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Dog food to damned cold

Only exciting food in recent days was a batch of dog food for the returning Anton, who is equally interested in food, walks and blue dinosaurs. His food was made of ground beef, beef hearts, oatmeal, brown rice, potatoes, whole eggs (including the shells, blitzed in the blender), spinach, shredded carrots, raw chopped garlic, red lentils and mixed (cooked) dried beans. And dissolved glucosamine tablets (he turns 13 this year).

Then I jumped on a plane, leaving this:

to come to this:

And here in Saskatoon it is a balmy -3c or so at the moment, except if you stand in a vicious wind. Yesterday was around -20c with a vicious wind.

Convenience, and the interesting arguments against microwaves

It strikes me that most of the ‘progress’ towards which the western world has worked itself to exhaustion has been the quest for greater convenience, a word that is starting to sound like a warning rather than a goal.

And working against it, as I re-learn basic skills like making my own mayonnaise and pasta, and switch as far as possible to local, perishable raw ingredients – awkward as they are to chase down – begins to feel damned virtuous. I’m grateful to have the time to indulge my fancies in this way.

But it seems to me that convenience is a selfish value. Rarely, it seems, is anything described as convenient of universal long-term benefit: the convenience of the car has contributed to what will be catastrophic effects on us all. Disposable anything, from diapers to juice boxes to syringes, creates more burden on landfills, usually involves a lot of plastic, and pushes out of production the more durable versions of itself (those that involve tedious washing or maintenance before re-using). Those notorious standby switches on electrical devices await our whim with the remote control; round-the clock hot water tanks are ready for random 3 am baths; city planning makes it impossible to live in much of this continent without driving: all of it needlessly draining energy for the sake of making our lives easier, which has been our single-minded and undisputed collective mission.

When it comes to food, it’s becoming clear that convenience can be dangerous to your health. As Michael Pollan points out, food that has a long shelf life has a long shelf life because even pests and microbes don’t find it’s worth eating; the perishable aspects of foods that are removed to keep a food from spoiling are usually what holds the nutritional value (wheat germ, for example, stripped out of white flour; the fragile antioxidants in fresh foods destroyed by heat processing). Long-lived food substances constructed in the lab are not comparable in any nutritional way to their traditional counterparts. As Pollan says, we co-evolved with the carrot for a reason, and it wasn’t so that we could extract beta-carotene and conclude that was the only reason for eating one. Eating badly and popping vitamin supplements turns out not to be the same as eating well over a lifetime either.

One convenience issue I’ve been mulling over as I re-heat my home-made meals using a microwave is whether microwaves are a bad or a good thing? While I am open to the idea they are a bad thing, I have not seen proof of that. And while I may be vaguely uncomfortable with blasting my meal for 3 minutes in the microwave, I like less the idea of heating it for half an hour in an otherwise empty gas oven or feeble toaster oven.

The main arguments against microwaves, that they damage the foods they heat, appear to be based on ‘scientific research’ done by a Swiss agronomist (though usually described as a scientist or a food scientist), Hans-Ulrich Hertel (often misspelled as Hans-Urich Hertel).

My willingness to have faith in Hertel’s findings is hampered by the fact they are only reported in blogs, alternative health sites of unknown credentials, and illiterate online ravings, all of which fail to mention they were based on a study of 8 people.

My nascent faith was further shaken by one item that named Hertel as the head of an anti-cell phone organisation called the ”World Foundation for Natural Science” (check out the website!) and another that says he was convicted in Swiss courts of making anti-semitic statements around the same time he won the right to publish his ‘research’ on freedom of speech grounds.

The Skeptic published an article about microwaves in 2003 that put things into perspective, and (Australian) ABC’s Dr Karl debunked Hertel’s evidence again in 2006. But I’m ready to hear about more credible studies that show the dangers of this particular form of convenience.

Tons of Tonnato

A less than beautiful substance caught my attention in Parma last year. I would see it in the windows of delis and think, mmm, a platter of grey sludge: how appetising! And then I tasted…. Last night I had my second successful experience making a version of Vitello Tonnato, served over hard-boiled eggs to make it Uova Tonnato. We thought it would be good as a dip or dressing for vegetables, or drizzled over cold poached fish, as well. It’s smooth and delicate when properly made, and its flavours meld to a point it becomes hard to identify. I made a variation of Delia’s version (less the eggs and garlic). Interestingly, Vitello Tonnato is mentioned quite often (translated as Veal in Tuna Sauce, which does not sound so appealing to me) in the book about the origins of Slow Food, Slow Food Revolution, which makes sense since it is a Northern Italian specialty.

I also wanted to report that the vegetarian haggis worked out really well on Burns Night, even without being piped in and addressed. It’s not a million miles from a nut loaf, to be fair, but it’s not all that different in texture or flavour from the real thing either.

Went for a hike to Witty’s Lagoon on the weekend. In one of those quirks of the weather systems (and with apologies to my countrypeople currently suffering -40c temperatures) our pleasant afternoon of this….

gave way, a few miles up the road, to this:

Reading week

I have had a good run of reading lately. After finishing In Defense of Food, which I have charmed all my acquaintances by quoting from incessantly, I finished reading the book that came out of The 100 Mile Diet yesterday. I liked the attention the authors paid to making things – crackers, pasta, sauerkraut – from scratch, and it was interesting to learn what was and wasn’t easy to come by in and around Vancouver.

I have Shopped and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle standing by to begin, but am now reading Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s The Way We Eat – Why Our Food Choices Matter. The authors are a philosopher (specialising in bio-ethics) and a lawyer from a farm family. It’s got a lot to do with who pays for our food choices: if we buy cheap food, someone (maybe us) will pay, in many ways. More about that another day.

I’m also reading a history of the Slow Food movement, called Slow Food Revolution.

It’s Burns Night, and I found several recipes for vegetarian haggis, which I had eaten a couple of times in Scotland before Christmas; it was very nice with neeps and tatties and a dollop of onion gravy. Here’s another (bit simpler) one.

Food, poetry, film, school dinners

A foodie poet has told me about a literary journal in New York, Alimentum, which is about food! I had also heard that Gastronomica publishes poetry. Good to have a couple of markets for food poetry.

Went to see How to Cook Your Life last night, a foodie delight; a German documentary about an American Zen master and foodie. I particularly liked the talk about respecting food, and about waste: treat the food, he said, as if it was your eyesight, as if it was that precious, and don’t waste a single grain.

Saw the film made of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on the weekend: wow.


It made me ask myself why I hadn’t found the time to read a book that was so unbelievably painstaking for its author to write. But it has become a beautiful film, with – yes – food involved, improbable enough for a character fed by tube (significantly for a Frenchman, perhaps, one of the incentives offered by his physiotherapist is that he must learn to swallow so that he can eat normally). One of his fantasies involves a prolonged and sensual seafood feast, mostly raw oysters of course, but it looked like there were a few calimari on the table as well.

And interesting and heartening to see that the UK school system is introducing cooking classes so that teenagers leave school able to to more than operate a microwave. Jamie Oliver is credited with waking up the British public to the same sorts of issues about juvenile nutrition and food skills that Alice Waters has been talking up on this side of the Atlantic.

Journalism, food geography and a mighty fine picnic

We had the entertaining guidance of the Guardian‘s very own Matthew Fort to speak to us last week. I have been to many a talk on how to write and on selling your writing, but it never hurts to have a few stern reminders from a guy at the top, like: you can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write every day. His chief tip is to try to elicit three reactions from the reader: ‘I never thought of that’; ‘that’s really useful’; and ‘I really enjoyed that’.

One side-comment he made stayed with me: British food shops are shooting themselves in the foot by keeping bankers’ hours; the only food shops open at times when their customers are able to shop are the supermarkets, and so they win the business. A remark that goes for other places as well; but he praised Italian food shops for staying open in the evening so that working shoppers could patronise them on their way home. Here in Parma most shops open between 8.30 and 9.30 and close for a very long lunch (12.30 till as late as 4.30) but then reopen for evening trade, until about 7 or 7.30 – which is indeed convenient, seen in that light. Not the first thought in my mind when I finally emerge to do my shopping on Saturdays around noon, but I guess that’s my choice.

We finished our week with Colin Sage, an environmental geographer and crusader for raw milk Irish cheeses. He talked to us about food geography, and specifically about some of the regulatory issues around raw milk cheeses that are helping to draw a scientific noose ever more tightly round the food we are able to buy. He referred us to Marion Nestle, a name that’s been coming up in various places and readings, and mentioned a useful article by our hero Michael Pollan about the rise of a whole new evil that goes by the handle of nutritionism. And he left us with the suggestion that maybe it’s time to grow our own food.

He called on us to shift away from thinking of ourselves as simply consumers having our choices limited and being passive recipients of what might be less and less a ‘whole food’ and more and more a nutrition product. We need, he says, to become food citizens with an active role in asserting values and creating an environment for our own sustenance. Increasing transportation costs mean there will be a higher and higher cost for our food: the current system is unsustainable. We need to be responsible and involved in how and where food is sourced, and grow some of our own food if we can. He advocates alternative food networks: perhaps develop small scale cooperatives for sharing food resources. Fair trade needs to go further than chocolate or coffee, and develop in such areas as fruit that we’ll never be able to grow in northern climates.

Oddly enough I had been listening to a Food Programme piece from last February on much the same theme, where the speaker, Colin Tudge, advocated a “world-wide food club” – a cooperative relationship between good farmers who really want to produce good stuff, artisans, bakers and brewers who are prepared to produce good food from it, and people who are willing to pay for good food properly produced.

Colin Sage has also spent time looking at the structures around our food governance, and is uneasy with his findings. The bodies that research and govern our food supply are suspect: there are well publicised funding relationships between business and research (academics and scientists) and government which is problematic for impartiality: when funding determines what is being studied and how the results may be released, that limits what we can truly investigate and report in all that we need to know about our food. The ‘cosy relationship’ that exists between business and regulatory bodies in terms of who heads them (but where do you find the expertise to head regulators if not in the industries they come in to regulate?) can be causing problems again in impartiality. And food sovereignty means that countries that need to feed themselves are using their own resources to grow export crops, which are more lucrative, but create a world in which food is being grown as animal feed or fuel while their own populations suffer hunger and malnourishment. Sobering stuff; the more so when so much of it is literally echoing down this year, repeated with variations by our speakers and in our readings.

With all that on our minds it could have been hard to gather the strength for a Labour Day picnic in the park but we managed. We spread our blankets on a sunny day in a quiet, walled garden overhung by chestnuts in full flower with a few bouncing dogs in the background – and later in the afternoon some curious soundtracks (Frank Sinatra?) coming from the puppet show in the courtyard of the Castello dei Burattini. One by one we set down our wares, explaining why they were not adequate, which ingredients we’d been unable to find or adapt, why the recipes had not worked as we had hoped, why they didn’t look the way they were supposed to; and one by one we ate the offerings with delight and mutual encouragement. Even halfway through our year it can be a scary thing to share humble food among our ever-more gastronomically enlightened selves. But we all agreed we must do it more often.