ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

There’s obviously something in the air right now; there was a well-portioned segment of the BBC program You and Yours about consumer food waste on Wednesday.

The core of the discussion was a recently released survey by the UK recycling and waste management organisation WRAP, that revealed that about one-third of food people buy in Britain is thrown away; half of it is edible. (That doesn’t include the food that is wasted by consumers when eating at restaurants, and by the food service industry itself, a whole new discussion I’d like to hear about.)

The survey suggested a lot of waste is down to several controllable factors: fridges may not be set cold enough to keep the food properly; people do not eat perishables quickly enough; and they simply buy more than they can eat, because they shop without planning or making shopping lists, and they shop for informal eating rather than prepared meals. Food retailers can manipulate us into buying more than we need through over-packaging, or by discounts or two-for-one deals.

The waste is not simply financial, it is also environmental, since the food industry alone produces about a quarter of the world’s total carbon emissions. Consumer waste is compounded by supermarket waste – when we pick through the shelves to find the freshest products by their sell-by dates, we contribute directly to this of course – and by industrial waste at the farming and factory end of things.

As we’ve certainly heard time and again this year, the speakers agreed that one of the big underlying causes of waste is the cheapness of our food; and I know it doesn’t feel all that cheap when you look at the prices in the shops and compare them with prices a few years ago, but it is a relative thing. Where, Lord Haskins observed, fifty years ago we used to spend thirty percent of our disposable income on food, we now spend less than ten percent. It’s the same as cheap clothes, he said: if it’s cheap, we don’t value it, and it becomes disposable. (I’ll bet there are roughly equal numbers of people in this world today making crumbs and croûtons out of stale bread as there are darning holes in socks that are otherwise wearable.)

Food historian Ivan Day pointed out that there’s a whole branch of British cuisine, a pudding tradition, based on recycling bread: he cited treacle tart, bread and butter pudding, and a Tudor pudding called whitepot that’s made with cream and dates and cinnamon. We don’t make the time to make those traditional puddings nowadays, he said. We’d rather chuck the bread and buy our puddings from the supermarket.

The speakers also agreed that there isn’t as much common knowledge about food nowadays, which means they aren’t always sensible about what they throw away and how long to keep things. Honey keeps for years, but industry is obliged to date it. Yogurt was mentioned as a food that was created in order to stabilise milk for storage; its use-before date can be safely ignored if you keep it refrigerated and use your nose and eyes to see if it’s still edible. If it’s not bubbling or mouldy, it’s safe to eat, it just might not taste its best. They talked about salad bags: pre-washed salads and vegetables are usually washed in chlorine and the water that remains in the bag can turn the produce swampy if you don’t eat it promptly.

Interestingly, WRAP’s CE Liz Atkins said the survey revealed that about ninety percent of consumers don’t think they are wasteful; a further third simply don’t see food waste as a problem. She suggested that if we got control only over the food we could have eaten, it is equivalent environmentally to taking one in five cars off the road. We’re all at fault, she said, it does matter, and we can make a difference individually. Now let’s start with that list…

Having suddenly realised the end is nigh, or at least that there is a risk all the food in our cupboards might not get eaten before the end of July, I was moved to take out a bag of soja nera and apply it to a recipe for Black Bean Soup. Anything with oranges in it sounds good to me, happy here in orange heaven. And I am becoming well known for my interminable soup making, I think.

So I dumped the beans in a pot full of water and soaked them for about 8 hours as is my custom. Then I drained them and put them in another pot of water and cooked them for about two hours. They were cooked, but they weren’t all that soft, so I cooked them a while longer. And another while. And another. Four and a half hours later they were still stubbornly al dente. I sent a couple of electronic cries for help into the ether. I got sympathy and solidarity by return.

I know I’ve cooked black beans to a comforting semi-sludgy texture before, but I think I’ve also had this problem before. And clearly, so have other people. Something in my memory said it’s a problem to cook them with salt, it keeps them from mushing up, but I hadn’t added any salt; I wondered if it might be the weird mineral content of Parma’s water (Acqua di Sulfur more than Acqua di Parma most days). What should I do? I toyed with the idea of draining the beans and cooking them a while longer in some distilled water, but I wondered if their structure had already been changed irreversibly. So I left them sulking overnight in their cooking water.

In the morning they were still firm and shapely. I turned to Harold McGee, in one of my classmates’ favoured texts, On Food & Cooking, and there was the answer! He describes a condition called Persistently Hard Beans, in which they can take an abnormally long time to soften or never do. He says there are two possible reasons: in one, caused by growing conditions on the farm (high temperature, high humidity and low water supply), the outer seed coat gets very hard, preventing water from moving into the interior. The other is a fault from storage: beans that were normal when harvested undergo a structural change if stored for long periods in warm temperatures and high humidity – exactly Parma’s summer climate.

There is no cure for either condition, alas, but he says you can avoid the first by making sure you pick through and discard the smallest beans. In the second case you cannot identify the culprits until you have tried to cook them. After that, the unsoftened beans will be (obviously) smaller than their properly hydrated companions and you can pick them out if you have the time and patience.

Or you can serve them on rice to really hungry guests and hope nobody notices, for la fame muta le fave in mandorle (hunger makes hard beans sweet). And if you serve enough wine with them you will know that il vino è poesia in bottiglia (wine is bottled poetry). And by the end of the evening when you all look like a sack of old beans, you can all beam at one another and observe gli amici sono come il vino: migliorano con l’età (friends, like wine, get better with age). Amen to that.

So I’ve had this boring technology drama going on for a couple of months now that I thought I would share with the world.

I came to Italy with an Acer Aspire laptop I bought in Canada last March, and which I hoped would get me through the course. But our apartments here are not equipped with phones, so most of us rely on skype and email for our communication with the outside world. Although I was enchanted by the ease and economy of skype, I got increasingly frustrated by the sound of the laptop’s fan cutting into my calls. Did you just turn on your hairdryer? my callers asked when it roared spontaneously into life through great chunks of every conversation. Nobody else in the class seemed to be having this problem, and eventually I found some reports online that lead me to conclude Acers just have stupidly loud fans.

So I decided enough was enough, I’d just buy a whole new laptop, which I did immediately before our trip to Puglia, and hallelujah, my shiny new HP Pavilion works much better for phone calls, and is smaller, lighter, faster to boot. But because I had to buy it in Milan, the only operating system on offer was Windows Vista, which is far from trouble-free, it seems, and the only language (and keyboard) the store could supply was, well, Italian. So I am coping with new laptop, new operating system, new keyboard and new language. Yeeps.

I spent some eight hours last weekend attempting in vain to download a Vista driver for my mickey mouse 2 month old printer and finally gave up. All right, I thought, I can just use Old Laptop for printing. And I remapped New Laptop’s Italian keyboard to one I’m more familiar with and thought it would be good discipline for my touch typing skills. A pain, but it could be worse. Meanwhile, since I had given up as well trying to understand error, update and installation messages in Italian, I’d ordered an English language operating system and Office package (just cannot get on with MS Works which won’t read the Word or Excel documents I need to use for coursework and daily life, and I miss Outlook). Life seemed cumbersome – and expensive! – but generally bearable.

Then, literally moments before the food technology exam commenced on Friday, for which I was using Old Laptop, an intermittent problem resurfaced. Old Laptop decided it would no longer recognise its power source and informed me it would give me 2.46 hours of battery life — for a 3.5 hour exam. I scrambled to copy the files I’d need onto a flash drive and then managed (thank you Unisg) to borrow a machine from the university for the exam.

Later that evening, at the end of a nail-biting and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to copy photographs, iTunes and some other brutally large and essential files onto a cd, during which time battery life declined to about 12 minutes, I closed the lid for the last time. Yesterday morning I tucked Old Acer under my arm and took it down to the computer repair shop.

Which was closed, of course, because it was Monday morning. So, back I went on Monday afternoon.

Non parlo molto bene Italiano, I told the guy behind the counter, my ritual opening line here. E non parlo inglese, he replied. So off we sailed into our murky voyage of techno-linguistic discovery. By the merest fluke, I did have my purchase receipt with me, but for some mysterious reason it shows that I bought the laptop on 3-Mar-00 (but luckily the credit card receipt says 06). So I thought the warranty was expired, but guy behind the counter thought it should be a two year deal, and having confirmed it’s the laptop not the power cable that’s at fault, he’s shipped it to Acer in Milan.

At least that’s what I think he said. Two years was mentioned, certainly, and Milan, but I may have invented the rest. Perhaps he said that it would take me two years to get it back from the factory in Milan. Perhaps he said the factory in Milan would be charging me two years’ salary to look at it. Or perhaps he said I have the vocabulary of a two year old and his nephew in Milan speaks better Italian than I do. He declined an email address from me, so I can’t wait for the call on my cell phone where he explains what the deal is…

I read somewhere that on this day in 1755, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born in France. He wrote The Physiology of Taste, about the pleasures of food, published in 1825 when he was just 69. I should like to add that a couple of centuries later, on this day in 1955, my dear departed parents were married; it was their enduring joke on the world to elope on April Fool’s day. The last anniversary they celebrated was their 46th, shortly after my return to Canada in 2001.

We wrote our much anticipated food technology exam on Friday which got me thinking, as I perused my notes in the lead-up, about how learning really takes place, particularly in an aging and over-full human brain. The information actually retained probably had more to do with affection for the instructor than interest in the subject. For example I’m not sure, having supposedly completed the course, that I even know what is meant by the term sensory analysis; my understanding of the term is all tangled up in my enduring incomprehension about statistical methods which appear to have been the main topic under discussion (for many reasons it was hard to know really what in that class was being discussed). On the other hand, I feel sound in my understanding of olive oil technology which included harvesting and milling operations as well as chemical make-up and regulatory issues around extra-virgin olive oil. Reading my notes again brought the pleasures of the class back to mind in a way that doesn’t normally happen, I think.

Our much-loved instructor in that class, Sandro Bosticco, who had also led us gently, kindly and knowledgeably through a couple of wine tasting classes last week (one of which I wretchedly had to miss, felled by another short-lived stomach bug), reappeared to lead us through the terrifying expanse of the Vinitaly show yesterday, which also features an olive oil exhibition, Sol. He took us through an oil tasting at a producer who was promoting a high quality blend of extra-virgin olive oils, called Gemini, which successfully combined the punch of Tuscan with the flavours of Sicilian. He then led us back into the Tuscan wine pavilion where we sampled some Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Which of course is not to be confused with wine from the Montepulciano grape, as earlier explained by our Montepulciano-growing friends in Le Marche).

The rest of the day was an exhausting but pleasurable tour of a few select producers under the wing of our campus director, Carlo Catani, no slouch in the wine area himself, particularly when paired with another distinguished varietal, the university’s director Vittorio Manganelli. We lunched in the Puglian pavilion and saw again our old friends orecchiette and agnello, but the best thing on my plate was the starter, a lovely little timbale of melanzane bathing in a pool of fresh tomato sauce and jauntily garnished with shreds of cheese and a chapeau of basil leaf.

Would you go to a wine tasting in this pavilion?

..who speaks of her time in Dijon, that started in 1929:

It was there that I learned it is blessed to receive, as well as that every human being, no matter how base, is worthy of my respect and even my envy because he knows something that I many never be old or wise or kind or tender enough to know.

from Long Ago in France.

She speaks tellingly about her fierce and frugal landlady, Madame Ollangnier, who scours the markets and badgers the food sellers into handing over the lamest and haltest of edible foodstuffs which she then transforms into excellent meals for M.F.K. and her other lodgers.

So having read that last night I was delighted by the coincidence of this morning’s speaker, Andrea Segre of the University of Bologna, who told us a fabulous tale about his students’ food economics project that has blossomed into a many-fingered enterprise: Last Minute Market began as a way to turn the horrific waste of supermarket surpluses – those imperfect, unwrapped or dented items the ordinary consumer won’t touch with a ten foot euro – into nutritious meals for the local needy.

More food economy in the afternoon with Riccardo Vecchio who walked us through the ins and outs of PDO (Protected Denomination of Origin) and PGI (Protected Geographical Indication) marks on foods, from a marketing and economic point of view. They’re not just in Italy, not just in Europe or the UK, but potentially all over the place now. And he gave us a briefing on farmers’ markets, which are new to Italy (being gradually brought back in after they died out here around 1900, that is). There are plenty of food markets in Italy, it’s true, but the stall-holders are typically not farmers or food producers selling their own wares.

And now, back to my books. Food technology exam tomorrow. More later.