Food for Dummies

Twenty two years ago, as I was pulling a leek from the supermarket display, an older woman stopped short in front of me and frowned. "What is that nasty thing?" Talk about tipping points. I went home and plotted the first edition of How to Fix a Leek...and Other Food From the Farmers' Market to tell people what ordinary vegetables and fruits were. I wrote it with and for farmers tired of answering the same questions over and over: What is that? How long will you have it? What do I do with it? The ignorance was mind boggling.

Most people weren't calling leeks "nasty" any more but they were still wondering what the hell to do with one when I brought out the second edition a year ago, updated to include the more "exotic" produce northern farmers had somehow managed to coax from their soil, the craze for heirlooms, and more culinary history. People who bought it were encouraged by knowing the differences between goat and sheep cheese, and what to do with kale, since they were now hearing how nutritious it is. A few readers said knowing carrots came from Afghanistan and that podded peas are a relatively new invention, one that Thomas Jefferson was madly tinkering with at Monticello, made food "interesting", which I keep hoping means more familiar and less frightening so they get out there and get more.

Not even the Taliban are as terrifying as our food ignorance. It is so profound and wide-spread that yesterday several educated and well traveled members of my California Dharma group actually asked me over lunch to teach them how to eat seasonally, meaning what could they eat right now in February. Supermarkets had deprived them of all sense of time, and perhaps their health. The discussion started over what we were eating: warm buttery bulgur with carrots, dates and dried figs, almonds, pine nuts and pistachios, accompanied by orange inflected lentil salad and fresh yogurt. I described this as winter pantry food. But I did allow as how farmers' markets would offer some fresh produce also worth a February meal.

Talk of farmers' markets turned to the now dubious use of the word "organic", then heated up when the former nun in our groups said she'd recently been diagnosed with a cancer--after eating nothing but so-called "organic" vegetables from her local Safeway. Yes. All that "organic" out of season stuff grown in South America soil, flown thousands of miles and sprayed before it can enter the country... Enough said. I wrote about it earlier.

"I don't know what's seasonal?" she said, "except maybe what's at a farmers' market, what you get from a CSA."

I asked if she ate the same veggies over and over--a surefire recipe for cancer--and she said, yes, naming the usual supermarket suspects: tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, potatoes--for lack of knowing what else to eat. She and the three men in the group were astonished when I said the simplest rule was to follow the kitchen cues Nature sends: eat cold weather crops in cold weather (kales, chards, broccolis, lettuces, cabbages and winter squashes) and hot weather crops like tomatoes, eggplant, okra, corn and berries, in hot weather, relying in springtime on wintered over godsends like parsnips and leeks plus early risers like asparagus and peas. I was astonished that my no-brainer seemed such great wisdom, they proposed I take them on farmers' market tours to teach what to eat when and how to prepare it. And this is California!

And so Kitchen Literacy, Ann Vileisis' densely footnoted report of how corporate interests spent the entire 20th Century assiduously and assertively pulling an iron curtain over millenniums of accrued culinary wisdom to manipulatively divorce people from their own instincts, and create a Medieval food dark age wherein fear and ignorance make folks totally dependent on industrial packaged food. This story of food for dummies is best summarized by the famous exclamation of Joseph Conrad's character up the river in the heart darkness: "The horror! The horror!" Our 21st Century factory farms, destroyed land, contamination outbreaks and epidemics of anorexia, cancer, diabetes and obesity are tributes to the triumph of corporate food totalitarianism. So are big Ag's current political victories over food pyramids, modified foods, drug use and getting frozen pizza sauce illogically called a nutritious vegetable. Look out! It is packing 120 years of getting its way. That's a big bang.

We can only get out of the way by getting back what they took away: our food sense. For millenniums humans have relied on their eyes to tell them food "looks all right to eat." This is why the Chinese even today want their fish and chickens alive in the marketplace: they want to see if they are lively with good health. Humans have relied on their nose to tell them something smells a little off, a bit rotten. They have relied on touch to tell them a fruit or vegetable is too hard to be ripe, too squishy to be fresh--or that meat is tender. Hopefully these survival instincts aren't dead yet.

There is of course no finer place to show them off or simply hone them than a farmers' market. Here we can pinch and smell and examine what we are about to put inside our body. Here we can find that light mark on a melon rind that indicates it actually grew on the ground or those cracks around a tomato stem that indicate it was really was sun ripened and not gassed in a long distance truck.

Here we can find out what's growing right now, so it can make us grow. Here we can ask about pesticides or fertilizer or growing conditions and read the face to face answer from the person who produced the product.
Here's where we can find accountability and thus responsibility. And probably not a very large carbon footprint.

Here's where we can take two steps backward in time to the way life used to be in order to go forward the way it should be. What a breakthrough. I think of it as "the end of mystery."