Gourmet dumpster diving

I ate out of the dumpster for the first time today. It was delicious.

You'd expect it to be covered in slime and filth, but it wasn't. The way dumpster-diving expert David Giles describes 'recovered' or 'saved' food, you'd think it came straight from the shelf at Whole Foods rather than the dumpster out back. And funny enough, I'm sure he was right when he said it is safer to eat out of Safeway's dumpster than Jack-in-the-Box's drive-thru.

The juice he brought for the class to sample was the most expensive brand, Naked, and probably double what any normal juice would cost. But instead of spending $10 on a half-gallon, I ate for free and at the same time felt good about saving the environment, feeding the hungry, yadda yadda yadda. Well, not so much feeding the hungry as Ben and I nearly singlehandedly downed an orange juice and a blackberry-blueberry mix. Still, it felt good knowing that my food came from the trash. Never thought I'd say that!

Not only is dumpster diving economical for poor college students like Yours Truly, it prevents a hell of a lot of waste. David noted during class that 96 billion pounds of food are wasted by Americans each year, from the feedlot all the way to the last bite of uneaten food on the plate. Couple that with the carelessness Pollan noticed given to food (in his case, corn), and that food surplus morphs into a shortage because of plain apathy. Pollan deduced that since it didn't make economic sense to input effort and money to making sure extra food is distributed, it is cheaper to throw it away.

I found the following recipe that makes good of the vegetable scraps, if you can call it a recipe: It calls for taking the week's vegetable scraps and boiling them in water until the nutrients are leaked out to make a nutritious broth. Add one onion, 6 cloves of garlic, and a pinch of olive oil. Then strain out the scraps and use the broth in a variety of ways. You could dip bread in it, add crackers and chicken, add fresh veggies, or just drink it up.

Kevin and Donna Philippe-Johnson.
<http://www.geocities.com/~newliberty/earthstar/recipes.htm>

United We Stand- with pizza!

Keith mans the mud oven


Evan just before being splattered with a pizza... just kidding

My delicious pizza before it became a calzone

Pre-calzone

With garden fresh tomatoes and basil

All the toppings fit to eat

I have known for eighteen years the benefits of eating straight from your own front yard, but making pizza in the clay oven was the first time that I have used homemade ingredients in such a manner. Having helped propogate the vegetables myself, I took great satisfaction in eating my creation, but more than satiating the munchies, I got to look at food not only as such, but as part of the cycle that Pollan describes in his book. The manure that is trucked into the UW farm is recycled and eliminates the waste problem; as Michael Pollan notes, "there is no waste problem in nature." Waste to one is food to another, and I felt that experiencing the food cycle in a practical manner makes me look around the curtain in many other areas as well: who thinks of themself as part of the food cycle? Generally I feel that humans are a dead end, but as my Environmental Science field trip taught me, guess what fertilizes your veggies? In Texas, we call it 'Dillo Dirt,'

Anyways, growing toppings was only the beginning of the difficulties. My pizza was stuck to the plate and ended up so deformed I ended up with a calzone. Getting the pizza into the oven required the sacrifice of Keith's arm hair, and while he was singeing himself to make our food, the class began to interact in a manner that I hadn't seen before. I realized that the communal activity had created a community that rallied around the shared activity. This added a whole new element to my Anthropology of Food experience: food as a social tool, akin to the food Fisher discusses in her article "A Thing Shared." Food becomes something we united around, something that brought us together more than any project or assignment ever could.

Pizza Ingredients:

Trader Joe's pizza crust

Trader Joe's tomato sauce

Trader Joe's cheese (American but I'm not sure)

Tomato

Basil

Onion

Genetics

"Will she soon have blond hair and blue eyes?"

The genetic manipulation of the species we eat has me scared. At first, natural selection chose which plants and animals would survive. But starting with the Fertile Crescent and the ancient civilizations, artificial evolution had a hand in choosing which were to survive based on amicable characteristics. But now man has gone a step further and 'fixed' the problem before it occured. Nevermind the ethical ramifications, I think that toying with our food's genes isn't safe, period. I fear for the time when the 'Terminator' gene, which makes seeding impossible, cross-pollinates and spreads out of the lab. The film 'The Future of Food' delves into how quickly a GMO crop can spread by revealing traditional Mexican corn cross-bred with the new strain. Add that to the fact that NO GMO foods are labeled as such in the United States, and you begin to see what has me so worried. The film lays out very clearly that there are unknown risks to GMO food that are being shushed by the gov- I mean, corporations. I think that it is a secondary human right (kudos to the Human Rights presenters) to know what I am eating; to not know seems to me like walking on ice with an unknown thickness.

This image sets the tone for genetic manipulation: if we are splicing any gene with another, what godawful creations and "bovine abominations" are possible? They post this up at bus stops in the Netherlands because the Europeans, unlike Americans, foresee the pitfalls. In Taussig's article, the cow is compared to the Nazis who wanted, in the words of a farmer, a monoculture of blond hair, blue-eyed people. Compare the idealistic one-size-fits-all view of Hitler to our standardized produce and homogenous food, and I see startling parallels. So what if my tomato has a little wart on it, it tastes the same either way! When I gardened in Austin, I used to try to find the weirdest shaped tomatoes i could, and lo and behold, those often had more taste that the 'perfect,' ball-shaped fruits!

I decided on a recipe that is simple yet solid:

Vegetable stir-fry

1 pepper, red or yellow
1 cup broccoli, chopped
2 carrots, diced
3 cups rice
2 cloves garlic
1 cup onion, diced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 sprig rosemary
Several leaves chopped basil

Add oil and garlic and heat until hot, then add vegetables until slightly browned. This is not a difficult recipe, people, so you should be able to make it! If you can’t make stir fry vegetables, then just give up cooking.

Based loosely on the recipe from:
<http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1641,128183-249192,00.html>

Lentil Soup

Making lentil soup was the first soup I have made from start to finish. It takes too much time to make in the hectic college life, but soup is the most nutritious thing I can find in the store so I eat it at every opportunity. I found that cooking the ingredients in a wine-and-vinegar broth adds and brings out the flavor like no other, and it made me wonder about making many of my other dishes in this fashion. What if I made the pasta sauces by drying them out before adding them to the pasta? I think a dry food is much more flavorful than just adding the ingredients raw.

Speaking of extracting flavor, Michael Pollan discusses in his food-exposer book "that a food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrients," in other words, all one needs is the flavor and nutrition, not the actual food itself. That logic leads to the 'industrial foods' of today in which corn is transformed into everything. I am disgusted that this allows for food processors to claim that a chemical recombination of corn can be "natural raspberry flavoring;" I'd much rather just eat corn knowing what it was and not guessing at its origin. Concentrating nutrition in things like soup or pasta is one thing, but tricking the consumer and his tastebuds is dishonest and artificial.

Sidenote:Pollan also notes that McDonalds uses LIGHTER FLUID among other things to preserve freshness in its chicken McNuggets. Well that sure as hell does a lot more than preserve freshness.

Not only is this labeling misleading, there is so little nutrition in corn-derived products that vitamins and minerals must be added. Because so much of our economy has become corn-driven, more hearty foods have been shoved roughly aside in favor of the cheap and plentiful. But to cook soup is to defy the industrial corn agriculture; I cannot think of many ways to construct a soup based on corn. Soup is a complex thing, much like the "teeming wilderness" Pollan describes soil to be. Man is much better off imitating nature than trying to improve it, I believe, and soup seems to follow this path much better than any processed corn-based product possibly could. As simple and stupid as it sounds, you can usually tell the nutrition of a food by its color. White bread versus whole wheat. Corn versus vegetables. Corn even looks bland; it's no wonder diet-related diseases have spiked in recent years. "All food is corn," the modern viewpoint states, but those are empty calories. Real nutrition lies in the diversity that is soup.

Making the soup with Ben and Ariel

Here is the recipe for the hearty lentil soup we made in class:

Lentil Soup
1 cup brown lentils (soaked overnight)

6 cups water

2 celery stalks, diced

1 carrot, peeled and diced

3 cloves of garlic, sliced

1 onion, diced

1/4 c olive oil

1/2 c tomato sauce

1 bay leaf

2 potatoes, small dice

2 T red wine vinegar

1/2 c red wine
salt and pepper

Stir fry the celery, onion, garlic, and carrot in olive oil. After 10 minutes add the red wine and vinegar and stir until evaporated. After the mix dries, add the water, lentils, bay leaf, and tomato sauce. Simmer for 30 minutes, then add the potato and simmer for another 30 minutes. Add salt and pepper. In class, we put half the soup in a blender to give it a creamier texture, but it is the cook's preference whether to blend the soup. Enjoy!

Mmmmm.... soup!

<http://www.stjonn.com/biscuitland/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/Picture%20892.jpg>

Of Rice and Men -and Cows

While thinking of titles for the blogs, this one was so clever and witty I had to use it as a title, even though this blog has nothing to do with rice. :-)

I am disgusted. Michael Pollan's book has officially ruined my appetite for cows for quite a while. If any of you readers are having trouble staying vegetarian, just read The Omnivore's Dilemma and you'll see what I mean. Couple that book with the short animated spoof called The Meatrix and you have instant vegetarians. The film compares the agriculture of humans in The Matrix to the way we raise cows, pigs, and chickens nowadays, and it is so disturbing I can hardly finish the juicy hamburger I'm eating as I write this. Mmmmm... so good, yet so bad.





Anyways, the fact that they feed the spare animal parts back to their kin reminds me of the film Soilent Green in which humans are recycled as food. The only reason the FDA banned the practice was because of mad cow disease, and they still use the growth hormones and antibiotics that are widely known to be bad practices but make for good profit. Plus, since they can no longer use cow meat as feed, they use pig or chicken instead. Have our food producers no ethical sense? Just because cow tissue is the cheapest commodity available does not mean it should be used; I think there are certain boundaries set by nature that should not be crossed. In support of this, Pollan says nature selected against cannibalism for a reason. "Fat is fat, protein is protein," they say indifferently, but I beg to differ: herbivores stay herbivores.

www.themeatrix.com/

Children are like Popcorn

Americans eat more corn than almost anyone other than Mexicans; it is a huge staple in our diet, whether we know it or not. One article in class noted the potentially toxic effects of diacetyl, a flavoring added to popcorn. Apparently the man contracted lung cancer from microwaving popcorn several times each day for years on end. Now imagine how much corn he ate when the average American already eats 25 pounds of corn per year. If each bag is four cups of corn, three times a day, for 365 days per year, then that amounts to 4380 cups per year! That's hundreds of pounds per year! Really, how much popcorn do you need?

Something I find intriguing about the economics of food is the tremendous social pressure to eat like everyone else. Like African American Muslims looking for solace and community, we are pressured to eat what our friends and family eat. Thus cultural tradition endures and we can be 'brainwashed' against certain foods, much like African Americans tried to move away from the slave foods of ham hocks and collard greens. While in France, I felt an enormous, silent law indicating that I should eat several pieces of baguette per day, along with at least one healthy vegetable dish.

Children are like popcorn. With this tradition of following similar food paths, the obesity problem arises: children eat the same as their parents and balloon up like the bag of popcorn in the microwave. And like the corn, the food that the child eats is repetitive and often nutritionless. Something like 64% of adults and 32% of children (Hellmich, USA Today) in America are overweight. What makes the epidemic worse, as exposed by Morgan Spurlock, is that corporations like McDonalds addict the children when they are young and thus develope an addiction to the food.

I thought I would incorporate a health food recipe to counteract the effects of fast food. One can always eat celery as a 'negative net caloric intake' food, but I prefer this healthy recipe that also tastes Godly. This is my favorite of all the foods I tried in France; it tastes fresh and earthy yet it feels fried as well.

Tomates Provençal- Grilled tomatoes from the Southern region of Provence. Eaten alone as an appetizer
Sliced tomatoes
Sea salt and coarsely ground pepper
Crushed garlic
Shredded basil
Herbes de Provence- can be substituted with lavender, rosemary, marjoram, basil, bay leaf, and thyme
Dash of olive oil
Set in oven until crispy. Can be put on bread or crackers as well.

Tomates Provençales <http://www.recettes-sans-gluten.com/img/entrees/tomates_provencales04.jpg>

Clafoutis

Dessert can be a social occasion, something not quite as formal or personal as dinner yet a profound welcome nonetheless. This is another French recipe sans corn and delicious as well. It is different from many other cakes because the dish stays in contact with its main ingredient, fruit, rather than smothering it in sugar or additives. The clash between the American taste-good attitude versus the French quality is summarized in Ruth Ozeki's characterization of the locals and the hippies. Each views the other with distrust and has different ideas of what constitutes delicious food. It is notable once again that the native Idaho crowd seems to be much more afflicted with food-related diseases, even poor Momoko, ranging from cancer (pesticides) to obesity and heart disease (meat-and-potatoes diet).
I have seen firsthand in France that they are so much healthier than the majority of Americans. It was so apparent that the first thing I saw at the grand train station was the skinny people. Anyways, I soon learned it was because of portion size rather than any other dietary reason when I ate more than my host mother, father, and brother combined. Having three sons themsleves, they thankfully understood the elephantic dietary requirements of the teenage boy and provided accordingly. Merci beaucoup.

Clafoutis de fruit- Gâteau français
3 eggs
100 g sugar
1 pinch salt
80 g butter
100 g flour
1 spoonful baking powder
1 cup milk
Un peu de vanilla
Mix together the egg, sugar, and salt. Then add the butter, flour, baking powder, and milk and stir thoroughly. After everything is mixed together, add 1 kg of fruit such as cherries, apricots, or peaches.

Corn ________

“We are not only what we eat, but how we eat, too.” –Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma

How right this quote is; not only are ingredients the problem but quantity as well. Morgan Spurlock asks one interviewee how many people choose to Supersize when asked. "All of them," was her shocking response. Spurlock puts corn in the hot seat when he shows the pile of the 30 pounds of corn syrup that he has eaten in a month from the massive amount of soda and added sugars. I think it is obvious that the American style of quantity rather than quality is at the heart (and killing it too) of obesity and diet-related diseases.

It is no wonder Americans have so many health problems when the food is so processed that you cannot even tell what makes up the main ingredient. What exactly are Cheetos anyways? I assume they’re some mix of corn and wheat ingredients, but it is an unnatural mixture that transforms a food into something that the human body was not designed to digest.Pollan goes on th describe the ways in which corn products are derived: there is corn startch, corn flour, corn oil, corn syrup, and a myriad of other, lesser know cornstuffs. I discovered that while the 'corn belt' (much of the Mississippi River basin) is dedicated to corn production, only 5% of corn is eaten as a whole product; the other 95% is altered to whatever product is needed. In addition to the consumption of corn by humans and livestock, it is becoming commonplace as the additive 'ethanol' in gasoline. This is a terrible idea, seeing as it is driving corn prices sky-high and bankrupting many of the poor that depend on corn for their livelihood. It is also argued that corn uses just as much fossil fuel-derived energy to grow and harvest and process the corn such that it is not lessening our dependence on foreign energy sources and instead wastes valuable land from food production.
So I decided to post a recipe that does not use corn at all:

Tapenade- crushed olives and anchovies on toast or crackers
7 anchovies
500 g olives
2 cups café de câfres- not sure what the translation is
Mix and mash all ingredients and cool in the fridge. Spread like jam over toast and crackers

Garden salade

One of the herb gardens at the University of Washington

We’ve been reading a lot about the evils of processed foods, so I decided to make a post about my favorite uncooked meal that also happens to be very healthy. I assume it to be especially good for the immune system, for it includes olive oil and garlic in addition to all the antioxidants and nutrients in the lettuce. It is my personal belief and preference that at least a spoonful of olive oil is taken per day; many Mediterranean cultures have olives as one of their cornerstone foods. The French also used copious amounts of olive oil absent from the American diet, or poorly substituted with generic vegetable oil. Much like corn is to the American diet, olives can be taken in a variety of ways. Olive oil is eaten with bread; olives adorn certain dishes, especially pizza; olives make up pistou and tapenade, to name but a few. But olives are not usually processed and chemically altered like corn. Michael Pollan describes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma all the environmental degradations of monoculture corn production- but I saw firsthand the olive trees compliment the landscape and promote polyculture along with lavender or other crops. I was shocked tofind Pollan describe the way in which corn molecules are manipulated into being in everything from –surprisingly- cardboard to fiberglass to MSG. I naturally assumed most of these products to be petroleum-derived but was haunted to hear that they are made of the same thing that I happen to be eating right now in my Sun Chips.

I realized vegetable oil can be used on anything, I even saw some olive oil ice cream there. Another interesting tendency was the ability to make any meal compatible with bread. The Carrascosas thought I was quite unusual with my soft spot for plain baguettes. "No one eats their bread plain here," they would tell me. What they didn't realize is that like the anthropologist who traveled to Belize, the local foods they take for granted daily are of great pleasure to me.

The salad in my family is very often the solid dish; it is rare that we have a dinner without a salad. I suppose in many ways the salad is to my family what the baguette is in France, or rice is to Asian cultures. The lettuce, carrots, and -I suppose- garlic can all be homegrown.

Homegrown Salad
1 head lettuce
¼ cup grated Romano cheese
3 carrots, sliced
for one batch to toss a large salad for 6-8
1/4 C olive oil good quality extra virgin
2 T vinegar, can use balsamic, or raspberry, or rice vinegar for variety
1 clove garlic pressed
1 t to 1 T mustard, to taste, can use country style or French's style
dash Worcestershire sauce, optional (note this makes it non-veggie cause it has anchovies)
dash salt, to taste
dash sugar, to taste
blend and toss immediately before serving

Also, my mom wants me to add that she “never ever once gave [me] the dreaded lunchables.” Thanks, mom!

Japanese Obento: The Link between Food and Society

I found it extremely intriguing the attention focused by the Japanese on their obento, especially compared to the carelessness of American lunches. Lunchables offer no symbolic love or support. The whole Japanese culture seems to be fixated completely on productivity, and since lunch is the only break the children receive from incessent learning, it is the only time a mother can express her love. It is also noticeably different in France, where children are allowed to go home for lunch. I think that food truly highlights the foundations of our societies: what children eat for lunch reveals a certain truth about the nature of the entire society.

So for making my obento in class, I decided to go with the cute animal dominant present in Asian culture and make a bear out of the rice triangle. I tried to contrast the colors as much as I could, throwing flavor contrast to the winds. It is hard to see, but the seaweed wrap under the yellow and pink contains egg and Japanese vegetables. Other than the high salt content, I designed the obento to be an overall healthy meal with all the major food groups represented.

My obento including pickled plums, seaweed, rice, fish, cucumber, egg,

Japanese vegetables, squash, green beans, and salmon

Andrea Arai, our guest speaker and expert on obento, noted that the economy of Japan had a huge effect on the modern obento. During the boom of the 1980s, the obento was more important than ever because the Japanese believed that if you followed traditions, a happy future lay ahead. I couldn’t help but compare this to the economic boom in the United States in the 1950s. In Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation, she notes that the typical 1950-era American family ate a meat-and-potatoes meal almost every night cooked by a mother that was expected to stay at home a provide for the family. It is a reasonable assumption to suggest that Japanese food will soon go the way of American food: much less strictly structured and much less traditional. Already, Japanese wives have begun to leave the house and take jobs, leaving the obento in an unsure position in Japanese society. But I thoroughly enjoyed the art of designing my food’s appearance for the first time, something largely absent in American cuisine, even if the taste wasn’t the best.

Herbes de Provence

Another view-altering food experience that I had was a month long foreign exchange program to France, where I lived with a family in the Southern Provence region. This warm region near the Mediterranean is not unlike the Hill Country of Texas so much of the food has overtones, if not similarities, of each other.

Teaching the French about Texas. The cowboy hat may have been a little misleading but it was still fun to wear and it sure kept the kids’ attention

I never had the same dish twice; Madame Carrascosa was careful always to adjust the ingredients just enough to that it tasted completely different. One of my favorite and easiest to make dishes was composed of sausage and peas tossed together and cooked in an herb-filled broth. The vegetable and meat were mutually complemented, giving each a taste of the other. The French especially seem to employ this idea of balance with every meal. The food groups were always intertwined and never eaten alone. Lamb with carrots. Fish with cucumbers. Come to think of it, it was an ingenious idea to mix it all up; it gave the food a flavor that no one ingredient could accomplish. Pollan discusses the way humans –omnivores- debate what to eat more than any other species, but I say the French are an exception. They don’t deliberate over what food to eat; they simply use whatever ingredients are available and magically morph it into haute cuisine.
Many of my favorite dishes were homemade recipes. I was reminded of this recipe in particular because of our class tour to the herb gardens, and I noted we made our pistou rouge almost entirely with ingredients we had ourselves or were bought at the local Carrefour from local suppiers. The recipe was simple enough:


Pistou Rouge- much like tapenade but red
1 cup dried tomatoes
½ cup Pine nuts
50 ml Olive oil
50 g parmesan
50 g basil
3 pieces garlic
¼ squeezed lemon juice
Dash of Salt
Dash of Pepper
Grind everything into a paste for use on crackers or bread. Enjoy!

The Foundation: Chips & Salsa

Before you even get water at a restaurant, you're served chips and salsa. It's the basis for Tex-Mex food, and it leaves the options open from enchiladas to barbecue. The art of making salsa is a big deal in Texas because there is a myriad of flavors, spices, and herbs that make each type unique, much like fine wine. There are entire, intense contests based on home recipes made in the blender, and I find that even though salsas such as the East Side Cafe salsa are delicious, the homemade ones have something much more authentic that can't be accomplished except on a small scale. Perhaps it is because that is the way food was originally prepared, but when my mom makes homemade salsa, it tastes like water in the desert (and believe me, you'll need plenty of water):

Texas Homestyle Salsa
1 C coarsely chopped onion
1 C cilantro, leaves and stems
1 jalapeno (or more to taste), coarsely chopped, seeds removed
1 clove garlic, coarsely chopped
2 (14.5 oz) cans diced tomatoes, drained
3 T lime juice, I use about 2 times this much
1/4 t salt
Blend. Yield 4 C.
Eat.

The two deciding factors are the chunkiness and the spicyness. My host family had never even heard of 'jalapenos' or 'pinto beans' that I needed for my family's salsa, so I had to improvise a bit. 'Tortilla chips' were also nonexistant! I was quite shocked to find Carrefour bountiful with cheeses but lacking the basic necessities for the chips & salsa experience.Tomatoes define the texture and I prefer the smoother, runny salsas rather than the large pieces that make up the thicker stuff. Jalapenos are the mainstay pepper in Texan salsa, but I like to substitute with an occasional bell pepper. Lemon juice gives it a zap of tartness that separates my family's salsa from others. But most of all, the crunching of the chip and the spicy burst make chips & salsa such a desirable food. Just don’t forget to have plenty of water nearby!