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(**This post was lurking in my unposted half-finished back-(b)log and pertains to two previous posts from September 2007: apologies if it reaches and confuses current subscribers!)

We went round the mulberry tree on Sunday.

I don’t believe I’d ever eaten a mulberry, let alone picked one off a tree. I was surprised. They seemed very fragile, perishable nuggets, difficult to get hold of at the perfect moment of ripeness. Once ripe, these ones at least seemed to be already mouldy. Past their harvest date or inherently flawed? Further research clearly indicated..

The Sunday morning sessions were really interesting. I started with the panel on Foie Gras, poppies and cacao.

The Foie Gras Fracas: Sumptuary Law as Animal Welfare? presented by Cathy K. Kaufman, discussed the ethics of foie gras (duck) production as practised in New York state. Her starting premise was that “killing animals for food is morally acceptable provided that animals not suffer unnecessarily in their rearing or slaughtering”.

The argument she presented was more or less the same as I’d heard from a former chef. She observed that migratory birds have an inbuilt behaviour to store fats for the journey, and to do this practice a form of gluttony that is compatible with being fed the volume of grain that producers provide them; and that the force-feeding of birds, gavage, has been practiced for millenia: it appears on Egyptian tomb-paintings reckoned to date back to 2500 BCE. She also observed that tube-feeding is not a world away from the regurgitation/throat feeding practiced by parent birds on their young (i.e. although we would not want a tube down our throats, it’s not so different from having your mom’s beak pushed down there). The birds Kaufman was writing about were visited by veterinarians who found them generally less stressed and in better living conditions than factory-farmed fowl, as I guess you’d expect when they are raised in smaller numbers. Jeffrey Steingarten has a good piece on the same theme.

In Poppy: Potent yet Frail – Aylin Öney Tan gave the Turkish history of poppy production and the impact of foreign interference in local agricultures. She dated opium poppy cultivation back to Mesopotamia in 4000 BC. Her comments on the physical similarity between poppy seed heads and pomegranates were a revelation, as she showed a few illustrations that could be seen quite differently if you mentally swapped plants. She talked about the culinary uses of poppy seeds: in breads and baking, in both savoury and sweet dishes, and as a cooking oil, which contains no opiates. The oil is also used by artists and the paint industry because of its unique drying qualities. She pointed out that it’s a plant used in its entirety by peasant farmers, including the use of poppy seed pulp (left over from oil pressing) as animal feed (now that would make for happy animals..?). Although poppy production resumed in 1974, after being banned due to international pressure, the legal hoops that villagers have to go through limit the numbers of those willing to cultivate it.

Cacao in Brazil or the History of a Crime by Marcia Zoladz was a bit of a tangled web, covering an example of market manipulation in the late eighties and early nineties. Basically it was the story of a group that was aiming to change the economic and political power balance in Brazil by buying up cacao plantations and then destroying them by infesting them with a fungus known as witches’ broom (Crinipellis perniciosa). The infected plantations would then infect healthy ones and cripple the whole economy. Cacao was always an export crop, so there are question marks about its value in a healthy and self-sustaining economy. Brazil’s complicated social history – where slavery was abolished but replaced by a kind of indentured labour system – was part of the problem, and the reason for the act, as well.

Sunday lunch was organic chicken: local, seasonal foods, very good and extremely beautiful.

A further postscript: The papers presented at the 2007 “Food and Morality” themed Oxford Symposium are now available from Prospect Books.

Saturday afternoon

Moving on from the already full morning, on Saturday afternoon I went to a talk by Rachel Laudan, on how food makes us moral agents – more or less virtuous. She presented two trays of foods representing opposing value systems: in one, we gain altitude on the moral scale through refinement, through mixing and perfecting through cooking and treating our foods. Proponents of the refined side of the equation believe that cooking separates humans from the animals and barbarians who eat raw, unrefined food. Examples include refined flours and sugars (sugar, she observed, is an immortal food: you can remain pure by eating foods that never perish — might be said of a lot that we find on supermarket shelves these days) and wine.

On the other side, where we find wholemeal breads, water or milk, we gain moral value through the belief that foods are naturally good, and that cooking or refining them disguises their benefits. In this value system, cooking stimulates unnatural appetites and leads to sins like gluttony. So, I guess the bottom line would be that once again, you judge others according to what you’re used to.

Then on to Steven Kramer, a philosopher-foodie, who invited us in How Clean Is Your Plate? to think about morality and change, the entrenchment of habit when it comes to our food choices. The talk’s title referred to the admonishment by parents to clean your plate because children (always elsewhere) are starving. Quoting from Plato, Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, his recommended starting point was actually a book about animal welfare by Peter Singer, a utilitarian philosopher, called The Way We Eat: Why our food choices matter. He spoke about our willed ignorance when it comes to food production, particularly the raising of animals for meat: we don’t want to ask the questions about what’s on our plate. But when we introduce ethical issues to our eating, are we creating a fear of food? He concluded with a discussion of the moral issues demonstrated in Babette’s Feast, with its opposition of dull but virtuous cuisine versus extravagant gourmet foods, and the less than simple value systems attached to each.

There was then a discussion of food and environmental challenges, in which student Brian Melican asked how one brings people round to actually make choices and change their eating patterns without imposing on them a kind of consumer dictatorship. He questioned the difference between marketing and propaganda and balancing food preferences – like, say, mangoes – against their wider issues, such as the environmental cost of transporting them to your table and the need for their producers to make a living. It was, he said, a ‘different pocket’ reality: when ultimately we pay for the real and hidden costs of cheap food under different names, there’s a disconnect.

Saturday night’s Ethical Dinner, prepared by chef Tim Kelsey in consultation with Caroline Conran and Anissa Helou, was based entirely on ingredients sourced within 25 miles of Oxford. The evening’s entertainment was edible hat-making, led by Alicia Rios, to which end we gathered what was left on the tables after supper, and added it to the groaning board of ingredients.



Some stunning headgear emerged.

And meanwhile, it was the Last Night of the Proms, which was celebrated remotely and appropriately even in Oxford.


A long wordy account of the first morning of the Food & Morality conference

On Saturday morning I hopped a bus to Oxford at the unearthly hour of 7am on my way to the Oxford Symposium on Food and Drink, whose theme this year was food and morality. It was a gorgeous morning and I walked towards the college, passing a sunny graveyard.

By 8.45 I had dropped bags in my room at St Catherine’s college and was on my way to a vigourous survey of the ups and downs of right-thinking foodies in Berkeley California from the sixties to the present by the simply wonderful Ruth Reichl, in an opening address called What Should We Eat?

Speaking from her considerable experience in documenting food trends, she pointed out that we have been agonising over food ethics from the year dot, and that the underlying reasons have swung between efforts to control class, religion and the economy.

In the fifties and sixties, efforts to churn wartime industries into moneymaking economy meant that advertisers positioned cooking as symbolic of an unworthy, undesirable prison that modern women would be fools not to shed. We were encouraged to liberate cooking time for other aspects of life: time was more valuable than food in those days of plenty. Movement followed movement: food was politicised by such books as Diet for a Small Planet. Meat was out, boycotts were in.

By the mid nineties, industrialisation of our food had created all kinds of new jumping points for protest: chemical adulteration, genetic modification, contamination and disease; the end of food as we knew it. She mentioned a test by English volunteers who had tried to live as battery chickens for a week, and lasted 18 hours. There were starting to be a lot of questions about how our food animals were treated, and the demand for ethically raised meat has rocketed as a result.

For a while fish seemed like the answer, but fish are fighting a losing battle with the modern world: oceans are being drained of species by fishing technology, and the global hunger for sushi has had a huge impact, a food that is less about tradition and health than it is about the possibilities of refrigeration and air freight. Bluefin tuna was a despised fish 35 years ago, but its price has increased 10,000 times since then, and it is vanishing as a species.

And we have contamination of farmed fish, and contamination of sea and land and deforestation of wetlands resulting from increased fish and shellfish farming.

But what do we do? Technological advances mean it’s unrealistic to expect farmers to go back to ploughing the fields by hand. For the first time in history, we have too much food AND starvation: “while half the world goes hungry, the other half is killing itself with calories.” We have, she said, so many moral choices today it’s a wonder any of us eat at all.

We are hearing a lot about growing our own food, cutting down our food miles and buying locally. But is that the correct moral stance? There have been studies that show it’s a far from simple equation: the nature of mechanisation on the farms, the type of feed (it takes a lot of fossil fuel to produce grains like maize) and the slaughtering systems for meat (where are they, how are they powered, etc.) can all throw calculations off. So one New Zealand study found that 1 tonne of lamb raised in New Zealand and eaten in London was less fuel dependent than the same amount raised in Oxford and eaten in London.

She cited a recent review in Atlantic Monthly of Michael Pollan‘s Omnivore’s Dilemma as formulating an attack on gourmets: the author’s moral stance appeared to be that the only moral choice is vegan, “where the Christian and the gourmet part ways.” Will the vegetarian diet be the only acceptable diet of the future?

Most of us, she concluded, would like to do the right thing.. if only we could figure out what that was.

Well. That was some beginning. We turned then to a swiftly-moving panel.

Chocolateer John Scharffenberger talked all too briefly about ethical sourcing of cacao beans. The all-too familiar gist was that farmers are getting the short end of the stick, being paid very badly while supporting with those poor wages whole communities. He proposed instituting higher quality varieties of healthier beans which would allow a fair living to the people who grew them.

Then Raymond Blanc stepped up to dash our illusions about the charmed life of the kobe beef cattle. He’d visited Japan and, eager to see their living environment, met many stone walls. Finally he set up a visit himself and found filthy calves, confined to small pens, and force fed grain until a final year of grass fattening. And a slaughterhouse where the cattle were killed and hung in the open air in front of their fellows, the blood running between the hooves of the waiting animals. In short, marketing mythology at work.

Henrietta Green, described as the mother of farmers markets in Britain, talked about the evolution of chicken from a food of luxury to something valueless; bizarre questioning by supermarkets and fast food chains to decide whether chickens can suffer; questions about whether a battery chicken has a right to life or anything else just to feed us cheaply. And that, as always, it’s all about taste: a better reared chicken (free range and longer lived) tastes better.

And finally, Armando Manni talked about the decline of the polyphenols – the health-giving components of extra virgin olive oil – through poor bottling, transport and storage. I was thanking my lucky stars for my olive oil technology classes which meant I was, I gather, one of the few who understood every word he said.

Tim Lang talked about public policy and the role of the state as arbiter of food morality in a world where private morality can’t address most of the issues – since they mainly have to do with industrialised food whose safety and availability has been decided for us by the state. We may think we have too many choices nowadays, but according to Lang, we can call it choice but it’s really selection. The individual consumer cannot influence the food chain when it’s in the hands of a few large food companies. We are all, he concluded, juggling with highly complex bundles of contradictions.

Well, didn’t I take a wrong turn during the tea break. Look what found me…

And here you could buy quinces and jams.

And here I’ll stop, for now.

Wednesday: Culatello and the tale of the black pigs

What a difference Wednesday’s trip was from Tuesday’s. We travelled to the village of Polesine Parmense to visit the Antica Corte Pallavicina – home of some prized artesanal Culatello di Zibello and the much revered Al Cavallino Bianco (“white pony”) restaurant.

Polesine’s very name, according to our guide, means village that has been destroyed many times by the Po River (Po + lesionare/to damage), which has a history of flooding. Although it was very low when we were there – we couldn’t see any water at all from the banks we walked along – it did overwhelm this area massively in the floods of 2000 (which had also put another of the restaurants we’ve visited under water). The climate favours culatello production: high humidity coupled with great heat in the summer and cold temperatures – normally below freezing – in the winter. Artisanal culatello aging takes place in cellars, using windows to regulate the flow of air rather than automated humidity and temperature controls used in industrial production.

One of the cattle to be seen on the property where, later this summer, a high end Agriturismo will be opening, with guest rooms in the castle.

The place is owned by by the remarkable Spigaroli brothers. We were shown round by Luciano, the businessman; Massimo – a distinguished chef and president of the Culatello di Zabello consortium – was unfortunately away, but we heard a lot about him both from his brother and from last year’s students. Massimo’s passion for pigs is legendary, and he’s gone to astonishing lengths to build the farm’s heritage breed herd of 500 – the only free range culatello pigs in Italy we were told. This fact is not due to the innate cruelty of the Italians, but to the scarcity of land available to most pig farmers here (but why then, I wondered, is there free range pig farming in tiny wee England? More arable land than mountainous Italy, at a guess. And perhaps due in some part to the highly vocal, highly visible animal welfare lobby in that country which as far as I can tell has no real counterpart in Italy).

The pigs Massimo has found and raises to use for Culatello di Zibello for this operation are black pigs, similar to Spain’s Pata Negra (cerdo ibérico) pigs. They are free range only in the summer months and cost a lot to raise, because they are not suited to rearing indoors in crowded sheds like the prosciutto pigs. He wanted to raise them in traditional ways, using cereals produced on the farm. The only way he can do this is to fund the Culatello di Zibello production with income from the restaurant.

We started in the production area where some new pork thighs had just arrived. It’s a very small production, deliberately so, to control quality. The three men – Roberto, Carlo and Kumar (a vegtarian from India) – working the table were trimming and preparing the meat, which arrives in the same shape, more or less, as a prosciutto ham, but only the large part of the thigh is used, the bone is removed, and the meat is sewn into a pig bladder. The size of the pigs used for culatello production is different as well: these porkers are 250-300kg when they are slaughtered (as opposed to the 140kg prosciutto pigs – which are again bigger than commercial pigs from Northern Europe). So that makes them more expensive, because it costs more to raise pigs to this weight.

Roberto prepares to trim the ham. After he has trimmed and de-boned it, it’s whacked and trimmed precisely into its characteristic pear shape, then trussed, rubbed with locally produced Fontana wine and garlic, seasoned with salt and black pepper, and then refrigerated for ten days.

After ten days, during which time the ham is massaged daily, the ham is washed and placed in a pork bladder. Roberto stitches it closed:

and weaves it into its characteristic shape with string:

Done:

An artesanal Culatello di Zubello will carry three labels: one identifying it as Culatello di Zibello; one with the label of the consortium; and one with the label of the producer. What is sold in restaurants or delis as simply “culatello” is not produced in accordance with the consortium’s standards; what is sold as Culatello di Zibello DOP (and lacks that third tag) is not artesanal, using traditional aging cellars, but has been produced in the eight villages of the allowed region and is likely to be the product of an industrial scale production.

We moved into the cellars to inspect the culatellos hanging from the rafters, enjoying the Po breezes.

Moulds on the outside of the ham are part of the aging process, as the hams develop their character.

Some Culatello di Zibello that has been aged 21 months and sliced in the typical ultra-thin slices — which you can and should eat with your fingers.

Finally got to taste some lardo. And it was… lardy. But it had definite texture, a bit chewy, and the seasoning was lovely. Perhaps on hot toast it would be better. But I was swiftly distracted by the arrival of some awesome tortelli (hot and flowing with melting cheese and spinach.. or was it chard) and some interestingly flattened gnocchi in a tomato sauce.

A fantastic cheese tray. Top row: not sure about the first one; second one is Gorgonzola (dolce); then Pecorino Toscano; Parmigiano Reggiano (24 months); bottom row: something very ripe and runny with black pepper coating (not sure what it was); bottom right-ish is Caprese (goat cheese) wrapped in chestnut leaves.

Dessert: a delicious, mildly alcoholic, vaguely custard-like, pebbled with almondy? crumbs signature dessert accompanied by gelato (frutta di bosco – berries or mele – apple). After coffee we sampled some of the house-made liqueurs and with the full complement of Antica Corte Pallavicina wares in front of us – half a dozen kinds of salami, Culatello di Zibello, wines, liqueurs – forthwith invested collectively and decisively in the retail side of the business.

Tuesday: the pig breeder and then lunch at La Nonna Bianca

Phew. I have been in more than one barn in my time but never one that smelled like Tuesday’s. This was a day to sober the hardiest meat eater: when we parted ways at the end of it I was reminded of people leaving a funeral.

Our guide through this version of hell was Francesco Sciarrone, the veterinarian and meat inspector who had previously talked to us about animal welfare and slaughterhouses. He and the pig breeder answered questions afterward, and at one point someone asked him how he felt about eating pork, witnessing as he does the entire grim saga from industrial pig production through slaughter every day.

Traditionally, he observed, people ate meat once a week, or maybe every couple of weeks; nowadays we expect meat every day, even several times a day. So, his implicit reply was: if you want meat every day, this is the market economy’s way of fulfilling that request.

He told us he himself doesn’t eat meat every day; he has it maybe once a week, and for that he goes to the butcher in his town, so he knows how the meat was raised and who is slaughtering and processing it. So he pays four, five or maybe six times what we’d pay for the meat of the animals in those hellish sheds, but that’s what it costs to raise it humanely. And he’s fortunate to be in a part of the world where small scale butchers have not yet been entirely driven out of business by supermarkets. (I recently saw some figures for England: The number of butchers in Britain has declined from 22,900 in 1980 to 6,600 in 2005.)

I guess that makes it vote with your feet time. Here’s the Italian version of where that pork chop on your plate comes from:

We kitted up in some protective plastic for the occasion and that kept the muck off us (but was more for the protection of the pigs from infection). The smell when we walked in to the sow shed was overpowering, overwhelming, persistent.

According to the EU, “Sow stalls are the most widely used housing system within the EU because they allow individual rationing, prevent aggression, are easy to manage and occupy little space. However, in some member states, the use of individual stalls for pregnant sows has been made illegal or is currently being phased out.” Signatory states have until 2013 to change their systems, but the stalls (aka gestation crates) can still be used to confine the sows for up to four weeks after gestation, according to the US Humane Society’s report on the subject (they also have a short video clip about sow stalls on their website). I was grateful to learn that the UK has banned these since 1999. I don’t know if there’s legislation governing this in Canada, but the largest pork producer in the US has just announced its intention to do away with them.

Anyway, here – from the point of insemination (usually artificial), for at least the next three weeks – they stand, sit or lie down, because that’s all they can do.

When after 21 days they are seen to be definitely pregnant, they are moved to another barn – which we didn’t see – to finish the gestation period, about three more months. (My reading tells me that at least 60 to 70% of US sows are housed in stalls throughout the entire gestation.) Presumably the ones who didn’t get pregnant the first time get to stand there for another round. If they’re lucky.

Then when they are ready to give birth, it’s into the farrowing crates; these too are designed so that the sow cannot turn or move other than to stand, sit and lie down, with what is called a “creep” area for the piglets to move around her. She is barricaded from them so that she does not lie on them (and damage the product). Even when they are safe from crushing, the farmer said there would be around a 10 percent mortality among the piglets, mainly from issues to do with development and feeding.

Once the piglets are weaned (by law when they are at least 4 weeks old), the sows are returned to what the EU coyly calls “service accommodation,” namely, in most cases, sow stalls. They can expect to live like this, moving back and forth from one crate to another, for their entire lives, which for good breeders last 6-7 litters (around 3 years). Longer lives than the pigs we eat, which are slaughtered when they reach prosciutto weight – about 9 months and 140kg.

When they’re weaned, the piglets move into teen (weaner) housing, kept in family groups. Not because we love them so, but because it keeps them from fighting for hierarchy and damaging the product. The promising ones – from a size point of view – are branded on the hips with PP – Per Prosciutto. We noticed this on some of the hams we saw at the prosciuttificio the day before.

This is all the fresh air these pigs get in their lifetimes.

When you live in conditions like this, you get sick. This was the top of the nearly overflowing bin we passed on the way into the barn. Before slaughter, there’s a resting period for animals who’ve been on medication, to try to get the drugs out of their system – to minimise harm to the people who eat the product.

The illumination beyond the door, which looks like daylight, comes from the windowed or skylit outer areas of these barns; it’s not an outdoor run.

Again, kept in family or familiar groups to keep them from fighting. I guess this is where they stay either until they reach slaughter weight or until they are transferred to another farm to be “finished”. One thing I am guiltily grateful for: that our tour did not take place in the heat of summer, which I’m told is hot and humid – temperatures in the thirties and forties (celcius). I cannot imagine what those sheds must be like then.

The smell hung around for hours as we debriefed soberly afterwards at La Nonna Bianca, the very trattoria that waylayed Carlo Petrini on his way to talk to us. Even without the salumi, which we declined, the meal was pork-heavy: this is after all pork country. We each said, I’m sure, our private apologies to the pigs on our plates. I mulled over what Petrini had said when asked about animal welfare, something poetic about how you eat the violence you wreak on other living beings.

So, the food began its march across our tables. Petrini’s favourite: tortelli verdi (what we’d call ravioli, though by definition, it seems that here, ravioli are meal-filled pasta; these vegetable ones are filled with ricotta and chard, or was it spinach), followed by equally sublime tortelli di zucca (sweet pumpkin filling) (–they disappeared too quickly to photograph), both served with butter and parmigiano–reggiano.

Coppa di maiale arrosto con patate all antico – rich, soft pork with fabulous pan-roasted potatoes, golden and tasty and speckled with crispy bits of rosemary.

Guanciale brasato con crostoni di polenta (braised pork cheeks) with fried polenta (getting a little full by this point..)

Gorgeous desserts – a kind of standalone creme brulee, a fruit tart and chocolate pudding.

Some food reading, viewing, listening

An interesting interview with Whole Foods co-president Walter Robb. The CEO of Whole Foods, John MacKay, posts a blog on the company’s website. Of interest to me and my recent reading is the exchange of public letters between MacKay and Michael Pollan, discussing Pollan’s somewhat skeptical take on the Whole Foods phenomenon in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. and the expansion of organic food production and retailing into something that rather too closely resembles the system that organics grew up to counteract.

David Szanto, who completed our course at UniSG in November, joined us for some merrymaking at the Quebec cheese tasting evening last week, and he pointed me to a recent article in The Guardian, The Organic Church Splits, about the Soil Association which I suppose you could say turns some of the same ground from a British perspective; and there was an earlier article and podcast on US organics in Business Week last October. An op-ed piece in the New York Times called The Amber Fields of Bland explains the US farm bill, and the terrifying span of its coverage, and just what it has done to food production in that country.

I’ve been watching a dvd called The Future of Food which MJ brought back from Canada. About farmers, farming, gmo crops and seed/pesticide monopolies, it’s an excellent introduction to the realities of farming today and the issues we should all be attending to in our food. I liked the dvd extras, which included a clip from Michael Pollen responding to the question about ‘will food cost more in future’ – yes, he said, but it’s artificially cheap right now because of heavy crop and farming subsidies in the US and Europe, and people need to perhaps look at their relative priorities: which do you want to spend your money on more each month: safe/nutritious food or $40+ on cable tv? He also made the excellent point that prepared food is always more expensive than food you cook: so people need to learn to cook. But they also need sources for raw ingredients: in some poor neighbourhoods it’s simply impossible even to buy fresh fruit or vegetables.

Doris pointed us to a well respected Austrian documentary on themes of food and hunger, We feed the world – global food which I’d like to have a look at someday.

There’s a Belgian-made short documentary you can view online at EUX-TV called Chicken Madness, about dumping of chicken surpluses in Africa by western countries such as Belgium, Germany, Holland and Brazil. It seems we’ve got very picky in the western world and we just don’t want to eat all of the chicken, so we sell the icky bits to someone hungrier than us. But the lack of effective licensing (=political corruption) and the dearth of functioning cold storage facilities at the receiving end results in an economic double-whammy: food spoilage and the trashing of African poultry farming which can’t compete with the prices — or the convenience of a ready-to-cook product, however tainted. But the industrialised world is committed to free trade at (literally) all costs. As one African farmer bitterly noted, would the US and Europe be ok with the destruction of their local economies in the name of globalisation? Something to think about next time you pick up a packet of chicken breasts…

And I recently listened to a podcast about nutritional food labelling. An education in how little consumers understand of what they read on the label: consumer food education has a long way to go. One telling example from the American representative who said that the majority of American consumers surveyed could not say what a typical daily calorie intake ought to be, despite the calorie information printed on the food labels since 1994 which stated that it was based on a 2000 calorie per day allowance; and that they often disregarded serving size recommendations and simply ate the whole packet. Which says something about labelling, obesity and education.