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cafe culture

Posted in Drinks, Philosophical, Restaurants, Whimsical on July 10, 2010| 1 Comment »

It’s what I miss most about Rome. How could that be? Something so mundane, minor, lowly. What about the art, the architecture, the people, the food?

I’ll explain. Cafes in Italy encapsulate so much of the culture at large. During these weirdly liminal weeks of re-entry into American culture—when I’ve felt like I’m two places at once, or nowhere—I’ve been going through a process not unlike grief. Surprising surges of emotion come over me at inconvenient moments, and I wonder if I could still be weak from jet-lag. No, I’m just sad that that wonderful, brief year is all over. I’ve had trouble expressing this grief because I don’t want to sound like a complete snob or ungrateful spoiled brat while, on the beaches of New England, I weep for the lost vistas or Rome or when, confronted with the plethora of choices at a coffee shop, I tear up thinking about the perfect crema on a Roman caffe. I’ll admit, I’m sad but life is good. Buonissimo, even.

After that brief apologia, let us return to Roman cafes. On my last full day in Rome, I didn’t go to view the dome of San Pietro or to gaze up at the oculus of the Pantheon once more. After leaving Jack at Scuola Arcobaleno for the last time, I stopped in the cafe on Via Fonteiana where we stopped almost every day for a little treat. I stood at the bar and didn’t even have to say anything, because the friendly guy who makes the coffee drinks remembers what everyone likes. What an honor for me to be included in his encyclopedic memory of drink orders in this cafe where people come and go constantly all day long! All the other parents from the school stop here before or after dropping off the ragazzini. In cafes in Rome, people come in and stand at the bar. There are no lane-ropes marking off where you’re supposed to stand in line. How barbaric! Everyone is relaxed. They seem to have all the time in the world. The parents and the bankers and pharmacists and grocery cashiers and hardware shop owner from across the street stand around, sip a caffe or cappuccino, maybe eat a nutella-filled pastry wrapped in a napkin, chit-chat, drop a few coins, and amble out. Everything is done with a sense of ease. There are no paper cups. No rushing and bumping shoulders at the “condiment station.”

American coffee shops cater to the all-American values of independence and convenience. But in our rush to make things easier for ourselves (plastic lids to prevent spilling as we speed-walk or drive on to the next important thing/place/event) or more “custom-made” (add-your-own-milk, choose-your-own-ingredients, metastasizing menus) are we sacrificing what is of real value in custom, culture, and civil-i-zation? Do condiment stations make us more civilized?

After that, I still didn’t go to see the one more piece of great art or architecture that I’d yet failed to see. I wanted to enjoy my last day of being immersed in the mundane beauty of everyday life in Rome. I walked down the steps to Trastevere and looked at the laundry hanging from windows, the succulents and bougainvillea spilling from balconies. Before going to get one last haircut from the mild and nonchalantly good-looking Fabio Serafini, I stopped in to Cafe Paris. (Not the one of Dolce Vita fame on Via Veneto, but a scruffier version in a medieval piazza of Trastevere where the hipsters and homeless people mingle.) I savored the atmosphere as much as the coffee: the ancient brown wood of the interior, with decades-old ads on the wall, the gruff carelessness and skill of the young man behind the bar. No excessive friendliness or list of questions about how you’d like that.

What is it then, about Roman cafes that make them nodes of their culture? It’s the way they encourage people to take a few minutes to savor a flavor and a scrap of conversation. Uncluttered service. The cultivation of custom in defiance of the drive for efficiency and convenience Americans value so much. And everything in the atmosphere of a cafe—from the old decor to the elegant cups—speaks to that sprezzatura in which the Romans live their lives, ignoring the grafitti and humidity, talking non-stop in a musical language, eating well, looking good, driving their Smart cars alongside ancient aqueducts and other imperial ruins with nonchalance and style.

Some might see a cultural malaise, oppressive conservatism. These are there. But so is cultivation, an awareness of beauty, culture, and quality that, perhaps because of the proximity of the Colosseum, the Caravaggios, lives on the shoes on people’s feet and in the crema on a caffe.

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food in art: grapes and whales

Posted in Fruit, Philosophical, Seafood, Water, Whimsical, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, food in art, Moby Dick, roving locavore on March 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

At a junction of thoughts that represents some substance of my life right now: a chapter in Moby Dick; a talk about food in high art given by Leonard Barkan; the local-food-movement mantra know your food, know your farmer; swimming, during which activity my thoughts form folds with each lap and the thought that my son loves swimming connects to the porpoises on Planet Earth and in Moby Dick, which leads to another branch of my family, those Nantucket whalemen ancestors, who probably dined on whale at some point, and one of whom carved an incredibly intricate scrimshaw fan during those endless hours of calm water.

Leonard’s talk, “Thinking of the Grapes” (which refers to this painting by François Boucher) was about how food has an ambiguous status in high art, in particular (in this lecture) Renaissance and Baroque painting. Food is both vividly, sensuously present in all of its particularity of detail, and is officially secondary to the main subject. Gastronomy falls far below philosophy, theology, astronomy, or love, and yet it obtrudes itself into the artist’s imagination and into the picture and takes on significance as the too-muchness of what we desire and fear of appetite. It is suppressed, Leonard suggests, because it is just too consuming.

Food enters art more or less smoothly or subversively depending on the culture, the age, the medium, the genre. Novels—omnivorous gluttons of the details of everyday life that they are—might be expected to contain more food. Moby Dick has none of the delicacy of Boucher’s lovers feeding each other grapes, and contains a smorgasbord of greasy, glistening, animal food and its bestial eaters. But the discussion of eating in the chapter “The Whale as a Dish” is not simply a display of macho engorgement. It has as much ethical, psychological, cultural, socioeconomical, and philosophical penetration as the best thinking about food today, and combines all of these elements in prose more musical, serio-satirical, and strange than anything I’ve read recently.

Here is the chapter.

“The Whale as a Dish”

That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.

It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth’s time, a certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be eaten with barbecued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls. The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great porpoise grant from the crown.

The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel—that these men actually lived for several months on the mould scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called “fritters”; which, indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something like old Amsterdam housewives’ doughnuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.

But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump which would be as fine eating as the buffalo’s (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is; like the transparent, half-jellied white meat of a cocoa-nut in the third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it is a common thing for a seaman to dip their ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made.

In the case of a small sperm whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings), they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavour somewhat resembling calves’ head, which is quite a dish among some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually dining upon calves’ brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a calf’s head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf’s head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at him, with an “Et tu Brute!” expression.

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned, i.e., that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.

Moby Dick (1851)
Herman Melville

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rainy holiday in Rome

Posted in Philosophical, Trends, tagged agricultural biodiversity, American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, eating locally, local food, locavore, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore, Slow Food, Terra Madre on December 8, 2009| Leave a Comment »

It’s rainy, school’s out, and everything’s closed for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. We made pizza for lunch, and now Jack is busy with various projects involving wooden trains, plastic tractors, blocks, legos, paint, and books. I’m drinking espresso, listening to Let It Be, and reading various things on the Slow Food website.

This week, Slow Food’s Terra Madre project will have a worldwide celebration of eating locally and sustainably. Here’s their description of the Terra Madre network:

In 1999, Slow Food launched the Presidia project which has since involved thousands of small producers across the world, strengthening local economies and saving cheeses, breads, vegetable varieties and breeds from extinction. The worldwide Terra Madre network was launched in 2004 to give a voice and visibility to these farmers, breeders, fishers and artisan producers, and to bring them together with cooks, academics, youth and consumers to discuss how to improve the food system and strengthen local economies. Today the Terra Made network is made up of more than 2,000 food communities.

Here at the American Academy, we’re going to celebrate by making the family dinner, on Friday night, a Terra Madre feast. Mona has done an amazing job over the past few years of connecting with farmers and food producers in the area, and this meal will also mark the birthday of the American Academy’s Rome Sustainable Food Project as a Slow Food Community. I like how the Terra Madre poster explains the impetus behind this event: “Animati dall’entusiasmo di Mona Talbott….” Yes! Many great things that happen here have been animated by the enthusiasm of Mona Talbott. I’m excited for this meal, as is Jack, because he gets to help, with the other kids, to make orecchiette and harvest lettuce from the garden.

A bunch of lucky school kids in Rome will get to go to the Italian School of Film Animation to watch Ratatouille and Totò Sapore e la magica storia della pizza. (Sounds fun. I’d like to see it.) There are also compost and juice-making workshops for ragazzi e bambini. Ooohh, fun! Dirt and fruit, sticky hands, making messes!

I highly recommend reading Slow Food International’s Seven Pillars. This is where it’s at.

For other Slow Food items of interest, you can check out their website. And here’s a description of the Terra Madre celebrations.

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braised pork & grass-roots

Posted in Dairy, Grain, Industry, Meat, Philosophical, Shopping, Trends, tagged agricoltura biologica, agricultural biodiversity, American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion food, Biola, eating locally, Food Inc. film, Lo Spicchio, local eating, local food, locavore, Rome locavore, roving locavore on November 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »

In my last post, I attempted both to recommend Food Inc., and to criticize what I saw as the overly facile closing message (“vote with your fork”). There was more to the event, here at the American Academy in Rome, and there is a positive alternative to the dark suggestion of the film that Monsanto may well take over the world. Briefly, these follow-ups/upsides have to do with braised pork and grass-roots.

Let’s start with grass-roots. Since the screening, I’ve talked with a lot of people about how depressing the film is. It seems to offer only the meager solutions of “voting with your fork” and waiting for policy change to adjust the prices of food. Obviously, more needs to be done and can be done. One of the people I’ve talked with a lot about these issues is Mona Talbott, the executive chef here. She is passionate not only about great cooking but also about reforming American food culture through cooking education. An over-reliance on convenient but unhealthy fast-food is in part a consequence of a general lack of cooking skills and knowledge. Another part of the problem is the misconception that fast food is cheaper than home-cooked food. This doesn’t have to be the case. The Rome Sustainable Food Project works on a tight budget to provide nutritious, delicious, and sufficient food for all of us. Mona points out that the world’s oldest traditional diets, like that in Italy, have had such long histories of sustaining people in part because they can sustain—with complete nutrition—the most people. In other words, traditional diets are complete, and they are poor people’s diets. The basis of the Italian diet is the lowly triumvirate of beans, grains, and greens. These are affordable. Pasta is cheap. The cheapest cuts of meat are delicious when cooked slowly.

But cooking, which often isn’t learned in the family anymore, needs to be learned if families are to be fed on these inexpensive foods rather than on fast food. Actually, many people don’t know anything about food anymore, much less cooking! If you take a look at my friend Sharyn’s comment on my last post, you’ll see what I’m talking about. She teaches in a university, and her students don’t know about the seasonality of any foods.

Several things need to, and can, happen, with a grass-roots effort. More communities can take on the reform of school lunch on their own, and even put in edible schoolyards (playground gardens) and teaching kitchens. Children, then, can teach their parents about seasonality and cooking. Or they can learn about food and cooking by asking their grandparents, as their doing with the help of Bioversity’s campaign Diversity for Life. Cooking schools can teach home cooking. Institutional kitchens—like the one here, with its unpaid interns—can double as educational kitchens. Old routines, like canning parties, can be revived. (Mona mentioned this today, and you might recall one of my recent posts about the biodiversity scientist I met recently, Stephan, who has fond memories of tomato-canning parties in a neighbor’s garage.) Children can be taught the basics of cooking, and along with those, the comforts and thrills of cooking, by being included in the process of growing and making food. With the encouragement of children and community-based campaigns, working parents can be convinced to plan ahead and find the time to put together a healthy meal—even if it’s just rice, beans, and something green.

Mona, who has cooked for the best restaurants and wealthiest people, wants to devote herself to this grass-roots cooking re-education effort when her tenure as the head of the Rome Sustainable Food Project ends. She’s a real inspiration.

* * * * * * *

Immediately after the film screening on Saturday, we participated in a panel discussion with two of the farmers who sell their organic foods to the Rome Sustainable Food Project: Enzo Foi, who came with Filippo da Sole, from the farm and agriturismo destination Lo Spicchio; and Giuseppe Brandizzi, from the organic dairy Biola. The audience had many questions about organic agriculture (agricoltura biologica) in Italy, food politics in Italy, and the differences between the U.S. and Italy on these matters. Enzo told us, without the wish to romanticize Italy for the mostly American audience, that the main difference between the U.S. and Italy, in terms of industrial agriculture, is scale. Here, as in the U.S., there is a large industrial-farm lobby that shapes the politics; synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are used (although the European Union has outlawed GMOs and rBST); small-scale farmers are going out of business. But, also as in the U.S., there is a movement to expand sustainable agriculture, and to encourage buying locally produced food, and some politicians are helping to promote these causes. (There are, of course, differences. Italians know how to eat and have a culture of food, for one!)

More important than the help of politicians, though, is the grass-roots movement exemplified by these men and their families, who are educators and cooks as much as they are farmers. They farm and cook and eat the way they do because they want to preserve the land, foods, and traditions that have sustained people for centuries and that could—if not cared for—be lost to oblivion. If you’ve seen Food Inc., consider the proud strut of this rooster compared to the falling-down factory chickens:

Lo Spicchio gallo

After the film and discussion—and in spite of the revolting images of factory farming we’d just seen—we all eagerly went upstairs to the dining room to eat a meal prepared with the ingredients from Enzo’s and Giuseppe’s (and a few others’) farms. We ate Lo Spicchio pork braised in Biola’s whole raw milk; cardoons roasted with lemon and buttery breadcrumbs; polenta; local red wine; and the most flavorful “blondies” I can imagine. (We eat a lot of braised meat here, in part because Mona and Chris like to cook the whole, traditional, foods of everyday Italians. The braising cuts are the cheapest cuts. The other night, Chris and the interns cooked up an amazing meal of braised lamb with harissa, chickpeas with greens, and cous cous. Simple. Complete. Delicious.)

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the Mediterranean diet as cultural heritage

Posted in Cheese, Dairy, Drinks, Fruit, Grain, Pasta, Philosophical, Seafood, Sweet Things, Trends, Vegetables, Wine, tagged agricultural biodiversity, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, Bioversity International, Diversity for Life, Italian food culture, Mediterranean diet, roving locavore, UNESCO Italian diet, UNESCO Mediterranean diet on October 31, 2009| 3 Comments »

Italy’s Parliament voted unanimously this summer to recommend that UNESCO list the Mediterranean diet as endangered, so that it might be protected and preserved as a part of cultural heritage.

I’m interested in this public declaration, in part, for its semantic implications. Can a diet be treated as an aesthetic or religious object, or as a plant or animal species? In fact, the Mediterranean diet is all of these things. Italians are rightly proud of their food, and of their heritage. Diet here is interwoven with cultural practice, with religious ritual, with craft and design, and with plant and animal species that have an intimate connection with both the geography and the history of Italy’s distinct regions.

Of course, the natives of this boot-shaped land could describe the complex set of cultural practices that is the Mediterranean diet better than I, an outsider, and a barbarian American, could. But I’ll offer a few arguments, anyway, in favor of designating this diet an endangered piece of cultural heritage.

The Mediterranean diet is interwoven with national and regional identity. This goes deeper than the kind of identity declared by small towns with billboards at their borders declaring them the pistachio capital of the world. It’s an identity that has less to do with marketing, and more to do with the deep emotional ties of childhood memories, in which food and family are tightly woven together. Particular foods and foodways are tied to family traditions, religious rituals, and to regionally specific cooking styles.

When I was at the Bioversity offices yesterday, I met one of the senior scientists there, a man named Stefano, whose work as a scientist and educator about agricultural biodiversity perfectly aligns with his passion for food and food memories. In our brief conversation, he gave me many examples of the Mediterranean diet as cultural heritage and as endangered. When he was a child, he said, the whole neighborhood would get together in someone’s garage to peel, cook, and bottle tomatoes for use as sauce. While he was living in Africa, his homesickness took the form of a craving for the comforts of pasta. His mother and sister write down the recipes and menus of family meals; these recipes are their family scrapbooks and triggers to memory. One of these recipes is for a stew containing 57 varieties of wild leafy green. (Surely this recipe and the knowledge of how to find, much less cook, 57 varieties of wild green are endangered!) Another recipe is for quince jelly. How many quince orchards have you seen lately?

These foods and practices—this cultural heritage—is endangered for several related reasons: the globalization of simplified diets based on cheap, and less nutritious, commodity crops; the lure, or necessity, of convenience foods for working mothers who don’t have the time or inclination to hunt out 57 varieties of wild green; the encroachment of fast food into the diets of children; the loss of food and cooking knowledge through the generations. One of the terrible consequences of the loss of food practices is that the actual foods can be lost as well. Many of the crops that have sustained peoples all over the world for millenia fall under the new designation of “neglected and underutilized species.” This is how food as a cultural and aesthetic practice shades into an endangered species.

Another, no less important, reason to preserve the Mediterranean diet is that it works. People have thrived, and not been prone to cardiovascular disease or obesity and its consequences, on this diet for many generations. This is because of the intrinsic nutritional value of the foods themselves, and it is also because of the set of cultural rules that guide eating. The people here eat small portions, a variety of vegetables, whole grains, fish, and cheese, meat, and wine in moderation. No cappuccino after lunch, no hard liquor before dinner or gelato in the morning… the list goes on. And dessert is often fresh fruit.

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Let’s Get Real.

Posted in Fruit, Fungi, Pasta, Philosophical, Vegetables, tagged Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, eating locally, local eating, local food, locavore, locavore in Rome, locavore Rome, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on September 15, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I find that what I cook for dinner here in Rome is similar to what I cooked in Vermont or Alabama. The only difference is that the ingredients are generally better or cheaper. For example, last night I made bucatini (long, skinny tube pasta) with the ingredients I had in the fridge from previous days at the markets: chanterelles, dandelion greens, prosciutto, fresh onion, garlic, parmaggiano reggiano I’d grated with a hand-grater.

greens

It was delicious. And made with ingredients that would have been much more expensive in the States and would have been seen with a halo, or rather a tiara, above them, which spelled out “e-l-i-t-e f-o-o-d.” Ingredients like dandelion greens, for instance, are perversely seen as unusual, elitist, and foodie-fetishized by the general public. This is unfortunate, because they are so delicious and easy (to grow and to cook).

Here in Rome, everyone buys and cooks huge bunches of dandelion greens, varieties of chicory, treviso, radicchio, and countless kinds of beans. Everyone buys multiple varieties of tomatoes that actually taste like tomatoes and not like paper towels injected with citric acid. I was talking to Mona, the chef at the American Academy, about this observation a few days ago. She had a few explanations. One is that Italian cuisine is based on greens, grains, and beans. To Americans, this sounds like “health food,” but think about what an amazingly varied pyramid-foundation these food groups provide. Everyone in every socio-economic group here eats greens, grains, and beans. Another reason has to do with land ownership. Historically, land has been owned by the church and leased to small-scale farmers. The “get big or die” dictum doesn’t really work here. Agricultural land and the regional cuisines are seen as part of a national heritage, too, and so there are social, cultural, and economic motives for preserving the status quo when it comes to food.

I don’t need to rehearse for my readers the problems with the farm bills of recent history or the problematic ramifications of agricultural subsidies in the U.S. Everyone knows that large-scale monocultures of commodity crops like corn and soybeans end up being favored over diversified smaller farms that might grow dandelion greens alongside sweet onions, tomatoes, and melons. The consequences of this kind of agribusiness are a dumbed-down or simply wiped-out cuisine, a boring selection of cheap food that must be jazzed up with corn-derived substances and packaging to sell, diet-related diseases, a general lack of cooking skills, and a silly politicization of good, real food, whereby fresh fava beans are seen as chi chi.

I’m learning things here that could be taken home. (OK, get out your corn-tassel pom-poms for this): C’mon, America, let’s get real!

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Cucumbers, Part I: Poetry

Posted in Philosophical, Poetry, Trends, Vegetables, tagged "The Task", "The Task" cucumber, Amy Campion, Cowper cucumber, cucumber poetry, cucumber salad, eating locally, food culture, good food movement, growing cucumbers, hothouse cucumber, local eating, locavore, modernization of food, Robert Hass cucumber, Robert Hass cucumber poem, roving locavore, William Cowper on July 22, 2009| 1 Comment »

cukes
“If you think I am going to make
A sexual joke in this poem, you are mistaken.”

So says Robert Hass, in his playful poem, dryly titled “Poem With a Cucumber In It.” The poem contains etymological musings on “cumbersome” and “encumber,” musings on the Berkeley sky, memories of travel, and a rough recipe for cucumber salad with dill and yogurt.

Perhaps the most famous poem with a cucumber in it is “The Task,” published in 1775 by William Cowper. Like Hass’s, this poem contains something of a recipe: for growing a hothouse cucumber. Cowper meditates for pages on the challenges of growing this sun loving plant in the English winter. He describes the construction of the greenhouse, the creation of fertile soil out of a “rage of fermentation,” the coddling of seeds and sprouts, the fertilization which in winter requires that “assistant art/ then acts in nature’s office.”

The cucumber takes on social significance as well. It is the object in a meditation on two main topics of eighteenth century political economy: value (“when rare/ so coveted, else base and disesteemed—/ Food for the vulgar merely”) and labor (“To raise the prickly and green-coated goard/ So grateful to the palate […] is an art” requiring intensive, careful labor unappreciated and unacknowledged by the wealthy purchasers of winter cucumbers). Cowper advises “ye rich” to “grudge not the cost” because:

Ye little know the cares,
The vigilance, the labor and the skill
That day and night are exercised, and hang
Upon the ticklish balance of suspense,
That ye may garnish your profuse regales
With summer fruits brought forth by wintry suns.

Cowper’s socioeconomically-conscious advice might sound familiar to those of us who write and think and read about our current food culture: learn about how the foods you take for granted are grown; don’t take them for granted; consider the farmer’s labor; grow some food yourself; keep a compost heap; build a cold frame; consider the social and economic costs of unseasonal foods.

To read this eighteenth-century meditation on the economics, culture, and cultivation of cucumbers is to be reminded that our current “good food movement” exists in an historical context. Skepticism about and moral indignation toward the modernization of food—whether that means hothouse-cultivation, refrigeration, or genetic modification—is as old as modernity itself, and probably older. Praise for farmers and their ancient art—and injunctions to praise them—are as old as the art itself.

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to cultivate, v.

Posted in Philosophical, tagged Alabama locavore, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, roving locavore, Vermont locavore on June 12, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I was listening to “John Wesley Harding” this morning and thinking that Bob Dylan is someone who cultivates oddness—in a way that seems oddly genuine. (But what is authenticity in a celebrity? One of the subjects of my British lit. dissertation….) Anyway, that got me thinking about what an encompassing, useful word “cultivate” is. We cultivate land, relationships, our intellects, our tastes, even our eccentricities. Or if you’re a four-year-old boy who loves tractors, you’ll cultivate just about any surface.

cultivator

There are no surprises in its etymology: since its entrance into English, by way of medieval Latin, it has had both a literal and a figurative sense. It has always meant: to till the soil, to promote the growth of plants and to educate, train, refine a person or intellect; to promote the growth of a science, an art, a sentiment, a friendship; to devote one’s attention to these things. It is close to nurturing. We like to help things grow. Cultivation is culture in the abstract as well as in the most basic form of crops planted for us to pick and eat.

As an adjective applied to the land, it implies an opposite: land is either cultivated or it’s wild or waste. I like the way Michael Pollan, in my favorite of his books, Second Nature, puts cultivation in the middle of two seemingly opposed concepts in our modern Western paradigm: nature and culture. Pollan argues, with grace and good sense of humor, that between these, which are not really opposed, must be cultivation. In fact, nature as we know it is already cultivated—as a science, an art, a sentiment. Since we’ve already had our hand on almost every inch of nature, our obligation is to cultivate it. Not to turn it all into cornfields, for crying out loud, but not to let it become waste. To cultivate wilderness that we’ve already tampered with—even if just by demarcation—rather than consider it “virgin” and expect it to fend for itself in the midst of the mean world of modern civilization and its pimps.

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Poet-Intern-Farmers

Posted in Philosophical, Trends on May 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

24farm_190

There’s a great little article in the New York Times today about liberal arts undergrads getting summer internships on organic farms. I like how Kim Severson, the NYT food writer, commends the idealism and willingness to act of this “new generation,” but also winks ironically about the ways in which undergraduate idealism and willingness to work aren’t always equally calibrated.

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The Market Is There

Posted in Eggs, Philosophical, Trends, Vegetables, tagged Alabama locavore, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, Auburn Alabama farmers' market, conventionally grown peaches, eat locally, local food, local peaches, locavore, organic peaches, pesticides peaches, roving locavore, Southern peaches, Vermont locavore on May 22, 2009| 1 Comment »

We went to the first farmers’ market of the year at “Ag Heritage Park” today in the drizzle. I and everyone else there seemed to be wondering the same thing: why aren’t there more farmers around here? The line for the most varied vegetable selection was almost thirty minutes long. The berry farm stand ran out of strawberries at ten past the opening hour. Peaches were gone by the time Jack and I made it out of the veggie line. Hundreds of people arrived in the first hour and stood around in the rain, beaming at each other as they hefted canvas bags full of local lettuce, peaches, cucumbers, honey, cheese, and eggs—if they were lucky enough to get some before it all sold out. There’s so much pent up demand for fresh local food, and too few CSAs and small farmers to meet it with their supply. This may be because the market is young in relation to the agricultural history of the state, in which commodity crops like cotton and lumber dominated.

The exciting thing, though, is that small farms are popping up or remaking themselves to meet this demand. And if you ask around enough you find out about other producers who have been in the area, quietly serving up their grass fed beef or organic greens for decades. (For example, the Ritches of Goose Pond Farm, one of whose scrumptious chickens we enjoyed with friends the other night.)
fm haul
Jack and I took home a small haul: red leaf and butter lettuces, an armful of baby summer squashes, veggie goat cheese from Bulger Creek Farm in Notasulga, and some honey.

Eggs were available, but we already had a dozen of the local “Frank’s Famous Eggs” in the fridge. (Their yolks are molten orange! And if you happen to eat a supermarket egg when you’re used to the density and flavor of these, you’ll say: what’s this tasteless rubber?)
frank's The lettuces made a crisp bed for some eight-minute eggs.

salad

I roasted the summer squash in a skillet with olive oil, salt and pepper, and a sprig of backyard rosemary. Jack insisted he didn’t like “fwash” but he ate every sweet and salty morsel.

squash