I’m basically food obsessed and as I mentioned in an earlier blog I found out only after Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s writing that there is a reason for my obsession and it is called the food industry which has turned mere food into categories of protein, carbs, fat or Vitamin this and that. I’ve often thought that I needed to go to classes to get better informed about food but now I find that in some ways I was blessed by the grace of my background. With my grandparents from Turkey, my father born in Cuba and my mother from New Orleans, I learned to eat good real food at a very young age. Whether the bulgur in my father’s mother’s kibbe or the field peas in my mom’s mother’s Sunday meals, I ate grains, I ate good, and well with this voluptuous figure, it shows. I was never one to turn down a good meal.
So let’s fast forward to right now – I’m at Rouse’s and I am going to buy my usual eggs, the free range, nothing added, brown large eggs – not X-large and lo and behold I start reading and find out all of these eggs come from California. When I lived in California I wrote a piece for the Jewish Times about the Jewish chicken farmers in Petaluma and now Michael Pollan writes of the Petaluma Farms advertising free range but that being deceptive as there is a door the chickens can go out into this small yard but only for two weeks of their lives and while they write a good story they deliver the typical horror associated with food factories – inhumane treatment of animals that we eat. And you are what you eat. Keep that in mind.
So finally I find some eggs from Mississippi so I tell my friend Beth, who writes a blog about Slow Food, and she says the good news is that we can buy eggs and milk from the Green Market – only the Green Market didn’t happen this Thursday because of the rain – and so then she tells me that these two guys are taking over the old Indonesian furniture building on Earhart and opening Jack and Jakes very soon which will have all local everything – produce to meat. Yee ha! Bring on Jack and Jakes because we all know that Whole Foods aka Whole Wallet is a story line of whole foods but not an actual repository of that at all. And my Rouse’s location has a dearth of natural products even though they are super nice there and will get anything you want but they still keep the “organic” selections in their own little place in the store.
We’re finishing up the red quinoa that I bought at the Trader Joe’s when I was in L.A. and wondering how to get some more. This shouldn’t be that hard. Tin’s nanny, who is a vegetarian and was asking about where to eat out, tells me they are opening back up a co-op on St. Claude that should carry these types of things and so maybe now I’ll mail order some red quinoa because Tin loves when I make him tofu with the Turkish spices Flower gave us, red quinoa and roasted sweet potatoes and sprinkle olive oil and lime juice on it. So I’m speaking to a colleague who lives in the middle of the corn belt about our food abundance which has caused a severe perversion of eating in America and how India needs more than ever more food cheap and fast, and he said, “… it’s a big discussion point amongst our friends. some don’t like local, some don’t like organic and some won’t eat anything unless they grew it themselves.”
When did food get so complicated?