On The Table, July 17
This week’s share
Please note, contents of the boxes can change, visit Golden Earthworm’s website for their newsletter, the most up to date harvest information and more recipes and farm news. To help your veggies last as long as possible, visit our storage tips page.
- CIPOLLINI ONIONS | Qty: 1 bunch
Beautiful sweet yellow onions. Delicious roasted (try this week’s recipe, on GE’s website, click above) or grilled. Very difficult to find in stores or even specialty food shops! This onion is meant to be used fresh, not stored. - CARROTS | Qty: 1 bunch
- BEETS | Qty: 1 bunch
OK, you’ve caught us! Beets again this week…. But what do you want us to do? Let this gorgeous crop just sit out in the fields and rot? This is one of the best beet cr0ps we’ve ever had, so we have to share the bounty with you! (No word yet on when we’ll exhaust the fields….) - CABBAGE | Qty: 1 piece
- BASIL | Qty: 1 bunch
- GARLIC | Qty: 2 heads
Fresh garlic - straight out of the field, so they’re not cured or cleaned yet! You can eat them fresh as-is, or store in a cool, dry place. You’ll notice that the dry outer skin has not yet formed. To peel, just remove the thin purple-hued skin around the outside of each clove. - ZUCCHINI
- CUCUMBERS
Better Living Through Chemistry? Book Review:
In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
I must confess that I have yet to read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I reviewed some similar books in this space last year, in the genre I’ve come to consider “Baedeker’s Guides to the Supermarket.” I have tended to think of it as a sad testament to our food system that we need so many of these books to help us make informed choices. But the sheer number of them is also a sign that people are suddenly paying lots more attention to where their food comes from than they have in decades. This is a good thing because so much of what’s been going on all this time has needed people’s willing ignorance to thrive and that is clearly coming to an end.
Michael Pollan’s central thesis in In Defense of Food is that the ideology of Nutritionism: “the widely shared but unexamined assumption that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient” has gripped the country for several decades, twisting how we think about and eat food. That food is much more than a collection of nutrients, and the eating of it should be enjoyable, social, sensual and cultural as well as, or even more so than strictly ‘nutritious.’ That it is nutritionism that has led us down the path of fad diets and ‘whole grain’ Lucky Charms. Where everyone starts taking fish oil supplements because of the latest study and the nutrient of the moment is added into everything. We’ve all come to believe that nutrition (and therefore food and eating) is so complicated that we need experts to tell us how and what to eat. This has all happened over the same years that real food has become much harder to find and the ingredients in the “foodlike” substances that have replaced it have become more mysterious and unpronounceable.
Yet evidence that the experts have been leading us down the garden path is all around us. We have spent years destroying our enjoyment of food in the name of health, and yet we suffer from some of the worst diet-related health problems ever seen. We have people who are both obese and malnourished. When previously healthy, non-Western people adopt the Western (American) diet the health problems soon follow. So there is no protective factor in being Japanese or French, African or Aborigine. If you eat like we do, refined carbohydrates, large amounts of fat and sugar, very little fresh produce, you will become sick. As evidence, Pollan presents the story of a study done in Australia with a group of overweight, diabetic Aborigines who had begun their lives in the bush. They agreed to return to their hunter-gatherer ways in the bush to see if that would reverse the metabolic syndromes they were suffering from. After a mere 7 weeks they had lost on average close to 18 pounds and significantly reduced or eliminated all the metabolic syndromes they had been suffering from.
Conversely, he presents some of the evidence from early 20th Century studies of indigenous people eating a wide variety of traditional diets, all of them healthy. We are omnivores after all. So the Inuit can eat blubber and raw fish and meat and not get the heart disease nutritionists would expect the extremely high fat content of their diet to cause. There are a number of other populations that survive without much produce in their diets, but of course they are not eating refined flour and sugar either. There are also traditional Western or Eastern (as opposed to Indigenous) ways of eating that are healthy as well. The Mediterranean diets of Italy, Greece and Spain. Asian cuisines that rely heavily on produce, where meat is more of a flavoring agent than the central feature of a dish are very healthy. The French confound nutritionists with their pastries, cheese and wine coupled with low rates of heart disease and diabetes. Clearly there is no one right way to eat, and no one nutrient whose presence or absence is the ticket to health.
Human nutrition is very complicated, and scientists are always learning more: micro-nutrients and phyto-chemicals we don’t even understand individually. Even more complex are the ways in which they interact with each other in one food, or that food combined with another food, and then heated, which changes things again, and eaten, which changes them yet again. But Pollan’s argument is that we, as eaters, don’t in fact need to know what all the nutrients are in the foods we eat, as long as they are, in fact, foods. “The specific combination of foods in a cuisine and the ways they are prepared constitute a deep reservoir of accumulated wisdom about diet and health and place. Many traditional culinary practices are the products of a kind of biocultural evolution, the ingenuity of which modern science occasionally figures out long after the fact.”
Which brings us to the advice portion of the book. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” It sounds simple and in fact it is, once the meaning of seemingly obvious words like food is clarified. (Hint: ‘whole grain’ Lucky Charms don’t count, no matter what it says on the front of the box.) “Don’t eat anything your great- grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” You know best your own family and how far back to go, but the point is that it’s probably a couple of generations. And it doesn’t strictly have to be your own family. Eating food from traditions of long standing is the point. Our mothers and probably grandmothers have by now learned too much nutritionism, and lost too much tradition, to be helpful. What I thought of when I was reading that was the experience of eating the first greens of the season from Golden Earthworm. It was such a pleasure. It went beyond tasting good, it felt good. The point is that I don’t personally need to know the chemical constituents of the chard and kale, the olive oil and garlic and how they react with each other when heated, or what it does when I put vinegar or lemon on them or all the things I’m getting out of them while I’m digesting them. I just know that they’re really good that way, and that’s all I need to know. My grandparents ate greens prepared that way, as did their grandparents in turn.
Another change that has occurred over the same years is the shift in how we spend our money. Where 40 years ago American’s spent 17.5% of their incomes on food, and 5.2% of national income on medical care, those fractions are now reversed. We now spend 9.9% on food and 16% of national income on health care. Cheap food is an illusion. The price is paid in environmental degradation and poor health. Personally I’d rather spend more on good food and eat well, than pay less for too much unsatisfying food that I eat until it makes me ill, and then be forced to spend too much money on the medicine I will need to keep me alive.
I’ve read many books about food and eating. Depressing tomes about the current state of agriculture in America. Food contamination that sickens hundreds or thousands of people, animal cruelty, the very real danger of mad cows rampaging across the countryside in rebellion against our inhumane treatment all these years… One very effective way to respond as individuals is to opt out of a sick food system as much as possible. And as Michael Pollan points out, it is now more possible than it has been for a long time to do that. Leave the supermarket behind. Get as much of your food directly from farmers as you possibly can, through CSAs and farmers markets. Grow your own if possible. I found that this book had more of an effect on how I think about food than many others, no doubt due to the generality and simplicity of the framework he suggests. “Don’t eat anything that doesn’t rot.” “Eat slowly.” “Pay more. Eat less.”
So in the spirit of traditional eating, I will offer a zucchini recipe from an old cookbook written by an artist about the ways Italians feed their families. It was published in 1971, when the handbasket had only just begun the trip to the culinary hell we have been creating for ourselves with chemistry and science. It is by Edward Giobbi and the title is “Italian Family Cooking.”
Pasta Con Zucchini (Pasta with Zucchini)
from Italian Family Cooking by Edward Giobbi
- 2 cups sliced zucchini
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 3 tablespoons butter
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 cup zucchini flowers, cut up, optional
- 2 tablespoons chopped parsley
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper
- 1 pound pasta
- Grated Parmesan cheese
Saute zucchini in oil and 2 tablespoons of the butter over high heat. When it begins to brown, add onions, zucchini flowers, parsley, salt and pepper to taste. Lower heat and simmer for about 10 minutes. Cook any pasta you like until it is tender but firm to the bite, al dente. Add remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and toss well. Add zucchini mixture and toss well. Serve hot, with grated cheese, to 4 to 6. (I noticed that the ingredient list calls for 3 tablespoons of butter and the directions call for 4. Use your own taste to guide you to the greater or lesser amount of butter.)