Food, Politics and Religion

Part 1: Nourish us!

Mother Knows Less: How the Food Media Colonized our Kitchens

Photo courtesy of Caroline Clough: http://mealsihaveeaten.blogspot.com/

In my house, one night a week is always pizza night. The day changes, but the recipe does not. The chewy dough is flavored with extra-virgin olive oil and a dab of pesto. It is cooked in a hot oven and nestled within the scorching edges of a cast-iron pan. I top the pizza with a homemade tomato sauce made mostly from sweetened tomato paste speckled with red pepper flakes and fennel seeds. Fresh mozzarella is melted until it spreads out gooey and starts to brown beneath the hot flames of the broiler. The cheese blankets the surface just above some handcrafted wild boar prosciutto from Philadelphia’s Italian market. Maybe, if I’m in the mood, the pie is also sprinkled with juicy pineapple chunks. Finally, a dusting of shredded Parmagiano-Reggiano cheese accompanies cheap garlic powder, onion powder and a sprinkling of dried basil.

Photo courtesy of Caroline Clough: http://mealsihaveeaten.blogspot.com/

The final result is thick, almost an inch tall. It is more like focaccia than traditional Pizza. The olive oil creates a rich almost cake-like crumb that browns against the hot cast iron pan and creates flakey edges resembling pastry. The bottom crunches between my teeth and the hot messy mixture of toppings challenges me to get it into my mouth before it slides off onto my plate or drips down my lip, scorching my chin. If I miss, I lift the bubbly goop with my fingers and make sure it lands on my tongue in time to compliment the crust. I feel it starting to scorch the top of my mouth, so I cool it down with a sip of Brunello. In my opinion, this is pizza perfection.

Of course, oenophiles might complain that Pizza is too complex for me to taste the subtleties of the legendary Montalcino wine (Brunello di Montalcino, “nice dark one,” is a red Tuscan masterpiece that usually accompanies rich and heavy meat dishes). Wine snobs might call it flavor pornography that sacrifices vino-eroticism for pure gastronomic perversity. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed fireworks: I like when pungent, sweet, sour, bitter and salty smack me in the face.

But my wine pairing is the least of my problems. Gourmands, for example, might complain about the pizza’s skillet shape. It is not deep dish like Chicago’s. It is not flat and flexible like New York’s. It is not crisp like the original Neapolitan. It is not square like Sicily’s. Furthermore, my combination of ingredients is too pedestrian to qualify as gourmet like Wolfgang Puck’s trendy California version: no wild mushrooms, no arugula, no avocados.

Also, some folks may take issue with the mozzarella. This grocery store purchase is not made from the milk of the water buffalo. It is not even hand crafted or packed in water. No, it comes shrink-wrapped from Wisconsin and branded with a name that ends in a vowel – i or o, maybe both — and a logo colored red, white and green: some marketing department’s attempt to conjure emotions related to Italy.

No, neither my pizza, nor its ingredients are authentic. It is a bastardization of the original and it hardly resembles the well-established American counterparts. Dough tossing pizza professionals from both continents would likely laugh at my pie. Yet, I continue cooking it my way. I’ve worked as a professional chef for so many years that I feel absolutely confident about my creation. Otherwise, I’d probably obsess over it, attempting to achieve some sort of cultural-culinary purity.

I remember this anxiety well from my youthful years in the kitchen. I purchased specialized ingredients from a variety of ethnic grocery stores because I wanted to make genuine food: corn husks and masa harina for true tamales, Japanese short grain rice for real sushi, red bean paste for bona fide steamed buns. I had an obsession with trying to make the real thing. Real paella. Real Waldorf salad. Real buffalo wings. Real Pizza.

What is real pizza? Is it the thin crusted one made in Naples, Italy? Most food historians agree that the tomato topped flat bread originated in Neapolitan cuisine centuries ago. Cheese wasn’t added until the late 1800s. Does this make all subsequent versions bastardizations? No, unlike other foods, pizza has become such a staple of the American diet that we generally do not worry over questions of authenticity. What about other, less ubiquitous, ethnic specialties?

The Burrito, for example, doesn’t really exist in Mexico. There is a traditional Burrito in the Northern Mexican town of Ciudad Jauréz. However, I’m told it barely resembles the overstuffed American meal-in-a-wrap. More akin to a hoagie, submarine, grinder, or muffaletta the Tex-Mex burrito is not authentic Mexican cuisine. Rather, critics might call this an example of U.S. restaurants appropriating indigenous food.

But I could just as easily flip this accusation around. I could say that the very notion of authentic food is a colonization of the family kitchen. From this perspective, cookbooks, food TV and celebrity chefs have robbed the family household of its food authority. Mother is no longer the expert. The expert is the expert. The celebrity chef is judge and jury.

You might argue that it is unfair to vilify restaurants, publishers and famous foodies. You might say they are anthropologists for the masses. They allow us to experience far away places through our taste buds. They give us the opportunity, literally, to consume distant cultures. Before Julia Child, some people argue, Americans knew little about France and even less about its cuisine. French food meant Kraft mayonnaise and canned or frozen Haricot Vert (thin French string beans). Gastronomic gurus made us cultured and worldly. They introduced us to far away places. Furthermore, identifying what is ethnically authentic actually increases the value of unique cultural attributes. In other words, by giving a voice to “humble peasant food” we grant it authority as an acceptable cuisine.

Wait! This statement begs to be challenged: acceptable to whom? It was already acceptable to the families that ate it. In some cases it ensured the survival of generations of eaters. By defining it, don’t we imprison a culture into a cookie-cutter Jell-o mold? Don’t we rob the household of its ability to construct its daily dish according to familial nutritional needs? Now the inability to cook according to the officially sanctioned and so-called authentic recipe – whether due to lack of technical knowledge, or lack of funds to purchase ingredients – marginalizes the home cook.

In fact, while Julia Child, James Beard and M.K. Fisher are often credited with bringing good taste to the USA, one might say that what they actually brought was the idea of an authoritative and elitist voice that chooses the good food, dismisses the bad, and defines sophisticated taste for the rest of us.

What is this “French” cooking? Why should we master it? And what makes it an art? Certainly Julia’s Parisian French recipes were not more genuine than the home cooking done by mothers, grandmothers and peasants in regions throughout France. But Mrs. Child was on TV, PBS even: that ad-free bastion of educational programming. She was an authority. Did her wealthy background — Vanity Fair’s Laura Jacobs describes her as “from wasp stock” — and Smith College education give her a more refined palate than the rest of us?

Or did it just give her articulate speech and the ability to convince a nation that her subjective taste preferences should also be theirs? Because despite the mythology, America ate well before Julia. The new world was extolled for its bounty of exotic ingredients. In fact, many early colonial dishes, particularly the Southern ones, are now experiencing resurgence in international fine cuisine. Virginia’s salt-cured country ham, for example, is often praised with enthusiasm historically reserved for Spain’s dry-cured Jamón Serrano and Italy’s Prosciutto di Parma.

This Smithfield, Virginia creation predates Julia Child. Legend has it that Native American methods of salting, smoking and aging venison were adapted to the razorback hog by the Jamestown colonists when they first arrived on the new continent over two hundred years ago. Furthermore, the process of making Virginia’s Country Ham is hardly unique when compared to the process used to make Spain’s and Italy’s. The differences are mostly a result of the idiosyncrasies of regional climates and their effects on the grains and water fed to the hogs, the salt used to cure the meat, and microorganisms in the dark atmosphere of the aging cellar. Intangible or invisible factors, whether chemical or spiritual (as in ‘the soul of the Parma infuses a unique kind of love into a smoked hog leg’), are the biggest differences between one culture’s dry-cured ham and another’s.

Cooking methods are as universal as human ingenuity. For every pizza, there’s a flat-bread with regional toppings on the other side of the globe. While the Burrito may use ingredients indigenous to Mexico, the citizens of Ciudad Jauréz certainly did not invent the idea of wrapping up their food. Maki and Spring rolls are two Asian examples of rolled food. For every Pâté there’s a meatloaf or Kofta. Industrious home cooks all over the world are adept at modifying local foodstuffs into original creations, even if they don’t all bear the Escoffier or Cordon Bleu stamp of approval.

The codification of authentic ethnic cuisines stinks of the same nationalist ideology that eliminated the spoken dialects of impoverished regions and replaced them with the King’s English, Spanish, French, German, Italian etc. In fact, the refined cooking techniques of France come straight from royal court. Taillevent, the famous cook to Charles the V of France, and La Varenne, author of France’s first book of haute recipes passed their knowledge on to generations of royal chefs whose techniques have been updated, modernized and christened with fancy names. Julia Child eventually took the baton (or should I say baguette?) and taught U.S. TV viewers and cookbook readers authentic fancy French names and regal cooking techniques. She also brought European culinary aristocracy to a new continent. Or as Laura Jacobs wrote in the August 2009 issue of Vanity Fair, what Julia Child introduced to the American home cook was:

Principles—a belief in a right way as opposed to a wrong way. Just as Emily Post’s Etiquette set forth a blueprint for civilized conduct, an ethical structure, if you will, that anyone—no matter what their birth—could learn, so Mastering set forth the structural verities of classic French cooking.

Although the birthright becomes irrelevant, the very notion of principled gastronomic authenticity defines upper, middle and lower class palates carving them into class divisions unequally distributed like white and dark meat poultry. Gourmet sophistication becomes like poetry, ballet and opera — high-art used as economic segregation — for a generation of middle class baby boomers raised on Bob Dylan, Alvin Ailey and Leonard Bernstein. The peoples’ entertainment had taken the ‘high’ out of high culture. Mid-Twentieth Century artists and their pseudo-socialist revolutionary ideology had eliminated the performing arts’ ability to divide the proletariat and bourgeoisie. However, an upwardly mobile generation of white-collar hippies still needed ‘culture’ for the same reason the Nineteenth Century’s Victorian aristocracy did. It separated them from their darker skinned, lower paid or less educated compatriots. Food culture met the prerequisites. It became the new high-culture. A flock of gastronomes, book publishers and TV producers was ready to profit off the new (and gigantic) generation of American elite. An industry established a new set of ‘high’ standards, to which ‘low-culture’ citizens could ‘buy-up.’

Food personalities like Julia Child (followed by Jacque Pepin, Madeleine Kamman, Paul Prudhomme, etc.) inadvertently partnered with the food industry. We tend to forget that the food media developed right alongside the modern industrial food complex. For most of human history, knowledge of nourishment and nutrition was kept in the family: passed from one generation of home cooks to the next. Food and its preparation, recipes and home-remedies, were passed from parent to offspring, from elder to child. But when the daily meal became ‘cuisine,’ when soup became ‘potage’ and beef stew became ‘bourguignon,’ the maternal (or in some cases paternal) link was cut. Family heirlooms, culinary and agricultural, were tossed to the compost heap. Grandma no longer taught mother to bake biscuits. Grandpa no longer taught father to smoke stag meat. Feeding expertise moved outside the home. Corporate interests took the reigns. Factory sealed aluminum cans replaced Ball canning jars. Cryovac and flash-frozen fish replaced salt cod.

Julia Child — then an iconic symbol of American matriarchy – helped the food industry mark its territory. She did not make cooking simple. Instead, she wielded a wallop of a maternal guilt trip, showing women just how luxurious dinner could and should be. And all the while, she pretended it was easy. Now if you don’t have time to fashion a four-star fancy French feast, why bother cooking at all? Buy dinner instead! Restaurants were happy to serve take-out and delivery. Frozen TV platters were plentiful. Hamburger helper, Frito pie and Tuna Casserole were quick fixes that required purchasing packaged and processed provisions. The gargantuan food industry was more than happy to reap the dividends of the new home cook’s insecurity and learned helplessness. Meanwhile industrious parents with time, money and higher education, were elated to learn the new culinary arts. Epicurean expertise not only became a signpost of superior sophistication, it also proved that privilege was the paragon of good homemaking. Or in psychoanalytic terms, the ‘good’ breast flows with gourmet milk.

This is how an unintentional partnership between our favorite foodies and a corporate food industry created a national cuisine that perfectly fits our capitalist culture. I disagree with the critics who claim that the USA – because it is always dipping from a multicultural fondue pot of immigrants at the forefront of a global economy — can never develop its own food. They say it will always be just an amalgam of everything — including the sink. However, I’d argue there is a National cuisine. But it has nothing to do with ingredients and recipes. It is not about hamburgers, apple pie, Cajuns, California or barbecue. Instead, it is a consumerist cuisine: food fit for commercialism.

It is seen in value added products with surnames like imported, organic, local and authentic. These products insure a dynamic market where bread is no longer just bread. Instead, it is a commodity with multiple price points. Wheat. Multigrain. Artisan. Like a car, an electronic gadget, software, or a hedge fund, there are different versions that range in price from cheap to outrageously expensive. And each version’s value is related to the authority granted to it by celebrity chefs and cookbook authors.

Part 2: Sustain us!

Too Many Lobbyists in the Kitchen: The Bitterness of Gastro-political Activism

Julia Child, following in the footsteps of France’s Escoffier, made the Twentieth Century the American age of culinary opulence and value-added luxury with Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Michael Pollan, following in the footsteps of a new generation of chefs like Alice Waters, has set the Twenty-First Century on the track to an age of epicurean ethics. Every bite is political. You vote with your fork. It is a new mythology of mastication that resonates with our capitalist ideological foundation. Table manners are reconstructed into political lobbying.

Although this new gastronomic grass-roots activism seems to be in resistance to the corporate control of our agricultural food system, the implications are more complicated and potentially problematic.

Retailers like Whole Foods and authors like Michael Pollan,  Eric Schlosser, and Jonathan Safan Foer – although admirable in their intentions – have inadvertently sown the seeds of the political food movement in the same noble soil of entitlement that sprouted the separation of eaters along class lines. These heroes of culinary activism neglect to point out that it is in the backyards of wealthy hosts that marginalized party guests suffer from the toxic run-off of the exclusive cocktail hour. In other words, the national food system that has caused obesity and diabetes epidemics with commodity corn sweeteners and cheap subsidized calories is in fact the flip side of the culinary sophistication heralded by TV personalities and cookbook chefs.

Consider that one advantage to mastering the art of an ethnic cuisine is that it invalidates the kitchen antics of the average family cook and widens the gap between classes. Despite Grandma’s old world origins and the hardships of the boat ride she made from the homeland, her unsophisticated ‘macaroni’ smothered with tomato ‘gravy’ and topped with the cheap pecorino Romano is inauthentic now that she resides in an urban immigrant neighborhood. Never mind that South Philadelphia and Boston’s North End can claim direct culinary lineage to Italy. Because Mario Batali has defined regional Italian cuisine for an audience of food network junkies and Manhattan restaurant patrons, Nonna is an imposter. Her lack of interest in truffle oil is indicative of both financial and culinary inadequacy. And now, in the age of gastro-political activism, not only is her so-called non-traditional cooking mediocre, it is also ethically and nutritionally suspect.

Clearly, it benefits the narcissistic interests of affluent eaters to increase the oppositional space between authentic and fallacious food — and to equate that opposition with simple moral parallels like good and bad, or political parallels like local and corporate agriculture.

TV chefs are not the only offenders. Scientific food engineers also inadvertently help increase the divide. Synthetic flavor enhancers, for example, are increasingly used to trick taste buds, preserving and augmenting the polar divisions in the process. Empty laboratory constructed calories masquerade as nutrients, fooling neurotransmitters on microscopic levels. Evolutionary biologists argue that artificial food dyes and flavors deceive our hard-wired instincts to eat what’s good for us. Meanwhile, government subsidies increase the economic distance between vitamin rich vegetables and sugary soda pop. A liter of coke is cheaper than a head of Swiss chard. The poles get further apart. As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, so healthy gets healthier and junk food gets junkier.

However, we should not blame only the corporations like Cargill, Kraft, Sara-Lee and Philip Morris. The ambience of the American consumerist cafeteria lunch line seems to be the only logical next chapter in the culinary myth that began with the epicurean elitism of the Twentieth Century. Therefore, we should look critically at both the corporate industrial infrastructure of the U.S. food supply and the popular intellectual movement that resists it.

Not only is local, organic and/or ethical the new higher-priced luxury prefix signifying opulence on national menus, it is also a moral marker of piety preserved for people of privilege. Now upper class, educated articulate speakers (following in the footsteps of Julia Child) – calling themselves healthy eating advocates, nutrition educators, and political activists – can act like missionaries saving poor savages. No longer do we teach the infidels that our God sustains life better, now our food provides a more nourishing experience.

Give us each day our daily bread, but make sure its whole grain and unbleached. Sure, it is more expensive. However, hard work is rewarded with dollars. And dollars bring everyone closer to enjoying the everlasting benefits of upper class moral superiority. Yes, only the rich can digest the divine rewards of the new consumerist culinary religion. Fast food, soda pop and commodity corn (and increasingly, animal based proteins) bear the markings of a new heathenism.

Unfortunately, this political food movement confuses its socialist tendencies with free-market opulence and progressively mythologizes local, organic and small-scale food processing as the new road to Mecca. They have forgotten the great depression’s soup lines. They ignore the fact that the U.S.A currently eats better than any society in human history. They’ve repressed memories of the hunger citizens endured just a hundred years earlier. The centralization of the national food supply fed millions of hungry people and has all but eradicated starvation in developed countries (albeit at the expense of the third world).  Thanks to the subsidization of commodity crops, the average U.S. consumer need only spend 9.8% of his disposable income on food.  And clearing the table of precarious and vulnerable local food economies is precisely what enabled a national bounty. Do the pundits of the new political food movement see that they are merely advocating that history plays like a bad song on repeat? The pendulum moves in the opposite direction. From local to global and back again, we swing from one hyperbolic extreme to the other.

Of course, there is nothing new about this debate. It is a county fair pie-eating contest between centralized hoarding and individual autonomy. It is not only a central paradox of our democratic capitalist economy (social welfare state or corporate manifest destiny and the unequal distribution of wealth?). It is also the principle enigma facing the socialized animal: individual or cultural sovereignty. This polarity and its psychological ramifications are symbolized in many ancient stories. As staples for human survival, food and water are ideal ingredients for an mythological repast.

For example, our current food and agricultural infrastructure is based on the same metaphorical edifice as the prudent advice of Joseph the dream interpreter (Genesis 41:31). He counsels Pharaoh to store the bountiful harvest’s grains in preparation for the inevitable seven years of famine lurking right around the corner. Let us not forget that, like biblical Egypt, the U.S.A. streamlines, stores and industrializes the food supply not only to satiate the appetites of corporate fat bellies, but also to fortify the nation against the threat of famine and crop-killing natural disasters. Likewise, the authors and activists who try to resist the corporate food economy have unconsciously built their argument upon a mythological foundation. Like Moses, they attempt to liberate the chosen people from an overly indulgent and exploitative corporate and government Pharaoh.

In this retelling of Exodus, however, the chosen people are not enslaved. Instead they are sophisticated and privileged. They are a select few who have the advantages necessary to heed a message that perpetuates class-based moral separatism. The media validates them. The restaurants cater to them.
It is not blood that they will smear on their doorposts but rather zesty arrabiata sauce made from organic vine ripened tomatoes and flavored with Niman Ranch pancetta. Growth hormones and antibiotics will smite the first born of the unsophisticated and undereducated. The liberated elite will part the waters of high-fructose soda pop, shedding the shackles of common cuisine and heading off into the desert.

The unleavened flat bread of the new Israelites is not the bland matzo my grandmother served. It is pizza in its ‘authentic’ new American manifestation.

Hopefully, they’ll use my recipe:

RECIPE FOR PIZZA PERFECTION

For the Dough:

1 7-gram packet active dry yeast

1 ¼ cups warm water

1 TBS Pesto

1 TBS Sea Salt

3-5 Cups of Flour

Fit your mixer or food processor with the dough kneading blade or paddle. Inside the mixer bowl, dissolve the yeast in the water. When it starts to bubble and smells yeasty, add 2 cups of flour. Mix to combine. Allow the batter consistency concoction to double in size. (This step is called making a sponge. It gets the yeast going and helps develop gluten). Add salt and pesto. Add 1 cup of flour. Knead adding small amounts of flour until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Coat the dough with olive oil and allow it to rise until doubled in size.

For the sauce:

In a blender or food processor, combine 1 6oz can of tomato paste with 2 TBS of sugar, 1 tsp Sea Salt, 1 TBS of Pesto, 3 TBS Red Wine, ½ TBS Fennel Seed, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Blend until smooth.

To assemble the pizza:

Turn on oven at highest setting (450-550 degrees Fahrenheit). Place a large cast iron skillet on the stove at medium-low flame. Stretch half of your dough (reserve the second half for another pizza) out so that you have a disc the size of your pan. Lay dough on the hot skillet. Spread half of the sauce evenly with a rubber spatula. Cover with cheese and toppings of your choice.

Bake the pizza in the hot oven until the cheese is gooey and bubbling. Turn on your broiler and brown the top of the pie for 1-2 minutes

(careful not to burn it!).

Open a bottle of red wine. Pour. Drink.

The preceding is an excerpt from a proposal I’ve written for a book entitled:

Eat. how food became religion and why we’ll never feed our hungry souls.

If you are in the publishing business and interested in reading the entire proposal, please email me: jordosh@gmail.com