lagusta.com - on food

"There is a mystery in metabolism and in the hungers our body feels, in our cravings and dreams. I suspect there are nutrients we cannot see, cannot measure, essentials that can't be synthesized and packaged. The best thing, the most living, present, desirable thing I can taste is only now, now, now. There is nothing certain here, no reliable predictors. I don’t want there to be predictors – I want to be surprised, inspired, renewed by food. I want to eat with no idea, no idea at all, what to expect, no idea what will happen next, what taste will turn my head, change my mind, next. To eat with ease and joy, to eat with the wholehearted belief that what one eats is good, to eat with trust – this is a great secret."

--Sallie Tisdale

"It is impossible to mechanize production without mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants, and animals without making machines also of people."
--Wendell Berry

ACT ONE

I’m no fucking health foodie.

I have two cakes baking right now, so forgive me if my thoughts are distracted. There was a good deal on late-season apples at the farmer’s market, so I’m doing a study in apple cakes to find out which ones I like and which ones I can do without. Organizing my files. A spring cleaning. I like apple cakes that are like coffee cakes, with a streusel topping. I don’t like apple cobblers, just layers of apples with a doughy topping and bottom. I’ve tried sautéing apples in calvados, port, and other liquors to see if that gives more flavor to all sorts of apple cakes, and it’s working out well. I usually find that vegan cakes don’t have enough richness and flavor as they should, and often have an overly chemically taste from misuse of baking power, soda, and apple cider vinegar. Slowly, I am trying to work with good ingredients, instead of against them. I am trying to find out what works best with the apples, what elevates their flavors instead of masking them. I am trying to let them teach me things.
I believe in food.

More and more, this seems a radical position.

I believe in grapeseed oil and coconut oil and olive oil and sesame oil. I believe in salt, maple syrup, hot spices, avocados, bread, and bread, and bread. Rarely 100% whole wheat bread. I believe in sprouts, lettuces, organic produce, apple butter, all-fruit jam, and flax seed oil. I believe in olives, tempeh, full-fat coconut milk, eggplants and tomatoes and spinach. I believe in chocolate, beer, wine, and, especially, whisky. I believe in saffron and lemongrass, cardamom and curry powder. I believe in roasted peppers sitting in olive oil, sourdough starter in a container that hasn’t been washed in months, pickles and sauerkraut fermenting on the countertop, pineapple chunks sitting in a sugar solution for years in a crock until they turn to brandy.

I am not scared of food. I am scared of bush and war and killing good people in Iraq. I am scared of pro-lifers, people from the south, my father, and the religious Jews in my town. I am not scared of an eggplant. But so many people I know are.

I know dozens of people who won’t eat eggplants, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, and spinach because they are nightshades and are known to disrupt the calcium balance in the body. One of my former clients won’t eat corn because it is "high on the glycemic index," meaning high in natural sugars.

She will eat "health food" candy bars until she is sick to her stomach, loaded though these are with preservatives, chemicals, and genetically modified soy proteins. But she won’t eat any form of corn, even a corn tortilla made fresh at the Mexican market near my work. Another friend of mine won’t eat fruit after 11 am, because it "ferments in the stomach when it comes into contact with other foods." Of course, there are several ancient cultures all around the world which do eat fruit with food for exactly this reason: it helps break down proteins in foods so they can be more easily digested. No matter. She doesn’t like the idea of anything "fermenting" in her stomach. And everyone knows how, with the onset of the Atkins cult, we are back once again thinking "starch" is the culprit of all dietary ills. I guess no one has noticed the Italians and French, who eat bread and pasta by the pound and always have, and still manage to be major world powers. Oh well. Atkins came out with a best-selling book, you know. He’s a doctor. Who cares that he’s more than a little overweight and has had a heart attack. Most of my vegan friends are trying to eat more raw ("I’m raw on the weekends now," one says to me at a party where I had spent hours preparing appetizers and cookies. "Do you have any raisins or organic raw almonds?" I did, and I gave them to her with no sneer, but still.). Almost every week one of my

private cooking clients wants wheat-free bread. Avocados, nuts, seeds, oils - out, out, out. Too much fat. We’ll take margarine and artificial flavors instead. We might get cancer from the hydrogenated fats and chemicals – but we won’t be fat, so I guess it’s OK.

I hate all this shit. I am so fed up with it, I can’t even tell you. I see so fucking clearly what has happened. Let me calm down enough to try to explain it in a coherent fashion.

But before I do that, I guess I better explain about my own diet, that of hardcore veganism. Actually, I think it would make more sense if I explain about that later. I’m sure at this point you think I’m a huge hypocrite for making fun of everyone I know who has no many foods on their "no" list, while my own "no" list is so long: no meat, fish, birds, eggs, butter, dairy, honey. No leather, fur, silk, suede, feathers. Second hand wool, blah blah. I’ll get to that later.

First, here are some vague, disorganized, zygotes of ideas on why we are where we are with food at this moment.

I have a cookbook I heard about from the Bloodroot women from the late seventies, called Wings of Life. The author, Julie Jordan, says:

"There’s a new kind of cooking – rising, bubbling, sprouting in our land. It’s strong cooking, based solidly on foods the earth offers us." She suggests going to a health food store and looking around if you are unfamiliar with the foods she has been discussing. "The people there are part of the food movement and will help you."

More than 20 years later, I think that food revolution has failed. It sounds dumb to say, right? Now there is organic pasta sauce in every supermarket. Fancyass NYC restaurants feature "humanely raised" meats and organic mesclun salads and heirloom corn ragouts. Huge health food stores like Whole Foods, which sell toothbrushes and onions and baby arugula and diapers and prepared sushi and scratch baked breads all under one roof are thriving. Whole Foods has maybe 40-50% organic produce, and a lot of it. Grapes and apples and maybe 20 kinds of greens and lettuces. Heirloom potatoes and tomatoes. Everyone around me wants to eat "healthier."

But I don’t think things are better than they were when I was born, when my mom made my baby food and never threw out an avocado seed without trying to sprout it. I think the meaning of "healthy" has been so co-opted and perverted so as to have lost all meaning. What does "health food" mean? Why am I so angry about all this that my fingers shake as I type?

ACT TWO

JUNK FOOD VEGANS and YUPPIE SCUM HEALTH FOODIES

Produce is cheap, comparatively. Corporations can’t make a huge profit from it because it has so many variables – it has to be taken good care of so it arrives at the store fresh in order for people to buy it. It has to taste good, the same all the time, so consumers don’t get used to sweet oranges then suddenly get bitter ones. It is seasonal, regional, and fussy. Some of these "problems"

are being taken care of with genetic engineering. Tomato varieties are bred for shipment, not taste, and now they can be spliced with fish genes to promote god knows what, better color or something. While GMOs are busily ruining all produce, corporations are busy insisting that we don’t need real food, anyway, so what does produce matter? Lycopene in a tomato is an antioxidant? That’s the loser way to get it! Now we have chemically synthesized versions of lycopene, coated in luscious artificially-flavored chocolate and rolled it in GMO hazelnuts. Why eat 3 tomatoes when you can get all that lycopene plus heart healthy $OY in one gen-soy-quik-lite-nutra-choco-keto-decadence bar? Yum.

Oy.
I am tired of vegans eating Tofutti ice cream made with genetically modified soy protein which has been heated to 400 degrees, bathed in chemical acid and base solutions, spun at high temperatures and injected with artificial colors, flavors, and nutrients. I am angry at my vegan friends scanning mainstream cookies for non-vegan ingredients and finding cookies like Hydrox or Newman’s Own chocolate mint, which taste like shit and are filled with unpronounceable ingredients but are "vegan." But I can’t blame these vegans, because, obviously, I was one. I ate all that crap.

Our current corporate culture makes it so hard to find decent health information that we have no idea how dangerously useless these "foods" are. They are "indulgences" and nothing more. The big secret is not just that they are unhealthy and possibly cancer-causing and most definitely spirit-crushing things to put in the body, but that they also happen to TASTE LIKE SHIT. It’s not hard to make a good vegan cookie. It’s just by the way TV commercials make it sound, no one in the world has the time to bake a batch of cookies anymore, although it only takes about 25 minutes. We’re made to believe that these are things best left to the professionals at Nestle, Newman’s Own, Walnut Acres, whatever. They are probably all owned by Coke or Kraft (which is owned by Philip Morris, which just changed its name to Altria) these days anyway. It saddens me that counter-culture vegans fall into these traps.

It saddens but does not disgust me. What disgusts me are, oh, what shall I call them? The yuppie scum healthy crowd. Urban, with either a little or a lot more money than they need, these freaks – mostly women – consider themselves informed about "health." I am acquainted with and seem to be constantly surrounded by countless numbers of these idiots, and I know just how their pea-sized minds work.

I have unlimited reserves of anger directed at them at all times. They read a 2 paragraph "in depth" report in Time magazine about how dangerous melons can be because of e. coli bacteria. Melons are out forever. They hear about a friend of a friend who lost 20 pounds by only eating green foods, and they vow not to eat another tomato. They are terrified of bread. They put all their faith in nutritional supplements, protein powders, genetically-modified soy, all that shit. They are the reason health food stores are becoming more and more corporatized and the produce aisles are becoming smaller and smaller while the supplement aisles are ever-widening.

These people’s ideas on healthiness are not rooted in politics or passion, they are rooted in a sickening, very American desire for self-preservation. They want the American new millennium dream: to look, at the end of their lives, as if they have not lived at all. No wrinkled skin, no excess pounds, no proof of wisdom or a life well spent, only youth youth youth. I don’t want that. I want wrinkles and white hair and saggy, flabby skin. I don’t care about self preservation, I just want to be happy and live lustily.

ACT THREE

CORPORATE GROCERY STORES

I come at everything from the understanding that the rise of the corporate state is the number one problem in America ™ today. I’m not going to bother with examples of why this is, although you should go read some books by Kalle Lasn, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Wolf and Eric Schlosser, if you don’t believe me. OK, one example: I saw an actual article in the New York Times yesterday on a proposal NYC is thinking of to solve its budget crisis: endorsing products. Volvic water, the official water of NYC. I am not fucking kidding. I mean, have you ever read 1984? Well me neither. I started reading it when I was 12 but it scared me and I didn’t get it and I put it down. But I know enough about it to know that it’s the world we’re living in right now.

With that understanding as our foundation, turn those ideas on the corporitization of everything good in the world to food. Health food has become a huge, huge business, and because of this real food is becoming harder and harder to find. I take it as a given that the corporatization of anything leads to its demise. I think the reason the vegans-eating-corporate-nasty-food phenomenon makes me so angry is because I always assume vegans are trying to de-corporatize their lives,

and the Hydrox cookies and all that, instead of being something to pseudo-guiltily joke about with other vegan friends, is actually just a sign that you have become a corporate product. That’s what drives me crazy about the yuppie scum healthy crowd: these people (oh, dear, you know something intolerant is going to come out of your mouth when you begin a sentence with "these people") think there is nothing political about their eating habits and lives in general, but they do not know the great secret about themselves, which is that they are incredibly political: they are absolute, ready made products of the corporate culture in which they happily surround themselves, and what’s more political than that? Nothing is more political than your own life. This is what they do not understand, and this is why they are the lowest of the low.

Let me try to pull back a bit. I should say this: I know that we are all trying. We all want what’s the best, and in our own different ways, we are just trying to muddle through and get to a place that feels right for us. This goes for eating and everything else. This essay is just my attempt to get close to get to that place by clarifying my thoughts on the idea of food. It seems to me

that as a culture right now we are moving backward every day. I don’t really blame the yuppie scum healthy crowd for this (although I do like writing that phrase over and over), I blame corporations. I don’t want to fall into the trap of directing blame downward instead of upward as it belongs, but I want to find the balance between not blaming the "victim" (I do believe the YCHC has been brainwashed into certain ideas about food, so in a sense they are victims) and inciting the masses to see how important it is that we begin to change how we think about food.

I shop at Whole Foods a lot. I hate Whole Foods, but I have to shop there for one of my jobs, and since I have to shop there, I wind up buying my own shit for my own catering jobs there, too. And they have such nice stuff. But all the time I’m in there being romanticized by the ramps for $14.99 a pound (ramps are baby wild leeks! The perfect metaphor of spring! I must buy 2 pounds! Who cares that metaphors are lost on my private cooking clients -- I must have ramps!) I have to keep reminding myself that I don’t think Whole Foods should exist. For one thing, the people who work at Whole Foods could not, in any way, be said to be part of "the food movement" that Julie Jordan wrote about, and all helping they do is completely and utterly fake, their plastic smiles straight from the WF handbook to good customer service.

Is bigger better? Yes, in some ways. But my question is: why is it so impossible that an independent health food store can’t have one store as big as WF? What societal and corporate factors are influencing the flow of money, real-estate and etc to the extent that I can never imagine my neighborhood health food store scraping together the money to open a store the size of Whole Foods? *That’s* that scares me, not the fact that WF is so big, because I like that. I don’t like giving my money to WF because I know it goes out of my community, and because of that they can never be community-minded enough, no matter how many free cooking classes they offer (for the record, I got an offer to teach there and I declined). Honestly, I don’t even like my community [2004 note: I have since moved], but I do like the idea of knowing just who I’m giving my money to. Yes, it’s nice that WF supports small "artisan" companies and probably does a lot of good for them. But the "artisan" companies they publicize so much are probably less than 5% of their business, and anyway, I believe in local food. Whole Foods pretends to be a local store, but it’s never as real as at Aquarius, where they order me the ear cleaners I like, play punk rock, give me a wilty looking cauliflower for free, hang up my private cooking signs, and if I pick out some bad shiitakes because I’m rushing, Carmen says "I’m no chef, but those shiitakes look nasty. Do you really want them?"

Of course, the other side of that is that their produce cooler is broken half the time, their prices are higher than WF, and they never seem to have anything I want.

I know that people don’t want to spend all day shopping, so they are thankful when they can at least get some organic carrots from the supermarket and don’t have to make a special trip to the health food store. I guess they feel good about supporting organic agriculture, too.

But I want to support people who I feel believe in what I believe in. I don’t think the WF execs, managers, cashiers, etc etc really give a damn about whole foods, I really don’t. I think if they really understood the concept they wouldn’t have tried to build an empire based on organic apples, because I think that’s fundamentally against what the whole foods revolution in the 1970s was about. It was about more than food, it was connected to the other social movements of the time and, to a certain degree, recognized the connections between food, local economies, and general quality of life.

[July 2004 note: Since I wrote that, I've slightly changed my position on WF -- did you know that their CEO is vegan? I read an interview with him and was convinced that they are trying, in their yuppie alterna-corporate way. So I guess I've got to give small props to the WF.]

I don’t know. I was born in 1978, what do I know? Well, I know that most people involved in progressive things in the 60s and 70s have become the dreaded baby boomers/yuppies, and that’s all part of the problem: how the ideas of that era were co-opted and commercialized, often by the very people who had participated in them.

I think maybe it’s all about this: how do we know when to stop? When we have something good, how do we teach ourselves to have restraint and say that it’s good enough, and leave it at that? One hand, I’m happy I can get good organic produce at WF, on the other I feel that only exists because of greed. WF wants to get bigger and bigger, and thus concentrate wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Supporting WF means supporting the unfair way capitalism is practiced in America today (although personally I am an anarchist in many ways, thank you very much. But I’ve read enough and been blinded by enough Ayn Rand [O how shameful to admit to a childhood obsession with Ayn Rand!] to know that capitalism could be practiced in a much better way than it is now.)

[2006 note: my new essay, Small is Beautiful, talks about this.]

ACT FOUR

THE BEST BOOK I EVER TASTED

I just re-read this amazing book - The Best Thing I Ever Tasted: The Secret of Food by Sallie Tisdale.

You must go out and read it. Today! Here I am trying so hard to get these ideas out, feeling I’m not doing a good job, and, flipping to a random marked page in The Best Thing I Ever Tasted, here Mz. Tiz just breaks it all down like I never could. Writing about being involved in the movement Julie Jordan speaks of in Wings of Life, Tisdale says:

"Large corporations had come to control the American body and appetite, the American way of buying, selling, and living, in part by directing that appetite, in part by following its every twist and turn, ready to pounce. Eventually I grasped the fact that however one defined the problem, the solution would have to be local. I could see that what I ate, where and from whom I purchased my food, how it was shared or hoarded, how waste was handled, had instantaneous as well as long-lasting effects. I could see that each small act was part of one large whole – a whole motion, a wave, a movement. Eating in a healthy way – a 'whole' way – meant I had to ask a number of what seemed at first irrelevant questions about the rest of my life: what kind of clothes I wore and where the fabric came from; how animals were treated and used; how I used birth control – not just to prevent pregnancy but as a matter of what women were willing to put into their bodies..."

Tisdale writes a lot about how we got to where we are today, where we have so much "time-freeing" technology and industrialization and all this, yet our eating habits have become so much worse and no one knows how to cook (or eat) anymore. In the 1950s, she writes, the housewife was "a modern consumer, not an old-fashioned drudge. Cooking without recourse to the miracles of food processing was seen as quaint at best." That’s one clue: the aggressive post-war marketing of "labor-saving" devices (can openers, cans, canned foods, TV dinners, microwaves, frozen foods, etc) began to change the way we see food. It took it out of our own hands and into those of corporations. This was the beginning. Well, really, things began with the industrial revolution, but this was still an important thing. I think it all began in the 50s, and it was all tied into post-war attitudes toward the importance of leisure time as a god given right.

And then feminism gets into it. Food and women, historically so sisterly, became an important issue. Who cooks the food, who does the shopping and cleaning. When women went out to work, they still usually did the cooking. Food, the food revolution I mentioned earlier not withstanding, was further downgraded as just one more thing to do in a world of children and jobs and all that. So the microwave and can opener became more and more important.

And now we have architect-designed kitchens with wine cellars and warming drawers and baby fennel and the best of the world’s foods brought to our door (mangoes and plantains and chipotles and blah blah blah), but it is all so distanced from reality. Only rich people (and young vegan cooks with credit cards) can afford this shit, anyway.

The problem with the health foodies I see so many of is that they seem to believe that, as Sallie T says, "we’ve

developed as picky creatures who think far ahead about the consequences of our appetites...that our endocrinological systems are so delicately attuned to every gram of carbohydrate and protein that a slight variation in schedule can make us sick...but we’re simply hungry animals, happy at a full plate. When there wasn’t enough food, our ancestors went hungry – not just at bedtime, but for days, weeks, and longer. The fact that women tend to deposit fat around their hips, thighs, and belly is a manifestation of evolutionary success. A little bit of fat is health and fertility." Yes, that’s exactly it. She says just what I want to say about these people – they forget how we evolved and they have no gratitude.

At this point I sense some readers becoming angry at me. How can I say all this about evolution and eating anything available, when I don’t eat so much? I’ve never talked about what my veganism means to me on lagusta.com. It seems sort of (soy) cheesey, and I’m afraid it will make people leave lagusta.com, believing it’s just another bit of vegan propaganda. Oh well. I’ll make it quick. And if you are of the anti-vegan persuasion, would you stay if I tell you that I can't stand many vegans? True story.

ACT FIVE

ON VEGANISM

There are many health and environmental arguments for veganism, but I refuse to mention them. I am vegan because animals are not food. I know that we evolved eating animals, but I believe we ate far less of them than most people want us to believe. I think we were primarily gatherers. But who cares about that. All I can say is that we are here now, and whereas in the past, we ate whatever we could get, today we have no need to do that. No one can honestly argue that we need meat to survive anymore, because there are so many old vegetarians and vegans around these days. Today we have so much to choose from, and why we would choose to eat another living being I cannot imagine. There is absolutely no ethical justification for why we keep our animals for food as we do, and once we know the facts about how they are kept, there is absolutely so reason to continue eating them, just as once we found out about the Holocaust we had a moral obligation to stop it. I do not understand why cows deserve to die in death camps but my relatives didn’t deserve to die at Auschwitz. I know everyone hates that comparison, but if you do you’re free to leave now. It makes sense to me. I’m not running for president, so I don’t care how many people I offend.

Of course, there are those who keep animals in more humane conditions and believe that makes it OK to eat them, so I am forced to get into deeper waters.

Even if they are kept (kept is the right word) on the 1% of whatever it is of farms that are actually like the farms we imagine, why do we persist in believing that other animals must die in order for us to live? It is generally assumed that one should not kill beings just because one can. I do not understand how we got to where we are now, that humans are suddenly the top of the pyramid of all civilization and history. I believe in life on earth as a great circle, and in a circle no one is at the top. So there goes the meat eating argument.

Once one stops eating flesh, the various animal "foods" that do not require killing an animal become more and more troublesome. If we do not believe that it is morally acceptable to eat animals just because we have invented guns and factory farms, why is it any more ethical to drink milk and eat eggs? Aside from the fact that these products are obviously not meant for us to eat (milk is supposed to come out of the woman, not in! Humans are the only animals who drink another animal's milk, as well as the only ones who drink milk past infancy at all) and cause many health problems, and even aside from the conditions in which these animals are kept, do we really have the right to drink the milk of another species or eat its abortions (I know it's not exactly correct, I can't stop myself from calling eggs abortions. It makes me laugh every time)? My ethics tell me no, so I don’t.

I have very few meat-eating friends, so I don’t worry about offending meat-eaters. I have lots of vegetarian friends, and I respect them, but I still have to carry my argument through to its conclusion. I understand how hard it is to go vegan (it really is hard, for a while, at first). But I don’t understand why all vegetarians aren’t trying to become vegan. I don’t understand the mind that stops eating animals for ethical reasons then persists in thinking that using them but not killing them is OK. Animals in factory farms who are being used for milk live in more misery than cows that are eaten simply because they are alive longer. Therefore – I really believe this, I’m sorry veggie friends! – I think it is worse, from an ethical standpoint, to drink milk than eat meat. Doesn’t that make sense? And we all know about chickens – the cutting off of beaks with hot knives, the suffocating of male chicks, I won’t go into it. I hate talking about stuff like this, that’s why I have never discussed it before on lagusta.com. I’m almost done with it. One more thing: yes, eggs and dairy products can be "produced" in a more ethical way. But unless you
a) live on a farm, or
b) have no job and therefore have the time to search out the best raw, fresh, organic milk and good quality organic eggs you can and
c) have the money required to purchase these products
you shouldn’t be eating animal products.

So, I have been vegan for over 10 years now, and lately it all seems so simple. Just as my brother, my cat, or my cd player is not food, neither are many of the things that they sell in the grocery store. It’s as simple as that. I don’t eat flesh because it’s not ethically edible.

My position is moral. It also has historical background. In The Vegan Sourcebook, vegan scholar Joanne Stepaniak (read more of her stuff!) has a whole chapter on "vegan roots." She reports that the word vegetarian was defined in 1847, but we all know vegetarians have been around forever– Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, Plutarch, and many more dead white guys were veg long before it was fashionable (before 1847, vegs were called Pythagoreans, because the triangle dude was one of the first known vegetarians). I’m sure countless women have been vegan quietly through the ages, because of ethics or situations. Stepaniak says that the term vegan was first used in 1943.

ACT SIX

IF YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION ABOVE, JUST READ THIS PART

So, to recap: the reason I cannot respect and feel so contemptuous of these new health foodies is that their position is not moral and has no historical background.

It is actively immoral in that it positions the self at the center of its universe and refuses to see connections between the self and the rest of the world, and it is actively ahistorical in that it actively erases what we know, historically, about food. Modern yuppie healthy horrible people rely on modern technological "advances" that have not been tested by time and are promoted as safe by the same people who stand to profit from their sale. It’s sickening, saddening, and has to stop.

ACT SEVEN

THE SAPPY ENDING

Sallie T says: in the 1950s."the woman who insisted on simmering her stew over slow heat was made into the symbol of those unfortunates who were stuck in the past. Today, again a rarity, she represents the end result of all that forward motion. She is the lucky woman who has escaped the grind."

My checking account is negative a couple hundred dollars this month, but it’s OK. I’ll get more clients, I’ll get a big cooking job, I will sell truffles and teach cooking classes and get my tax refund. I will take deep breaths and know that what I am doing is right right now.

I am making my apple cakes and writing down notes. The kitchen is all appley smelling and outside it is quiet and springy. I need to finish the cakes so I can start cooking food for my private clients. I need to start recipe testing for a big dinner I’m doing in June. It is Tuesday afternoon and I have escaped the grind. I am making up my own life as I go, thinking about things and refining my ideas, trying to become a woman I admire, filling my mouth will new tastes, my head with new ideas, and my

heart with the happiness that can only come from a real life, well lived.

april 2003

update sept 2003! look at this amazingly rad patch a reader named luann made after reading this essay!