ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Having spent the weekend in the environmental vale of despond, we faced Monday with chef Barny Haughton, who talked about the efforts he and his more-than-a-restaurant Bordeaux Quay are making to live and work sustainably, modelling good behaviour as a restaurant and educational body. They aim to be carbon neutral within five years, having already invested in sustainable infrastructure and culinary techniques and following local food procurement policies (“if it grows in the West Country”, he says, “we don’t buy it elsewhere”).

Tuesday, we all cooked together under Barny’s watchful hand, becoming one happy appetite making a communal lunch. We had been sent to the morning market to come in with a vegetable (or something) to contribute, and we had quite a feast: stuffed mushrooms, risotto milanese (made with fresh chicken stock), saltimbocca with salsa verde (with fresh herbs, anchovies, mustard, lemon, olive oil) aubergine towers, aioli with crudites, and a zucchini frittata.

In the process of making saltimbocca Barny explained a bit about the veal education campaign, which is to try to communicate to people who drink milk or eat cheese that they are actually forcing the production of veal, which it has become unfashionable to eat. If they then refuse to eat it, you end up with the situation as it is in England where the calves that are needed to initiate milk production are either shot and buried on the farm or shipped to Italy. This is not to minimise the brutality that has been exercised on veal calves in the past, but to say that veal is to beef what lamb is to mutton; people who eat lamb without qualm should be equally prepared to eat veal rather than perpetuate the waste of life that exists now amongst a confused public.

Friday morning’s lecture was based on a couple of readings we’d done: one on punk food culture in Seattle, and the other on fast food outlets in China (Of hamburger and social space: Consuming McDonalds in Beijing). A lot of interesting stuff came out of it. We started with Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle, which places the concepts of cooked, raw and rotten at its points; the discussion was about what those ideas represented in a counter-culture which had quite naturally (being counter-culture) adopted opposites, so was raw (vegan) instead of cooked (processed, industrialised, omnivorous) and included rotten (foods retrieved from supermarket dumpsters or stolen from markets). And for the second article we talked about it in the context of Sidney Mintz‘s observation that eating differently transforms you – so to eat like an American in Beijing provided a kind of local version of cultural transformation.

In the afternoon we had the second half of the décroissance lecture, and the theories and political actions needed to counteract it. It was a little disappointing to learn there were no simple, effective solutions to a problem that’s been growing since the industrial revolution. The complexity of the economic rat’s nest that holds it all together is not likely to be untangled with a single stroke. Too many vested interests, too many power relationships. A population too tied to the comforts, rules and products of a growth economy, and too unaware or unwilling to see our individual connection to the larger problem.

And an infrastructure that doesn’t support it. It may be possible to live – as I did for 13 years – without a car in a city with a large public transport system; but if you live in a small town, for example, how do you manage? There are towns in every country that have no public transportation, or transportation that runs once a day or less. So people who move to the country to live a healthier life or be greener often find they use their cars far more than they ever did in city life: they are likely to get less exercise than they would in a city where they had to walk between transport stops or were able to use bike lanes rather than risk their lives on narrow country roads. What does that do to the environmental balance I wonder.

And as for downshifting our lives: it all sounds good. We should be wasting less, polluting less, growing more of our own food. But do the people who live in tower blocks have that option or is it reserved for those who can afford the luxury of a house with a garden?

What do we do with all those people living in urban centres, who are there after all because there simply isn’t enough land for them to have their own patch?

Or with those who are a couple of generations beyond having learned to cook their own bread, sew their own clothes or repair furniture –which nowadays is made of self-destruct particle board? Who maybe have to hold two jobs just to pay the rent and feed their children and haven’t the luxury of stepping off the merry-go-round in order to learn how to cook anything from scratch instead of buying frozen pizzas and processed foods, let alone why it should matter to the rest of the world what and how they eat?

We received this interesting link from a Unisg alumnus: What the World Eats is somewhat terrifying when you look at the amount of processed and packaged foods on everyday tables around the world.

Well, on with the show. Today we have a first meeting with Barny Haughton, of Bordeaux Quay, Bristol, talking about culinary techniques; later in the week we’ll have the Austrian-born American physicist (author of The Tao of Physics) Fritjof Capra.

Returning from stage is always a bit of a culture shock, but come Wednesday morning we had shaken off bus-lag and were back in our places (with bright shiny faces) at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Everything was pretty shiny, in fact, as it was raining – bucketing down – and Torrente Parma was looking like a torrent of latte, not the sparse trickle we’d left behind only ten days earlier.

We met our new instructor of the week, Carole Counihan, who has us paddling swiftly down the byways of foodways, gender and the anthropology of food. We’re talking about the preservation of food cultures through anthropological methods, like interviews and observations. We’ll be trying an observation of our own in the next week.

The other instructor this week was economist Serge Latouche, who came from Paris to tell us about décroissance, which argues that civilization can no longer be founded on infinite economic growth. He picked up the thread where An Inconvenient Truth left off.

Referring often to the ideas of Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, he spoke at some length about the implications of unchecked growth on every aspect of our lives. Where food is concerned, a growth economy means the food industry is encouraged to force consumers to consume (or at least buy) more than they need so that profits can continue to grow, which of course requires industrialised food production and massive waste. You could take that to mean that if we buy into this pattern, we’re complicit in building populations of spiritual and physical obesity. And their harvests of waste, illness and pollution.

He spoke of three evils of the growth economy: advertising; programmed obsolescence; and credit.

Advertising’s crime is creating desire for products that are not needed; its job is to generate additional growth by nurturing a chronic sense of discontent and inadequacy in the target audience. A successful campaign will create cycles of insatiable demand and overproduction. The victims are vulnerable people who can be brainwashed into feeling inadequate, and the most vulnerable of those are children, already subject to excesses of advertising through television, but also through corporate sponsorship within their schools. He also singled out the mailshots that he says create up to 50kg of unwanted paper per household in Italy, with attendant issues of deforestation and pollution.

Programmed obsolescence forces consumers to replace items rather than repairing them. The lifespan of a computer is two years or so, and after that it simply stops working (or one year and one month in the case of my dead Acer laptop); the corporate solution – and the one that we consumers have implicitly consented to – is to dump these dead machines on foreign shores, all toxic chemicals and non-biodegradeable parts. Gone are the days when you could be self-reliant in your own home with a few good wrenches and screwdrivers; nowadays you can’t even diagnose the problems with most of our appliances and cars unless you have computer diagnostics. We will persuade people – shame them, mock them – that wearable clothes can no longer be worn because they are no longer fashionable. And what was I reading recently, that talked about the loss of the verb “darn” – that the very idea of repairing a hole in a sock had become passé in a culture that simply threw old clothes away because they were cheaper to replace?

Credit, he said, attacks consumers by encouraging them to consume even when they are unemployed or unable to afford what they are manipulated into wanting. He cited some depressing figures: in France, 80% of the population is indebted to the amount they will earn this year and next; Americans owe what they will earn until 2010. And, unsurprisingly, it seems that Canadians, too, owe more than they earn. It got me wondering who pays for the debt of the one in 53 American households that declare bankruptcy (and presumably go on to assume more debt as soon as they’re legally able, since credit helps to fund bank profits growth), and what implications that will have for all of us down the line if the debts are ever called in.

There was of course much more said, and I look forward to the next installment this afternoon, and some time to digest it all.

Can you really get anything you want? Alas, they were closed when we passed by, so we will never know.

I have to confess I have never been awed by French food, having had in my short lifetime eaten better in Spain, Italy and indeed Holland and Germany than in France, where I’ve had some spectacularly bad food. And I wasn’t converted on this trip. We had a lot more mediocre meals than good ones, and it reminded me of London in that way: it’s easy to find a poor meal; finding a good one is a matter of luck and/or money.

Then again, if I may delve into thoughts inspired by this year’s studies in the culture of food, there is an art and a skill and a cultural knowledge involved in reading a country’s menus that should give you fair warning about which places to avoid; that coupled with a heavy purse can keep you safe from most bad food.

All of that having been said, Dijon’s Le Piano Qui Fume was a great find, and we simply stumbled upon it, and took a second look simply because of its name (does anyone know if that is an allusion to something, by the way? We forgot to ask).

A former creperie, it has been operating for the past four years in a good central location of Dijon. We had the three course menu for a not unreasonable 27 euros per person (passed on the cheese course which I’m sure would have been stunning as well) which began with an amuse-bouche of vichyssoise. Our paths divided with the starters: the asparagus and smoked salmon salad was perfectly executed, but the cannelloni – which our generous dining companion shared – was even better, a tender family of escargot sleeping in a soft pasta bedroll. (So much more comfortable than a nasty old shell full of garlic butter.)

Then we all converged on the rabbit, which was exquisite; the diners around us who had the cod dish looked as happy as we.

Lapin: before…

And after…

And then desserts of beautiful fresh strawberries (a little waffle with bitter orange marmalade was a perfect companion) and my clever fellow diners had the even more celestiale chocolate mousse with a surprise hidden puddle of white mint creammmmmmm lurking in its depths.

Even the darling little cakes that came with coffee were charming and clever.

And oh, happy day, there was a mix-up in our group’s final dinner reservation on our last night in Dijon, so we were able to return and try all the things we missed the first time.

The sweet, tangy ratatouille that came with the cod gave me a shock: so that’s how it’s supposed to taste? And I had been reading MFK Fisher’s amusing recipe for it only the night before. The one change to the delivery was substitution of mint ice-cream for mint cream in the dessert, but it was altogether a delightful encore and a welcome finale to our visit.

On Friday, we visited the Château de Corton-André, to hear about the wines of Pierre André from Christian Ciamos. He told us first about the yellow tiled roof of the chateau, which had come from Bruges and which was one of few in the area, an emblem of nobility dating back to the power days of the dukes of Burgundy. The château itself had been built on Cistercian cellars: the Cistercian monks were the first vintners of the area and established most of the vineyards and techniques still in use in Burgundy wines.

In the fields, he talked about the moves to organic and biodynamic methods of cultivation that he and other winemakers are making. Basically, he said, it’s a question of respecting nature. Hence the roses still grown at the ends of many vineyards: they are prone to the same fungal attacks as vines and will show evidence before the vines do.

The vines of Pierre André are treated for disease, he said, not the risk of disease, otherwise you kill both the illness and the ecosystem. He and others we’d heard from during the week came back to their incontrovertable truth: that living things that are not routinely treated with chemicals (whether pesticides or antibiotics) are fundamentally more healthy and able to resist disease than those you make dependent on chemical cures. There is again no irrigation in use here: the vines are made healthier by having to sink their roots deep into the soil to find water.

We then retired to the cellar to have a tasting of wines from 2003 and 2004, and picked up an interesting snippet about wine tasting: there are three noses in wine – when it’s just poured in the glass; when it’s been swirled; and when the glass is empty.

A big excitement later that afternoon was the visit to François Frères Cooperage, where we watched barrels being made. The company makes most of its own staves from lumber purchased at auction, and trims the pieces to size in a small mill on its property. The staves are then aged for two years before being trimmed again and formed into barrels. The most dramatic moment was the toasting, where the half made barrels are placed over fires so that the heat relaxes the wood and flavours it to the specification of the buyer.

Before we knew it, Monday had arrived and it was our last day in France.

We visited Gaugry, a family-run cheese factory near Dijon, to learn about the making of Epoisses. This is one of the soft smelly French cheeses that I’ve never been wild about, but I enjoyed the tastings, and found my favourite of the three we tried was mild, creamy and firm – a much gentler taste than the aroma suggested. It was nice, though not enough to cause me to risk the aromatic integrity of my fridge in Parma by bringing some back with me, but I will look forward to tasting it again one day.

It’s a slow-coagulated, hand-salted cheese that is molded and dried before beginning a month or so of washings several times a week in marc de bourgogne (a wine solution) which gives it the orange colour we know it by.

We tried three different versions: two raw milk (one a farmer’s cheese and the other made at the Gaugry factory) and one pasteurised, for markets like the US where raw milk cheeses can’t be sold. A tip for the interested is that pasteurised versions are runnier than raw milk ones, so it’s easy to spot the outsider among these three:

We had a few hours in a very warm room at the top of the Burgundy school of business in Dijon, where Peter Dunn walked us through the massively confusing layers of names and quality marks for Burgundy wines. It was new information to me on the Bordeaux Classification of 1855 and some helpful review of AOC requirements for French wine. It was more on exposure, water, soil, limestone, marl and weather systems, and a bit on pruning and vinification.

But before that, we were subjected to what may be the worst meal ever served (and not, in most cases, eaten): the cafeteria of the business school in Dijon. Curiously, they were offering this abomination during a student recruitment drive. The first photo was an unidentifiable deep fried something that was described as having a ‘bolognese’ filling; it was served on a mystery grain.

The vegetables had been cooked into some kind of alternate chemical existence; it was as if they had gone beyond their roles as long dead plants into some new and appalling incarnation that could not properly be described as a life form.

It was puzzling to us: why had we been brought here? Was there a learning point in this mealtime? This was not slow food; but neither was it particularly fast, and it was fairly certainly not even food.

When we had completed our close observation and dissection of the substances, and drunk our cups of water, we were directed to a large bin in the corner where everything – the ‘food’, plastic cutlery, plastic plates, paper cups and napkins – were tipped into a plastic-lined void. A perfect finale: this school doesn’t trouble itself with either edible meals or recycling. I wonder what other lessons the business students take away from this place when they graduate.