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Grist special series on food and farming
Grist
You know where babies come from, sure — but do you know where Tater Tots come from? In this two-week series, we’ll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of your very own diet.
Everybody eats, every day, but we tend to gloss over the details. Things like the work that really goes into putting food on our plates, the environmental impacts of food production, and how we can make the best choices — for our bodies and the planet — when it comes time to chow down.
So take a seat at the Grist table as we venture to the Farm Belt to talk with farmers, economists, and chefs; check in with leading writers like Michael Pollan and Elizabeth Royte; and give you a chance to ask for advice from the folks at Sustainable Table, a national group that connects shoppers with local suppliers. We’ll also take a close look at confined-animal feeding operations and at a sustainable-food revolution in Iowa, share some tasty recipes, and even give you a chance to quiz yourself on your edible IQ.
By the end of the series, we hope you’ll feel stuffed (but not in that uncomfortable Thanksgiving way) with new ideas and inspiration for putting good food on your table.
Bon appetit!
- What’s Your Edible IQ? An exclusive Grist quiz
- Your Food Doesn’t Come From the Store: A journey into the heart of industrial agriculture
- A Tale of Two Counties: In the farm belt, a look at the extremes of agricultural production
- Images of a sustainable-food revolution: An audio slideshow
(9 October 2007)
More articles should be appearing during the next few days. Go to original for the latest. -BA
Heart and Soul
You Grow Up, Change Your Life, Travel A Million Miles. Why Does the Spirit of This Food Stay With You?
DeNeen L. Brown, Washington Post
I never thought I would end up here, barefoot in my kitchen, humming to gospel music on a Sunday afternoon. My hands wrinkled from water. My belly pressed against the kitchen sink. I shift my weight and go between counter and refrigerator, moving around my kitchen with the confidence of womanhood, pulling out pans and cutting boards, imitating the women of my childhood.
[See Recipe: Collards With a Dash of Soul]
Life is funny how it takes you back. Despite all the places you’ve been. Sometimes it stops you and reminds you of the lessons you were once taught. Tells you not to forget where you came from.
And you end up in the kitchen with your memories. And the water is running, and you are washing a chicken, the way Mother did. Dumping cups of flour in a brown bag, shaking in seasoning, salt and pepper, heating up oil in a cast-iron skillet. Waiting for the oil to get hot, the way Mother instructed. Dropping in just a touch of flour to watch it bubble. Coating the chicken with the flour and placing the chicken in the oil, tenderly, piece by piece. Jumping back from the oil as it leaps from the skillet, chasing you like it did when you were a little girl. And from a distance, you watch the chicken fry until it turns brown. Golden.
(10 October 2007)
Afro-American chef Bryant Terry has incorporated some Southern recipes into the popular cookbook Grub that he co-authored.
In our hyper-rational discussions about food miles, it’s easy to forget the importance of memories and emotions associated with food. See next item for more on this vital connection.
This article includes a sidebar on collards. Traditional Southern cooking emphasized collards and greens for good reason. They’re a **magical** group of vegetables is due for re-discovery.
Collards, kale, beet greens, and swiss chard, for example, are easy to grow and are about the most nutritious vegetables around. In our area (SF Bay Area), swiss chard grows like a weed. I grew tree collards which shot up to about seven feet and produced abundantly for years.
They can be cooked in a number of ways. One way is to cut out the stems, place several leaves on top of one another, roll them up like a cigar, then cut in about 3/4-inch slices. You can parboil, boil, steam, put in soups, stir-fries. I like them mixed with onions, garlic and olive oil. Maybe a few little chunks of bacon.
They may take a little while to get used to, but if prepared well they are addictive. Collards, corn bread, a little pork. Mmmm!
P.S. Don’t throw out the ribs of Swiss Chard. In France, they are considered the best part. -BA
Rent-a-Grandma
Grandmother’s kitchen: Keepers of culinary roots teach a generation lost to cooking
Olivia Wu,, San Francisco Chronicle
…Kimberly Tran is hot, hip and wholly 20. In transit from teenager into adulthood, she manifests the two cultures perfectly. She curves into straight- cut jeans and her midriff bares a smooth swatch of flesh. She giggles, tosses her long black hair, and punctuates her speech with “like, ya know?” Her right hand, when free, is glued to a shiny camera cell phone. She holds a job; she goes to school. She wonders what she’ll do when she grows up.
She seems your typical American girl until you ask about what she eats, and what she wishes she could cook. Her answer is far from typical. “Thit kho, ” she replies. That’s braised pork belly. In the same breath she names two more dishes — stuffed squid and crab soup.
She grew up on these dishes, but she’s never made them. Born in Hayward, Tran is Vietnamese, with one-eighth French mixed in. A culinary school graduate, she can craft a beurre blanc and whip up a souffle. But she can’t stuff squid with glass noodles and pork, because, like many Americans of her generation, she hasn’t made the time to learn, and had no one to learn from.
Tran is the ideal first candidate for The Chronicle Food section’s Rent-a- Grandma series.
Grandmothers, mothers, aunts — they’ve been the gatekeepers of home- cooked traditions. By lurking at their elbows, generations have learned foodways and more.
These women presided over warm, cluttered kitchens where aromas arose, penetrating our pores, enveloping us as we slept. They dispensed drinks, snacks, band-aids, reminders (to do homework) and advice. Occasionally, they would let fly the sharp word that could instantly still us. We carry within us the music of chatter in grandma’s speech and the perfume of her stove. Grandmas were comfort, safety. Roots.
Our bellies filled, we were sent to play, to study, to sleep. Our invisible tape recorders, though, might also have captured vivid memories of the hows and whys of cooking — perhaps in the tart taste of a peach cobbler, perhaps in the earthy, bone-marrow-y noseful of a meat stew, in the hiss of frying fish, the touch of soup slurped on lips. Grandmothers linked us to our heritage.
Tran has never lived near either of her grandmothers. She is a first- generation American whose father emigrated to the United States from Vietnam in 1980. When Tran was born in 1983, one grandmother was in France, the other in Vietnam.
That’s just about the time that demographers began noting an American generation lost to cooking. Mothers fed the labor force, and the food industry began marketing instant food to kids. Extended families extended themselves even farther across the world, and nuclear families split their nuclei through divorce.
…Tran’s American food world stretches from duck liver to fast food, but it doesn’t include homemade braised pork belly, which is why she needed to rent a grandma.
So The Chronicle stepped in. We found a 67-year-old powerhouse in the person of Quyen Phan, a retired businesswoman, doting grandmother of six mostly pre-school children and mother of six, one of whom is Charles Phan, the chef-founder of Slanted Door.
We arranged for Quyen Phan to meet Tran on Clement Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District to shop together. Then they would go to Charles Phan’s home to cook. Barely reaching Tran’s shoulder, Quyen Phan stood tallest in energy, running the rest of us ragged in one afternoon of shopping and cooking.
(5 May 2004)
An extraordinary series. Others articles include:
Sounds, aromas and tastes of Mexico’s culinary heritage pass to a new generation
A desire to learn Jewish cooking is answered — with a passion
Cooking and life lessons in a Filipino kitchen
Four generations help a Bay Area woman rediscover her New Orleans roots
