I'm learning to eat again.
I've had the remarkable fortune in my life to be challenged by food. I worked for a short time for a fascinating man who would go on to become a prominent personality in the world of foodie television. I was pretty much a disaster at that point in time, a neurotic woman in my mid-twenties with a catastrophe of a marriage, three tiny children and some chronic health issues. I didn't have time to think about anything, and so it might never have occurred to me that I was bumbling through life pretty blindly. In my mind, I was doing anything I had to do in order to survive the challenges of my situation. I hadn't bothered to think about what it takes to thrive.
This was before the ubiquity of thought-provoking food shows, at a time when giant freeway-side chain restaurants were easily confused by the masses for fine dining, and my exposure to real culinary culture was limited. TV Food Dude was, not surprisingly, the first person with whom I ever really discussed the implications of cuisine. I had always enjoyed flavors and admired quality preparation, but those conversations helped me to see food as something more. It was a perfect lens through which to view a culture, or a person. The rituals involved in selecting, preparing, and sharing fare can offer insight like no other into the world around us.
My diet at the time was as inconsistent as my life. Some days, I'd put tremendous effort into preparing a good, healthy meal for myself and my family. Other days, I'd load up on McSnacks and ramen noodles in an effort to finish the task of feeding myself in the quickest and easiest way possible. But that's not what I wanted.
I left that job, and later that marriage, in part because I realized that I couldn't make myself healthy without a pretty dramatic whole-life turnaround. And while I built the beginnings of a career for myself, I stumbled into another job that would teach me about the world, through the filter of food.
It was at a tiny cafe in a tiny suburb of Minneapolis, and I waited tables on and off there for almost five years as a side job while I worked toward The Dream Job. The menu wasn't overly ambitious, but every one of its simple entrees was creative, authentic and well-executed, a perfect reflection of the restaurant's owners.
The first winter that I worked there brought snow almost every Monday, like clockwork, hard enough to slow business to a crawl. To pass the time, The Boss and I developed a tradition of trying to perfect the grilled cheese sandwich--he'd cook, and I'd eat. In the years since that winter, I have had the opportunity to dine at some of the finest restaurants in the country, and to be honest, there's not much that tops creamy, melted chevre on flawlessly grilled whole wheat bread, served with thinly sliced pears and a dallop of date reduction. I learned a lot from that sandwich--that flashy presentation is cool and all, but there's no substitute for good technique and honest, real ingredients.
I'm a little bit older now. I've taken some of those lessons to heart, I think, and for the most part I'm pretty sure that the ingredients that I'm offering the world are of a higher quality than those I used to share. But every now and again, there are reckonings. And so I'm learning to eat one more time.
The dark side of my exposure to the world of food is that I've accidentally learned more about food production in this country than I ever wanted to know. Some of it is pretty common knowledge--our food is making us sick, and fat. But I also know that factory farm conditions are deplorable, that our present methods of food production represent an enormous portion of our country's dependence on foreign energy, that our approach to food in the United States is creating shortages in sustainable food supply elsewhere in the globe. And yet, I've maintained that eating "pretty healthfully" was good enough.
I got called out at the Minnesota State Fair. By a cow.
In the dairy barn, a beautiful black cow with curly, fluffy fur made eye contact with me from her display stand. She looked awfully soft. I gave her a good pat on the neck, and then a scratch behind the ears. And then she did it. She dropped ecstatically to her knees, and she leaned into my legs so I could scratch her more effectively. Like a great big puppy dog, she laid at my feet for several minutes, basking in whatever attention I could give her. It was hilarious.
Also, it was a moment of truth. At that moment, the idea of eating beef at all was off the table for the short term. She just reminded me too much of my own big, black puppy. But the idea of a creature like her, confined to a miserable, diseased life on a feedlot seemed unthinkable on the long term, as well.
I have no illusions about the facts that we are part of a food chain and that humans are omnivorous. But we have become such a production-based society that we have forgotten about everything but the bottom line. We've forgotten about the honesty of our ingredients.
The truth is that Americans consume about three times more protein than our omnivorous little bodies require, and that our methods for the production of this quantity at a price we can afford are dangerous both to our bodies and to the planet. While it's impossibly to accurately determine whether there are causal relationships between food additives and any number of diseases that are on the rise, we absolutely understand the relationship between our agricultural practices and the recent prevalence of outbreaks of foodborne illnesses like E. Coli O157:H7, and that the vast majority of water contamination in this country happens as a result of industrial agriculture. We know that it is better for our bodies and for the earth to consume livestock that is raised in ways more consistent with nature. And yet, I've been more or less pretending not to know, and eating in ways that were in direct opposition to my conscience.
Fine, Damn Cow. You win.
I'm on a temporary hiatus from meat, until I can do enough research to figure out the best place to source humanely and responsibly produced livestock. It's been two and a half weeks, though, and truth be told, I don't miss meat even a little bit. It's actually been a fun challenge to prepare meals that I feel good about, and that my kids can get excited about. I'm paying more attention to properly nutrition than I ever have, and mastering ingredients and flavors to which I'd never paid enough attention. I have much more energy. I dropped a pants size in two weeks, all the while stuffing my face. It's frankly pretty awesome.
Farmers' markets have always been among my favorite places, and Waffle Guy and I stopped by a small market this morning. It's a good time of year for this sort of shopping, and we left with bag after bag of gorgeous produce: peppers, leeks, parsnips, eggplants, beets, scallions. On the way home, we giggled about the quantity we'd purchased, and realized we'd need to share in order to consume it all before it went bad.
We invited my parents over for a Harvest Feast, and set about to cooking a marvelous meal with the kids. We had warm oatcakes with garlic-chive creme fraiche, served with a country tomato soup made with parsnips and leeks. On the side, there were mushrooms with caramelized onions and fresh basil; thinly sliced zucchini sauteed with white wine and mint; and roasted golden beets in a maple-balsamic glaze. It was some of my best kitchen work to date. I'm kind of giddy about it.
Best of all, everyone had a part in it. The Littlest Waffler rolled out the dough for the oatcakes, while her big sister seasoned the soup with salt, pepper, and a hint of nutmeg. Waffle Guy put his formidable knife skills to use, slicing and dicing furiously. Mom sliced mint leaves into thin, perfect ribbons. I was the queen of the burners. It was magic.
I watched my family as they gathered around the table to eat, and I remembered those conversations with TV Food Dude. If it's true that you can learn a lot about people by what and how they eat, then I was proud of who we were as a family tonight--laughing, talking, savoring, contributing. We were alive and appreciative and real.
Waffle Guy could not stop talking about how good the food was, comparing items in the meal to some of the more notable dishes we've shared in restaurants. It's likely that he's awfully biased because I'm his wife, but I will say this: the technique was good, the ingredients were honest, and it was made with love.
I'm grateful today for food, and for the people who taught me to understand what it means. And I'm grateful for the chance to learn to eat all over again.
