In 1985-86, we happened to be geographically linked with a winemaker who worked with a newcomer in the wine world named Randall Grahm, who had bought land a few minutes up the coast, between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, in Bonny Doon. Grahm had planted a lot of French Rhone-style wines and in 1984 released the first Le Cigare Volant. We knew about none of this until our neighbor*, Daniel, the assistant winemaker at Grahm's new winery, Bonny Doon Vineyard, started bringing home wines for us to try. The chardonnays had none of that stingy sugar nor over-oakiness that had made us dubious about the few chardonnays we had tried in our heretofore brief drinking lives. These filled our mouths with butter and sunlight and honey and flowers and pears and herbs.
One day Daniel brought home some Le Cigare Volant, the flying cigar wine, a blend of Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvedre. Daniel had shown us by then how to breathe as we tasted, about the different mouthfeel of every wine. Our newly awakened palates and vocabularies discovered plums, berries, cherries, leather, tobacco, smoke, wood, earth. We scraped together some extra money for a case while Daniel worked there, a stretch for us poor college students but worth it.
Our neighbor soon became disillusioned with "working for snobs," as he put it, and in rapid succession he got a degree and a job as a professor of environmental sciences. Meanwhile, Grahm's fame as a winemaker grew, based on the reputation he had built with his "flying cigar wine," as it was affectionately known. Our knowledge of wine varieties also grew as we continued living in the sleepy town of Santa Cruz, near our little gem of a market a few blocks away, Shopper's Corner. The wine buyer at "Shopper's" had a special passion for finding inexpensive gems, and we're talking not Three-Buck Chuck here but three-dollar bottles of Cotes du Rhone, Burgundy, Chardonnay. Pinot Noirs from France and yet another world of Pinots from California. You could get bottles of Ridge Zinfandel for six or seven dollars -- what an education those wines were in how the stresses of heat and time and locale could affect a single variety.
Giving his wines irreverent names was one of the methods Grahm, the driven director of Bonny Doon Vineyard, used to stoke the buzz about himself and his new wine blends. The coinage "Rhone Ranger" told of Grahm's quest to bring Rhone varietals to California's north-central coast. Le Cigare Volant was the first of these, and now having had a case of a 1980s vintage of that wine into the early oughts seems like something worth remembering. The wine called Big House Red was an early and successful attempt at cracking the mass market and has allowed Grahm more time and money for his pursuit of his own synthesis of growing grapes and blending them in new ways.
This morning I scanned the Wednesday liquor-store ad, and no, Le Cigare Volant is not on sale (you can buy a few-year-old vintage for about $35 at our local mart), but wacky names from the list of sale wines were popping out all over the page. I've gotten used to Big Ass Cabernet and Red Bicyclette and Goats do Roam, but here is an import called Mommy's Time Out and a sparkling shiraz (a wine I have been wanting to try very much since I learned of it from an Aussie mate) called Naked on Roller Skates. Methinks the cute-name trend may have exhausted itself. Randall, what do you think?
*We have awfully good luck with neighbors, don't we?!
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Choosing to be gluten-free
As someone who believes that things "happen for a reason," I am finding that whether or not my child is sensitive to gluten (or something else), it's been a good experience to try living without wheat. I stopped cutting it out because it seemed like I was the same before and after, and when I tried it after a couple of months of strict, gluten-free eating, nothing seemed to change. So now I'm not going out of my way to avoid it, but I am still baking gluten-free things and trying to rotate new grains and vegetables and starches into our daily diet.
No one likes risotto as much as I do, but polenta works if, like tofu, you season it well and serve it with highly flavorful things (like veggies roasted in olive oil and cheese, and/or a rich marinara sauce), or if you fry it and serve it with something tasty and bright. Quinoa hasn't caught fire in our household, but I still serve it once in awhile anyway.
But now I know more about what is out there. Now we're eating buckwheat and amaranth and coconut flour and teff. We're using tapioca and arrowroot powder instead of cornstarch. Brown rice flour is a good staple, but tends to be bland, dry, and gritty when baked; brown rice flour needs to be mixed with other flours for added flavor and texture -- sweet, nutty sorghum flour is a good addition. (Now I get why people have recipes that call for six, seven, eight, and more kinds of flour.)
What I find missing from the gluten-free living sites I've seen so far is a more systematic discussion about baking and living gluten-free. A couple of organizations are trying to organize gluten-free information on restaurants, and there are lots of ambitious home and professional cooks with great recipes online, many of them on their blogs. But what I don't see is a breakout, for example, of each type of flour, with descriptions of how they behave in cooking and how they taste, with optimum preparation methods suggested for each. Wouldn't that be a great resource? It would be a lot of work. You'd have to test like crazy to get all that data, but wouldn't it be wonderful to look at a table that allowed you to find the best flours when you wanted to make pancakes or cream scones or yeasted bread or pie crust or crackers or hamburger buns yourself? You could take it even farther and test the mixes and products available on the market today.
I would also like to see a more comprehensive information set about gluten-free dining in the forms of cards that diners can present to servers, training for restaurants on gluten-free food preparation, etc. I know you can find this stuff out there, but it's not all in one place. We've had so many experiences when I have wished I could just send someone to one page on a website for more information. Misconceptions abound: "You can eat spelt, right?" "You can just take the bread/bun off." "Just eat the ice cream, not the cone." "No, that peanut sauce doesn't have gluten in it -- just hoisin sauce [which contains soy sauce, which contains wheat]." That last one is a variation on this one: "If there's no wheat flour in it, there's no gluten in it." We have heard all of these ourselves, just in the last four months of cooking and eating out gluten-free, when eating at the homes of friends and families, on playdates at friends' parents' houses, and dining out at restaurants. It would be great to steer people in the right direction. That said, I appreciate absolutely every relative, friend, and waitperson who has tried to work with us during our trial of this diet.
For us, we are no longer convinced gluten is the culprit, since many of the same complaints persist in our daughter. And she had the same experience I did when she had a "gluten challenge" and we tried some white wheat flour a couple of times: no change. I now wonder about the gluten-free/casein-free diet -- our daughter eats so much dairy -- and I wonder about eggs (we'd be sad to lose them -- what a staple they are in our diet).
We don't even know if it really is our diet that is causing our child's tummyaches. We have also theorized that she has a more limited set of perceptions (a classic symptom of sensory integration disorders) of her body's signals than we have; when she says, "My tummy hurts," it could also mean different things: "I have sensation in my tummy," or even: "I have pain somewhere, but I'm thinking about my tummy because I just ate."
But I know we're better off eating this more diverse diet. I feel healthier knowing that I'm eating so many different foods, even though I don't have much direct evidence that my overall health has changed significantly (unless you compare photos of me six years ago and now -- I do think I look healthier).
Best dinner this week: Kale with bacon and balsamic vinegar, black japonica rice, fresh yeasted bread (flours: brown rice, white rice, arrowroot, potato, amaranth, coconut, sorghum, flaxseed meal, and oat flour), tomato and avocado salad. Served with toasted pine nuts, for any or all of the dishes.
No one likes risotto as much as I do, but polenta works if, like tofu, you season it well and serve it with highly flavorful things (like veggies roasted in olive oil and cheese, and/or a rich marinara sauce), or if you fry it and serve it with something tasty and bright. Quinoa hasn't caught fire in our household, but I still serve it once in awhile anyway.
But now I know more about what is out there. Now we're eating buckwheat and amaranth and coconut flour and teff. We're using tapioca and arrowroot powder instead of cornstarch. Brown rice flour is a good staple, but tends to be bland, dry, and gritty when baked; brown rice flour needs to be mixed with other flours for added flavor and texture -- sweet, nutty sorghum flour is a good addition. (Now I get why people have recipes that call for six, seven, eight, and more kinds of flour.)
What I find missing from the gluten-free living sites I've seen so far is a more systematic discussion about baking and living gluten-free. A couple of organizations are trying to organize gluten-free information on restaurants, and there are lots of ambitious home and professional cooks with great recipes online, many of them on their blogs. But what I don't see is a breakout, for example, of each type of flour, with descriptions of how they behave in cooking and how they taste, with optimum preparation methods suggested for each. Wouldn't that be a great resource? It would be a lot of work. You'd have to test like crazy to get all that data, but wouldn't it be wonderful to look at a table that allowed you to find the best flours when you wanted to make pancakes or cream scones or yeasted bread or pie crust or crackers or hamburger buns yourself? You could take it even farther and test the mixes and products available on the market today.
I would also like to see a more comprehensive information set about gluten-free dining in the forms of cards that diners can present to servers, training for restaurants on gluten-free food preparation, etc. I know you can find this stuff out there, but it's not all in one place. We've had so many experiences when I have wished I could just send someone to one page on a website for more information. Misconceptions abound: "You can eat spelt, right?" "You can just take the bread/bun off." "Just eat the ice cream, not the cone." "No, that peanut sauce doesn't have gluten in it -- just hoisin sauce [which contains soy sauce, which contains wheat]." That last one is a variation on this one: "If there's no wheat flour in it, there's no gluten in it." We have heard all of these ourselves, just in the last four months of cooking and eating out gluten-free, when eating at the homes of friends and families, on playdates at friends' parents' houses, and dining out at restaurants. It would be great to steer people in the right direction. That said, I appreciate absolutely every relative, friend, and waitperson who has tried to work with us during our trial of this diet.
For us, we are no longer convinced gluten is the culprit, since many of the same complaints persist in our daughter. And she had the same experience I did when she had a "gluten challenge" and we tried some white wheat flour a couple of times: no change. I now wonder about the gluten-free/casein-free diet -- our daughter eats so much dairy -- and I wonder about eggs (we'd be sad to lose them -- what a staple they are in our diet).
We don't even know if it really is our diet that is causing our child's tummyaches. We have also theorized that she has a more limited set of perceptions (a classic symptom of sensory integration disorders) of her body's signals than we have; when she says, "My tummy hurts," it could also mean different things: "I have sensation in my tummy," or even: "I have pain somewhere, but I'm thinking about my tummy because I just ate."
But I know we're better off eating this more diverse diet. I feel healthier knowing that I'm eating so many different foods, even though I don't have much direct evidence that my overall health has changed significantly (unless you compare photos of me six years ago and now -- I do think I look healthier).
Best dinner this week: Kale with bacon and balsamic vinegar, black japonica rice, fresh yeasted bread (flours: brown rice, white rice, arrowroot, potato, amaranth, coconut, sorghum, flaxseed meal, and oat flour), tomato and avocado salad. Served with toasted pine nuts, for any or all of the dishes.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Mmmm. Cheese!
I had been through the cheese drawer and found a hunk of Irish Blarney (yes, really), which we had sampled and loved at Whole Foods. My little one was excited at the prospect of a snack of that and we cut some into little sticks, which we followed with some apple slices.
"How come Whole Foods has such good-tasting cheeses, Mama?" the young one asked.
"You're right. They seem to go out of their way to get the best cheeses," I said.
"Yeah. They have all these cheeses that go whoop all around your mouth," she replied happily.
-rk
"How come Whole Foods has such good-tasting cheeses, Mama?" the young one asked.
"You're right. They seem to go out of their way to get the best cheeses," I said.
"Yeah. They have all these cheeses that go whoop all around your mouth," she replied happily.
-rk
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Eleven observations on my new gluten-free life
A few conclusions after a few weeks of living gluten-free:
1. The hardest things for me to give up were beer and soy sauce (or anything with soy sauce in it).
2. People can appear to be sensitive and aware of the importance of being gluten-free and still be completely clueless. And you still have to let it all go by and not get all worked up about it. Otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy.
3. A corollary: You must always be willing to send something back at a restaurant, or have alternatives on hand at group events. Best idea: call ahead if you need to know whether you have any options, so you can plan accordingly.
4. Garbanzo bean flour smells terrible in wet batter. As bad as wet dog.
5. It's really important to have snacks around that you can eat. There's nothing worse than looking around your kitchen and through your pantry and feeling that all this stuff is off limits.
6. You must always do the due diligence by reading every label, and by knowing what to avoid.
7. We are so lucky to be doing this now, when we can bike to a store two miles away that has all the new flours and substances we are experimenting with.
8. Some people on the internet who are gluten-free seem to enjoy making you use as many different kinds of flour as possible (you know who you are!).
9. It takes a fair amount of baking to figure out what your personal preferences are.
10. I no longer cut in half or two-thirds the amount of leavening a recipe for gluten-free baked goods call for, to adjust for high altitude. I use all the yeast and all the baking powder called for.
11. I expected to find lots of bread recipes using baking powder and baking soda, but instead find that lots of recipes for breads use yeast. Yum!
-rk
1. The hardest things for me to give up were beer and soy sauce (or anything with soy sauce in it).
2. People can appear to be sensitive and aware of the importance of being gluten-free and still be completely clueless. And you still have to let it all go by and not get all worked up about it. Otherwise you'll drive yourself crazy.
3. A corollary: You must always be willing to send something back at a restaurant, or have alternatives on hand at group events. Best idea: call ahead if you need to know whether you have any options, so you can plan accordingly.
4. Garbanzo bean flour smells terrible in wet batter. As bad as wet dog.
5. It's really important to have snacks around that you can eat. There's nothing worse than looking around your kitchen and through your pantry and feeling that all this stuff is off limits.
6. You must always do the due diligence by reading every label, and by knowing what to avoid.
7. We are so lucky to be doing this now, when we can bike to a store two miles away that has all the new flours and substances we are experimenting with.
8. Some people on the internet who are gluten-free seem to enjoy making you use as many different kinds of flour as possible (you know who you are!).
9. It takes a fair amount of baking to figure out what your personal preferences are.
10. I no longer cut in half or two-thirds the amount of leavening a recipe for gluten-free baked goods call for, to adjust for high altitude. I use all the yeast and all the baking powder called for.
11. I expected to find lots of bread recipes using baking powder and baking soda, but instead find that lots of recipes for breads use yeast. Yum!
-rk
Friday, March 21, 2008
My inner epidemiologist
A friend of my relatives' wrote to me recently and talked about discovering she was allergic to gluten, and said that doctors had been telling her for so many years that if she would just fix the way she was thinking, her gut problems would disappear. I wrote back and said that is exactly what I have been learning about in reverse: I have heard if you heal your gut, your brain can work the way it is meant to. (Which reveals my own presupposition that there is some kind of bodily intelligence, a seeking out of equilibrium, if we can tap into it.)
Learning that there are neurons in the gut has set off many chains of ideas for me. It feels like things are falling into place about disease and the people I know and what so many of them are suffering from. Some of what I learned came from a book called Dangerous Grains, and an interesting film I screened last fall discussed the possible connections between diet, GI, and developmental issues, such as autism and sensory integration disorder. I have been fascinated by this idea and have been doing some research. I mentioned my "inner epidemiologist" to the friend in a reply and I have been thinking about studying this seriously ever since. It fits with some of the research I have done on pharmacological drugs and their effects. I do wonder whether we are pounding the heck out of our heads and bodies with these chemical sledgehammers when we may need to be concentrating on healing our guts instead.
Meanwhile, I'm curious about what I could do now to improve things for kids at school. One of our kid's greatest frustrations, aside from not being able to have the same treats everyone else has on birthdays, is no longer getting to have hot lunches at school. I spoke with the person in charge of our district's lunch program, and she said, "I don't see gluten-free anywhere on the horizon." All the school lunches are loaded with gluten, and the rest have cheese. I was hoping that the nachos might have been a good choice, but even the cheese sauce contains "modified food starch," a substance far too indeterminate to be classified as gluten-free. But what if, like the new "harvest bar," stocked with all the usual suspects (the cut-up fruits and veggies and iceberg lettuce salad you usually find in the lunches anyway), you had a gluten-free stand that had a selection of protein-rich, whole-grain muffins and energy bars? What if someone came in now and then and made buckwheat crepes at lunch and filled them with steamed asparagus or sliced almonds and fruit? I have long been disgusted at all the white-flour laden snacks I see at school -- the ones the teachers and parents often pick up on their way to school. The donuts, the cookies, the cupcakes. White flour and transfats galore. Ick. I wonder whether a series of talks on "Food and Mood," would appeal at all to teachers, other school personnel, and parents. It would be so interesting to gather some experts and allow them to field questions about the current research on diet and behavior.
I see kids who have allergies or behavioral issues and wonder sometimes, what if you stopped eating white wheat flour? Or gluten? Or dairy? How would you behave if your guts were not continuously* being injured by a large proportion of the food you ate every day?
*Incidentally, I love the mnemonic for how to remember the difference between continuous and continual: continuous means one uninterrupted sequence (the word ends in ous, get it?). Continual is the one that is ongoing yet intermittent.
-rk
Learning that there are neurons in the gut has set off many chains of ideas for me. It feels like things are falling into place about disease and the people I know and what so many of them are suffering from. Some of what I learned came from a book called Dangerous Grains, and an interesting film I screened last fall discussed the possible connections between diet, GI, and developmental issues, such as autism and sensory integration disorder. I have been fascinated by this idea and have been doing some research. I mentioned my "inner epidemiologist" to the friend in a reply and I have been thinking about studying this seriously ever since. It fits with some of the research I have done on pharmacological drugs and their effects. I do wonder whether we are pounding the heck out of our heads and bodies with these chemical sledgehammers when we may need to be concentrating on healing our guts instead.
Meanwhile, I'm curious about what I could do now to improve things for kids at school. One of our kid's greatest frustrations, aside from not being able to have the same treats everyone else has on birthdays, is no longer getting to have hot lunches at school. I spoke with the person in charge of our district's lunch program, and she said, "I don't see gluten-free anywhere on the horizon." All the school lunches are loaded with gluten, and the rest have cheese. I was hoping that the nachos might have been a good choice, but even the cheese sauce contains "modified food starch," a substance far too indeterminate to be classified as gluten-free. But what if, like the new "harvest bar," stocked with all the usual suspects (the cut-up fruits and veggies and iceberg lettuce salad you usually find in the lunches anyway), you had a gluten-free stand that had a selection of protein-rich, whole-grain muffins and energy bars? What if someone came in now and then and made buckwheat crepes at lunch and filled them with steamed asparagus or sliced almonds and fruit? I have long been disgusted at all the white-flour laden snacks I see at school -- the ones the teachers and parents often pick up on their way to school. The donuts, the cookies, the cupcakes. White flour and transfats galore. Ick. I wonder whether a series of talks on "Food and Mood," would appeal at all to teachers, other school personnel, and parents. It would be so interesting to gather some experts and allow them to field questions about the current research on diet and behavior.
I see kids who have allergies or behavioral issues and wonder sometimes, what if you stopped eating white wheat flour? Or gluten? Or dairy? How would you behave if your guts were not continuously* being injured by a large proportion of the food you ate every day?
*Incidentally, I love the mnemonic for how to remember the difference between continuous and continual: continuous means one uninterrupted sequence (the word ends in ous, get it?). Continual is the one that is ongoing yet intermittent.
-rk
Monday, March 10, 2008
Panisse!
Panisse rocks. I'm going to go make a fresh batch in a minute, but it is the thing that is making the switch to gluten-free baking easier, oddly enough. It is a great way to get used to the nutty flavor of garbanzo bean flour, which is a major ingredient in some of the gluten-free flour blends I'm using.
A few weeks ago, our local paper ran a recipe from a local restaurateur for panisse. Everyone's heard of Alice Waters' Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, but few know that panisse is a dish made from chickpea (or garbanzo) flour.
4 cups water
1-1/2 cups chickpea flour
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
6 tablespoons olive oil
Boil water, and with a long-handled whisk blend in the chickpea flour. Add the salt and cook on medium-low heat, stirring often so the mixture doesn't burn (do watch your hands and face -- I keep the mixture covered and use a silicone oven mitt to stir this to keep from getting burned by any spatters). Cook about 4-5 minutes until the mixture is thick (like polenta or oatmeal). Stir in three tablespoons of the olive oil. Pour and spread the cooked mixture into an square pan (8- or 9-inch), oiled with one tablespoon of the olive oil, and put a sheet of plastic wrap on the surface so a skin does not form. Refrigerate for a minimum of four hours or overnight. Cut into cubes and toss with the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil. Fry on the stovetop or bake at 400 degrees F. for 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally to brown and crisp the panisse cubes evenly.
I haven't gotten as far as making a sauce for dipping the panisse cubes, but I will; so far I've just enjoyed them as a side dish with a main and vegetable. They are so delicious -- and they feel so much better for us than french fries!
-rk
A few weeks ago, our local paper ran a recipe from a local restaurateur for panisse. Everyone's heard of Alice Waters' Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, but few know that panisse is a dish made from chickpea (or garbanzo) flour.
4 cups water
1-1/2 cups chickpea flour
1-1/2 teaspoons salt
6 tablespoons olive oil
Boil water, and with a long-handled whisk blend in the chickpea flour. Add the salt and cook on medium-low heat, stirring often so the mixture doesn't burn (do watch your hands and face -- I keep the mixture covered and use a silicone oven mitt to stir this to keep from getting burned by any spatters). Cook about 4-5 minutes until the mixture is thick (like polenta or oatmeal). Stir in three tablespoons of the olive oil. Pour and spread the cooked mixture into an square pan (8- or 9-inch), oiled with one tablespoon of the olive oil, and put a sheet of plastic wrap on the surface so a skin does not form. Refrigerate for a minimum of four hours or overnight. Cut into cubes and toss with the remaining two tablespoons of olive oil. Fry on the stovetop or bake at 400 degrees F. for 20-25 minutes, stirring occasionally to brown and crisp the panisse cubes evenly.
I haven't gotten as far as making a sauce for dipping the panisse cubes, but I will; so far I've just enjoyed them as a side dish with a main and vegetable. They are so delicious -- and they feel so much better for us than french fries!
-rk
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
What this Foodie is up to now
Here's a snippet of my fiction, which is quite focused on food. 20-year-old Leah and her older sister Sarah have been recently orphaned when their celebrity chef parents died in a crash. Sarah got the loyalty genes and Leah got the other ones.
She has always cared about this stuff, Leah recalls. She remembers going to the grocery store on her bike and asking the lady at the produce section about fresh basil for pesto, which she'd read about in the Silver Palate cookbook. Someone had told her dried herbs would work just as well as fresh in the pesto. "Just use a little less than the recipe calls for," they said, trying to be helpful. Leah remained unconvinced even at the tender age of eight; she would not have accepted that answer any more today. Only twelve years later and you can no doubt buy fresh basil leaves at midnight on Christmas Eve in Aspen, Leah thought.
Just yesterday Leah had said to her sister, "I think my days of eating meat might be numbered. It's so unsustainable." Now, over her slice of toasted and buttered monolithic American wheat (at least there was a decent sourdough yeast involved here, Leah admitted, satisfied with something at last), she wonders whether she will have to do something more radical with her life than she realizes.
With the dropping of these veils of food awareness she shares the disillusionment of some of her friends, whom she is surprised to find have been shocked, shocked to find sexism and harassment and all variations of violence against women being perpetrated out in the real world, despite all the long-ago landmarks: all the civil rights and equality legislation last passed in the 1970s. Maybe growing up with moms who grew up in the Title IX era gave us kids who could play any sport they wanted and moms who could coach soccer teams now but also rendered said moms a little oblivious to the realities of sexual politics from the playground to the penthouses and power suites of America.
It was tough, going out there thinking that the feminists of the previous generation had already eradicated those old-school obstacles and then finding out that all most guys wanted was this thing, it wasn't more than that; it was just a thing like a bracelet charm or a rabbit's foot, proof that they too could have that thing they all thought everyone else had: "friends with benefits."
Doesn't friendship normally imply benefits? Leah asked herself. And if you have to say the "with benefits" part, she figured, wasn't there something spooky about the whole exchange? So far she has tended to avoid the sex question for herself. Frankly, she's squeamish about all that; she hasn't met many men who she feels might change her center of gravity in a good way instead of knocking her out of her physical and romantic equilibrium, a delicate construction at best under the most ordinary of circumstances.
Leah shifts her attention back to her interest in food and farming and wonders what she will have to do to elevate her concerns properly, to give the issues the proper airing. She wanted to think up something radical to step up her work, to help her get her message out. Because all this being jealous of people who have a pulpit for some message is just silliness. Leah knows she just needs get up and find her own durned niche. Then she thought about her friends again, noting that she and her peers weren't exactly demonstrating on behalf of women's rights lately, the way her mother did in college twenty years ago to demand equal wages for work, even though they all knew that most women's wages still haven't closed the gap.
Leah realizes her passion is educating people about the magic of food and wine -- she has quickly come to see how sustainability and organic farming add another dimension to food, yielding something far richer and and unique to place and time. Now only was it a delicious world, but you entered into a land where you could fully nourish instead of ravaging cycles of life.
But what was the key? Wheat? Sugar? Meat?
Unlike Ms. Ask-A-Genius in the Sunday lifestyle magazine, Leah feels her government, in its adherence to another set of values and guidelines, has completely lost its perspective on this magical equation. For them, it's all about the money and political favors that can be extracted from each of the transactions involved in growing, harvesting, processing, and distributing wheat to the masses.
Leah’s food-obsessive cycles are like manias: she’s noticed she becomes obsessed with food-related notions and fads more and more of the time, more intensely each time, and she rotates through each one more quickly: the Atkins diet, xylitol, food safety, and now she’s on a personal quest to learn about the hazards of gluten. She feels weird; to herself she says she’s “a little Joan of Arky today” but doesn’t particularly want to plant that suggestion in anyone else’s mind. When she’s with other people, she thinks a lot about how to say anything without proselytizing. She figures she can’t really say anything unless asked.
She’d felt a jolt of recognition when she read a few stories someone pointed her to on a website called Beyond Vegetarianism. People who had become obsessed with eating specific things, even healthy foods, wrote about their travels to the brink of sanity and back. Leah sees how such obsessiveness could parallel anorexia in providing that pretext for controlling all input. She understands her friends who are true athletes and why they spend all their time on their diet and on fine-tuning the health of the body they use for their dramatic feats of derring-do; she can even see how she and her band and her music could benefit from some of that tuning, if they ever did hit that elusive Big Time. A personal trainer and my own chef? Sign me up, she thought.
The question that still nags at Leah, though, is why so many people seem sickly to her, so disconnected from their physical selves. She knows she’s gone through similar phases herself. And most of the people she sees in a day seem utterly unable to invest more time and care in the bodies that they carry around to represent them in the world.
She doesn’t even know what it is. Laziness, she wonders? No, plenty of people are active and overweight; plenty of people are fit and overweight. And reports of their deaths are greatly exaggerated, Leah has been learning, in her recent researches. Turns out you stand an even worse chance if you’re on a very low-cholesterol diet; you’re more prone to a bunch of ailments, and more likely to commit suicide to boot.
She keeps turning the problem over in her mind. Are people afraid if they start working out or even simply doing something that involves movement for an hour a day, “that would make me gay” or something? Surely, Leah thinks, there must be a way to help people find a comfortable equilibrium that best supports their health.
Leah then makes two of the best decisions of her life: Leah decides there must be a better way, and she decides to let her mind work on it in the background, to sleep on what that better way might be.
Leah had laughed out loud the first time she heard the aphorism that “human beings are just devices made for carrying water from one place to another.” And even a few times after that, too; the phrase tickled her so. But now she’s plugged food into that equation, and it’s helped her zero in on what felt to her like a new dimension in food, something she had not fully seen or recognized before. Suddenly she was able to see not only food’s essential ability to keep your engine running – its caloric value – and in addition, its ability to bestow health. She’d always seen food as a necessity, but what if it could be more than that? What if food could elevate you to your highest potential? Nourish you and detoxify you all at once?
Did looking at food through this lens differ at all from counting caloric units? She thought so, yes. It gave her something constructive, something positive to look for instead of something whose impact needed to be resisted.
On Weight Watchers for three weeks, Leah remember how adept she’d become at calculating how costly her food was in the scheme of alloted “points” for the day. But she had lost something in learning that translation, in the way that sometimes learning the name of a bird or tree removes you from the direct experience of that bird or tree. Food had flattened out for her in that time and for a while after. She hadn’t appreciated food much; she’d just gone through the motions of eating and sometimes cooking, but with that acute knowledge of each item’s nutritive density.
Now she was seeing food with an inner glow. Yes, she had changed her mind about the value of a lot of the foods she grew up eating. But she also had acquired a certainty and a clarity she had never shown before when she talked about it.
And she was sticking to her rule about not bringing it up, to avoid evangelizing, yet people were asking her about it every day and she was loving the discussions, the awakening in people’s eyes.
Later they’d look a little sheepish when she saw them at the store with their loaves of bread and hamburger buns and the like. “I’m still doing some research on that. Seeing if I could eat that way,” they’d say.
-rk
She has always cared about this stuff, Leah recalls. She remembers going to the grocery store on her bike and asking the lady at the produce section about fresh basil for pesto, which she'd read about in the Silver Palate cookbook. Someone had told her dried herbs would work just as well as fresh in the pesto. "Just use a little less than the recipe calls for," they said, trying to be helpful. Leah remained unconvinced even at the tender age of eight; she would not have accepted that answer any more today. Only twelve years later and you can no doubt buy fresh basil leaves at midnight on Christmas Eve in Aspen, Leah thought.
Just yesterday Leah had said to her sister, "I think my days of eating meat might be numbered. It's so unsustainable." Now, over her slice of toasted and buttered monolithic American wheat (at least there was a decent sourdough yeast involved here, Leah admitted, satisfied with something at last), she wonders whether she will have to do something more radical with her life than she realizes.
With the dropping of these veils of food awareness she shares the disillusionment of some of her friends, whom she is surprised to find have been shocked, shocked to find sexism and harassment and all variations of violence against women being perpetrated out in the real world, despite all the long-ago landmarks: all the civil rights and equality legislation last passed in the 1970s. Maybe growing up with moms who grew up in the Title IX era gave us kids who could play any sport they wanted and moms who could coach soccer teams now but also rendered said moms a little oblivious to the realities of sexual politics from the playground to the penthouses and power suites of America.
It was tough, going out there thinking that the feminists of the previous generation had already eradicated those old-school obstacles and then finding out that all most guys wanted was this thing, it wasn't more than that; it was just a thing like a bracelet charm or a rabbit's foot, proof that they too could have that thing they all thought everyone else had: "friends with benefits."
Doesn't friendship normally imply benefits? Leah asked herself. And if you have to say the "with benefits" part, she figured, wasn't there something spooky about the whole exchange? So far she has tended to avoid the sex question for herself. Frankly, she's squeamish about all that; she hasn't met many men who she feels might change her center of gravity in a good way instead of knocking her out of her physical and romantic equilibrium, a delicate construction at best under the most ordinary of circumstances.
Leah shifts her attention back to her interest in food and farming and wonders what she will have to do to elevate her concerns properly, to give the issues the proper airing. She wanted to think up something radical to step up her work, to help her get her message out. Because all this being jealous of people who have a pulpit for some message is just silliness. Leah knows she just needs get up and find her own durned niche. Then she thought about her friends again, noting that she and her peers weren't exactly demonstrating on behalf of women's rights lately, the way her mother did in college twenty years ago to demand equal wages for work, even though they all knew that most women's wages still haven't closed the gap.
Leah realizes her passion is educating people about the magic of food and wine -- she has quickly come to see how sustainability and organic farming add another dimension to food, yielding something far richer and and unique to place and time. Now only was it a delicious world, but you entered into a land where you could fully nourish instead of ravaging cycles of life.
But what was the key? Wheat? Sugar? Meat?
Unlike Ms. Ask-A-Genius in the Sunday lifestyle magazine, Leah feels her government, in its adherence to another set of values and guidelines, has completely lost its perspective on this magical equation. For them, it's all about the money and political favors that can be extracted from each of the transactions involved in growing, harvesting, processing, and distributing wheat to the masses.
Leah’s food-obsessive cycles are like manias: she’s noticed she becomes obsessed with food-related notions and fads more and more of the time, more intensely each time, and she rotates through each one more quickly: the Atkins diet, xylitol, food safety, and now she’s on a personal quest to learn about the hazards of gluten. She feels weird; to herself she says she’s “a little Joan of Arky today” but doesn’t particularly want to plant that suggestion in anyone else’s mind. When she’s with other people, she thinks a lot about how to say anything without proselytizing. She figures she can’t really say anything unless asked.
She’d felt a jolt of recognition when she read a few stories someone pointed her to on a website called Beyond Vegetarianism. People who had become obsessed with eating specific things, even healthy foods, wrote about their travels to the brink of sanity and back. Leah sees how such obsessiveness could parallel anorexia in providing that pretext for controlling all input. She understands her friends who are true athletes and why they spend all their time on their diet and on fine-tuning the health of the body they use for their dramatic feats of derring-do; she can even see how she and her band and her music could benefit from some of that tuning, if they ever did hit that elusive Big Time. A personal trainer and my own chef? Sign me up, she thought.
The question that still nags at Leah, though, is why so many people seem sickly to her, so disconnected from their physical selves. She knows she’s gone through similar phases herself. And most of the people she sees in a day seem utterly unable to invest more time and care in the bodies that they carry around to represent them in the world.
She doesn’t even know what it is. Laziness, she wonders? No, plenty of people are active and overweight; plenty of people are fit and overweight. And reports of their deaths are greatly exaggerated, Leah has been learning, in her recent researches. Turns out you stand an even worse chance if you’re on a very low-cholesterol diet; you’re more prone to a bunch of ailments, and more likely to commit suicide to boot.
She keeps turning the problem over in her mind. Are people afraid if they start working out or even simply doing something that involves movement for an hour a day, “that would make me gay” or something? Surely, Leah thinks, there must be a way to help people find a comfortable equilibrium that best supports their health.
Leah then makes two of the best decisions of her life: Leah decides there must be a better way, and she decides to let her mind work on it in the background, to sleep on what that better way might be.
Leah had laughed out loud the first time she heard the aphorism that “human beings are just devices made for carrying water from one place to another.” And even a few times after that, too; the phrase tickled her so. But now she’s plugged food into that equation, and it’s helped her zero in on what felt to her like a new dimension in food, something she had not fully seen or recognized before. Suddenly she was able to see not only food’s essential ability to keep your engine running – its caloric value – and in addition, its ability to bestow health. She’d always seen food as a necessity, but what if it could be more than that? What if food could elevate you to your highest potential? Nourish you and detoxify you all at once?
Did looking at food through this lens differ at all from counting caloric units? She thought so, yes. It gave her something constructive, something positive to look for instead of something whose impact needed to be resisted.
On Weight Watchers for three weeks, Leah remember how adept she’d become at calculating how costly her food was in the scheme of alloted “points” for the day. But she had lost something in learning that translation, in the way that sometimes learning the name of a bird or tree removes you from the direct experience of that bird or tree. Food had flattened out for her in that time and for a while after. She hadn’t appreciated food much; she’d just gone through the motions of eating and sometimes cooking, but with that acute knowledge of each item’s nutritive density.
Now she was seeing food with an inner glow. Yes, she had changed her mind about the value of a lot of the foods she grew up eating. But she also had acquired a certainty and a clarity she had never shown before when she talked about it.
And she was sticking to her rule about not bringing it up, to avoid evangelizing, yet people were asking her about it every day and she was loving the discussions, the awakening in people’s eyes.
Later they’d look a little sheepish when she saw them at the store with their loaves of bread and hamburger buns and the like. “I’m still doing some research on that. Seeing if I could eat that way,” they’d say.
-rk
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