Aahhh... Food

WE’VE been spending some pleasant hours recently on parts of Prince Edward Island’s Confederation Trail, a province-wide network provided by the disused railway bed.

In the cooler air of fall, the mosquitoes have gone and it’s beautiful, easeful, relaxed and conversational walking weather. And, as we’ve walked, we’ve picked up wild apples, stuffing our pockets with fresh windfalls and plucking fruit from low-hanging branches. Few others seem to bother.

Some of the apples are pretty awful. But many are delicious, their wildness intensifying the flavour. We’ve turned our freezer into a winter cache of wild applesauce for tangy meat sauces, marinades and sweet desserts.

In Scotland, it was brambles (“blackberries”) that were there for the picking… in New Zealand, shellfish could almost always be harvested… wherever we’ve been, it seems, there’s been delicious food lying around waiting to be picked up.

And I’ve long found food itself a fascinating pathway to joy.

I have Polynesian and Italian friends to thank for that: not just for some of the magical memories but also for a few liberating attitudes.

At a time when my social life was almost wholly Maori, and hangi (earth ovens) were a frequent part of it — my young adulthood in New Zealand — I discovered that food has a lot to do with relationship. It’s about drawing people together, about sociability and community. Food, not booze or loud music, was the making of a party. The beer was there, sure, and it was shared; the music was made by real people right there on real instruments that, as often as not, were passed from hand to hand. And everybody sang, everybody danced: the wooers and the heartbreakers, the cousins and the couples, little kids and great grandmothers. And everybody ate. You can’t have clique and community.

Much more recently I’ve been welcomed to Italian communities, most especially to Isernia in the Molise Region. Italian culture values beauty, style, taste and family. Here, food has a special role too. There are still rural communities in Italy where almost everyone produces olive oil, cheese, wine, bread, herbs, smoked meats… and they pass it around. So every meal has a special intimacy because the hands that produced the fare on the table are familiar, nearby and known. It’s a sincerely felt privilege to have a neighbour’s cheese, declared the best in the vicinity, on your table, just as it is to know that, at that neighbour’s table, it’s your olive oil they’re dipping their bread into.

So, as a matter of course, the courtesies are followed of presenting food at its best, at its most attractive. Food feeds personal bonds as well as community pride, and is respected whether or not the person who produced it is actually present.

And the Italian way of presenting small course after small course allows each main ingredient to be singularly featured at its best: its smell is accessible, its flavour is uncluttered, it is seasoned uniquely to enhance its best attributes, and it is displayed attractively, not lost in a heap of other ingredients. It was in Italy that I “got” the idea of using fresh green herbs by the handful and meat more like a seasoning than as hunking great steaks, of keeping pasta toppings as simple as fresh tomato and basil chopped together, of the unique voice of each ingredient… of simplicity and purity, freshness, flavour and variety.

And each course is likely to be accompanied by a carefully chosen wine that enhances that particular course in ways far more subtle than “red or white”. The campagna wines (the local “country” wines) tend to be fruity and less taste-numbingly alcoholic than exported wines… and, originating from the same soil and surroundings as the food, a carefully chosen local wine helps to draw best attention to the hidden beauty of the landscape. As ingredients often come with their own folklore as well as a neighbour’s name, a rich relationship with food, land and community is sealed at the table, and so much is shared, that memorable meals are affordable.

Here in North America, such attitudes are scarce and, even allowing for the difficulties thrown at us by our northern climate, it’s surprising how badly we eat. Tragically, despite, or possibly because of, our wealth, we have managed to consign ourselves to a culinary hell in which going to McDonalds is considered a “family treat” and frozen packaged dinners are advertised on the basis that they can be on the table in two minutes flat.

Today is the day chosen as “World  Food Day” by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. It’s a time to remember that a billion people around the World live in hunger. We can sign the petition and think, “how sad”. But it’s hard to know what WE can do to change things.

Well, we can look at our attitudes toward food: for our own sakes it’s all good if we appreciate food more. It’s important that we respect our food, and the sources of our food, and experience it in ways that fill us with gratitude. If we can do that, I think we can approach the global issues more effectively.

As it is, we’ll happily heap into a whole lot of different foods piled onto one plate — starch, meat, greens — and lose the flavours of them all under gravy, ketchup or pickles. It’s not possible to bother ourselves overly about the identity, source and nature of a particular ingredient because particular sources are erased by the homogenising manufacture and delivery of low-cost, high-volume bulk food “products”. The tendency has been to let most flavours subside into blandness. Food then turns from beauty into bulk, and we no longer get to dine; we just make quick refuelling stops.

So we don’t get a chance to be tantalised by freshness, flavour, simplicity and diversity… and this is perfect for the supermarkets: supply can all fall back onto refrigerated container loads of water-gorged chicken breasts, pork cutlets and bright red roasts of beef to be over-cooked and doused in starchy, salty, preservatives-laden store-bought gravy. Cooking (and eating) has become “too hard”, “too time-consuming” and this strips most of nature’s more interesting (and less expensive) foods from our menus, homogenises our diets and makes eating one of our society’s least interesting activities.

An oft-quoted study by Timothy Jones at the University of Arizona in 2004 found that, on average, American households were throwing out around 14 per cent of the food they’d queued at checkouts to buy, almost a sixth of it still in its packaging and before its “best before” date. That was about $43 billion worth of food that was being tossed — more than 14 times the value of the World Food Programme’s 2006 global food distribution. Almost half of America’s annual food harvest wasn’t making it to the table, thanks greatly to wastage in the supply chain. In Canada, we can't assume that the picture is much different.

Eating without interest or enjoyment, it is easy to eat too much too quickly and too indiscriminately: the ten-minute meal is as good as it gets. Instead of “eating”, we talk about “nutrition”, and get bullied into fad diets, supplements, extracts, additives, vitamins and “health” foods. We are conned into thinking about food as doses to be “taken” like cough syrup: calculatedly, and without passion. The frustration of it erupts in occasional, guilt-engendering sugar-binges, preferably involving a wallow with cream, pastry and chocolate.

At the same time, we’ve habituated to levels of food processing that ruin and contaminate the food’s original health value. When I started baking all of our bread again, using plain, unbleached, additives-free flour, I found I was unexpectedly freed from several puzzling little allergies… and we began to taste and enjoy bread again. Contrary to all of the propaganda, baking bread is NOT that much time or trouble. The most demanding part is the 15-20 minutes it takes to get your dough going in the first place. And I’ve found that the fun bit.

Our “health” regulations don’t help, effectively protecting monoculture, agribusiness and bulk handling — all of which are wasteful and energy-hungry — and curbing opportunities to add value to fruit, meat, milk and vegetables on the farms and in the rural communities that produce them. Employment is shifted to the towns and farmland gets taken over by speculators. Rural communities dwindle; families are separated. By industrialising food the way we have, we’ve produced some short-term financial “efficiency” (mostly expressed as profit-taking opportunities for “middle men”) at the cost of, rather thanks to, bio-efficiency.

There is a lot of enjoyment to be had in pursuing an alternative by learning how to turn what may be low-cost, generally unfavoured foodstuffs into unusual, tasty and beautiful meals. It is done all the time in places like Asia and Europe, South America and the Middle East. And cultures of the African Continent have an array offood preparation methods we can learn from.

                          

It can be nice to take a little more time out of the day and break a meal down to a number of courses to make the most of fresh herbs or vegetables straight from the garden, or a particular cut of meat, and let them contrast against each other. Marinades (plain apple or orange juice can be a brilliant place to start), stocks and sauces can save money and add uniquely created flavours. Planning around seasons and celebrations is fun.

Cutting loose, taking the time… and setting out to enjoy what we eat, and to play creatively with food, are worth it for the delight, the pleasure, the joy.

Eating leisurely with family and friends, and making an art rather than a chore out of preparing and presenting food open us to worlds of pleasure, meaning and deepened relationships, as well as to healthier diets, a less-stressed life, and saner, less wasteful supply chains.

Let me urge you to think Italian… and party Polynesian… and make good food fun.

The stupid Economy

“THE economy, stupid” were words that played a big part in getting Bill Clinton elected president of the richest, most powerful country in the world.

And talk about “The Economy” is the Western politician’s Teflon coating whenever awkward questions about social and environmental issues need rebuttal. There’s a “bottom line”, so the story goes, and no possible good can ensue if the “bottom line” is transgressed… pay homage to "The Economy" and you'll be fine.

It’s like Imperial Rome: once you’d sacrificed to Caesar, you could worship any other god that took your fancy. It’s a clever ruse: freedom on the end of a chain. Celtic druids and early Christians were not the only ones who paid with their lives for not playing along. “The Economy” — as a controlling belief system, not to be messed with — is comparable.

In September 2010, The Guardian newspaper in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, carried a Canadian Press story about native opposition to plans for a copper and gold processing operation (called the ‘Prosperity’ mine) to use a remote lake in British Columbia as a dump for its toxic tailings.

The story quoted the local Tsilhqot’in chief: “Our people are willing and ready to defend our lands. As one of my elders said when we were going through panel hearings, she will be there on the road in her wheelchair. She will have her shotguns and she will not miss.” The story noted that a federal review panel had found the project would impose “significant adverse environmental effects on fish, fish habitat, grizzly bears and First Nations’ use of the land for traditional purposes” — whatever that means.

The B.C. (British Columbia) government, on the other hand, “argues that (the project) should go ahead, partly because the economic benefits during the 20-year life of the mine would outweigh the environmental harm.” The story referred to a projected $5-billion “economic injection” and $600 million in expected tax revenues “in an area that has struggled to deal with the mountain pine beetle, the collapse of the forestry industry and low commodity process.”

To a modern ear, that sounds pretty clear — time to rally the legions for the cause of progress and economic common sense — and the Tsilhqot’in elder sounded simply daft: these people hadn’t got rich, they hadn’t produced a millionaire or politician of note… not even a pop star. But they did have their lake and all of their sustaining interactions with it, from birth to death, generation after generation. And “where,” you might ask, “is the profit in that?”

Well, we have a system that puts ALL of us on skids. That crazy Tsilhqot’in elder isn’t alone here.

It works simply, starting with an investment.

The investment commits money to a particular purpose on the basis of the chances that it’ll generate more money, fair enough. And who, given a choice between “more” money and “less” money would choose less?

The “more” money is good because it can fund more investment, and this is what drives “progress” …which, in turn, is “good” because the whole train of activity that’s set in motion spills over as income for people who can thereby fulfil career goals and material aspirations and get to mow suburban lawns, helping as they do so to generate new “needs” and opportunities.

The reason for the investment in the first place is the allure of its profit potential. Its profitability is determined by circumstances established very largely by previous investments. So: costly and complicated deep sea drilling for oil is profitable because of the massive global “need” for petroleum that was created by networks of previous investments — in things like internal combustion engines, tar-sealed road networks and airports that all owed their profitability in part or in whole to what was once the cheapness and abundance of oil and the unanticipated complication of emissions. The internal combustion engine changed our sense of place, of journey and time, our town planning, our communities, our relationships, the way we live and the way we see ourselves, the world.

Opportunities create needs … and they generate new opportunities and new generations of need: each multiplies the other. It is a pervasive, deep-reaching dynamic that produces proliferating points of change and adjustment and, in fact, takes hold of the direction of social and political change. It may be best to put to one side the knowledge that a person who chronically behaves this way is diagnosed as “obsessive compulsive”.

It’s not too long ago that no-one “needed” mobile phones, HDTVs or laptop computers; and there was a time before that when no-one “needed” telephones, televisions or typewriters. And, looking back, it’s hard to accept that people were no less happy then than now. It’s true that there was terrible poverty in the world’s richest nations “back then” but there’s still terrible poverty in the world’s richest nations and then, as now, it is more the result of inequities more than shortages.

When it comes to “shortages”, shortages have so far been accommodated as opportunities-generating “needs”; only now are a few shortages becoming absolute, in the sense that there’s nowhere to go for any more. So new opportunities lie in finding substitutes or ways to circumvent the particular need.

This avalanche of change called “progress” barges ahead with lusty pragmatism because the dawn of each new “opportunity” adds to the momentum of direct and spin-off investment. A financial “crisis” merely vents a little frenzy; it does not shift the direction in which we’re headed. And the frenzy is for money. Truth, beauty, meaning and wisdom don’t rate an entry on the balance sheets. Nor do long-term benefits to society as a whole, or the survivability of the planet. Money is promoted and seen as the express route to all of these other things.

As the momentum of the needs-opportunities cycle grows and accelerates, it all becomes more self-fulfilling and less considerate of external realities that offer little or no short-term profit. And the trajectory of this investment is steered ever more vigorously by those historically-laid paths of perceived opportunity rather than being led by considerations of a “better” future, or of natural life-cycles and planetary health. That some of us get more of whatever’s going is more necessary to profit-generation than our enjoyment of whatever it is that we get more of… or, indeed, our enjoyment of life.

It’s a stampede that’s dismissive of human values and ideals and is set to bring down a hail of disappointments. Forget heaven and the “eye of a needle”: it’s hard to get happy on EITHER side of the economic wall.

But there’s hope: a huge, 25-year study about getting happy, led by Bruce Headley, an Australian researcher at the University of Melbourne, and involving annual interviews with thousands of people in Germany, Britain and Australia, has found some interesting consistencies in the sorts of choices that lead to happiness. The first section, on the German data, was published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The most predictably trodden paths to misery were careerism and the pursuit of material “success”, living with a neurotic partner and — this seems so unfair, but it is a lesser factor — being an overweight woman or an under-weight man.

The most reliable paths to happiness, on the other hand, were led by the pursuit of altruistic and family values, and some kind of religious commitment.

Other studies too have shown that income is not a terribly effective predictor of happiness, and that it tops out fairly quickly.

So… maybe “The Economy” is not as absolutely all-important as we’re told.

Maybe we have better things to get on with. Maybe we should risk shaping our lives and our society around sounder value systems and better, happier ways to live.

Maybe the Caesars were mere mortals after all…

And, just maybe, those Tsilhqot’in know a thing or two.