the production and allocation of food is structured within the social system. This examination asks us to look at food as a complete system and it opens our eyes to where value is placed on the resource of food as well as the meaning of food. If we reduce our examination of food to the kitchen or the dining room we miss very important places within the social system that are imbued with value and distribution of resources. These choices within a society represent more than a static snapshot of value, rather they express the conversations of changing values.

For the different forms of consumption in hierarchical societies are not simply transformations of a timeless cultural pattern that continues unaffected by a changing social system. They are in conflict with one another not only at the formal level but in action too. They may generate conflict and conflict may generate change (Goody, 1982, p. 35).

Changes in the food system represent larger shifts within society. As Brillat-Savarin has famously stated: show me what men eat and I will tell you who they are – we can understand something of social meaning, value, class, and change when we look at how food is produced, distributed, fabricated, consumed and disposed of as a complete system. If we are to move past understanding culture in Bourdieu’s “restrictive, normative sense” we will need to understand food practices not as bifurcated events, but as a systemic representation of the social structure which they serve to sustain. It is the goal of this paper to begin this refocusing of how we study the culture of food. I intend to outline the five phases of the food system in order to create the framework through which we can begin to see the deep connection between food and people. In my experience the most effective way to accomplish this is through the power of narrative. It is my hope that by telling a brief story about the food of a region (in this case the Acadiana region of Louisiana) I will be able to show how all parts of the food system weave together to form the container of cultural meaning and value. Ultimately, this is a story about sustained survival, and it holds within it the potential key to how we perceive a sustainable food system. Instead of creating new technologies that dismantle our cultural systems there is the potential to return to the traditions and heritage we have won over many centuries of learning how to live in our world, and on our world. It is to the bayou we must now depart.

When the Water Comes

2009-11-01T17:54:00.008-05:00

Since I was a little girl I've had a recurring dream that comes when things are tough in my life. Water comes up- usually in a deluge, although sometimes I wander into it, and most often, it's in the form of a wave with dreadful winds accompanying it. I've learned that sometimes in life the tide comes in and we are left treading water, waiting for things to get a bit more shallow.

Lately it seems I know a lot of people who are treading water and the tide does not seem to be turning. Divorces, lost jobs, lost mortgages, injuries, deaths... change- painful, un-wished-for change. Anyone who knows me knows that I like change. I change careers, places, jobs, and possessions rather often. The only thing constant about me is my willingness for change. However, even I have my limits, and some changes are more remitting than others.

I have a friend who recently wrote a scholarly paper on resilience. Now, I am not familiar with the methodology or the data set, but what his paper says has what those in the academy call "face validity"... it seems to make sense on an intuitive level. He claims that there are five elements of resilience:

The desire to improve the persistent needs of groups and individuals
The satisfaction of seeing change and improvement, one person at a time
Support networks of family and colleagues
Spiritual beliefs
Spiritual practices

I guess I agree with those, and certainly I've called on all of them in the past six months as I've watched loved ones go through all of the worst things people can in this life. But there is something else... some other element to resilience.

Last week Richard Campanella was speaking at Loyola in New Orleans and he quoted two definitions of resilience from the Oxford English Dictionary:

The ability to return to a prior form.
The ability to recover readily from adversity.

Of course, he was talking about New Orleans, and there is an obvious resilience in that story. He also indicated that the second definition was probably more appropriate in that case. But what is it that allows us to recover? How do we 'come back' when all odds are against us?

I know for myself it is like a switch gets hit. After all of the tears, the mis-spoken words of anger and rage, when I surrender and say: "I give"... something just cools down and the soft whisper comes from deep in my soul: "let's try this again, shall we?"

Which leads me to think that resilience is a natural part of the process of change and life. Like the roses in the image at the beginning of this post, things go away... die, either metaphorically or really. And as those petals and leaves fall to the ground they carry with them the memories of joy we generate through the five themes my friend outlined above... which is why change hurts so much. We embed ourselves in others when we love them, and when those things decompose and die it hurts because part of us goes with them.

Let's not forget though that those petals and leaves, those things that die, compost into the fertile stuff of the next season. Good compost comes from dead shit. It really is that simple, and that true. So, when you love, know that it is not forever, and for heaven's sake... don't stop loving. As soon as you stop loving people, and things, and jobs, and places you lose the fodder that will compost into your future garden.

And as for that water... remember, you need that for things to grow as well. It may be deep when it comes, but it leaves alluvial stuff behind that your garden needs to grow.

Comfort Me...

2009-10-23T16:37:00.006-04:00

I went to the Rouse's Grocery store on Tchoupitoulas today to stock up on food for my trip to Wisconsin tomorrow. I got pretty much everything you would take to people you love and want to feed from the soul of Louisiana, because... let's face it, Louisiana cuisine is born out of healing the difficulties of life - or at least... surviving them.

Here's what I took to the register:

A bag of green onion Chee-Wees
A bag of Zapp's Sweet Potato Chips
Biegnet mix
Okra
Chef John Folse's crawfish etouffee
A shrimp pie
Pralines
Steen's Cane Syrup
Dried Shrimp
Olive salad
Italian cookies
Satsumas
Coffee
Luzzianne Iced Tea
Tamales in gravy
Stuart's pickle mix

And cheese, stuffed grapes leaves, crackers and wine (for the train).

As I was checking out the lady behind the counter commented on my selection, as folks often do in New Orleans when food is involved.

"Baby, it looks like you're having a party or getting out of town."

"I am leaving... my mom is having surgery." I replied.

"Oh, I'm sorry. Where are you headed?"

"Wisconsin."

"It's cold up there! Wait, you're missing some things here. Where's your sausage? "

To which the woman behind me added:

"Do you want to go get some sausage? I don't mind."

I assured them that I had sausage in the freezer at home as well as tasso for making gumb. They asked where I bought the meat, and when I told them Poche's in Breaux Bridge they both nodded approvingly and allowed me to pay.

"Good luck, baby. We'll see you when you get back."

Yes... yes you will.

The Seduction of Words: A New Orleans Love Story - Part 2

2009-10-18T22:07:00.003-04:00

Dear New Orleans,

You and I came to know each other ten years ago... and then I left.

What can I say? I was young, and I didn't realize that your secrets were something other places don't have. You know that you enticed me then, and I've never forgotten those times.

I'm sorry.

There have been a lot of places since then... I won't lie. I've really enjoyed those spots... it's true.

Kansas was better then I thought it could ever be. They have a healthy respect for pork and alcohol there- and the roots run deep. I endured a horribly boring relationship, but I also met my best friend there. I came to understand what "independence" means, and I began to understand what hot means... although you and I still need to come to terms with that. Ultimately, I had to leave though... because... well... it was Kansas.

Vermont was also wonderful- full of a new food movement and very thin people... two things I can't really resolve in the same thought. I know you understand that. It's wicked cold there... please forgive me, my vocal affectation is Vermontese. I find things "sweet." When you do something I need to correct I will have "no worries", and when you do the things I like (which is most of the time) I acknowledge my fawning love with "right on." And let's not forget... when I eat something I real like... I mean, REALLY like (which, again, is most of time) I will tell you "that does not suck." I really enjoyed Vermont, but it was so... monochromatic.

And there was Wisconsin... and probably some other spots that don't really resonate enough to tell you about.

But I've come back to you... beseeching. I understand a lot has changed for you. I know I wasn't here for The Thing... the really, really bad thing. I'm really sorry about that in a way I can't express to you in words. I know that on some level we can never understand each other, and I can't really understand what you've gone through while I was gone. I hope that won't keep us from meeting in some other ways though.

I really love your taste. You have amazing, incredible skills when it comes to food and people. Things are a bit rough sometimes, but you know I like that. You have this ability to maintain an incredible balance between anger and love. I really appreciate that you can accept our differences and still love me for who I am. Other places make judgements that you withhold... or are at least are willing to rescind when we move past that point and I figure things out. You let me be angry and full of lust at the exact same time... and you don't kick me to the curb for being a human being- you just love me more.

I think you also accept my wandering ways. I'm sorry that I need to go places, but leaving makes me understand why you are so different than other places, and why I love you so much. You keep on keeping on while I go on my little forays into the rest of the world- I think because you know I'll always be back.

And New Orleans... I think... I hope... that you will take me back. Please?

Baby, I love you.

Claire

Cooking: The Deviant Art

2009-10-17T20:59:00.015-04:00

What is good to eat must also be good to think. That is not my idea; it originated from Claude Levi-Strauss and his ethnographic studies about food. Recently, it has come to my mind on several occasions. In the past couple of weeks I've had the great, good-fortune to travel into Louisiana's Acadiana area in the Achafalaya Basin region. This is what much of America would call "Cajun country." As a matter of sanity and brevity, I won't go into the nuances of that cultural distinction here, but I would like to speak about why we need to consider carefully the things we think are good to eat.

On these trips to Acadiana I've eaten a lot of food... a lot. But I had a moment of clarity (pardon the pun) about class-consciousness and sustainability when I met up with Ray Brassieur, a professor of anthropology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He's a native of the area, and he spoke eloquently of the food traditions that are slowly fading to black because of their "ick factor" with new generations. Specifically, he was referring to the consumption of traditional cajun dishes like choudin or ponse (stuffed pig stomach) and tongue; but there are others you can think about as well... boudin, hominy, okra, all of the organ meats, and much local game.

These foods are rich in the traditions of the area because, historically they were the food of the poor. It is no joke when they say the only thing you can't eat on a pig is the squeal. When you have no money you eat everything you can catch, shoot or gather. Ray was pretty specific when he talked about growing up poor, but never hungry- not having money, but not wanting for anything. Marcielle Bienvenue echoed that when she spoke about always being able to go to the garde manger and find freshly butchered and prepared foods on her family's farm. And she called to the fore the issues of class when she spoke about her mother commanding her not to tell anyone she ate crawfish because it was "poor people's food." We have come to stigmatize foods because they are not "good to think" for us, often that means they are poor food. This is where food becomes an issue of class, and subsequently- sustainability.

What is sustainable when you have no money? The mass media image of sustainability is too often a marketing ploy to add on a couple dollars at the register, pricing out those who can't afford to buy, or excluding producers who are honest stewards of the land but can't afford the certification 'organic', or whatever else the term of the week is.

Sustere is the Greek etymology of the word sustain, and it means to "hold over." We sustain ourselves and our world when we take what we find in our environs and live with it, as well as on it. I am not saying that everyone needs to go out and shoot the squirrels in their yard, but I am suggesting that perhaps those who do subsist on those things aren't inherently backward or deviant for doing so. It may not be the lifestyle you choose, and it may be a lifestyle that is rife with contention and strife, but that doesn't make it unsustainable or wrong. This is traditional knowledge, and we might not agree with it but we can learn from it.

Maybe instead we could look at the foodways, all of the foodways, as potentially good to eat and not good to think- for us. Human bodies can eat an amazing amount of things that will sustain us, and yet each of us chooses from a palate of ingredients depending on what we know as "good to eat"- it's part of our cultural DNA, and there's nothing wrong with it. Eventually though, when we can no longer maintain our unsustainable, global food system we might need to rethink what we consider tasty. Food takes time... time to produce, time to fabricate, and time to consume. It's not always a trip to the grocery store. It also takes time to pass on the traditions and the knowledge of how to prepare the food: grow it, harvest it, process it, cook it. When we lose that knowledge... when we program ourselves to be repulsed... we are not only losing touch with what it means to be a human member of a culture, but also how to sustain life in our natural world.

I wonder... if you got rid of every prepared food in your kitchen right now, what would you have left to eat, and how long would it take you to prepare it? What would you have to put aside in order to go out and get the ingredients you needed, and prepare them- from scratch? And what if you couldn't get in your car and drive to get those ingredients? What would you eat if you didn't have a choice?

This isn't a doomsday scenario. It's not a call back to the land. It's not intended to be an admonishment. It's just something to think about next time you're handed a plate of food and you say "ick."

Eating Other, Eating Self - Part 4

2009-10-17T09:06:00.004-04:00

Conclusion

The gentle dance between who we are inside and how we experience our world requires each of us to blend a mélange of sensual experience and internal meaning. What I see, feel and know is deeply connected to my physical experience in the space of my world, but it has meaning only in a larger context of memories of experiences past. The location of those memories is both communal and subjective. My biography is shared to a great extent with those around me.

What insects, what trees, what bends in the stream, what times of day, what gestures, what rituals do we rejoice in? We need to start asking these questions of ourselves, our colleagues, our neighbors, and our children (as well as listen to their answers). By asking, we are giving ourselves permission to feel and give voice to our places- often for no other reason than for the joy of doing so. Our many answers, in turn, will need to find their way into the public record as murals and memories, as stories and songs. They will need to appear and reverberate not only at out dinner tables (and restaurants), but in our township halls, schools, parks, curbsides, and alleyways (DeLind, 2005).

The tapestry of time and space weaves together a narrative that contains both self and other. To understand the identity of self requires that we look both at the places of our memory and those who inhabit them. Within those spaces of embodied memory we find many points- many inconsequential, some epic- but all carry their load of meaning only in relation to each other and those around us. When Brillat-Savrin intoned: tell me what you eat and I shall tell you who you are (2002), he intended to explore one aspect of this living memory through the meaning of taste. We feed for our survival, but we eat to be human.

References

Abarca, M. E. (2007). Charlas culinarias: Mexican women speak from their public kitchens. Food & Foodways: History & Culture of Human Nourishment, 15(3), 183-212.

Berry, W. (1977). The unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of taste [Distinction.]. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Brillat-Savarin. (2002; 1925). The Physiology of Taste, or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy [Physiologie du goût.] (Dover ed.). Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge, England; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Delind, L. B. (2006). Of bodies, place, and culture: Re-situating local food. Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics, 19(2), 121-146.

Duruz, J. (2002). Rewriting the village: Geographies of food and belonging in Clovelly, Australia. Cultural Geographies, 9(4), 373-388.

Gvion, L. (2006). Cuisines of poverty as means of empowerment: Arab food in Israel. Agriculture and Human Values, 23(3), 299-312.

Kemmis, D. (1990). Community and the Politics of Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Totemism [Totémisme aujourd'hui.]. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lind, D., & Barham, E. (2004). The social life of the tortilla: Food, cultural politics, and contested commodification. Agriculture & Human Values, 21(1), 47-60.

Loichot, V. (2004). Edwidge Danticat's kitchen history. Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 5(1), 92-116.

Marte, L. (2007). Foodmaps: Tracing boundaries of 'home' through food relations. Food & Foodways: History & Culture of Human Nourishment, 15(3), 261-289.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception [Phénoménologie de la perception.]. London; New York: Routledge.

Mintz, S. W. (1986). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books.

Mintz, S. W. (1996). Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions Into Eating, Culture, and the Past. Boston: Beacon Press.

Ricœur, P. (2004). Memory, History, Forgetting [Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli.]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Eating Other, Eating Self - Part 3

2009-10-15T11:30:00.004-04:00

Memory and Social Identity

The sensual experience of taste occurs in the physicality of the body, but it’s meaning does not develop there. The values and meaning of taste develops as the body moves through time. It is this evolution that brings meaning to the things we eat. The physical being is only one part of what we identify as self. How do we know who we are? The ontological question of self requires that we are open to the experience of the now, but the meaning of those experiences enriches itself through the temporal flow of time.

With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is still there, but already it is sinking away below the level of presents; in order to retain it, I need to reach through a thin layer of time. It is still the preceding moment, and I have the power to rejoin it as it was just now/ I am not cut off from it, but still it would not belong to the past unless something had altered, unless it were beginning to outline itself against, or project itself upon, my present, whereas a moment ago it was my present (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 416).

The narrative of self weaves between the remembered past and geographic present, and it is a portent for the future, which can never be grasped other than in the imagination. Biography exists in relation to place, but it stands outside of place because it is only temporally represented in our conscious self. We re drawn to a place because of our accumulated memories of it, but those memories exist and have meaning only because of their accumulation within our self. And what we remember however temporally locked is structured through a broader social system of meaning. To a great extent, memory is a collective action. Individually we may remember singular events, but those events however independent are built into a larger narrative of interaction with others. To the extent we rely on others for survival, and we all rely on others for survival, we are equally reliant on some collective acknowledgement- in to agreement- that events have occurred and have some sort of meaning.

The ‘personal’ history of the memoir writer has confronted an ‘objective’ history embodied in institutions, or in the modification or transformation or even overthrow of institutions: a programme of educational training, a pattern of civil administration, a legal system, a particular organization of the division of labour. They have been inserted into the structure of dominant institutions and have been able to turn that structure to their own ends (Conneton, 1989, p. 19).

The outside meaning that Mintz refers to in the structure of time by the state, whispers eternally in the personal inside narrative. What happens to us, what we do, what we perceive and hold onto is ontologically subjective, but it is structured for us in the larger meaning structure of our social system. Memory holds a certain power of choice.

Despite the independence from social memory, the practice of historical reconstruction can in important ways receive a guiding impetus from and can in turn give significant shape to, the memory of social groups. A particularly extreme case of such interaction occurs when a state apparatus is used in a systematic way to deprive citizens of their memory. All totalitarianisms behave in this way; the mental enslavement of the subjects in a totalitarian regime begins when their memories are taken away. When large power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness it uses the method of organized forgetting. What is horrifying in totalitarian regimes is not only the violation of human dignity but the fear that there might remain nobody who could ever again properly bear witness to the past (Connerton, 1989, p.14).

Tied to the geography of collective memory, we make room for alternate interpretations of memory. Regardless of the power of the state, transcripts of resistance- what James Scott (1998) refers to as “hidden transcripts”- develop, depending on the system of memory we are engaged in and their relationship to the dominant narrative. Social groups that exist outside of or in direct conflict with the normative generating dominant class form alternate memories based on subverted but shared memories that relate to the dominant memory but carry alternate value systems.

Public memory is shaped by the competing and (unequal) discourses of official memory, which is promoted by powerful and/or governmental interests, and vernacular memory, which is disparate and diffuse, representing an array of different vernacular cultures. I refer to that aspect of public memory (typically white, male, heterosexual, upper-middle class). Where vernacular memory works in opposition to official memory, it can also be termed counter memory, although vernacular memory narratives can also be co-opted by official interests. When such communal memories become a part of public memory- and what is not. As a result, memories from the margins- particularly those of women and minority groups- are often suppressed, distorted, or deliberately forgotten to make room for the publicly promoted accounts of dominant culture (Collings-Eves, 2005).

Memory is relational, but it also holds the potential for differentiation. Belonging to a group is often evidenced in the ability to remember with that group, and that is practiced through both narrative and action. Because of its most basic functional value in sustaining life, the production and consumption of food becomes a site of embodied memory through the repeated actions of production.

In the Carribbean region in the slavery era, capture and transportation of Africans followed by the terrible test of plantation toil, experiences which seriously disturbed those parts of the ancestral culture which could be “carried” by the enslaved. They had to reconstitute their ways of life under daunting conditions, in new and unfamiliar settings, and in the absence of the full institutional structures of origin. Given the central importance of food in the lives of all peoples, it is not surprising that what the slaves got to eat, what they could produce or catch to eat, and how they came to create a cuisine of their own became building-block feature sof slave culture. The origins of such foods may seem to be the least telling part of the story. But diversity of origins provides an important lesson in the construction of culture- a lesson that Afro-Americans had to learn probably more fully than any other people of the modern times (Mintz, 1986, 36).
Food becomes a ‘hidden transcript’ of what is means to be part of a group that stands in contrast to the dominant group. The act of production is not only a requirement for life but a place of shared memory:

The image of a loaf of bread becomes a mobile one, offering the migrant taste, smell and textures of ‘home’ in the simple act of slicing, or through ‘other ‘ eyes (those of the child, well trained in sliced bread and supermarkets) the romance of ‘old ways’ and of ‘novelty’ – a romance of other times and places, other villages.

So, stories, memories and commodities attached to moments of sensory embodiment and reverie, constitute outlines of these alternative cartographies. As Lisa Law argues, ‘the sense are far from innocent; they are situated in a practice that can shed light on the way bodies experience different spaces of culture’ (Law, 2001) (Duruz, 2002).

These taste-based systems of meaning, cuisines of the oppressed, are central to the lived expression of group identity. Knowing how to prepare certain dishes in a specific way is not only an indicator of geographic origin- it is a significant symbol of group membership. Knowing the ‘correct’ steps to make gumbo may vary depending on what part of the world you are in and it is this exact variance that places you into a particular group at a particular time. Liora Gvion expresses this in her analysis of Palestinian ‘cuisines of poverty’ in Isreal:

Cuisines of poverty are practical systems of knowledge that assure survival and self-reliance. Moreover, their practice is part of an identity creation process that sustains a distinctive Palestinian uniqueness. As systems of survival, cuisines of poverty are gender-based stocks of knowledge that enable practitioners to assure food supplies and enough nourishment for one’s family. As agents of identity creation, the practices of cuisines of poverty, either out of necessity or out of choice, allows practitioners to choose forms and degrees of participation in the dominant culture. In other words, it is through their food choices that practitioners maintain a certain degree of independence and establish distinctive identities. Thus, cuisines of poverty relate the discourse of food to political and economical discourses by revealing historically politicized issues such as unfair land tenure and labor practices (Gvion, 2005).

The system of food selection, preparation and consumption that forms cuisine acts as a significant marker of social identity. This shared memory of action sustains us physically, and binds us emotionally to our communities.

To walk down this street (either literally or in imagination) is to revisit ‘secret’ histories, with all their nuances of pleasure or longing. In Burnie Street then, through small acts of remembering, nostalgic sites of childhood and family can be reclaimed and particular ways of being confirmed (Duruz, 2002).

The geographic spaces where we engage the food process represent locations of inside meaning, they are hidden away from the public spaces of the dominant culture. Even in the professional kitchens of restaurants and cafes we find a subverted location for the developing narrative of groups contrasting the dominant class. Perhaps because they are so taken for granted, so assumed to exist for the very purpose of our continued existence; these social spaces, public and private, are the location of a deeply intuitive memory.

Memory transcends, in space, the limits of the individual body. To the dimension of time and space, the feast adds the dimension of community to the extension of memory. Therefore, [t]here cannot be a disruption of memory since there is no individuation (Loichot, 2004).

Looking for Eating Other, Eating Self Part 2? Try here!

The Seduction of Words: A New Orleans Love Story

2009-10-14T17:26:00.021-04:00

Writing for me has always been like making love. I try to draw my reader in through a seduction of words and ideas that, if executed correctly, dance around in the head, leaving him or her slightly ajar- wondering what will be next... waiting for it... wanting it. At the end there is some kind of change, a new bond between us that wasn't there before. You've entered into my most interior space, my mind, and hopefully you'd like to sit a spell.

I love that feeling. The flirtation of those first interactions. I've been gifted with the words, and I like to use them. For over twenty years now I've been spinning this syntax of literary enticement, and I've become rather good at it. Even when beginning a new piece feels like pushing a box of rocks up a mountain, I have only to imagine the person on the other end of the sheet of paper, or screen, and the words always come.

Recently however, I stumbled. I've been working with the same editor for the last two years. The freshness of the relationship has grown into a nice patina of trust and admiration. He's my mentor, my teacher, and my friend. I've made countless mistakes in logic, grammar, and thought at his feet, and he has graciously pointed those out and redirected my sometimes over-active mind. It's a relationship that feels like a nice, old, soft chair.

When I set out to write a final paper for a project we've been working on for over a year (and no... I haven't posted any of it here) the malaise set in. The tedium of the same words, the same topic, the same thing again. Dutifully I tried to write it. There was not one inch of love in it. No emotions of conquest, no desire to open myself up through the complexity of well spun words- it was motions only. Writing it felt like a duty. When it was done I sent it off; and then it came back...

It is good and important work but not as sharp and clear as your other work. Hopefully, some time away from it will freshen your eyes. I get the impression of fatigue. Points are asserted without examples and the reader seems to be forgotten in an effort to get the ideas down on paper.

That was akin to rolling over and saying: "You know, could you just turn the light out and let me rest?"

And this is where the love part comes in, I think. There is a difference between making love and loving someone. The seduction works for only so long. Loving is something else. Love is a loud horn in the driveway at midnight. It's saying: "I love you, but what you just said ain't right." It's bad smells, and evil thoughts. It's staying in place when you want to run. Loving someone is not comfortable or safe, and it requires the deep patience only time bestows.

It's no irony of coincidence that I wrote that paper at the peak of my culture shock upon moving to New Orleans. Over the last six weeks I've begun the transformation from making love to New Orleans to falling in love with New Orleans. It does smell bad. It is hot. It is uncomfortable a lot. But it is deeply sensual in a way most things aren't anymore. It's dirty and it tastes good- all at once. It's old and full of corners you are nervous about, but want to know.

The day I wrote that paper, I was walking to the Rue de la course, my cafe of choice, and had navigated six or seven orange blockades covering up gaping holes in the sidewalk. These little obstacles have been in place on Carrolton since I got here and they show no sign of removal or even work. I had made it to the final corner, stretched out my foot and slipped in the muddy-fecal mess of a New Orleans street after a rainstorm. I cut the tops of my toes and began profusely bleeding through the mud on my foot.

I lost it. It was Sunday morning and there were lots of folks standing about, and I just started swearing and cursing the city, the street, and everyone on it. As I took out my water bottle and started to clean myself up an older black woman walked up to me and said:

"Baby, you all right?" I stopped, looked in her eyes and just exhaled.

"Yeah, I'm fine." She smiled, put her hand on my shoulder as she passed, and said:

"Baby, you alright."

And now, I realize, that is when I fell in love. New Orleans is a lover who never runs out of things that entice you- even as they nauseate you and make you mad. I wrote that paper at my peak of rage, hate, and repulsion for this city.

It's taken me ten days to be able to even re-read the paper; and yes, it's full of intense and brilliant content... and yes, it's poorly written. It's actually painful to read, and was the point in a relationship when making love with words turned into a requirement, and the passion was gone.

I was talking to my editor on Monday and he asked me if I had faith in him. I clearly and quickly said: "No" and I meant it. That loss of faith, and the frustration and rage were right there in that one word. It hurt to say it, and I think it probably hurt to hear it, like I intended for it to.

And that's when the love came through.

The words might be wonky, fidgety, itchy, constrained, and forced- I might be angry, frustrated, and difficult, but the deep love of the work, and the trust in the relationship is still there- and so, I write and re-write onward.

To be continued...

Eating Other, Eating Self - Part 2

2009-10-14T12:40:00.005-04:00

Geography and Biography: the Power of Terroir

No real culture- whether we speak of food or of anything else- can exist in abstraction from place (Kemmis, 1990).

As long as we are alive we are located somewhere, our bodies are physically present in the world. That physicality of geography requires that we interact with the spatial aspects of the places we find ourselves in, and it is through our senses we achieve this goal.

The body, the absolute here, is the landmark for any there, be it near or far, included or excluded, above or below, right or left, in front or behind, as well as those asymmetric dimensions that articulate a corporeal typology that is not without at least implicit ethical overtones.

In truth, displacements of the body and even its remaining in place cannot be spoken of, nore even thought, nor even at the limit experienced without some, at least allusive reference points, lines, surfaces, volumes, distances inscribed in space detached from the reference to the hear and there inherent to the lived body. Between the lived space of the body and the environment and public space is intercalated geometric space. In relation to it, there is no longer any privileged place but only different localities. The act of inhabiting is situated at the boundaries of lived space and geometric space. And this act of inhabiting is put in place only by an act of construction (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 150).

Riceour’s “act of construction” takes many forms, but it is visible as a system of meaning, which finds its constructed foundation on the bedrock of place. Even “the navigator’s wanderings demand their right no less than does the residence of sedentary persons. To be sure, my place is there where my body is. But placing and displacing oneself are primordial activities that make place something to be sought out. And it would be frightening never to find it” (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 149).

Our interaction with place happens through our sensual engagement within that space. When we come to know a place we can feel the ground under our feet, and we learn the way the sun arches in the sky at different points in the year. A new place is rich with new sights, sounds, taste and feelings. Because of these differences changing place requires a renegotiation with our conscious self. We must learn not just the new patterns, but also the new behaviors of a place. Just as we come to learn the rhythms of a place, its inhabitants have already developed their relationships to it, and that means we must learn that relationship as well. These relationships of time are tied to the inhabitation of a place, and they are the cultural system of meaning that binds us to our homes. As Wendell Berry reminds us:

A culture is not a collection of relics or ornaments, but a practical necessity, and its corruption involves calamity. A healthy culture is a communal order of memory, insight, value, work, conviviality, reverence, aspiration. It reveals the human necessities and the human limits. It clarifies our inescapable bonds to the earth and to each other (Berry, 1977, p. 43).

These physical bonds, forged in the places of communal living are a response to the environment around us, and they form a complex system of behaviors that generate a cultural system of meaning.

And when the effort to survive comes to rely upon shared and repeated practices like barn raising, survival itself is transformed; it becomes inhabitation. To inhabit a place is to dwell there in a practiced way, which relies upon certain regular, trusted habits of behavior (Kemmis, 1990, p. 79).

The connection of person to place sets the coordinates for interaction among people. We can know, or relatively expect, how things around us will operate based upon our understanding of the cultural systems of a place, and food is one example of how that “act of construction” occurs in a social system.

Food serves to ground body-place memory in the way immigrants live and re-imagine their cultural histories in consecutive ‘home,’ manifesting their movements through neighborhoods, cities, and countries. Through food mapping we can get a glimpse at the way migrant memory-work helps produce a sense of place through food roots and routes as migrants reinvent new cultural regions of ‘home” (Marte, 2007).

This idea of the “taste of place” resonates in the French concept of terroir. There is no literal translation for this word in English, rather it is a conceptual representation of the relationship of person to place through taste: every place has a taste inherent to its soil, air and water, and it shows itself every time we eat the same variety of olive grown in two different places by two different sets of hands- they are different. In Wisconsin boiled spare ribs are served over sauerkraut, in Kansas City they are severed with barbeque sauce on bread… these are differences born from the land: what comes from it, and the rituals that surround the preparation and consumption of it.

Each time a woman bends over her metate to work the wet maize kernels into dough and shape the dough into tortillas, she reenacts the initial creative moment. To this day, in the Aztec tongue Nahuatl, the dough she molds is called toneuhcayotl, which means “our flesh.” Maize and the people who consume it are joined in one continuum of divine creation Where the everyday practices of tortilla making continues, a familiar rhythm revolves around the hearth that links the cook outward from the meal to the family to the social and economic relations that define the community and its place in the world, for the hearth firs is also the site of the comida. As Gustavo Esteva describes it, That fire and [the cook] are the center of the conversation, and in fact the very center of family life, and family life is the center of the community. The whole community’s life is the in fact organized around such fires, the center of kitchens, the source of comida. Here food is woven into an understanding of what it means to be part of a human community (Lind and Barham, 2003, p. 53)

These meanings are constricted by what Sydney Mintz refers to as outside meaning (1996), those elements of the public, spatial interactions that set requirements for engagement. When we eat, whom we eat with, and what order we consume items are defined to a great extent by the larger, social structures of meaning that form around the relationship with place.

From the actual preparation of the meal, we can expand to larger contexts, such as the kitchen and household as gendered labor spaces, the way the cooks earn their income, and the places where they procure ingredients in their local neighborhoods. Each of the “domestic” realms is tangled with “public” spaces such as local Dominican food businesses implicating imports of food products, labor relations and the migrant trajectories between DR-US that made their existence possible. The food routes traveled in order for this meal to be cooked in the particular kitchen can be further expanded to include the geopolitical relationship between DR and the US, and the emergence of this staple as an icon of Dominican national cuisine (Marte, 2007, p. 270).

These relationships to outside meaning are structural social forms that influence a shared understanding of what is acceptable, what has value in the social system and what does not. This value is what Pierre Bourdieu (1986) refers to in his construction of the habitus: An objectified relationship between two objectivities, enables an intelligible and necessary relation to be established between practices and a situation, the meaning of which is produced by the habitus through categories of perception and appreciation that are themselves produced by and observable social condition (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 101).

This is essentially a way of creating a structural class consciousness within the social system, one that is defined primarily by the individual’s interaction with space.

Individuals do not move about in social space in a random way, partly because they are subject to the forces which structure this space (e.g., through the objective mechanisms of elimination and channeling0, and partly because they resist the forces of the field with their specific inertia, that is, their properties, which may exist in embodied form, as dispositions, or in objectified form, in goods, qualifications etc. (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 110).

Bourdieu’s forms are echoing the construct of outside meaning. We know places and things by the values we learn to place upon them, and those values are derived in relation to the structured power of the social system, most often represented in the state. In their observation of public kitchens in Mexico, Abarca develops this concept, however, in this case public kitchens are ways for women to subjugate the normative structure, turning the power of the state towards what Mintz refers to as inside meaning, where representations draw meaning through social structure, but in ways that articulate individual expression of that social value structure.
The public kitchen, on the other hand, underscores the influence of social and cultural capital such as customers becoming like extended family, instead of capital gain and fame. The public kitchen moves culinary practices from the sphere of domestic reproduction to commercial production without losing the familial ethical and moral values of caring, collaboration, and mutual benefit. This interconnection of spaces offers a paradigm that opposes the capitalist conception of professional kitchens (Abarca, 2007).

Lidia Marte (2007) continues this analysis of food preparation and consumption as a way for immigrant groups to bridge the outside power structures of a new social system with the behaviors and meanings of the lost, indigenous land. Here food is a language of sorts that transforms itself internally to create a third space of meaning, what Ricoeur refers to as narrative space, in which a hybrid cultural form develops from the mixing of memory with space, in this case- foodmaps.

Such Latino foodmaps reveal cultural exchanges and movements through food paths that help create specific neighborhoods out of commonalities of language, taste and migrant conditions (Marte, 2007, P. 279).

The formation of new families and the blending of two cuisines will continue to render new linguistic innovations and community networks. These tangled public/private experiences of place, space and memory-making could give us a launching pad to trace the extending boundaries of Dominican foodmaps in NYC, but also open lines of inquiry for other studies addressing how these food alliances emerged, and which kinds of Mexican narratives are arising about such processes.

As parallel appropriations in response to colonial violence, these encounters produced complex food systems and delicious meals out of indigenous, European, African and many other untraceable mixtures (Marte, 2007, p. 281).

Flowing from spatial experience is a second dimension of embodied memory. Lived time does not stop existing as it passes from experience to biography; instead the temporal flow opens into a geography of calendric time.

Just as in geographical space the places referred to the absolute of “here” of the lived body and its environment become particular locations that can be inscribed among the sites that cartography maps, so too the present moment with its absolute “now” becomes a particular date among all the ones whose exact calculation is allowed for by the calendar in terms of the framework of some calendar system accepted by a more or less extended part of humanity. Every noteworthy coincidence refers in the final analysis to those events, in chronological time, between some social event and an astrally based cosmic configuration (Ricoeur, 2004, p. 155).

Time intersects with space, and as it unfolds the meaning structures that live in our memory help to form the bond of association we feel to that place and those who share it with us. And it is to time we now must turn.

Looking for Part 1? Try here: Eating Other, Eating Self - Part 1

The Colonization of Cuisine- Draft 1- Part 2

2009-09-30T17:35:00.001-04:00

This is the second part to a final paper I am working of for my Integrated Learning Achievement for my PhD Program in Leadership & Change at Antioch University. I am working with Philomena Essed on this paper, and it focuses on cuisine and the representation of other. My primary goal in this paper is to begin to frame how we define community: who is in, who is out, and why? This is a critical concern when we begin to talk about making intentional changes in the food system. As we look at food and crisis how do we begin to frame what is "culturally appropriate" for a community? Who is at the table (pardon the expression) when those choices are made? Who is "the community"?

I mentioned this is a work in progress... it is the very green stuff on my Word document, which means there are errors in here and incomplete thought. There are references to quotes that aren't present, and notes to myself on things to expand upon. This is the raw work as I create it... artist, scholar, cook, writer.

I am posting this to ask for you ideas and comments concerning content... please spare the spelling and grammar remarks - that is what my editor is for (and my mom). If you have comments, please leave them -- but respect that this is a work in progress...

Social Identities of Self and Other

How do you answer the question “where are you from?” Are we from where we were born, where we live now, or some other factor- where we feel we are from? Being from a place means that we understand something of how things make sense in that place, we understand the things that have meaning in that place. The structure of meaning that develops in a place happens within the fabric of the community. As time moves forward it carries with it a series of events and activities that develop into a narrative of meaning. Individual things and actions have little meaning outside of their history, and that history develops within the confines of a group of people who choose to continue the narrative, remembering events perhaps not identically, but collectively. Stories about who, what and where form the foundation for what it means to be part of a social group.

INSERT CONNERTON QUOTE

When we know these stories we join the history of a place. As we live our lives, however simple, we add our words to the phrases that fill the minds of future generations. And so it is with food.

Ingredients are words in a larger dialogue of cuisine. Ingredients are the resources produced by the activities of agriculture in all of its permeations. Transformed into edibles through the activities of transportation and fabrication, these individual things are combined into complex and symbolic mixtures – recipes. These “prescriptions” are not words on a page, rather procedures that live in the bodily movements of a cook’s soul (----).

INSERT QUOTE ABOUT RELIVED EXPERIENCE THROUGH RECIPES

The bodily memories are formed through learning done within a community of people who have had the conversations about food Mintz refers to above, and have developed a value system for what is prepared well, and what is not. In his ethnography Taste of Ethnographic Things Paul Stoller retells the story of being prepared “bad sauce:”

INSERT STOLLER QUOTE HERE

In this example ---- clearly knows how to prepare the sauce correctly within the agreed upon cuisine of the community, and she chooses not to for a very intentional reason. The cuisine speaks for her in words she can never utter. There is meaning in the food is an expression of the cook. Each cook interprets the preparation of an ingredient in her own way, but the very preparation is part of a larger dialogue about what qualifies something as a particular dish. Last year I attended a conference on Cajun and Creole cooking. One of the women on the panel indicated that a visiting chef had wanted to make snake gumbo. All of the members of the panel scoffed at this because that clearly did not fit into the geography of Cajun and Creole cooking. But what is gumbo?

While the English word for okra developed from “nkruman” or “nkruma” in the Gold Coast Twi language, the Creole/Louisiana word “gumbo” is derived from the word for okra in the Central Bantu dialect of West Africa, the region that was also the home of many of the first Louisiana African slaves. Most of these slaves came to the colony after 1719. They brought with them a love for spices, smothered greens, and stews. A favorite vegetable of the slaves was okra, known to these particular Africans as “ki ngombo.” The word may also have evolved into “quingombo,” and was later shortened to “gombo,” then “gumbo.”

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America takes a different approach and gives attention to a deriviation from the Choctaw word kombo, for “sassafras,” the leaf that is powdered to make the thickening ingredient file. Okra and file are said to have first been used by the colonial French in 1722 after a much written about, but never documented, culinary uprising called the Fryin Pan Revolt, or the Perricot Insurrection. The quanit story goes that a group of frustrated housewives banged on pots in front of Governor Bienville’s home, protesting their bland diet of cornmeal mush and the lack of familiar ingredients. Bienville reportedly pawned the ladies off to his housekeeper, Madame Langlois, who knew the way of the Choctaw and thaught the French women how to cook rice, crabs, shrimp, crawfish, and wild game (Nobles in Tucker, 2007, p. 98).

What is gumbo then – an herb or a preparation, or both? I believe it depends upon whom you ask, which is why snake does not make sense to a group of twentieth century women who live in Louisiana and cook primarily in modern kitchens. The snake gumbo suggested by the celebrity chef from Texas does make sense in though, it is certainly edible and snake is a consumed ingredient in that part of the United States. What made the Louisiana women laugh, I think, was the idea that this chef would take a social signifier they so closely associate with Cajun/Creole cooking and misappropriate it to another community by using snake as an ingredient. It just did not make sense, so it was funny in an almost child-like way, and an insult to the “true” preparation. That chef was not qualified to introduce a new interpretation of the dish because he was not part of the collective community conversation about what gumbo “should be.”

In an increasingly global marketplace foods travel with increased rapidity. The story played out above concerning the transmission and transmutation of gumbo happened over 200 years ago, and it mirrors how food travels the world today- but now the process happens even more quickly. Today when I went to lunch at the Tulane student union I could have chosen from bagels, Chinese food, sushi, Creole, American, Greek, or Mexican food. Of course, representatives from any of those places would probably not accept the food being served from those kiosks, but the simple fact that they all appeared together within half a city block is a testament to how radically foods have moved around the globe and how willing many of us are to accept those things into our own culinary dictionary. There is an interplay in that kind of homogenization of cuisine – it both opens us to accepting new things and grossly misrepresents those things as it pulls them further away from their original context of meaning. This process of culinary evolution is not new and it is not bad, but it is different because it changes the scope of who is engaged in the discussion of what is “correct.” When we shift geographic parameters surrounding the conversation about a cuisine the question arises: who is qualified to speak about what is the correct preparation of a dish? At the heart of this question is the issue of authority: who grants it and who is allowed to receive it and the power that goes with it. And it is that issue I must now address.

The Colonization of Cuisine- Draft 1- Part 1

2009-09-30T10:51:00.003-04:00

As promised, I am going to put the introduction to a final paper I am working of for my Integrated Learning Achievement for my PhD Program in Leadership & Change at Antioch University. I am working with Philomena Essed on this paper, and it focuses on cuisine and the representation of other. My primary goal in this paper is to begin to frame how we define community: who is in, who is out, and why? This is a critical concern when we begin to talk about making intentional changes in the food system. As we look at food and crisis how do we begin to frame what is "culturally appropriate" for a community? Who is at the table (pardon the expression) when those choices are made? Who is "the community"?

I mentioned this is a work in progress... it is the very green stuff on my Word document, which means there are errors in here and incomplete thought. I am posting this to ask for you ideas and comments concerning content... please spare the spelling and grammar remarks - that is what my editor is for (and my mom). If you have comments, please leave them -- but respect that this is a work in progress...

Introduction

All human beings must eat for survival. Lacking any other commonalities, our need for food alone unites us. Food is energy and omnivorous humans can access their fare share of nutrients in a variety of ways; from meat to vegetables we can eat from almost anywhere on the planet’s pantheon of edibles. Perhaps it is this seemingly limitless selection that has transformed our animalistic need to feed into a very human expression of who we are, both individual and collective. Food and the series of complex rituals and activities that surround it has long been a hallmark of social expression. Different places have different ingredients from which to choose, and have led to different combinations of those ingredients. And as people have moved, both willingly and forcibly, they have taken their foods with them – in spirit at least. The great migration of foods across the globe is complex, and results in no cuisine that remains purely indigenous. As we continue to advance the frequency with which we transverse the globe our foods join us in what feels like a rapid process of heterogeneity. If it is increasingly difficult to define or remember what our ethnic identity is, our selection of foods no longer serves as a good reminder.

We have among us exponents of many culinary learnings; the herbs of France, and its sauces’ the oil and garlic of Spain; the pastes of Italy; the meal and chili of Mexico’ hot-breads from South Carolina and Virginia; pot pies from Germany and New England; chefs d’oeuvres, creations of our own master restaurateurs, unexcelled as they are (Scott, 1929, p.5)

This journey of food, what Raymond Sokolov refers to as foodways (1991), has led us into a new freedom of diet, but it also has a more threatening side. Food is a resource in two primary ways: physical and representational. The physical energy of food has often been used as a tool to dominate others, but that is not the focus of this paper. Instead, I propose to investigate how the powerful symbolism and meaning imbued in certain foods and rituals, what we call a cuisine, can be used as a form of cultural misrepresentation and domination. Scholars such at Edward Said have viewed imperialism and cultural dominance through the lens of literature and I argue that we can see the same process through the glass of cuisine.

Cuisine, argues Sidney Mintz:

What makes a cuisine is not a set of recipes aggregated into a book, or a series of particular foods associated with a particular setting, but something more. I think a cuisine requires a population that eats that cuisine with sufficient frequency to consider themselves expert on it. They all believe, and care that they believe, that they know what it consists of, how it is made, and how it should taste. In short, a genuine cuisine has common social roots; it is the food of a community – albeit often a very large community (Mintz, 1996, p. 96).

It is this caring about what is eaten that is critical because it forms distinctions of what is good to eat and what Clause Levi-Strauss has called “good to think” (1962). When a community engages in a conversation about a thing and assigns to it value then the physical resource of energy that food provides is transformed into a secondary resource: a cultural one. It is within that framework that I here approach the topic of food and representation. I propose that as a form of cultural meaning making food has in it the potential for misrepresentation and dominance. I would like to investigate that process by first investigating how food can be used to create meaning and then show how that meaning can be used as a form of imperialism. I would like to complete this examination by looking at how the researchers representation of cuisine has in it the potential to do harm to communities through misunderstanding and misrepresentation.

ADDRESS ISSUE OF WHO DEFINES “CULT APPROP”

Because food is so taken for granted it is an easy place to take advantage…We assume things about what people eat because we assume that if something is edible people will eat it – that is not true. We crave food because it is what we know as “good to think.” Who then tells us what to think about food? Are we informed by our community, or do others outside of us tell us what is “good to eat”?

Pedagogy & Record

2009-09-29T18:40:00.003-04:00

Recently I've been having lots of conversations about how educators share information in Web 2.0 (or the Real Web, or whatever you'd like to refer to it as). I have to admit, I'm an early adapter so I accepted these as part of my teaching practice a long time ago and really haven't given it any thought since then. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, websites... the whole shebang... just part of doing business I've always thought.

So, I became a Visiting Scholar at Tulane's Newcomb College Center for Research on Women this year, studying the food system in New Orleans and how it has responded to change in light of Katrina. When I arrived on NCCROW's doorstep as a resident of the fine city of New Orleans about three weeks ago I started having a lot of conversations about pedagogy and scholarship.

I love pedagogy... how do we teach? No... I prefer - how do we inform others. And I like conversations about pedagogy because it is not a given. It's hard to teach other people things that you know intimately. It's hard because things you take for granted are complex webs of knowledge for others.

I know restaurants in a very intimate way- front and back of house, top of house... there are few things that I don't know. So when I engage in food industry conversations and do that work it really just flows from me. I can make connections and see problems before they even occur. It's kind of like magic.

Try teaching that to someone. It's tough. It requires you analyze every step, question why you made every decision... trust me, it's hard. So when I talk to teachers about how they teach I get into it. And I also believe that technology is a tool in the box for bridging the gap between s/he who Knows and the Seeker of Knowledge. So these conversations, like the one's I have at NCCROW and at things like Tulane's Tech Day... well they make me stop and think.

And what I realize is that there is power in recording your experience for a couple reasons that go beyond narcissistic bullshit...

1. It is a tool of reflection and that is critical for good scholarship. If you don't stop and chew the cud of your experience as a scholar you are lost in a perpetual machine of activity.

2. It helps others see your process. Pedagogically speaking this is important for learning. A good friend of mine, Jeffery Dionesotes, did this recently in his blawg: PhotoDevot o. He chronicled mounting a photographic exhibit. This is critical for others to know. "Hey, how did you do that?"

3. It's part of the historic record. We need to preserve what we are doing, even if we think it is nothing, for others. It's too easy to say "this is just what I do... it's nothing." That little bit of self-deprecation robs others of history.

So... I realize I have a moment in time here to record what I am doing as a scholar in the field, and I intend to take advantage of that opportunity. I plan to use this blog as a clearinghouse of my stuff... writing, photos, videos. It will be rough-cut stuff. Later tonight I'll post the first part of an essay that is in its initial, unedited form. I'd like you-all to comment on things (be kind), and help me in my dialogue as well.

There are a few caveats.. I can't publish unedited interview transcripts and certain bits because that goes into the land of the ethically questionable (there is and Internal Review Board in all of this). However, I do intend to share the parts of this process that are my own. Let's call it a phenomenological investigation in how I, as a scholar, meet a subject and learn about it.

So... it's a little experiment. Join me won't you?

Eating Other, Eating Self - Part 1

2009-09-22T23:23:00.007-04:00

The following is the introduction to a paper entitled Eating Other, Eating Self. This paper is one of five I wrote for my theoretical Integrative Learning Achievement with Richard A. Couto for my Doctoral work at Antioch University in the PhD in Leadership & Change program. I will post further installments as time permits. Enjoy!

Things, be they ideas or objects, do not have meaning in isolation. Only when linked together in webs of agreed upon value are things imbued with meaning. This is a social construction because it is within the geography of the social system that these agreements are formed. Even when contested (and ultimately because they are contested) values and their subsequent meaning evolve within the social sphere and, in turn, help the evolution of the social system itself. Systems of meaning construction fall along the spectrum of human engagement from verbal exchange to the less tangible, more sensual experiences of human existence. This paper examines one of those meaning systems: taste. How we understand taste intersects both our geographic access to different foods and food combinations, as well as our temporal relationship with those foods. Agricultural production ties us to the land we live in, and as our lives wind on we construct a system of meaning around food that values some things more than others- our taste is formed .

What we consider tasty tells as much about us individually as it does about the social system we inhabit, how we construct ideas about what is good to eat closely follows what is “good to think” (Levi-Strauss, 1969). The values of taste when built into a system of cuisine form a socially constructed meaning system.

We do not eat merely to gain nutrients. We eat to experience taste- combining meats, fruits, vegetables, and seasonings in an endless variety of complex chemical interactions that produce different smells and flavor sensations. These foods all carry a symbolic load far heavier than simple nutrition or taste preference can capture. Foods have meaning for us. They signify lifestyle, celebration and ritual, nutritional concerns, and personal, ethnic, regional and national identities (Lind and Barham, 2003, p. 47).

Taste, and our relationship to food, is an important way for us to understand our social worlds because it is directly tied to two dimensions of how we configure that world: place and time. The agricultural act of production directly connects our individual bodies with our external world. Our bodies are built from the stuff of the earth transformed through agricultural production. As mother told us, we are what we eat- the act of consumption ties us physically to the land .

It is not just this spatial connection that binds us to our food, and this is a critical differentiation- animals feed on their worlds, humans eat theirs. Our ability to combine different edibles in recipes defines flavor profiles that evolve with social systems. The difference between feeding on what is available and non-poisonous and eating a composed diet selected from a variety of edibles stems from the temporal element of meaning that we ascribe to the foods and combinations of food we ingest. Meaning is consciousness, the intentional choice of certain elements over others. We choose to eat what we do because it fits into a larger, historical context of edible things: good to eat, equals good to think (Levi-Strauss, 1962). Cuisine is a social conversation about which flavors, textures and ingredients “work” together. Humans can eat many things, but depending on where you are in the world something forbidden in one part of the world is valued as a high expression of taste in another. The values ascribed to food combinations derive from a temporal process that binds food to social rituals and events. Perez and Abarce exemplify these bonds in their discussion of the multiple socially symbolic functions of the cocina (kitchen) in Mexican culture.

Cocina has three literal and symbolic translations that show how private and public spaces blend into each other to transform both. First, cocina can be a conjunctive verb denoting cooking as an activity, a set of tasks performed for food preparation. The cooking process transforms nature into culture (Levi-Strauss, 1969), and raw foods into meals (Douglass 1979). Also the performative act of cooking is predicated on the knowledge and skills of people competent to effect such material and social transformation. Second, cocina as kitchen defines a focal point of making meaning household life. As hearth and heart of the home, the kitchen is a critical space where people congregate not just to prepare and consume food, but to share in each other, thus enacting the connective tissue of kinship. This domestic emotional economy can also function within the public market place as the physical site of the family kitchen develops into a place and space for social, economic and cultural activity both in and out of the home (Abarca 2006; Williams-Forson 2006; Bueno 1988). Third, cocina as cuisine or cookery is a system of interrelated edibles and their preparation methods and techniques. A culinary system denotes the rules for making a culturally appropriate set of substances to be ingested and incorporated into human bodies. Cocina as cuisine can also contribute sustenance for emotional growth, linking feeder and eater through ties of affect. Already public as a shared food system, this aspect of cocina is a basis for communication (Perez and Abarce,2007).

Constructions of meaning dance at the intersection of spatial experience and temporal context. We understand what we are doing in the now because of the biography of experiences we have logged in the past, and we perform ritualized acts of consumption as ways to extend that meaning into the future, continuing our conversation with our historical and social self as we enter into territory unknown.

Without engagement or some embedded memory, food easily assumes the role of a ‘thing’- something quite separate from the living system that produced it and resides within it. The separation of the consumer (and often the producer) from the thing consumed, then, not only permits the compartmentalization mentioned above, but with little other than an assortment of discrete and prescriptively assigned attributes to bind the system together, encourages the consumer- and, however ironic, the “informed” consumer especially- to slip into a pattern of narrow self-interest (DeLind, 2005).

The journey of meaning making we find on our plates echoes Brillat-Savarin’s edict: “tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are” (1912). I would add that you need to tell me where that food came from- the space of the thing, how you prepare it and with whom and when you eat it- the temporal context of the thing. And so we start off looking at where our food comes from and why place is an important part of whom we are.

Comfort

2009-09-22T20:11:00.003-04:00

I wanted to blog about grocery stores... but I got side tracked by some personal things, and a mini-breakdown last night that even wine and my best friend could not assuage. There is a cumulative factor to change and stress, and last night I met my permeation point. New town, new climate, new foods, new people, new patterns, old relationships that are in various stages of evolution and decline... there's not a whole lot here that my humble reader wouldn't recognize in their own life.

This is change, and it is scary. When you throw the people you love into the mix, people in pain, people far away... it just makes for the perfect storm of emotions. As much as I like to be the Mistress of Change, even I reach a point where the doctor cannot heal herself.

So... what to be done? I went to the farmer's market. Now I'm basking in the loving glory of my kitchen. Bread in a second rise on the stove top. Beets, potatoes and eggplant are ready to go in the oven as well, and a nice quart of Creole Cream Cheese is draining on the counter. In short- I am cooking and eating my way to peace.

I'm not doing this necessarily for the eating, although there will be that... much of this food will be shared with new friends in order to make them old friends. I am cooking because it is a set of behaviors, movements, processes that I know so deeply in me that they bring me comfort. It's a new kitchen, some new products... but these are pots, and spoons, and knives that I know like I know the contour of my own body. And these things I'm doing- the knife cuts, the fermentation process, the baking... these are simple skills really, but hard won in their transformation into my psyche and my physical self. I look at the scars on my hands from the burns and the cuts and remember the lessons I learned there, and when I cook I re-enact the process that has been handed down to me by a long line of cooks, and that ties me to my heritage- even though that heritage is spread over generations, cultures, families and corporations. When I am in the kitchen I can join the human race again, regardless of place or time. I am in this body for now, and these gifts are mine to use, and to share, and to pass on. For that I am thankful.

Cheeses!

2009-09-20T17:37:00.003-04:00

I just returned from a two hour cheese making class through the Latino Farmer's Cooperative... and I am so pleased! The class was led by Kathia Duran and Barbara Lovas and we made four cheeses/kefir: creme fraiche, yogurt, creole cream cheese and kefir. I've been teaching and cooking professionally for a fair number of years now and I have to tell you... cheese has always been a bit too much like a chemistry experiment for me to get too involved, but these ladies changed all of that!

Of course I realize that the food industry really wants us to not understand how food is produced and has created a lot of bunk science to support those claims. What I am continually amazed at is how simple it is to make good food. Cheese is a fermentation process with culture... period. Needless to say, I will be making these products from... well until hell freezes over and I can't get the culture to activate!

And kefir?! Here's an amazing product that just might settle my little ol' upset stomach. Anyway... I'll be attending more of these workshops- it was the best $10 I have spent in a long time!

New Orleans Food and Farm Network @ Edible Schoolyard NOLA

2009-09-19T19:53:00.011-04:00

I had the good fortune of spending the afternoon at NOFFN's first installment of Grow Mo' Betta gardening series, this time at the Edible Schoolyard NOLA, which is located at the Green Charter School on Valence and Liberty. I love ESY NOLA and I really appreciate the power of NOFFN doing their garden education there.

It's the end of September and still in the low 90's during the day... which is hard on this Midwesterner's constitution, but it was worth the heat to see this kind of community based education happening. One of the most powerful things in this city is the intentionality behind the rebuilding of the food system. It was more than a little ironic that as we talked about compost and lead levels in soil there was a huge neighborhood party going on across the street.

Food is in the soul as well as the soil here.

Global & Local in New Orleans

2009-09-15T18:25:00.004-04:00

I had an interesting conversation with some folks today while visiting the Sophie Lab at Tulane's Newcomb Center for Research on Women. Our conversation touched on many things, but one that we came around to was the issue of the globalization of the food system. This is something that is of critical importance on so many levels that I'd like to chat about it a bit here. Of course, these are my opinions... not necessarily theirs, so yell at me if you don't like 'em.

We are global citizens, whether you like it or not. When economic and industrial processes were applied to agricultural practices starting in the middle of the Twentieth century we moved from a local to national, and ultimately- global food system. Many things have come with this, including the agri-industrial complex, mono-cropping and food deserts (and no, I am not missing an 's'). These are negatives, what economists call externalities, but they are part of what we now own, and own it we do.

If we were to shut our borders today the United States could not feed itself. We are food insecure in that respect. Now, we could re-engineer out system to account for the nutritional needs of our citizenry, but that diet and life-style would look very different than it does today. And then there is the sticky issue of the rest of the world... many of those folks would starve.

I believe strongly in a food system that will feed the world in a safe and healthy way. I also appreciate the power of a relocalized food system, but only if it will meet the first criteria. As we begin to think about how to create a truly sustainable food system we need to ask this question: for whom? If it is to be for the entire planet then we need to expand our present argument about food technology and move away from the binary of local versus global.

Okay, enough for now... check back for further rants later.

Regulation Be Damned!

2009-06-18T18:38:00.004-04:00

A while back I posted a little ditty about the peanut poison scandal (Food and Fear) and my concerns about over-regulation of small food producers. Well, you know how I hate to say "I told you so", but...

The new food safety bill HR2749 would effectively shut down small farming operations by imposing stringent regulatory measures on small family farms. This bill does not go after large agri-business, and it doesn't make our feed any safer. Please take a moment to visit the Farm-To-Consumer Legal Action Fund and sign the petition not to pass this bill.

The easiest way to be sure you are eating safe food is to get to know your farmer. I had the great opportunity to meet one such farm family on my trip to Kansas this past week... the Mitchell Family Farm is a fully operating organic CSA and farm in Cherryvale, Kansas. Farm like this would be seriously handicapped by HR2749.

I love regulation... regulation of Wall Street, regulation of health care, regulation of businesses that can't take care of themselves- not regulation of small family farms.

Best You Can

2009-06-06T20:23:00.004-04:00

It seems like I do blog entries when I'm camping... between spaces. This one is no exception. I'm outside of Des Moines, Iowa listening to Sidney Bechet and reflecting a bit on where things are at.

This is also my first trip away from my family's home after the death of my father on the 26th of May. I was incredibly close to my father, a confirmed daddy's girl... so this was a tough thing for me. I was blessed with the gift of being with my dad when he passed. It was strangely powerful to feel the life pass out of him... but not the spirit, I think. I can still feel his spirit strongly in me and with me. It is a calmness, and a willingness to rest in accepting situations, even when they are not pleasant. Strange thing that... in a way my father's death has melted something in me that has been frozen for a very long time. Let's call it a softness and a gentle resignation. I don't mean resignation in a bad way, but a willingness to accept things as they are: my graying hair, the wrinkles (only where the smiles have been), the remaining power in my body and mind and spirit, and the growing wisdom that comes with age.

Shortly before my father died he said to my sister: "Best you can." That resonates with me. Resigning oneself doesn't mean you don't fight for what you believe in... on the contrary, it means you pick those battles carefully, fight like fury, and then accept the outcome, even if it isn't what you think you want. Ultimately, what you get is what you are supposed to have, and fighting that won't change it. Engage things honestly, with love, and with anger when need be, and then rest in the knowledge that you did the best you could. We cannot know how the ripples of our actions will blossom in the future or in whom. As long as you move from a place of honesty within yourself you have done everything you can, and that is enough.

I think also that my father's passing has not taught me, but shown me the real power of love. Without waning into some kind of miasma of pansied cliches I will suffice to say that as carefully as you pick your battles, pick where your energy resides in the people around you. There is a Buddhist saying: "Love fifty people, have fifty worries." That doesn't mean you shouldn't love anyone, it means you can't love everyone. Love is powerful stuff... don't mess with it, don't ignore it, and care for it with as much time and energy as you spend on the battles and on yourself.

Who knows where all of my father's blossoms will appear. I know there are many seeds planted within me, and I look forward to seeing how they grow, watching the patterns they form, seeing the colors they are. God knows I've given them enough compost!

Schon Vorbei.. Bye

2009-04-29T18:25:00.002-04:00

I am writing this from a the wooden swinging bench on my campground's cabin porch in Canandagua, New York. Grant Green is playing, and I'm drinking a ROck Art Ridge Runner, waiting for the sun to go down to start a fire, open a bottle of sparkling wine, have some cheese and Vermont Smoke and Cure summer sausage, and toast the end of the last three years.

Three years ago I committed to working at New England Culinary Institute for three years... I did that. Now, it's time to complete the other commitment I made and become Dr. Menck.

Yes, things have not exactly moved the way I thought they would, but I have gotten everything I have wanted even if it's been in ways that seem imperfect at first. One thing I can say about getting older... at some point the realization sets in to your soul that life has a lot of shit in it, and (as Jimmy Buffett says) you have two choices: have fun or freak out. I think I perfer the former. I'm rolling with it.

And now that I only own the contents of an 8x16 storage pod, and my gypsy caravan... that seems a lot easier to do. I cannot express the joy I felt when I saw the 1-800-GOT-Junk guys (both very cute) take away the last bag of garbage. It was maybe only equaled by getting the deposit on my apartment back from my land-lady. What I do know is that I am pleased.

As they loadesd the last bits of garbage yesterday a nice steady rain began to fall... washing away all the debris of the last three years, and the three before that. This morning as I loaded the final things into the car a gentle sun shone down and I headed out... into who know what.

The GPS was set on "fastest" route... which took me through the winding roads of the Aidorondack State Park, and was NOT the fastest route. It was however very beautiful. Only when I put it on "most direct" route did I head back to the freeway... a nice end to a rather long day, and an even longer three months.

Now I'm here... chilling out, watching the only three other people in the park (three boys) try to start their grill. Maybe I'll go over and help them out... nah, they're drinking crappy beer.

Oh, where are the photos? Tomorrow folks, I promise. The only USB cord I have is busy with the GPS right now.

Where did I put that corkscrew? Oh, it's bubbly, that's right.

Sanctioned

2009-03-28T21:10:00.005-04:00

I wonder about how we know ourselves... name ourselves. I ask that question right now because I am in a bit of a middle ground, between here and there.

The space between, so to speak.

I live in a very beautiful place. That picture down there is what I see at the end of my driveway every morning. That's where I walk my dog. It's where I go when shit is nasty and I need to let go of things into an infinite river that changes every second in ways I can never begin to understand.

It humbles me.

I need to be humbled.

A mentor of mine, Paul Stoller, has written about the need for US citizens to be humble in the face of global realities we've so long faced down. I think he is right. At least for me he is right.

I am not inalienably right. There is no reason that I should succeed. Yes, I an bright. And yes, I am white. I've had every option opened to me. And maybe, just maybe... I am ordinary, not special. Maybe I need a little bit of a reality check.

I don't know what that means. But, you know... I'll figure that out in due time.

That is the beauty of this post... this little place.

It doesn't matter.

And really... neither do I. And that is okay.

Slipping the Skin

2009-03-07T19:01:00.004-05:00

As I pack things up here in Vermont, I slip ever more frequently to New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton makes me want to take a bottle of wine and sit in that very sweet, black dress of mine on Bourbon Street listening to the moist heat of drunken sex, boudin sausages and wonder why the rest of the country can't find a better way to incorporate all of that living into life.

I miss the visceral part of living. The feeling of sensuality that comes from kissing things: food, anger, people, self. New Orleans is all of that, every hour of the day. I miss that.

For ten years now I have carried all of this shit with me... furniture, clothes, papers, expectations that I never wanted to fulfill. I am so pleased to be packing those into a crate in Vermont, where they will stay frozen for the next ??? years. I am pleased to be returning to a life packed into a suitcase, although the size of that increases with age.

I want just what I can carry. I want to return to meeting people, and listening for the hell of it. I'm happy this crisis has hit. I'm happy to let go. I'm happy to go back to that black silk dress.

Food & Fear

2009-03-02T11:09:00.005-05:00

Yes, it's Monday and I've been listening to On the Media again. This time I am up in arms about the interview with Michael Pollan called: The Apple, Jacked. This is an interesting piece to me because Pollan is touching on several things that have been on my mind and in the media lately.

One of those things is the issue of transparency in the food system. The peanut butter scare is only our most recent example of this, and the Alar case is what Pollan discusses in this piece. Ultimately, we do not have a transparent food system, we don't know where those poisoned peanuts ended up just as we have no way of tracing Alar on apples. This is an anti-regulatory stance on agricultural products, and it has traditionally served large agri-business. It is in the best interests of large companies to keep regulation out of their production cycle because it is expensive and requires lengthening the processing chain. Self-regulation has allowed large schale agri-business to make huge profits through development of products that might have health risks, but we don't know (i.e. transgenics, growth hormones, etc.). We can't trace those things because they are not legally required to be noted in the production process. So, it seems obvious we should have regulation, right?

Not so fast... I would argue there is a potential backlash with regulation. We have seen this with organic labeling. The procedures to be legally regulated are so time and cost consuming that it forces smaller players (artisan growers for example) out of the food system. The only folks who can afford the regulation are big players. That's not what we want in a localized food system. So, there are some issues here that aren't so cut and dry.

Another thing I find interesting about the Pollan piece is its similarity to an article that was in the New Your Times last week: What's Eating Our Kids? The similarity here surrounds growing nerousis about food based on an instilled fear of the unknown. In the case of the Times article parents' maniacle desire to constrict kids eating comes from the fear of "bad foods." This is what Claude Levi-Strauss called "bad to think" foods, things that make us recoil because of our cultural values. Essentially what food paranoia does is create a lot of "bad to think" foods for kids as they socialize into their adult lives. This isn't desirable, and it's a bit xenophobic.

When we start to make value judgements about food the "good" versus "bad" categories create food alliances. I was struck by something Peter McPherson, President of the national Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, said at the Clinton Global Initiative University regarding values and assumptions. He was responding to a panel member's disparagement of microwaves.... but his comment was directed at the use of transgenic technology in less developed nations. The point of his comment was that we too often look at our own immediate food system capabilities and create a value structure. The "Slow Foods" approach to agriculture, where everything is relocalized is a nice thought, but how do we do that in parts of the world that are "food deserts," places that are arid and cannot sustain life? In those places the use of transgenically modified foods allows for sustained living of indigenous people... who are we to say no them because in our world-view transgenics are "bad to think"?

I think the point is to be aware that food manias can create fear in the social system, which evolves into a protectionist, regionalist value system. That is not the basis for a cuisine, it is the basis for prejudice between different parts of a diverse social system, and it has the potential to destroy the very diversity we need to live in a robust, civil society.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss

2009-02-22T14:26:00.008-05:00

The fact that I am an NPR junky is of no surprise to anyone, I suppose. I had an NPR moment today while listening to On the Media. The final segment of the show War of the Worlds really touched a nerve for me. You can listen to the piece yourself, so I won't go into great length in recapping it, but the piece focuses on the fear of recrimination associated with making comments about radical Muslims in European society.

One of the things that so impacted me in this piece was the message "don't silence the dissenters." This takes me back to Albert O. Hirschman, in Exit, Voice and Loyalty (a book that is impossibly difficult to read but amazing to understand). As I journey through my life I see this tendency to silence conflict and I am increasingly aware of its dangers. Organizationally this is the death knell for a business, and it works in direct conflict with the core function of dynamic equilibrium in systems theory.

Conflict has a function. When we are in conflict our natural tendency is to want to resolve it and return to a state of balance: equilibrium. This moves us forward, keeps us from stagnating, loosing sight of our external environment... it keeps us alive. There seems to be an almost unquenchable desire to silence conflict. The result is a dangerous quiet that won't last long. Without the delicate antennae picking up sounds (be they ever so dischordious) the organism looses touch with its environment. The receptors are dead, and the system doesn't even know it needs to respond to being out of balance because it doesn't "hear" that it is out of balance.

Ignorance is not bliss, it is a deadly, slow death.

I'm not suggesting that we embrace toxic personalities. But I am suggesting that we create spaces in which to have difficult conversations, and that we return to -or create- a set of guidelines for how we engage those conversations with respect for the core of the person we disagree with, or even hate.

It strikes me that Hirschman is right... if we silence dissent we leave only two options: voice or exit. In the case of radical views this too often translates into murder and suicide. In the case of our organizations I think the process might be different, but the results are the same.

Agree to love and hate your enemy... put your big-girl pants on and engage in a conversation, no matter how loud it is.

2009-02-21T18:04:00.005-05:00

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it. - Emile Zola

Meat

2009-02-14T22:41:00.001-05:00

Austin, TX; Hilton Downtown

CGIU is over. I left immediately following Clinton’s speech. I couldn’t wait through the group photo for dinner. I took refuge with a dead cow and some raw fish in a dark hotel bar called Finn and Porter.

This has been a bizarre trip full of almost no luster. I realized today that other than one other guy I was probably the oldest student at this conference… something that I think confounded everyone I met. I am too “old” to be a graduate student in the eyes of most. And certainly in this crowd I had a patina on me. In many ways that made this a bit of a training wheel exercise. Lot’s of “yeah duh” moments. But I wonder how much of that was me and my overly refined sense of everything… I have been to more of these than most of the students here have. I could be a mother to many of these students… so, there is a bit less naivety about what to expect. I also don’t see Bill Clinton as anything more than an ex-President. I realize that most of the students here probably had their first politically conscious moments in his reign (if we can call it that), but I was well formed in his tenure. Shit, he was the first president I voted for. I remember seeing him speak in Madison my senior year. He’s “my president”, my Obama. Seeing him now is like remembering a first kiss in high school… sweetly longing for things past, but so thankful those things reside outside of tangible reach.

There is a difference in processing with this generation. They truly conceptualize differently. I don’t know what they saw in those meetings, the large and the small. They are intimately connected with service… and incredibly earnest. I think if this was me at that age I would have listened intently, and committed to action, and wanted to be in the bar as soon as possible. We had a deeply frivolous, indulgent, hedonistic sense to our living. I don’t sense that from these folks. They are beautiful and young and driven by external lusciousness just as we were, but at their core is a deep sense of understanding and an almost anxious drive. They are external when we were internal. They are quiet when we are loud. They are serious when we were simply silly.

I don’t know which is better. I think both have their righteousness and both have their pits of despair. At the end of the day though, I end up with a glass of wine and a platter of fine food. That is enough for me.

Good bye Austin (for now)… back to the tundra and some reconning to do before I am freed to move on to the next act.

Mexican Food by Mexicans... Novel.

2009-02-13T13:31:00.002-05:00

Austin, TX; Marisco Seafood Grill

I’m having lunch… shrimp soup (soupa de camerones), chips, salsa and a Modelo especial. This Is a little dive on 6th street. So far, not too impressed, although the salsa is hot, and everyone is drinking, which is a good sign.

Austin is a trip. It is an incredibly clean city. People are also very friendly. Everyone on the street has said hello to me… everyone. It’s funny, everywhere you look is a “keep Austin weird” t-shirt or poster, but I have yet to see any wierdness. Even 6th street is very clean and well behaved. I’ve been walking around, even at night, by myself and I feel very comfortable… even when I took a shortcut down by the river walk at night. This is not New Orleans West…

I checked in to the conference at the UT Alumni center, which is where I am headed tonight. I am trying to find the stuff I sent for the exhibit tomorrow so I can finish my arts and crafts project, but so far… no luck. On a side note, I am checked into the hotel… room 1313 on Friday the 13th… hmmmm.

I walked to the capital building this morning. After retching on the photo of George W., I spent some time at the Confederacy monument in the courtyard. I guess we need those statues too, but it seems odd to me that Lincoln is on top of the statue.

Okay, that did not suck. The soup was a seafood bisque type of thing made with shrimp stock, tomatoes and I’m guessing some peppers. Poached carrots, corn, peas and of c9ourse shrimp in the bottom, served with rice and a toasted bun. That is what I needed! Thank you Mexican food made by Mexicans.

That is one thing that is very obvious here… there are a lot of Mexican folks, but also lots of Asians, Africans, and French folk. This is a very diverse city. Yes, there are also a lot of old, fat white guys, but they don’t seem to be in that great of a majority. Maybe it is because this is the capital city… probably.

I think back to trips to Galveston when I was on the boat. It was also a little “odd” as far as temperment, but in a different way. That was very much a seaside community, with a very slow pace. This is much more cosmopolitan. Ah, also… about shrimp in Texas. Let’s not forget that Texas is as much a Gulf state as it is a cattle state. The shrimp here are big and sweet and local, depending on what you call local.

Okay, off to find my stuff!

Everything is bigger in Texas

2009-02-12T23:55:00.003-05:00

Okay... I'm in Austin, TX for the Clinton Global Initiative University, which begins tomorrow. It's late, I'm tired, and this won't be long, but...

Austin is a trip. It's 70 degrees here which is like a sensual little romp for a Vermonter in February. I got out of the airport and heard some kind of tropical bird singing and almost fell over. It's like glass sliding in water walking around down here.

I got to the hotel (Hilton Garden Inn) on 4th, and it's quite nice. I'm in a room over-looking the downtown... it's very pretty. I took a little detour down to 6th street, which is a bit like a very clean Bourbon Street, without open beverages and vomit on the streets. I walked and found nothing but a lot of street vendors selling pizze and wurst. I opted for the pizza, which was pretty tasty. I wanted the peperoni and jalapeno, but had to make due with the cheese.

So, I'm hanging out in the room for a bit and then it's off to sleep.

On a final note... this little HP Netbook is rocking the free world so far. It connects to the internet, downloads Word docs, and streams video nicely. And it's tiny. Restricting total access to all of my computer things actually made me read on the flight. I'm working on A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman. It's a nice book, if a bit dated... there are five tastes, not four. She either left unami out, or it hadn't been acknowledged when she wrote the book... I'm guessing the latter, but I'm too tired to Google it and find out. Maybe tomorrow.

Canadian Beer

2008-07-19T17:52:00.004-04:00

I can't believe I am saying this... but French-Canadians are the winners at the Vermont Brewfest this year. I had two amazing beers from Dieu du Ciel, Brasserie Artisinale, in Montreal that were unbelievable... a hibiscus beer and a chocolate coffee stout. Before you jump on me, I am not into flavored American beers... these were different. The flavor came from being brewed into the beers, not adding flavorings and sugar after the fact. I loved these beers. I would crawl on my knees to Montreal (with passport in mouth) to have these beers again; which it appears I may have to do, since they aren't trackable in the US at this time. Poo... f- that.

I also had a really enjoyable raspberry wheat from another Canadian company, Hopfenstark. At least they have a mildly German name. Again, not a flavor added beer, but one that brewed with the raspberry in it. Puts Harpoons raspberry UFO to shame I'm sad to say.

Alright, you win Canada... this time. Please, just stay away from me on I89.

Salt

2008-06-08T19:12:00.002-04:00

I am back in VT after two weeks in WI and two days of driving. I'm wicked tired. I'm also profoundly appreciative of salt.

Not the sodium that is breaking my father's heart, but the simple goodness of kosher salt in unadultrated food.

I ate breakfast (Breakfast Burrito Meal) and lunch (hamburger and small fries) at McDonald's today. I don't want to think about how many calories that was... but I also couldn't even guess how much sodium I consumed in those two meal periods. Ultimately, it was satisfying going down, and I'm still hungry six hours later... which leads me back to my ultimate truth = it is all shit in the end.

So tonight I settled down to my white rice with peas and corn... the ultimate comfort food for a belly that is abused by the road, and sad... so sad.

About to Travel...

2008-05-23T20:40:00.009-04:00

Here I am thinking, "Should I bother with taking food to go, or should I just leave it up to 'The Road' to dictate my diet for the next three days?"

This is a standard trip on I-90 for the most part, to Scony (Wisconsin) from the Monster (Vermont). I want to make good time. My Pops just had heart surgery and I desperately want to see him. But it's a three day trip this time instead of the normal two; including animals (1 cat, 1 dog)... chalk that up to age, weather, or a desperate need to reflect... have with it what you will. I want to get away, and I want to get through. No one is reading this blog... this post... this is free form... this trip is that, must be that.

What I know is that I just made:
Tuna salad
Cooked off a duck leg
Jambalaya

Ummm... I'm thinking that means I've given up on 'Road Food.'

That makes me infinitely sad... and I think I am partly to blame for that. Which makes me sadder (is that a word?), so much sadder. What am I doing to the next generation of food-service managers?

Who and what can make money in this business any more?

Do we need to care?

And if we do... how do we fund shit that looks bad on paper?

Steve, you are right... the "mark of NECI" is too strong.

Forward I go, with no allegiance.

Drive baby, drive.

Lame?

2008-05-07T21:13:00.002-04:00

Okay, it's been four months since I last visited my blog. What of it? So, maybe I got a life... or maybe not.

So much, so much.

It's funny when you sit with the really shitty parts of life and find some great joy there.

You are right lunch bag, bumper sticker, overpriced t-shirt... Life is Good.

Boring

2008-01-11T18:03:00.000-05:00

That's me. It's Friday night. I'm sitting at home, working, occasionally playing on Facebook, trying to add restaurants to my little widdgy there. I know this all sounds pathetic, but what is really bothering me is that I can't think of any restaurants I've been to lately... I mean other than the ones I always go to. That's rather sad for someone who makes their living peddling food and general food-business knowledge.

Note to self: get a life.

Let it Snow!

2007-12-28T12:24:00.000-05:00

Alrighty! Back in the Midwest, even if I am one city short of my final destination. There's is wine here, a booked seat (on a flight that will probably cancel)... did I mention the wine? Never mind that there is 5" of snow on the way... there's wine here.

I must say that airport food is better than once it was, but why must everything be a chain? I'm at a Macaroni Grill right now, which is the least of many evils at O'Hare. The Penne Rustico is about two pounds of pasta with meat and cheese; wash that down with a glass of Chianti and it's all good.

I have no idea what time it is, or when my next flight leaves, although I think it's soon. God, wouldn't that be ironic... if I missed the last flight?

I am unclear on why I am eating on lovely Italian plates with rather nice (although really tall) glass stemware and plastic knives and forks. Doesn't matter... the food is hot the wine is... well, wine and I am finally out of Vermont and that God-foresaken BTV! I have a feeling I am also three hours away from another huge meal, and I'm okay with that.

Let the vacation begin!

Back for More...

2007-12-28T06:54:00.000-05:00

Someday I will get the hell out of the Burlington airport, but for right now I don't know when. However, I am back... this time on United to Chicago. It's been a hassle free morning so far. Even the "special" security treatment I got was relatively painless (although I don't understand why I got the "pat down" and not the little electronic wand, maybe she liked me).

Lessons learned...

1. Take a water containment device with you to the airport (water is outrageously expensive). I recommend the Platypus flat bottles, one quart size.

2. Airborne is your friend.

3. Download one extra movie to your laptop, because you just never know. I recommend anything with Johnny Depp in it.

4. Wear comfortable clothes that can double as pillows.

5. Always bring a non-electronic book (can't turn the Pod on when you're stuck in the airplane on the tarmack for 2 hours).

6. Travel light.

7. Be really nice to gate agents... they own this place.

8. Bring sandwiches (Hebrew National all beef bologna and American cheese is a good choice; this can't be destroyed and can stay out for hours with no noticeable deterioration in quality- whatever there is of it in the first place).

9. Sit towards the front of the plane if you can. Then, when you've got to rebook with the terminal agent you are the first off the plane and first in line.

10. Moisturize.

11. Wash hands often and use sanitizer.

11. Eschew caffeine.

12. Sit near a power outlet in the terminal.

13. Prepare for the worst, have no expectations and be happy with what you get... that's all there is.

Perhaps my biggest suggestion would be... don't travel at the holidays. However, if you come from a Midwestern family and live on either of the coasts this will not work for you, so download another movie, just in case.

Come on Chicago! At least they have bars in those terminals.

Trapped in the Most Boring Airport in the World

2007-12-27T12:50:00.000-05:00

I have spent a lot of time in airports in my life... most of it, I will admit, in the bar waiting for my plane. This trip breaks a record though. This is the worst, longest, most sober trip I have ever taken... what's worse is that I am twenty minutes from my house, in Vermont.

I am at Gate 11 at BTV, Burlington International Airport, in Burlington, Vermont. I've been here since 5 a.m. this morning. Actually, I started at the airpot yesterday at 2 p.m. when I was informed by a very cute check in agent that Detroit was "frozen in," and could I come back tomorrow morning and fly first class? Sure, no sweat, although I made a point of booking a late flight this time around. I hate getting up at 3a.m. to go to the airport so I booked a later flight. Oops!

So, at 2 a.m. this morning I rolled out of bed, took a shower and returned to the remote parking. A short shuttle ride later I was greeted by my still cute, but now with dark circles under his eyes, check in agent, Justin. "Still here?" I asked. He nodded and shuffled me off to my gate, where I sat until he showed up an hour later to let us on the plane.

After sitting in the smallest seat I have ever encountered on a plane for an hour at the gate they let us know that Detroit wasn't ready for us, could we just get out and walk? After deplaning and milling about for an hour we were told that Detroit had reopened for business. Weee!!!

Sad news when my cute little friend then told us that our plane had a flat tire. Sadder yet when he let us know that the spare tire was in Detroit on a plane that was not being let out for four hours.

At about 10 a.m. they finally got me rebooked and full of amenity checks and free food at the restaurant. Now, it is 1 p.m., the tire just left from Detroit, I am never going to make my first attempted rebooked flight, hopefully I'll get there for the second one... or is it the third? At this point I have so many boarding passes I can make a little pillow out of them, which is good because I am tired.

Did I mention I am twenty minutes from my house, my bed, my cat, my books, my piles of work?

Well, I wish I could say I've been productive. I have the most streamlined travel suite of my career all packed into one little bag. Computer with all my work on it, movies, music, books.... I've watched one episode of Anthony Bourdaine, listened to half of Eat, Pray, Love and contemplated the beauty of various male members of my stranded fellow passengers. There is one guy.... mmmmm... and my check-in agent, Justin, is still hanging out, cute in a sort of dorky way.

Let me also share one other little tidbit about BTV, this deserted sland of air travel... there is no bar in the terminal. The only airport in America with no bar in the terminal and that is where I get stranded. This is beyond buzz kill... there's no buzz to get here!

Avoid BTV if you can, unless you have a lot of work to do and a little more motivation than I.

Christmas Unadorned

2007-12-24T13:51:00.001-05:00

Well, Nari pretty much says it all for us this year. We've been naughty and it's been so nice!

I'm settled down for the day, working on my Change Essay for school. I have to say, I love to write it. I'll echo posts past for the year, it is luxury to sit and think about things, just think. Even more joy to express them in words and share them with others.

As I reflect on this year, and life in general for me now, I can't believe the absolute happiness of it all. I truly feel that I am on the right path, right livelihood, and all the rest. I love my work, my friends, my life. How can you be more blessed than that?

The tree is up with no ornaments (hence the unadorned)... never got around to that this year.

And of course today there is the Molten Weenie-Pot on my altar/stove. This is a favorite of Christmas past, present and (if I have anything to say about it) future.

Lil' Smokies from Hillshire farm (extra HFCS please!) and BBQ sauce of choice (this year some finely fermented Head County Sauce, extra HFCS standard in this model). The trick here is to braise the weenies until they are not just warm and encased with sauce, but bind with the sauce to create a nice velvety sheen. There should be a nice little line of caramelized sauce on the bottom of each weenie.

I know it's wrong, but I love it so and it's the holidays, give me a break!

Winter Wonderland

2007-12-18T15:50:00.000-05:00

Okay, I've not been the most conscientious blogger in the past few months... but here I am again. We've got snow in Vermont! The pup-cat have been out a lot; although this morning Nari, the watch cat, couldn't access her outside potty spot and decided using the Christmas tree skirt was just as good a spot. Bad cat!

I took Neelah out for a snow-shoe excursion this weekend and she had to pull me up the hill on the way back. She loves to jump into snow banks and swim her way out.

Here are a couple pics to whet your palate!

Giving Thanks for the Harvest

2007-11-22T16:30:00.000-05:00

This is the holiday to give my thanks to those who have helped me to harvest everything I have in the last year. This is a time to be thankful for what we’ve brought home, remember?

I am thankful always to my family, they support me and let me know when I’ve drifted too far.

I am thankful for my friends, who just put up with my bullshit. I will call... really, I will.

I am thankful for my school and the scholars who reside there, they fuel me to push farther and stay put when I miss the mark.

I am thankful to those who are learning with me, they share the process and all the pain and joy that includes.

I am thankful for my workplace, whose funding allows me to continue my studies and life.

I am thankful to my students, they have taught me to give without expectation of anything in return.

And finally, I am thankful for all those people and institutions who’ve drove me nuts in the last year, you have taught me to shut up and hope for redemption or at least patience.

And now, for something completely different…

Dog Gone It

2007-09-16T19:07:00.000-04:00

Today was awesome!

Neelah and I went to Shelburne Museum's Gone to the Dogs Day.

One-thousand puppies!!! It was a blast!

The whole gig is sponsored by Pet Food Warehouse, a locally owned pet food store (read a GOOD THING!). Neel buys all of her products there, as does Nari... poor under-represented cat that she is.

Neel started the day by backing out of her collar. She did return when mum called for her and she realized she had no f---ing idea where she was.

We ambled in and had a good stroll around.

There was a dog bobbing pool--- aka a kiddy pool with hot dogs at the bottom for the pups. We stopped at the "paw reading" booth, which was right next to the dog bone pinata.

Neel and I spent some time listening to the jazz band. We also spent some serious time with our friends from Gulliver's Doggy Day Care. Love the bus Gully! (Neel gets dropped off and picked up by mum).

It's so much fun to have the pup out in a place that welcomes them.

More stuff for dogs please!

Chowda!

2007-09-15T16:35:00.000-04:00

It's fall here and that is time for clam chowder! My take on this traditional New England soup/stew is a bit different this year. I am going for a healthier version, so here's what I did.

1/4 c Olive Oil
1/4c Whole Wheat Flour (King Arthur Flour Company)

This makes the roux. The traditional version would be bacon fat and flour. This makes the soup thick... no need for cream here.

1 sml Yellow Onion, diced
1 Fingerling Potatoes, diced (from my garden- Russian Purple and Swedish Peanut)
1/4c Corn

Onions and corn go into the oil until they are "wilted", make the roux with the flour, add the potatoes.

1 pint Clam jus (from steaming the clams)

Add that and let it stew for a bit.

2# Maine clams, steamed, reserve the juice
1/4c Calamari rings
1c Kale, shredded
1/4c Shitake mushrooms, sliced (local)

Add those at the end. Take it off the heat and let it go a bit.

A nice slice or two of Matie's sourdough is good for dunking. Don't pair it with red wine... go for a nice sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio.

For a laugh, while munching go here!

That does not suck!

Garlic Love

2007-09-02T18:30:00.000-04:00

Garlic bugs me.

It's hard to peel and then you have to dice it up. When I was a student at NECI I remember the nightmare of the gallon jug of peeled, but not diced garlic that I would have to bruinois e. Ugggh!!! The result of this torture was years of buying pre-diced garlic. I know this is bad. The chemical interaction when crushing garlic in a food processor leads to acrid toxicity, but I HATE DICING GARLIC!!! It gets sticky and then the skin sticks to the lush little fruit inside. It really pisses me off.

So, in my most unsustainable act of the year, I drove almost 300 miles (round trip) for garlic ice cream today.

While I was eating breakfast (scrambled eggs with shitake mushrooms and scallions, toast, vegetable juice and applegate farms sausage) I read about the Garlic Festival in Bennington, Vermont. I had intended to make a weekend of this festival but forgot, until this morning. So I packed up Neelah and we headed south. Three hours later we arrived at Garlic Fest. I had a wonderful vegetarian platter of Indian food from Spice Root in Williamstown, MA. The plate had chana masala (chick peas cooked in tomato sauce with ginger and coriander), coconut rice, and some kind of cabbage dish... there was also GARLIC nan. I loved the food. It was well seasoned and very nicely done.

Then I had the ice cream. I was thinking on the way down, "I hope it isn't just vanilla with garlic in it for the hell of it." But, it was vanilla with garlic in it. I was surprised though, I liked it. The coldness of the ice cream beat down the acridness of the garlic. It was just a slight hint of garlic. I think it would've been nice with a little ginger in it. I can't remember the name of the place that was selling it. Poop on me.

I washed all of this down with a fresh squeezed lemon-limeade and a trip to the Fox Hollow Farm booth where I bought one of nineteen varieties of garlic they offer: romanian red.

It was a fun trip, but six hours in the car with the puppy (who couldn't go to Garlic Fest) was a bit too much. Oh well, the ice cream was good.

Crossing Over

2007-09-01T19:41:00.000-04:00

Tennessee Williams, pup, died this week.

Wonka-Boy made more of an impression on me than most people ever will. He was a fairly good sized red dog... maybe some setter in there, who knows what else. He was a gentle, gentle soul who witnessed a lot of nonsense and a lot of bullshit. He also carried me through a particularly difficult part of my life. It is true to say that I loved the dog more than his owner, and I stayed for awhile in that peace. When Neel came about it was both invigorating and a nightmare. Perhaps this was the final indication that the rambunctious power of youth cannot give way to convention. It was the time I left Williams. He let me go and he gave me over to Neel and Naricesh.

I am sad to see this pup go. He holds a place in my life few ever will. Magic, Pogo, Martin... please welcome Williams into your lair. Nari, Neelah and I will be there some day, and we will all chew a good bully whip and sniff some good nip together.

Namaste.

Cow Poop Power!

2007-08-27T19:13:00.000-04:00

I took the sustainability class on a trip to the Green Mountain Dairy farm in Sheldon, Vermont today to see the Cow Power Fair. CVPS, our energy provider is engaged in a program to offer poo powered energy to Vermont residents (I am one of them). It costs slightly more, but is an excellent model for the future of energy production.

Here's how it works....

Several dairy farms in the state (the one we visited had 900 cows) produce milk for sale. CVPS has contracted with these farms to use the cow poo, which is 30% digested when the cow is done with it to generate methane gas and energy. On the farm they grow hay and corn for silage, or cow food. When the cows are done with it the farmers remove the waste into an underground tank. This is excellent in and of itself because it eliminates the need for manure lagoons where the stuff would normally be stored and not used.

Once in the tank the manure is 'matured' for a period of time. It produces methane gas which is turned into usable energy (have to check out the CVPS website for details). What is left over is able to be sold as fertilizer and the dry part can be used for the cow's bedding (I'm not sure how I feel about that). It's really rather brilliant. A nice closed system with good usable bi-products. A way to make mass produced cattle a viable operation and not so deadly for the environment.

The cows on this farm looked pretty happy. They had a good amount of space to lie around and were happily munching away on a mixture of corn and hay. I don't love the corn part of that, but there is some hay in the equation.

Anyway, it was a beautiful day and the students are so at the end of their ropes it was nice to get them out of the classroom.

Check out this video for a more detailed view of Poop Power!

Tomatoes

2007-08-26T19:38:00.000-04:00

Not much to report today. Harvesting from the garden is going well. There are quite a few tomatoes to be dealt with, basil, chard, potatoes, turnips (oh sooooo many turnips). Things that aren't doing so well: brussel sprouts are sad looking this year. Corn and sunflowers got big and never produced any 'flowers'. Bok choi, beets and carrots were crowded out by grass. Tomatillos are going like gang busters! There are peppers and nasties coming out my ears. I need to look at preserving flowers. Hmmm, I remember something about packing in sugar. I'll get back to you on that one.

I had dinner at Ri-Ra in Burlington. This is apparently a chain of Americanized Irish Pubs. It made me seriously miss The Burren in Davis Square in Somerville, MA. Now that is an Irish Pub! I had fish and chips. The fish was good, well fried, not burnt and not over cooked. The fries were blah and the potato leek soup needed to have its flour cooked out. I probably won't go back. Man, the portions were huge! It must have been about 32 ounces of fish. Less shit, better shit. That's my motto for portioning.

Snow White and Red Rose

2007-08-25T16:49:00.000-04:00

Neelah and I headed out this morning. I wanted to check out the "Islands" of Vermont, so we headed out to South Hero on Grand Isle. We stopped at the sand bar and took a little walkies by the wind surfer launch, but we couldn't get into the state part and beach: No Dogs Allowed! It's discrimination I say! Neel was so bummed when I turned the car around.

We headed up to the Snow Farm Vineyard in South Hero. It's a small little winery, the first in the state. I tasted the Snow White and Red Rose wines and bought a bottle of each. Nice wines. Nothing incredible, just solid table wines. Think I'll have a glass right now.

I'm working on my Leadership essay. It's going slowly. I realize I need to sit with the books for the leadership part of it. I'm looking at Greenleaf's Servant Leadership, Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers, Senge's The Fifth Discipline, Burns' Leadership and Peter Vaill's Management as Art. I'm trying to draw a narrative line between these authors and then tie that into systems theory and buddhist theory. Hmmmm.... maybe I'll have two glasses of wine.

It's Like... Scrambled Eggs on Salad

2007-08-22T20:38:00.000-04:00

Well, there is sometimes discord in life.

I am working on my Nature of Leadership Essay for Antioch, and it's a bear right now. I'm getting to the point with my writing that I feel like I need to change my pattern.

Up until now I've been a purger. I sit on an idea, then puke it out on the page, let it sit for awhile, read it, hate it, puke it out again, repeat until done. That's my process and that's great, but I can't take a year to write every learning product or I won't be Dr. Menck until the latter half of the century.

So, time for change.

I've taken to writing every day. I come home, mess around for a bit (frisbee with Neelah is high on the list of mesing around) and then sit down to write. I think it's the only thing that's keeping me on this side of sanity right now. Thinking is such a luxury. I sit here, stare out the window and think about General Systems Theory. Then I realize I know nothing really tangible about general systems theory, which makes me mad. I do some reading and then a general form for my thoughts comes into my mind and I write. I love it. I really do. Of course the product I'm putting out is crap. Here's a sample from tonight's offering:

"The application of systems thinking has crossed schools of inquiry, both social and scientific. The idea of systems found its origin in the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, an Austrian biologist, in the 1950’s. Von Bertalanffy proposed that all things could be looked at as a series of hierarchical structures that build into systems. WRITE MORE ABOUT VON B. General systems theory as it came to be known, crossed from the natural to social sciences via Kenneth Boulding, an economist writing and working at the same time in the United States. Boulding saw the value of applying the principle of biological systems to the realm of economics. In his article “-------“ he INSERT SHIT ABOUT ARTICLE HERE."

Writer's write. Heather Forest (that's Doctor Heather Forest to you) said that about her process in Yellow Springs this year, and I believe she is right. Write. Just write.

I guess I have to trust in the process. The process has always worked for me before. I think about Heather again here. I've always thought this process has been a gift of sight from some other-worldly entity. I could write powerfully because I was channeling some other thing working through me. I think that is bullshit. There is reason to this rhyme. These are my thoughts, and I need to take my thinking process to obedience class. If this is going to be my career, my brain needs to come when called. It also needs to have a frisbee thrown for it every once and awhile.

Panzanella

2007-08-18T13:39:00.000-04:00

I love this season in Vermont! The food is so fresh it's unbelievable. Today I'm snacking on tomato bread salad, panzanella. Tomatoes and basil are fresh from the garden, I picked up some cucumbers this morning at the farmer's market in Milton (my cukes died early). I'm using what's left of the sourdough from the Inn. Mat Zimmerman makes the best sourdough I've ever had. Bless his "mother", the sourdough starter he uses to leaven the bread. The key to good panzanella, I have discovered, is to soak the bread before you add it to the salad. I like the recipe from the website Mestolando. As always, the recipe is a guideline... not to be taken too seriously.

I picked up some veggies at the farmer's market today: eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, and corn. I also got a loaf of three flour bread that hadn't fully risen for $1.50. The whole trip cost $6.75 and I'm stocked for veggies this week. I also harvested turnips, tomatoes, chard and kale from my garden. I might take a look at the potatoes later, but I'm pretty much set for the week so I'll let them grow a bit longer I think.

Fun in the Sun

2007-08-15T18:23:00.000-04:00

Well yes, it's been field-trip week for me! Today I took all three of my classed to the North Beach in Burlington for the Spanish class party. It's the end of term so the celebration parties are all beginning. We had a nice time and held the economics class there in the afternoon.

I've been sticking to the $21 challenge so far without any problems. It's a much more intentional way of eating, that is for sure. This week's big win for a recipe is a Cuban black bean dish called Christians & Moors. Brown rice, black beans, green peppers, onion, tomato, cider vinegar cuman and chili peppers. It was quite good by itself, but this morning I threw a tortilla into the bottom of a skillet, put in the Moors an egg and some cheddar cheese and baked it... man that was tasty! I'd love to do this with a bunch of chefs and see what they would come up with for recipes. Hmmm, an idea brewing?

The Wonder Fish

2007-08-13T16:53:00.000-04:00

I took the Economics class to the Laughing Duck Farm today. This is a closed system tilapia/microgreen farm in up-state New York. Very interesting place.

We came into Westport, which is a one building town. I was looking for the far expanse of a farm, which I never found. Instead we came up on a house tucked behind a few others with a barn, a raised bed garden and a green house. The man we were supposed to meet, Don, wasn’t there, but two of his apprentices were and they offered to take us up the street to the “farm”.

We walked about a quarter mile up the road past a fast running falls, a common site in this part of the country. Next to the falls was a medium sized greenhouse… much smaller than those Eliot Coleman is using at Four Seasons Farm in Maine. That was it.

Next to the greenhouse was a small smoke house looking building with a set of solar panels on top with a smoke stack sticking out. That was the heating arrangement for the greenhouse in the winter.

We entered the greenhouse. It was a pretty standard set up, long tables of green stretched down the length of the house on both sides. What was unusual was what was below those tables. There were eight tilapia tanks just below the tables. Each tank had about 250 fish.

The idea here is pretty simple, and a good example of a closed agricultural system. The fish eat vegetal matter (in this case fish food, in a true closed system it would be duckweed), their poop is pumped up into the plants above, which filter out nutrients they need to grow. Once filtered in this way, the water is returned to the fish below with additional nutrients from the plants above. I am leaving out one step here… a filtration through an algae rock system.

Regardless, it was a pretty cool system and it didn’t take up much space. We had a good time and it was a beautiful day for a ferry ride.

What Twenty-One Dollars Buys

2007-08-12T20:43:00.001-04:00

All right… I’m back in Vermont, and I’m glad. It’s been a good week, but as always I leave with way more than I came with. My friend Tayo said it best, “Sometimes I wonder when we will discuss whether or not there is air.” That sums it up perfectly for me.

So, here we are… mission set and I am thinking about poverty. On that front I’m starting the $21 Challenge this week. I’ve set a few rules for this. Namely, the following:

I’m not including my pets’ food in this. They don’t need to do this.
I will not include travel days or expenses.
I eat at work one or two days a week. I think this is an interesting point. For those in a state of poverty, looking for a job in food service is a pretty good idea.
I am looking at this allotment as $84 month, not $21 a week. This will allow me to buy in bulk.
I am trying to eat organic whenever possible.
I am trying to buy local whenever possible.

Okay, so last night I sat and thought about what I would need to make this restriction work. I came up with the following list:

Brown Rice
Wheat Flour
Eggs
Tofu
Cheese
Beans
Potatoes
Dried Corn
Bread
Barley
Pasta
Milk
Vegetables, Fresh & Frozen

I believe that I can do this on those basic ingredients. What is missing? An assumed pantry of the following:

Salt
Pepper
Canola Oil
Olive Oil
Hot Sauce
Steak Sauce

I’ll let you know if more of those “essentials” pop up.

So, I followed that up with a trip to Hannaford’s in Milton today. This is a mainstream, small grocery store in a poor community. Here’s what I found:

Brown Rice: 2# bag = $1.29
Wheat Flour: (local) 5# bag = $2.99
Eggs: (organic, cage free) = $2.59
Tofu: 12 oz = $1.79
Cheese (local) 2# log = $8.49
Beans: 1# dried = .79c
Potatoes: 5# russets = $2.99
Dried Corn: 2# = $1.50
Bread: (local) $2.87
Barley: .79c
Whole Wheat Pasta: $1.69
Milk: half gallon = $2.29

So, I bought my allotment of that for $18.78. Yesterday I also bought the following, which cost me $9.25:

1 quart Blueberries
1 quart Tomatoes
1 quart Green peppers
1 quart Walnuts
1 quart Peaches

So, for the month I’m at $28.03. That leaves $56.97 for the rest of the month. The month starts tomorrow, August 13.

Argh. This will be hard I think. I'm taking my students int he Economics: Sustainable Communities class to the Laughing Duck Farm tomorrow. They’ve got tilapia and hydroponics meshed into one agro system. Interestingly enough, the Washington Post had an article on the Farm of the Future online today. It seems this might fit into that concept. We’ll see.

I’m tired physically and emotionally. This post may not be complete, but I’m too tired to put down more. I’ll be back.

Walking With Horace

2007-08-10T15:18:00.000-04:00

Yesterday after my last session (a gem on Spirituality led by Gene Rice), I took my camera out for a walk. I was walking around the campus taking pictures (as promised). I had a strange experience.

The first night I was here I camped on campus. I took a walk that night around the campus. I walked into the sculpture “Emilies’ Garden.” It was strange walking around. I felt a very strong sense of spirit being there. When I visited the circle again on my photo walk I felt it again.

After that I walked around and stopped at the Horace Mann monument. Between there and my car I had the moment… the burning question dropped into my head. Horace was whispering in my ear.

I stopped in the parking lot and wrote the following:

“ How do we construct social/cultural meaning/association/identity through food and the rituals of a meal? How does that impact our understanding of self?”

I drove downtown, parked and went for a walk on the bike trail behind the school. I walked past Glen Helen, made it through the Women’s Park, and went on. As it began to rain I just came up on a little shelter, where I stopped and wrote the following:

“ Food as a system of understanding, like language. Cross class study of food.”

And that was it.

I want to look at how we use food as a language of meaning that expresses personal beliefs and affiliations, specifically class. This links directly to the political question of how the food system in this country is constructed to create class division in access to food, resulting in our crisis of nutrition, or lack there of.

So, that changes the perspective of this blog. The learning process for me is self-reflective and bound by written and visual representation. My sister is right, I have been denying my artistic expression for the last fifteen years. I want to use this blog as a tool of reflection on the academic journey I am about to take. It will be a record of the conversations, personal and professional, and a collection of photographic images that build through the next four years as I prepare for and write my dissertation.

Fluttering in the Winds

2007-08-08T09:48:00.001-04:00

I ate at the Winds tonight. The café is a nice standard bistro setting; wood floors, local art and servers in black pants and white shirts. The food was good. They start you off with a variety of bread and olives. I complimented that with a nice glass of cava. For dinner I had the gazpacho with crabmeat. It was good, if not a bit non-descript. I also tried the beet terrine. This was a nice little ditty. Thin slice beets layered with a fair amount of goat cheese. On top was a little salad of arugula and some fried beet frou-frou. The salad wasn’t dressed, and I find arugula too bitter by itself. The terrine was good, but way too much cheese. I only ate half of it. I want to like this place more than I actually do.

Last night we ate at the Sunrise Café. That was good! I had a very nice grass-fed organic NY strip served with garlic red bliss potatoes and summer squash. A simple house salad started me off with a lovely lemon, olive oil herb dressing. Magnificent! I highly recommend this place. I’ll be back for the duck. It’s funky inside. My favorite things are the wall of china coffee cups and the olive oil can overheard lighting. The service is very casual (a.k.a. hippy-dippy). They have a nice wine and beer selection, as well as cocktails. Check this place out the next time you’re in Yellow Springs (which I know is often).

Oh yeah, and then there was school…

It was a good day. My initial trepidation, or Werginitis, is passing. I am excited to have the rubber hit the road. Learning the methods is really quite interesting. I am also taking a great liking to Carol Baron, our stats person. She’s a rock star. No distant bullshit about stats here. She’s totally approachable and patient. The whole faculty is this way. Everyone is wonderful about discussing the issues. I dig this place.

A final note… it’s hot. I am sitting here squinting through my fogged up glasses because I am so hot. The sun is going down and I hope it will cool down a bit. It was so hot that we changed buildings today. Yesterday was total misery sitting in un-air-conditioned buildings in 96-degree heat. By the end of the day I was sitting in a room with Dick Couto talking about my Nature of Leadership Essay and I literally had to get up and leave it was so f’ing hot. What a nightmare! This coming from someone who’s spent more than a couple 120 degree days in kitchens! I know it’s a nightmare to move your function in the middle of it, and everyone was wonderful with the school. It’s much better in the new building.

I’m at John Bryant state campground tonight. I love this campground. It’s so calm and quiet.

Wiggin’ on Wergin… Year Two at Yellow Springs

2007-08-06T08:03:00.000-04:00

I’m reclining at Antioch, Yellow Springs, Ohio… camping, per the norm, on campus. It’s hot. I’m not tired. I’m all ramped up for this residency, which may be the wrong approach at this point.

I’m a doctoral student at Antioch University (transparency, check). I’m very much into the pursuit of research as a way to reach deeper levels of meaning in daily experience, I also feel I want to understand how that translates into the process of change. How do we make change?

I keep thinking back to the talk by Bill McKibben and Dan Imhoff at Vermont Law School I attended with my NECI students. When all was said and done with the talk and questions opened on the floor, 8 out of twelve of those questions revolved around the accepted need for change with regard to the food system in this country, but the missing part was how was that change going to happen, and who would lead it. These are the questions I want to ask.

So here we are in a real hot Ohio summer, walking across the common of a campus that is closing in a matter of months. Tayo and I are riffing on some less than sensible thing, and up comes John Wergin, our home-room teacher for the next year. I am joking around about the Flight of the Conchords video Business Time as an appropriate theme song for this new year. His remark is “Yes, all the community building in year one is great, but now it’s time to get down to business.” Followed by a bit more about whipping us into shape and what not… am I scared? Hell yes!

Is this going to be the Year of the Statistic? Do I need to be taken to task? No. Do I want it? Yes. As we walked, I was reminded of going into class with Chef Michel for the first time in culinary school.

I was a first year student at NECi. I’d never cooked before. I am in a class with six other students and Chef Michel LeBorgne, French Master Chef. He’s the real thing, accent, scars and scary disregard for personal safety. I shook like a leaf. The second day of class he asked me if I shook because I drank. “No chef!” I intoned. “Well,” he said “you probably should start.” Words well spoken. Later, when he told me he dreamed about “beating the shit out of me,” I felt there may be some reason to rethink my career and education choice. And then I thought, “No, that’s what he expects and wants.”

I finished school, and I went on to achieve things Chef Michel will never do.

Damn it John Wergin. I am going to rock it out to the best of my ability. May it meet your expectation. Cut me. Burn me. Make me cry. I’ve been here before. When we’re done, I may just teach you how to cook.

A-Okay at the KOA

2007-08-03T21:42:00.000-04:00

I know that I live in the land of kitsch and tonight I am proud of that. I’m staying at the Canadaigua KOA in Farmington, New York, the heart of the Finger Lake wine region. I’ve stayed here before so I knew what I was getting into.

I love KOA. It’s a great, cheap, safe place to stay when you are the traveling fool. All of them have showers, laundry and wash sinks (for dishes), and most of them have pools and hot-tubs. I dig it.

This KOA is a bastion of older folk, mini golf, go-carts and a bass filled pond. There is also the Kafe, which serves a damn fine pancake breakfast: a stack (chocolate chip or plain), sausage or bacon, coffee or tea and juice for $4.25 for adults. It’s old-school camp food, and burned into the minds of so many kids I am sure. It’s certainly burned in mine… I love it!

I’m in a tent spot, $26 (I am a KOA member so I get a $2 discount). The bathrooms are clean, there is laundry and a pool and a bunch of other “amenities”: video games, Kabins, shuffle board…. Nothing I care about. But… there is the simple and elegant fact that I am within ten minutes from about half a dozen wineries.

I’m gently resting in the bliss of a sky full of stars (watch out for Mars this month!), crickets, grass and some damn cool women-camper neighbors on one side and a family speaking Italian on the other. I’ve got some sourdough from the Inn, some tomatoes from my garden, cukes from Priscilla’s garden, some summer sausage from Vermont Smoke and Cure, and a wee bit o’ Vermont cheese.

Ah, summer bliss! Tomorrow it’s on to Columbus, Ohio and a visit with my friend and fellow Phd student, Tayo. Tonight I’ll just rest in the wonderful heat of a summer well spent.

How Antiochian

2007-08-02T16:54:00.000-04:00

It’s the night before I leave for my PhD residency (doctor camp) at Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This is the campus that is closing next year. As usual, there are mixed emotions with the residency but the closing intensifies it all. I’ve been passively reading the pieces about Antioch closing in the Washington Post. It started with George Will and his less than complimentary “Forfeited Glory” and has since been responded to by several, the most public being “Save My Oddball Alma Mater” by Megan Rosenfeld. I say passively because I haven’t chosen to respond, and in this case I have a voice that probably should be heard.

I find both articles disturbing. Antioch is not closing, a campus is. The Yellow Springs campus is gorgeous. I hope to show that on the blog in the next week or so when I am there. It is a historical site that reveres not just Horace Mann but the Civil Rights movement and a fairly large number of liberal thinkers of the past century. Come on, the logo is an anarchist symbol! Antioch is left of center… but historically so. It holds a spot in the spectrum of our country’s educational history.

And the school still lives! I witnessed the first graduating class of doctoral students last summer and I will return tomorrow to sit in un-air-conditioned school rooms just as generations have done… perhaps for the last time in Ohio, but not the last time at Antioch. There is Keene, there is Seattle, there is L.A., and there is Santa Barbara still waving the flag.

Yes, my dear’s campuses may close, but Antiochians will never go away!

The Best Damn Weenies You Ever Had

2007-07-30T19:23:00.000-04:00

All right... tonight I am feeding the urge I created for myself in Economics: Sustainable Communities class today. Namely, hotdogs. But we are not speaking of any ordinary hotdogs, we are talking about grass feed and finished, no antibiotics, no bullshit hotdogs. From whence do these come? Applegate Farms, baby! These are the dogs of my youth. Meaty, hearty, ketchup gathering mustard dripping hotdogs that make you want to defend freedom as we know it.

Tonight's fair includes two of the beasties cut in moons and baked with whole-wheat pasta, Cabot cheddar, chard and tomatoes from the garden and kosher salt. That is love. Homespun love.

Cost, Ms. $21 a week?

The cheese was $2.50 for the pack, I'm using about a quarter of it... so let's say .62 cents.

The pasta was .86 cents a pound and I used about a quarter cup so let's say... .07 cents.

The chard was .99 cents for a pack of seeds. I've used about half that pack, and I can't even begin to guess how much that yields... let's just say .02 cents and call it a day.

The weenies, expensive little beasts, $7 for 8 of them... I am using 2, so that's $1.75.

I will get dinner and lunch from this meal.

That means the cost of my meal is... $1.23.

Peas Please!

2007-07-29T13:58:00.001-04:00

Peas, peas, peas and the first tomatoes of the season are coming out of the garden today. It makes me believe that living on $21 a week is not just possible, but pleasurable. Scott Nearing was correct when he said being poor in the country is easier than being poor in the city, at least you can grow your own food. In lieu of that the city does have its farmer's markets, but how accessible are those to lower income people?

This brings up the issue of the Farmer's Market Nutrition Program in the Farm Bill. We really need to support this kind of legislation. It makes whole foods accessible to people operating on limited budgets. Talk to your representatives about this issue by clicking here.

A Chef on $21 a Week?

2007-07-28T23:36:00.001-04:00

I'm busy obsessing about the issue of food and poverty. That, of course, has led me to the whole Congressional Food Stamp Challenge. So, I am reading the blog and I find myself thinking... these people are eating shit. Why? They are buying pre-prepared foods, which are inherently more expensive. Where's the bulk brown rice from the coop at .57 cents a pound? Where's the baked potato with frozen broccoli- cost .79 cents? Where's the beans and rice with cheese? Where's the lettuce seeds you grew into lettuce- cost, .99 cents a pack? Where's the soba noodles and tofu- cost .86 cents? How about the dozen farm fresh eggs I bought at the Milton Farmer's Market last week for $1.50?

Oh yeah, where is the TIME and KNOWLEDGE to grow and cook your own food?

So, I fluff up my tail feathers and follow that up with this thought... I could do better.

I'm a chef, right? I can cook on $21 a week.

So I ask myself, isn't this a challenge? Can I really live on $21 a week? Damn it. I hate it when I throw down the gauntlet for myself.

Something Old, Something New

2007-06-14T22:33:00.000-04:00

Today found me and mum at a family favorite, Pandl's Restaurant in Whitefish Bay, WI. This place has been around for 90 years, and nothing has changed. I still remember going to this place with my grandfather in the Seventies. Back then I always had the German Pancake (immortalized in plastic on the wall of the restaurant). This place is classic Milwaukee German, and the food is excellent. Normally I would have had the Weiner Schnitzel with spaetzle and braised red cabbage, but in my new pesco-vegetarian world I opted for the white fish. It was really quite good, not over cooked and lightly seasoned with paprika and a nice little mayo. The salad is also a must have- be sure you ask for blue cheese crumbles and french dressing.

Tonight we went to the Silver Creek Brewing Company in Cedarburg. I love this place, although there are some service issues. It's a tiny little brew pub in the back of the old stone grist mill on the river. I wish I could tell you how to get there, but I don't know how... I'll leave their website to take care of that. We sat outside next to the Cedar Creek and listened to the waterfall as we drank our beers and nibbled on our cheese plate. I had the Mai-Bock and it was wonderful. Husky, with some nice fruity undertones... this beer was much like a nice port with fizz.

Notice! The only food is a cheese plate (with optional beef stick and bread). The cheese plate is nice, but there is no description of the cheeses and whether or not they are local, so on and so forth. It's also wicked cheap. However, if you want something more filling, you can order out for pizza from Romano's, across the street.

Hurricanes In Wisconsin

2007-06-13T22:11:00.000-04:00

Ah... the happiness of a night well spent. A couple things to catch up on...

Last night the Ladies Three went to the Roux Brothers in Cedarburg, WI. This is a faux Cajun/Creole restaurant in the heart of the Milwaukee suburbs. I have to tell you, I've spent a fair amount of time making and eating gumbo and etouffee, and the shit here is good! A little on the tame side as far as spice is concerned, but it's the burbs so what can you expect.

Outdoor seating is the way to go, much better than inside the restaurant. (Note to restaurant owners everywhere: lavender walls and neon are a no-no.) The service was also excellent. Our server seemed very much a long term member of the team and spoke intelligently about the food, the restaurant and the operations. And the hurricanes...

The Perfect Omlette... At a Bowling Alley

2007-06-13T17:09:00.000-04:00

Grams, Linda and I went to breakfast (at 10:30... ah, vacation!) at a bowling alley today. Grafton Family Restaurant is a little 20 seater hometown place that serves breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nothing inventive on the menu, but damn the omlette was well made! I can still recall the trauma and drama of my first omelette with Chef Michel. It hurt. The French anger, the brown edges, and my insufferable ability to flip anything much less make a cigar out of protein.

Anyway, today's omlette was as thin as paper (no, there were not 3 eggs in that!), and no brown anywhere. Cooked to perfection with happy little veggies inside and a wee bit of cheese. No mind to the two kiddies pretending the sugar was coke, lining it up with their knives and snorting it through their straws. Atmosphere is not the best... but damn, the omlette was good!

Eggs!!!