Kitchen Intution: Tasting Poetry

Stop for a minute. If you’re near a kitchen, enter and look around slowly. Use your senses to consider what you find. Look at the bulky foods: potatoes, tomatoes, fruits, greens. Look at the canned, bottled and wrapped items: milk, cheese, meats, olives, minced garlic, mustard, salsa, hummus. Look at the nuts and spices and dried grains. Hold them in your hands, if you’d like (All employees must wash hands), smell them, taste them.

This is just an exercise, but like jogging or walking, regular practice is good for you.

The crucial step: whisper the names of what you see. Let the words hang in your throat and graze past your ears. Don’t be shy; string a few together. You’ll notice that some words go together like peanut butter and jelly, others like tomatoes and ice cream. What you’re practicing here is food poetry, and it can help transform your cooking life.

Tasting poetry marries eating and metaphor. It happens when distinct ingredients, cooked together, become something unique, and delicious. You can practice by speaking out loud the ingredients in your kitchen and cooking by instinct. You may not be a chef or even a seasoned cook, but you’ve been eating (hopefully) since birth, and that should be enough training.

You might ask why food poetry depends upon words as much as taste or smell. The reason is because cooking, a uniquely human process, is so intimately tied to human language, which allows us to imagine how foods will change in the cooking process and to teach others our methods. Without the ability to say “sauteed onion” and thus predict its rich flavor, most people would avoid them altogether.

Rather than tell you all the combinations I enjoy, this is the chance for you to create recipes simply by connecting the dots. You’ll make some false steps, creating some really ugly combinations. (For example, I love to cook, but I stumble all the time. Fortunately, my tasters are forgiving.) Along the way, you’ll discover your palate. You’ll rebuild a foundation for your intuition, which never left you, but was simply masked by a culture that relies on experts and advertisers to decide what to eat. If you’d like to post your favorite tastes (like: black beans, cumin; winter squash, cinnamon), all are welcome. Just remember to invite your friends and dig in.

Finding your Kitchen Intuition

I am no dietary expert. I claim no authority here though I pen these blog entries. One of the great benefits of the blogosphere culture is the instant availability of advice and information, particularly related to heath, diet and wellness.

But there’s a downside.

With so much information, who, or what, do we trust? With so many self-published authors self-publicizing and self-proclaiming their wisdom (myself not included, of course), who has authority?

As with so much, authority depends on the person seeking it. More easily than ever, a person can find a “reputable” source to legitimize almost any belief on any subject. Whereas there has always been a diversity of opinion among “experts,” it is now possible to view nearly every angle on a subject.

The overload problem is especially tough for those hoping to help themselves by learning to cook. What is healthy cooking? How do you find healthy recipes? Where does an inexperienced cook begin to learn about nutrition in the kitchen?

This confusion is compounded by the surplus of food items available at most supermarkets. Food providers in the U.S. and in many wealthy pockets across the globe have figured out how to source foods that meet everyone’s tastes—the cosmopolitan ideal. And now with so much chatter about how to use that food for healthy ends, no one knows quite what to do with it all. So we’ve turned to take out, cheap eateries and pre-made foods to replace scratch cooking. You can find plenty of criticism aimed at this trends, most recently from Michael Pollan.

For those who still cook, or would like to start, the options are overwhelming. Publishers pump out cooking books like GMO corn (Now More Variety! New and Improved Taste!) and there are infinite recipes on the internet. We’ve lost touch with the capacity to make intuitive choices about what to eat, even if we’re committed to making those choices ourselves.

Throughout the past century, since the food scientist W.O. Atwater began publishing nutritional charts and guidelines through the USDA, people in the U.S. became increasingly accustomed to receiving expert knowledge from nutritional officials. Somehow, government rubrics regarding calories and nutrients translated into rules that govern the country’s eating and, more importantly, food production. Now, in an age where more people are standing up to reclaim autonomy through food choice, the choices are immobilizing.

To help, The Garden Salvaged (your friendly, neighborhood, non-expert blogger) will feature ideas for reclaiming an eating identity (and cooking confidence) in the supermarket and the kitchen—a new periodic post titled Kitchen Intuition is meant to be a two-way street, a place to find suggestions as well as a platform for leaving your shopping, cooking and eating tips for the rest of the community. A potluck for the digital age.

Feeding the disease

The recent NY Times article, linked above, raises a matter of extreme importance to the public: widespread ground beef contamination. Yet it fails to identify the cause of the problem: non-grazing, grain-fed cattle. In fact, while the meat-producing industry would prefer not to change the status-quo, if food-safety reform is inevitable, industry leaders would prefer e. coli testing at the meat-grinding site. After reading the Times article, one might surmise that this is the ideal solution. For industry, however, that would not be so bad. At worst, that would require all meat to be doused with e. coli-killing ammonia, which is a solution only until you remember that humans are supposed to eat the product.

The real solution would be massive restructuring of the largest cattle producers, shifting to grass-finished cattle (all-grass-fed cattle is the gold standard, and also probably a pipe dream). Large-scale producers will do anything to avoid this, because that means less money from deals with corn growers and less bulky cattle.

So, while e. coli testing and regulation is important, it's key for a publication like the NY Times to step outside the industry/regulatory framework and probe the underlying causes of a faulty and dangerous national meat supply.

Back to the desert: Changing the food environment

New York City officials have taken unprecedented steps in the past few years to evict the junk and install healthy food in areas referred to as food deserts. The latest initiative is the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, which passed one bureaucratic hurdle on Wednesday, September 23, when the City Planning Commission gave its unanimous approval. This program, along with efforts to bring farmers markets and fruit stands to areas designated as lacking better options, should be applauded.

Yet the work cannot end there. The effort to lure supermarkets to under-served areas with tax and zoning incentives reflects the city's general categorization of food deserts as supply-side economic problems. The USDA, which recently published a report on the causes of food insecurity and the links to diet, health and socio-economics, challenges that view, suggesting that the problem is more deeply-rooted. Simply placing fresh options in a food desert, in other words, may not alleviate the pressures to follow unhealthy lifestyles.  

The new Department of Agriculture report revises the conventional modes of measuring the grocery gap, adding a census approach to the geographic analysis, which tended to skew results by assuming that people in a given area acted uniformly based on average socioeconomic and demographic data. The report shows some rather surprising things:

• Ethnic minorities (defined loosely as “non-whites”) live generally closer to supermarkets than whites, though minorities are also less likely to have a car.

• In terms of sheer distance to supermarkets, a low-income family is better off living in a low-income area than not; in general, wealthier folks live further from supermarkets than low-income individuals, suggesting that the food desert phenomenon is as much a matter of too-few-options in poorer urban areas as a matter of sprawling growth patterns that promote big-box, auto-intensive retail.

• The data bear out the fact that poorer people spend longer getting to supermarkets than wealthier people. For poorer people living further than 1 mile from a supermarket, they face the highest travel times of almost any other group.

• According to the report, some people living far from supermarkets have jobs located closer to supermarkets and many of them buy food directly after work, which means that calculating food sources near homes may not be the best measure of food desertedness.  

So, clearly the picture is a lot messier than the image of a food desert suggests. (Incidentally, the USDA report suggests substituting the term "food swamp.") In assessing access to food, studies need a basis for contrasting low and high access areas--high access means there's a supermarket near. But economics aside, for many people, supermarket shopping may not be the ideal way to shop for food. Some may prefer patronizing specialty shops, where they may be familiar with the owners and where they may socialize with neighbors. Others may not have the space or resources for bulk-food shopping. As the USDA report does show, supermarkets feature lower prices per unit as well as greater variety. Still, that does not mean that anyone who does not (or cannot) shop at a supermarket is necessarily at a disadvantage.

In short, the designation of "food desert" is too impersonal to account for the many choices that factor into a person’s shopping and eating habits. Yes, the country’s eating is out of wack, but the problem is not simply a matter of supply and demand (or irrigation and seeding, to extend the analogy). The demand for good food begins when life begins—although the meaning of healthy varies wildly, it's dishonest and absurd to argue that only certain people demand healthy food because of privilege or culture.

Food choice--the keystone in the food desert conundrum--becomes distorted by warped economics (when a $0.75 can of soda seems like a better deal than a $0.35 banana on the street), subversive advertising (where junk foods line the school halls) and bankrupt cultural values (when take-out is the norm, and cooking an anachronism, in the midst of economic recession and rising obesity rates). Supply is part of it, but so long as processed-foods dominate the demands of a supposedly-free market, initiatives like FRESH will stumble out of the block.