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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

I’d heard about the charming Italian film Bread & Tulips and finally got around to watching it; I am a Bruno Ganz fan from way back so was delighted to see him here playing a depressed Icelandic waiter in Venice…why not?

And I have been thinking generally about bread, even as the price rises due to the upturn in grain prices. One thing I learned something about over last summer was bread, having escaped the horrors of Emilia-Romagna’s all-crust-no-crumb-local-speciality pane comune

(and to be fair, the delicious chewy well oiled and salted focaccia, and its puffy little cousin gnocco frito/torta fritta)

and when in London indulged heavily in Euphorium.

There is a bit of a campaign going in the UK over real bread making, because it seems the industrial producers are putting a few extras in their loaves to make them appear fresher longer. Enzymes are one thing, amino acids are another (and from some questionable sources according to one writer I came across) and there is some toe-curling new jargon to learn while you’re at it: doesn’t ‘bread improver‘ sound like a dandy thing to put in your dough? I guess the trick is to sort out which of these are added as nutritional aids and which as materials that help bread makers to produce a more saleable, longer-lasting product. The latter by and large seem to make the bread less nutritious and less, well, bread-like, while the former has had its share of controversies around food adulteration.

There’s a British baker, Andrew Whitely, who is working hard to increase understanding about bread. He feels that some of the industrial bread-baking processes are behind the increase in gluten intolerance, and that if we were to eat properly made bread from sourdough cultures rather than high-speed leavening agents and their associated additives, there would be a substantial decrease in the wheat-related illnesses about.

I’ve just bought the American edition of Elizabeth David’s classic tome on the subject, English Bread & Yeast Cookery, which includes lots of background on the history and tradition of grains, milling and bread-baking over the centuries as well as contemporary and historical recipes.

A week ago, high up on Mt Washington, the view from the kitchen window looked like this:

And down here at sea level this weekend, the view was more like this:

In other news, I got into a caramel crisis trying to make a version of bonet, but luckily found this tip sheet for caramel makers. Unluckily it didn’t save the caramel from solidifying into a solid mass. It did make me think about cajeta, though, which came into my life in my school days, thanks to kind fellow students from Mexico, and this variation, Dulce de Leche.

I had embarked on the bonet project because I have been reading Slow Food Revolution (very slowly) and was charmed by the amount of bonet consumed by the movers and shakers while they were forming the Slow Food movement. The book, naturally, lists the menus from important meetings during the movement’s early years, and enumerates as well some of the many, many fine wines consumed by what was from the outset a group of dedicated diners who were curious about wines, and evolved into eco-gastronomes along the way. And provides an early draft of the Slow Food Manifesto, which originally began:

The culture of our times rests on a false interpretation of industrial civilization: in the name of dynamism and acceleration, man invents machines to find relief from work but at the same time adopts the machine as a model of how to live his life. This leads to self-destruction; Homo sapiens is now so consumed by the cycle of production, consumption, and overconsumption that he has been reduced to the status of an endangered species… The fast life has been systematically proposed for or actually imposed on every kind of form and every attitude, as if in a risky attempt to culturally and genetically remodel the human animal…

Well, I’m doing what I can to live slowly. Unfortunately one of the things slowing me down is trying to replace my abruptly retired doctor with a new one, only this town is extremely short of doctors, and I’ve yet to find one who can take me on. Where can they all be? Why aren’t they flocking here? Evidently they are nowhere to be found in this country, as there are shortages of them across the country.

So yes, I started a bee-keeping class this week. I don’t have bees, have no immediate plans to get any, but was curious because although I have always eaten honey I didn’t really understand how it was produced. My classmates were a mixture of current and aspiring bee-keepers and honey-eaters like me.

We started things off right with a tasting (creamed, orange, mesquite, fireweed, salal & blackberry, plus a little jar of French honey– whose label said ‘product of Italy’) and then had a review of the equipment needed. Essential items include a smoker and a hive tool, for prying the lids off after the bees have sealed themselves inside with propolis. We admired different styles of veils and bee-wear (it’s white because the bees dislike anyone in animal colours – brown, black etc. – but don’t mind white or bright colours) and looked at different ways to configure and prepare the hives.

I found a bee blog to keep me interested between classes. And a blog that has photos of dogs in bee costumes (hey, is the internet useful or what?), and Bonnie passed along some information from Darryl Hannah’s website about Colony Collapse Disorder, which our instructor (a former hive inspector) thought had a lot to do with pesticide use in the US. It’s not as much a problem on Vancouver Island (though we’ll learn more about it later) which interestingly has had a bee quarantine in place since 1986, since this is a honeybee bee breeding stock area. (Incidentally, who knew that bees are currently the only insects that are artificially inseminated?)

Meanwhile, here on the Island, it’s nearly fruit blossom time, which means we need mason bees (honeybees don’t wake up round here till the end of May or whenever the temperature hits a steady 12.4c), also known as Blue Orchard bees. They are smaller, gentler and sleepier than honeybees; they do their thing with the fruit trees and then go for a long nap in a hole pre-drilled (by someone or something else) in some wood which they seal up like, well, masons! You can make their nests for them by drilling holes 5/16″ in diameter and 4″ deep, spaced ¾” apart in blocks of wood.

By now I am sure that you are all well into your own celebration of this the International Year of the Potato, but in case you haven’t got everything in place, here’s a handy list of world-wide events you can still catch. What to do after that? Well, it can be a busy year if you let it.

Europain 2008 is coming up 29 March-2 April; sounds uncomfortable but delicious. Maybe closer to home (for some of us) it would be worth checking out the Seattle Cheese Festival May 16-18. How about joining the Nicosians for their annual Cherry Festival in June? Or there’s also the Prague Food Festival June 20-26. Stavanger, Norway holds its annual Garlic Festival in April, and this year is also hosting the real life rather weird cooking competition, the Bocuse d’Or Europe July 1-2: real life meets reality television. July 4-13 it’s time for the Ledbury Poetry Festival, which has spawned a poetry trail in a Herefordshire Orchard.

One could then return to Canada and attend the South Cariboo Garlic Festival August 16-17. After that, go Really Wild in Wales 30-31 August, and then down to Chichester for the Totally Tomato Show Sept 6-7, and back up to Ludlow Sept 12-14 (unless you are going to the excellent Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery) and across to Galway to celebrate some oysters September 25-28. Or round off the month with a visit to Sweden to catch Öland’s Harvest Festival 2008 September 25-28 and the Kivik Apple Market, September 29-30.

After that, you’ll want a little rest before Chocaday celebrations on October 12, and then make your plans for Eurochocolate 2008 in Perugia October 18-26, which should give you time to nip up to Torino to catch Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre which run concurrently from October 23 to 27. Then on to Austria for Salon Suisse des Gouts et Terroirs October 29-November 2. November 14-15 it’s the Clayoquot Oyster Festival in Tofino. On November 24 there’ll be tears before bedtime if you miss the Zibelemärit, the onion market in Berne.

In other news, giving some support to world-wide moves against bottled water, Venetians are giving up mineral water for Lent, which I guess won’t win them any friends in the Global Bottled Water Congress. Won’t bother the hibernating cod or dieting teenagers who’ve just been told again they can’t skip breakfast.

Goodness, here it is March. Where did that come from?

And here are some February crocuses.

The more I read, the more complicated the world seems. Recently I’ve been reading about Omega 3 fatty acids; there was a helpful article in the Times a little while ago that shed some light on one part of the puzzle – the difference between ‘good’ (EPA and DHA) and ‘bad’ (ALA) Omega 3 fatty acids, and the tendency of vitamin supplement marketers to blur the distinctions between them.

The ‘aha’ for me was discovering that the ideal balance of Omega 3 and Omega 6 in our diet should be about 4 (Omega 6) to 1 (Omega 3). Today’s diners are more likely to be in the 20 to 1 range, thanks to the transition that Michael Pollan describes as a catastrophic shift of our “western diet” from leaf- to seed-based feeding.

The outcome is that it’s harder all the time to get enough Omega 3 in our diets, since it comes mainly from green leafy vegetables and cold-water fish, and our diet is increasingly heavy on cereals such as wheat, corn and rice, and we eat more meat than we should (beef is a special case — but more about that later).

More problematic still is the question of whether or not fish is a good thing to be eating nowadays. Between over-fishing and dangerously high mercury levels in some fish, it’s hard to know what to do. There’s a helpful chart in an exceedingly helpful article called Mercury in Fish vs. Omega-3 Fatty Acids Health Benefits that clarifies many of the questions.

Someone had told me they’d heard mackerel was particularly bad for several reasons, but it turns out that King Mackerel is bad; Atlantic Mackerel is ok. From a mercury point of view, at least. But how do you know what you’ve got when the tin in your hand simply says “Mackerel”?

I’d been shocked to read in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and again in Not on the Label about the alarming transformation in beef of ‘good’ Omega 3’s into less helpful Omega 6s through the beef industry’s switching them from grass-eating animals to grain-fed meat products. It’s true even for a cow that ‘you are what you eat’, and by eating Omega 6-laden grain, the cow’s flesh becomes likewise heavy on the Omega 6, and therefore so does the meat we consume.

By the same reasoning, we should be wary of farmed salmon – once a favoured source of Omega 3s – that are fed corn and other grains instead of their Omega 3-rich natural diet. (But then the natural diet – requiring anywhere from two to five kg of fish (as feed), depending on whose statistics you read, to produce one kg of farmed salmon – is also unsustainable.)

An otherwise thoughtful article about salmon farming by Cameron MacDonald in the Globe & Mail (Feb. 23 Focus) fell a bit short, I thought, by not discussing these health implications when promoting grain-fed salmon as the solution to the destructive practices that harvest the fish that go into the fish pellets being fed to farmed salmon in BC. But then, as the author rightly says, eating wild salmon isn’t helping either in these times of over-fishing.

Eat less of all meats and fish, I guess is the only sustainable answer. Eat mostly plants, as Pollan says.

And here he is:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWg0cCNAB-M]