Sunday was the 85th annual Festival of the Grapes in Impruneta. We ate with friends on the rooftop of the lovely Hotel Bellavista. (Hotel Beautiful View). They served us a wonderful and simple and perfect family style dinner — penne with meat sauce, sage ravioli, beans, spinach, various meats, and to top it off, fresh grapes and grape tart, of course! Later the children ate ice cream. Then we watched the four neighborhoods of Impruneta compete with giant floats and elaborate costumes for “Best in Show.” Rain threatened, so we hurried home before the judges decided upon the winner.
Category Archives: To Eat
Processing Processed Food
There is a secrecy surrounding processed food. People who create the way it tastes are obliged to sign confidentiality agreements, presumably to protect both trade secrets — the popular taste of Coca Cola, for example — as well as the appearance that your favorite strawberry Starburst, for example, might have a bit of strawberry in it. Of course it doesn’t. You knew that. However, if taste and the process of creating what processed food tastes like has always fascinated you, read The Taste Makers from The New Yorker.
And if you want a little help visualizing the food you eat, several websites are happy to oblige:
Visual Ingredients posts the ingredients of processed food, and well, other food — the ingredient of broccoli is broccoli – in a visually appealing way.
Sugar Stacks shares pictures of food, with cubes of sugar, representing how much sugar the item contains.
German photographer Oliver Schwarzwald has created a fascinating photo essay illustrating Breakfast around the world (on his link, press editorial, then press breakfast). His breakfast pictures include a typical American breakfast, French breakfast, Russian breakfast, and more.
And if you really want to think about how our children are being raised on processed food (and it’s not pretty), check out this blog: Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project. A teacher commits to eating school lunches for a year, and shares her pictures of her daily school meal.
A recent memoir titled The Art of Eating In, chronicles Cathy Erway’s two year commitment to eating in: no fast food, no restaurants, to takeout.
Jamie Oliver is a chef who has taken up the cause for real food. Take a look at this trailer for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution
If this post inspires you to seek out fresh local food, then Local Harvest can help you find organic farms in your area.
Toast and the Toaster and the Toaster-Maker
DIY (Do it Yourself), Slow and Green, are all movements and concepts which are intertwined and connected.
Here’s a DIY story, which is oh so Slow, and teaches a lot about Green:
Consider if you will, the delightful pleasure of toast. Not only a way to redeem stale bread, toast is also a symbol of hearth and home.
“It isn’t only fictional heroes to whom toast means home and comfort. It is related of the Duke of Wellington – I believe by Lord Ellesmere – that when he landed at Dover in 1814, after six years’ absence from England, the first order he gave at the Ship Inn was for an unlimited supply of buttered toast.”
Elizabeth David, ‘English Bread and Yeast Cookery’ (1977)
Toast: crispy and hot with melted butter, or with cinnamon sugar, from twelve grain bread, or five or six grain, or sprouted, or simple rye, half burnt. All good. There’s French toast too, crisp with maple syrup. My husband practices heresy by preferring powdered sugar on his French toast, but then again, he’s from Texas and has some strange culinary traditions (Big Red, anyone?). And once I went to a potluck brunch where everyone oohed and awed over a French toast/ cream cheese casserole which frankly baffled me and was, to me, deeply unappealing. My grandmother, was a creamed-chipped-beef-on-toast expert, and though that sounds terrible now (dried, shredded beef drenched in flour and milk and poured over toast) it was rather delightful at the time.
But enough about the pleasures and follies of toast itself: imagine, for a moment, making your own toaster. Not quite as easy as plunking down some cash at the local big box. And, as Thomas Thwaites, the English toaster-maker found out, the massive industry and huge amount of industrial activity that goes into making a toaster for you to toast your bread is mind-boggling!
Thwaites in his own words: “So are toasters ridiculous? It depends on the scale at which you look. Looking close up, a desire (for toast) and the fulfilment of that desire is totally reasonable. Perhaps the majority of human activity can be reduced to a desire to make life more comfortable for ourselves, and has thus far led to being able to buy a toaster for £3.99 [among other achievements]. But looking at toasters in relation to global industry, at a moment in time when the effects of our industry are no longer trivial compared to the insignificant when our, they seem unreasonable. I think our position is ambiguous – the scale of industry involved in making a toaster [etc.] is ridiculous but at the same time the chain of discoveries and small technological developments that occurred along the way make it entirely reasonable.”(www.thetoasterproject.org)
It took him nine months to make, and he needed to source or find twenty-seven parts, including Mica, a piece of which he found on a Scottish peninsula, accessible only by boat.
Of course, growing a forest, crafting an ax, cutting wood, lighting a fire, and sourcing and making a small grill and toasting some bread that way would have taken a bit of effort too.
Thomas talking about his toaster:
Click here to watch more video chronicling his journey and effort.
That said, how much do you love toast?
What Do You Eat?
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer is an absorbing read. It’s about his exploration of the meat industry. An eye opener. The things that are done to animals are horrific, to say the least. Until recently I never really felt like a vegetarian. True, I didn’t eat meat, but that was because I didn’t like the taste. It was a matter of taste. I don’t eat mushrooms either, for the same reason.
However, knowing what I know now about factory farms and industrial animal husbandry, it’s clear: it’s true I don’t eat meat as a matter of taste, and I am also vegetarian.
So it was with special interest that I read an article about the Paleo Diet. This is a diet, a lifestyle really, where (mostly) men eat only meat in an effort to be as healthy and strong as cavemen. Another key of the Paleo diet is fasting between meals, in order to approximate what the cavemen may have experienced. It has a ‘back to basics’ kind of appeal, if you only want to eat meat.
Eating fads are common throughout American history. Perhaps because most Americans do not have a strong tradition of cooking and eating certain kinds of foods, (like the Italians, or the Mexicans, and so on) we are especially susceptible to dietary suggestions.
John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), the inventor of Kellogs, was not the first to promote a particular diet, and he won’t be the last. He plied his patients with multiple bowls of Corn Flakes in the early part of the 20th century. (Read the novel by T. C. Boyle, Road to Wellville, for a fun fictional account of Kellogg’s sanitarium).
I am not a big fan of cornflakes, but having had three pregnancies and being a woman susceptible to society’s pressures to be thin, I am no stranger to the struggle to lose weight and the struggle for healthy eating. I’ve dabbled in fads. I did Atkins post-baby once — it worked — probably because I don’t eat meat, which is an Atkins mainstay, so there wasn’t much left to eat, except whipped cream, as I recall. I tried the Zone too, but it was to abstract for me: trying to think of food in terms of percentages.
But really, it all comes down to:
eating whole foods — whole grains and lots of fruits and vegetables;
cutting out processed foods.
So why is that so hard? Well, for one thing, a mother or father prepares around 1000 meals a year for the family, (not including snacks), and even though grandma made it look easy (and maybe it was for her) for a lot of us, it ain’t easy. Another reason is the whole information overload thing, and also product overload — the sheer size grocery stores and the abundance of products and choices can be, frankly, overwhelming.
But again, my advice is (as with most things): Keep it Simple. If it’s too complicated, don’t eat it.
I would love to hear your thoughts, tips, and experiences feeding yourself and your family — send an email or leave a comment!