Food, Glorious Food!

I am a junkie for free food. There, I’ve said it, and I don’t necessarily feel better for unloading, but it needed to be confessed.

As a kid growing up in post-war Europe, food was scarce. Not starvation scarce, but limited enough that nothing went to waste. I remember my mother candling eggs, holding them up to a bright light to see if there were twin yolks. Twin yolks in the frying pan became two eggs, not one. I remember bouilli and still shudder at the memory of the grainy, pasty dish made by boiling day old country bread in water and adding a dash of salt and pepper.  On many occasions, that was dinner. I don’t remember seeing oranges or bananas as a kid, though there were apples and pears. And potatoes--not the monstrous two-pound tuber found here, but small, dense and thick-skinned things that were cooked whole, as informed sources told us the peel held the vitamins.  

Many decades later, it’s almost impossible for me to pass up an offer of free food. If my local store offers free cheese sample, tiny cubes meant to be speared singly with a toothpick, I will skewer seven or eight of them and be proud of the skills I display.  Then I will hover about the fast-emptying platter. I remember when my neighborhood Whole Foods, an upscale store, put out samples of expensive Italian salami. I set what I am sure remains a store record by working with two toothpicks in each hand. A week later they had free stuffed green olives. I returned to the display five times.

Megastores like Costco will be the death of me. On any given day, there are free samples of pizza, sausage, cookies, little dabs of tuna fish on crackers, deviled eggs, dumplings, salsa, ice cream, chicken salad and, if you’re fortunate, brownies. There is such a thing as a free meal!

Free food becomes not mere sustenance but a true and harmful passion.

Recently, I’ve given up all-I-can-eat buffet restaurants. I came to realize that I was exorcising all sorts of demons by trying to get my money’s worth out of a meal. I feel I am only doing my job if, for $12, I eat a pound of bacon, and another pound of assorted pork products.  In fact, deep down, I really believe someone who spends twelve bucks and come back with two potato slices, a half-tomato and a scoop of scrambled eggs is a miscreant, sort of. “Eat!” I want to say. “Eat! Winter is coming! War and famine are just beyond the horizon.”

I also have to fight my impulse to hoard food. In one of my rare wise decision, I recently opted against the offer of a free freezer I could have put in my garage. My first reaction was an enthusiastic, “Yes, I’ll take it!”  By morning, I had decided it was a bad idea, since it would enable me to hoard additional--and unneeded--victuals.

A few years ago I gave up refined sugar. More recently, after a long and still current bout with bladder cancer, I gave up artificial sweeteners.  Last week, I abandoned chocolate. I’m trying and so far failing to give up bread. It’s been generally easier for me to let go of other things--tobacco, alcohol, unprescribed pharmaceuticals--than it has to say good-bye to my morning bagel, or baguette, or English muffin. There’s probably a reason bread is called the staff of life.

I have friends who are much better with food than I am. They leave half their meals untouched, or pass up opportunities to stuff themselves. I find that amazing, and I envy their determination. Me, it’s all I can do to pass up the free tidbits, but I am making headway. Yesterday I made an omelet.  I only ate half.  Progress, not perfection.

 

 

   

Food

I grew up in a time and a place where wasting food was a serious sin. I was a Parisian kid in post-war France, and my family served a few repulsive dishes at least once a week. My least favorite—it still makes me shudder to think of it—was bouillie , a vile concoction of week-old bread boiled in salted water and seasoned with whatever might be in the kitchen on any given day. The dish had the consistency of watery oatmeal and, truly, it was foul beyond belief.  I do not know a single French person who has less than disturbing memories of such meals. Other delicacies included cow brains, pig intestines and other offal I am too delicate top mention here. Nothing was ever thrown away.

Yesterday night, I microwaved a bag of popcorn that Orville Redenbacher claimed should have been eaten before October 2010. As I munched on the perfectly edible snack, my thought was, Orville died in September, 1995, so what does he know?

I have a friend who, whenever he looks into my fridge or pantry, tut tuts the fact that I have not disposed of cans of diet soda dating from the late 90s. Those solid chicken tenders way in the back of the freezer? The hunk of equally hard filet mignon that has survived the ice age?  All perfectly comestible. As are the frozen string beans, the pasta I cooked a few months ago and decided to save for a wintry day, and the samosas with ice crystals on them. My position is that unless the food smells, looks or is otherwise guilty of unfortunate behavior, I’ll thaw it and eat it.

I have serious issues with expiration dates on pretty much anything, but on food in particular, I’m adamant. I think the giant concerns that manufacture and market the stuff we eat have found a nifty way of maximizing profits. They’ve instilled in us a knee-jerk reaction simply by printing faint dates on the packaging. We throw stuff away because we’re told to.

According to a May, 2011 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, “Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tons — gets lost or wasted.”  Key findings include:

•        Industrialized and developing countries dissipate roughly the same quantities of food — respectively 670 and 630 million tons.
•        Every year, consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tons) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tons).
•        Fruits and vegetables, plus roots and tubers have the highest wastage rates of any food.
•        The amount of food lost or wasted every year is equivalent to more than half of the world's annual cereals crop (2.3 billion tons in 2009/2010).

Obviously there’s a lot more involved here than the average American family’s disposal of a sac-full of half-eaten burritos.

Last week on NPR, a show was dedicated to examining food waste in America alone, and the discussion included some alarming statistics.

Americans annually throw out $165 billion—that’s billions with a b—of food. A lot of this ends up in landfills where it decays and becomes methane, everyone’s favorite greenhouse gas. This is 50 percent more food than was thrown away in the 70s.  So what happened?

Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About it), noted that we have taken the expiration date as gospel, when in reality it has little to do with food safety and relates to the peak quality of what’s about to be eaten—or thrown away.  Additionaly, he says, there’s a lot of wiggle room built into these dates.

Dana Gunders, a food and agricultural scientist, added that, “over half the land area in the U.S. is dedicated to food production, and over 80 percent of the water that we consume goes into growing (and) producing our food. So when we throw out, say, half a hamburger, according to an estimate by the Water Footprint Network, that's equivalent to taking over an hour shower, in the water use that was required for that half hamburger you just tossed.” And just to drive home the point, she added, “in terms of the water embedded in the food that we throw out. Well, annually, we are wasting the equivalent of two times the volume of Crater Lake...

Institutions—schools, hospitals, cafeterias and self-serve buffets restaurants and such—are probably responsible for a lot of food wastage, but families are guilty as well. We search the stores for two-for-the-price-of-one bargains and we habitually overbuy. We don’t freeze enough. We don’t like leftovers, and we recycle only three percent of the food we waste.

There are, however, a couple of interesting trends. A couple of large cities on the West Coast, notably San Francisco and Seattle, have begun curbside composting where the end products—fertilizer—is used in city parks and recreation areas.  Starbucks has promised to recycle its coffee grounds and unsold pastries so they can be transformed into usable plastic’s and laundry detergent.

Me, I’m going to try to eat down my fridge and not buy food before I have eaten what I already have. Which, unfortunately, includes about a dozen bags of sweet potato fries.  So I know what’s for dinner for the entire week.

 

 

Glorious Food

To eat is a necessity. To eat intelligently is an art.  La Rochefoucauld

There is no love sincerer than the love of food. George Bernard Shaw

Supersize Me. Morgan Spurlock

In America, the best way to become invisible is to be fat.

In 2008, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the obesity rate among men was 32.2 percent and a slightly higher 35.5 percent for women.  The numbers were confirmed, then revised by the Center for Disease Control which, in 2010, estimated the rate had increased to 35.7 percent for adults, and remained at a steady 17 percent for American children.

We eat too much and we eat the wrong foods; we are enamored of salt, sugar and fat, and we don’t exercise nearly enough. We snack. Food is everywhere; it is a religion. There are more restaurants per capita in the United States than anywhere else in the world. In New York State alone, there are 17,461 fast food places and according to the US Department of Agriculture, the Empire State is considered one of the healthier areas, food-wise.  Not so are Vermont, Washington, DC, Maine, Montana and Rhode Island, which have more fast food restaurants per capita than any other states. (You can find out how many fast food restaurants are in your state by going to the USDA’s website, http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-28/strategy/30669674_1_fast-food-food-chains-food-restaurants.) The country is dotted with some 160,000 fast food restaurants that serve 50 million Americans daily and make $110 billion annually. Most, though not all, sell high-calorie, high-starch, high-carbohydrate, and low fiber foods made with corn syrup, and refined sugar and flour. The fact is, the way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000 but our desire for more—of everything—has stayed the same.

So here’s a question: Is obesity a disease, or is it a philosophy?

In a way, it’s amusing. In European literature and theater, obesity implied wealth and well-being. A family with abundant food on the table liked to display its affluence and attendant physiques and the fat bourgeois and his wife and children were often the object of ridicule both in print and on stage. Think Molière.

Now, in a similar and strange turn of fate that made rednecks grow their hair long, it is the poor who are fat while the rich eat less. And on the third Thursday of November, we all—wealthy and not—cheerfully celebrate a national day of gluttony.

But the fact is we have labeled obesity in its simplest form: overindulgence. In the Western world, and increasingly everywhere else, this is a trait that characterizes our way of life. We are nations of overindulgent consumers whose tastes for excess are not necessarily limited to food. Our obesity in all forms, far from being limited to the larder, guides our lives.

Perhaps this is the logical culmination of free enterprise. We are taught to never be satisfied with what we have; in many ways the American Dream is one of escaping a life of less for a life of more. We want homes bigger than the ones we grew up in, jobs with more responsibilities than our parents ever had, and salaries that would astound our forefathers.  We want more for less, and with food, this is a realizable ambition.

Orson Wells was right. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.

Proust and Me

Marcel Proust, the French writer whose Remembrances of Things Past   (A la recherche du temps perdu) ranks high in Western culture as a book everyone quotes and no one honestly reads, writes of tasting a Madeleine and being transported back to childhood. Though both French and writer, and despite not being a Proust, I recently had a Proustean moment. It was not with pastry but with paté. 

Specifically, rillettes, a coarse, peasantish pork dish that has little in common with the more elegant mousses, fois gras, or quenelles favored by blue bloods. Rillettes comprise pork belly, garlic, ground pepper, salt, and herbs that vary according to the region. The recipe is not complex, but it is time consuming. In France, rilletes are a staple of cafés and brasseries where they are spread on slices of buttered baguettes and eaten with cornichons (gherkins) and a glass of the house red wine. They’re inexpensive, filling, savory, and proudly blue collar.

Rillettes were among my father’s favorite foods, though my mother, of a somewhat higher social class than he, looked down upon them and claimed they smelled bad. Much to her disgust, he instilled in me a deep appreciation for the dish. When I brought him to the US after my mother’s death, we found a lone restaurant in Georgetown, Le Pied de Cochon (now a Five Guys hamburger place), that served the dish. The rillettes there weren’t as good as the ones found in Paris, and certainly no match for those from Bretagne, but beggars can’t be choosers. Until his death, my father and I ate rillettes once or twice a month for three years and were never disappointed.

Recently, I found rillettes in a local high-end food store, there alongside the chi-chi cheeses that cost $40 a pound and the rare wines from Argentina and Estonia. I bought a small plastic container of two ounces for almost eight dollars. It was worth every penny and I now understand Proust.

I scraped the thin layer of suet off, scooped out a dollop, spread it on a piece of French bread and… was instantly eight years old again, sitting on the beach in Benodet, Bretagne, watching my tall, thin, war-hero father dive into the frigid water, swim beneath the waves for far too long and emerge, laughing and breathless from the cold as my mother, shaking her head at the foolishness of men in general and her husband in particular, held out a thin towel for him. He splashed his way back to shore and threw a handful of cold water on her, then dragged me into the surf. I squealed with pleasure and fright, and to this day this small event remains one of the fondest memories I have of childhood.

That day there were rillettes, cooked with a hint of anise, hard-boiled eggs, country sausage and hard brown bread, mortadelle,  Pernod for the adults and grenadine syrup for the kids. There was lobster with home-made mayonnaise, too, and sea urchins, shrimp, oysters and other delicacies that the children found horrific. It was a perfect day.

Back here in the States, I ate and dreamed, then I covered the fatty treasure in plastic wrap and placed them in the fridge next to the black cherries and a wedge of ripe Port Salut. Were my father alive, he would have methodically set the table in the dining room with real silverware and napkins, then raided the fridge for his favorite meal of cheese, fruit, and rillettes.

In mediocre times, these are good things to remember.