Cooking is Subversive

I've been working a bit with the Occupy Wall Street folks in New York, who are putting together a cookbook, and it's gotten me thinking about the subversive nature of simply picking up a knife and preparing your own dinner.

When you cook for yourself instead of reheating processed convenience food, you opt out of the garbage that the mainstream food industry wants you to eat. Cooking for yourself is a way of thinking for yourself, choosing not to believe all of the advertisements telling you that it’s too hard, or takes too much time, or you’ll never make it taste as good as the celebrity chef who’s got his name on the package.

Don’t believe it. Don’t let any celebrity chef ever convince you that you don’t know the right way to hold a knife, chop an onion, or bone a chicken. There are as many ways to hold a knife as there are people handling knives. You may be able to learn some tricks that will make you more efficient, or make your cooking look more professional. But in the end, as long as you cook something reasonably tasty, don’t hurt yourself, and don’t make anyone sick, then you’ve done something right, regardless of how you’re holding your knife or slicing your onion.

Cooking is a subversive act because it involves taking back the power to choose every ingredient in your meal, making the decision to buy from folks who give a damn about the people who work for them and about the soil, air, and water. When you buy ingredients from small farmers, you support individuals and families who have chosen to make a living outside of the mainstream food system. They’re usually kinder to to their land than industrial operations, and they make their own calls about what they’re going to grow, and where they’re going to sell it.

Shopping at a farmers’ market is a subversive act. When you choose heirloom fruits and vegetables rather than tasteless, industrial varieties, you do your part to preserve ancient plant knowledge and species diversity. At a farmers’ market you have the chance to buy ingredients from farmers who use age-old seeds and knowledge to produce tasty, healthy food, rather than squeezing as much low quality produce as they can out of land that’s already tired.

Shopping at a farmers’ market or joining a community supported agriculture program is a subversive act because you’re doing your part to help build on alternative economy, one that doesn’t rely on multinational corporations or transnational trucking firms. You’re paying for the fruits and vegetables that you actually get, rather than spending extra money for the services of middlemen who jack up the price of your groceries without giving back anything of value.

When you cook for yourself and plan your meals around fresh, local ingredients, you buy from people who keep your money close to home, as they turn around and support other local businesses instead of extracting profits that ultimately go to a corporate office in a distant city. When independent businesses can generate their own livelihood, fewer people are at the mercy of low paying jobs with companies that charge obscenely low prices for products made by people who work for even lower wages in developing nations.

Cooking is a subversive act because it is a magnet that brings people together to work collectively, gathering and prepping ingredients, and then sitting down and enjoying the results, taking time to exchange thoughts and ideas, visiting face to face instead of through a computer screen. Cooking creates connections, providing a meeting place with cooperation at its root. Cooking with a community involves sharing skills, and building something bigger than the work of lonely individuals. Cooking and sitting down to meals is time that you don’t spend working, shopping, or watching television.

Cooking is a subversive act because it brings different cultures together to enjoy each other’s food, creating connections instead of going to war. Strangers are less strange once you have tasted their recipes and sat at their tables. Each individual act of connecting to someone who is unlike yourself, someone the media teaches you to fear, helps to defang the myth that the world is a hostile place, and weapons are the only solution.

Cooking is a subversive act because it gives you control over your health. The better you eat, the more likely you are to are to get up and do something rather than sitting on the couch. The better you eat, the less you need to support the mainstream medical industry, and the less you rely on highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs and an insurance industry that doesn’t insure much. Using your own judgment and developing your own knowledge base about the way for you to eat makes you less vulnerable to bogus claims on food labels telling you that a product will help your heart, boost your energy level, or keep you regular.

Cooking for yourself is a process of getting to know your own needs and your own mind. The more you produce your own food, the more your food choices depend on what you really want and need, rather than what the food industry wants you to buy so they’ll make more money. Choosing your own ingredients allows you to tune into the ways that different foods affect your well being and your metabolism, and choose combinations that help you thrive.

Learning about your own food allergies and sensitivities gives you the knowledge and power to heal yourself, and stay alert and engaged. Cooking for yourself allows you to choose your own portion size, figuring out how much food you really need, and it allows you to choose the right amount of salt for your meals, rather than consuming all of the extra sodium that convenience food manufacturers add to their products so they’ll last long on supermarket shelves while they’re sitting and waiting for you to buy them.

Cooking is easy, once you get past the idea that you have to make something complicated and dazzling. Use good, fresh ingredients, and prepare them simply. Practice and build your skills. Learn from the folks around you, and share your own knowledge. Cooking is power. Cooking is wealth. Cooking is subversive.

Reawakening

I own a business that makes the same food week after week, month after month, and year after year. The ingredients change seasonally, but the menu basically stays the same. So it's a big deal when we introduce a new menu item.



This past fall we started selling beef tamales. We'd been selling only vegetarian tamales for years, in fact, our entire menu had been completely vegetarian until we introduced a beef chili in an effort to limit competition at the Jubilee Farm pumpkin patch event. (They were talking about bringing in a burger vendor for the omnivores.) The chili was really tasty, but it was more work than we'd anticipated and it just didn't sell well.

The beef tamales however, were an instant hit. Once we introduced them at all of our markets, we quickly began selling more of them than of both of the vegetarian varieties combined. There were a couple of pissed off vegans, but not nearly as many as we'd expected. Ironic as it may sound, I felt like it was a step in the right direction as far as my big picture objective of encouraging folks to eat less meat. There's an ounce of beef in a beef tamale. If someone chooses to eat one along with a big pile of locally grown vegetables on the side instead of eating a burger or a hot dog, I feel like I'm making a difference.

We began buying our meat from Crown S Ranch, in Winthrop. My household has been enjoying their fine products for years, and they gave us a great deal on some overstocked meat that had been shaped into hamburger patties. We did some mutually beneficial cross marketing.

I drove out to visit the farm in late October. As the author of two vegan cookbooks, I wanted to be able to tell customers that I'd visited the farm that was raising the animals that went into my tamales, and I felt good about using their products.

It was a magical place. Jennifer and Louis, the owners, are both engineers and they've designed a wealth of technologies and systems --some simple, some complex--to make the most of natural cycles and synergies, and raise tasty, healthy animals. At one point Jennifer was showing me around and explaining some of the systems, and she stopped in mid-sentence, gestured at a nearby cow, and said, "Let's move away a bit. I'm talking too loud, and I'm stressing her out."

By the end of the visit, we'd brainstormed all kinds of ways we could collaborate. To start with, I agreed to make tamales using their beef and pork, for them to sell in their farm store and distribute to their wholesale accounts. They'd provide the meat, and I'd charge them a wholesale price that didn't include marking up the most expensive ingredient.

She ordered more than 700 tamales, and I made them and froze them for a pick-up in a couple of weeks. A week later, she sent me an email regarding a much smaller batch of tamales I'd brought to the farm store when I visited. Customers were asking whether I was using GMO corn and she was curious about the answer.

The GMO issue has always been a tricky one for me. On the one hand, I want good, clean food as much as the next person. On the other hand, I have a great working relationship with the Mexican distributor who suppliers my masa and corn husks, and their products make wonderful tamales. I could get a non-GMO masa from the behemoth natural foods distributor, but I have to drive far to get it, and they don't treat me like they value my business. I'm also not as happy with the way the tamales come out when I use that masa.

And yet Jennifer's email was so friendly and non-judgemental that I found myself revisiting the issue. I researched prices, tried thinking outside the box, and made a sample batch. I found myself liking them more.

But I still had more than 700 tamales in the freezer made with the GMO corn. I offered her an out. I'd been using this masa for many years, and I knew I'd be able to sell these tamales. If she wanted to wait until I could use all non-GMO ingredients, that wasn't a problem for me: I'd simply pay for the meat that she'd provided.


She bought them anyway, saying that she'd just treat them as a transitional batch. In the meantime, I went ahead placed an order with the behemoth natural foods distributor for quite a bit of the non-GMO masa. I've even found parchment paper "corn husks" that have the look and feel of the real thing.

Once I got started, I began revisiting all of my other ingredients as well. I've always been comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction, and I believe that incremental change can be as effective as all-or-nothing dogmatism. I use plenty of clean, local, organic ingredients, but I also use GMO masa and cheap, industrial cheese. I've never set out to provide an absolutely wholesome product. Instead, I've aimed to create a reasonably wholesome product that's a great value.

For the most part, the few customers who have called me out about these inferior ingredients over the years have seemed smug and self-righteous, and that kind of attitude makes me want to dig in more than it makes me want to change. But Jennifer's attitude about the tamales was sensible and easygoing, and it really got me thinking.

Media Storm

There's been quite the media storm lately about food safety at Seattle farmers' markets. The PI ran an article citing a report that the health department found 252 violations in 265 routine inspections this year, including 189 that were considered critical. National sites such as Barfblog and Epicurious promptly ran articles parroting the same information.

As a long time farmers' market vendor, I've experienced hundreds of on site health inspections. Some have involved red "critical" violations. Once I hadn't prepared a bleach bucket, though I did have bleach, water, and a container for bleach water on hand. Several times I've been cited for having handwashing water that was a few degrees cooler than the 100 degrees that the health department requires.

The most common violation found on my company's health inspection reports lately involves a regulation called the four hour rule. The health department allows you to hold potentially hazardous foods in the danger zone (40 degrees F to 140 degrees F) for up to four hours as long as you discard them at the end of this time. In order to use this rule and be in full compliance, you must write down the time that you took the product in question out of your cooler, as well as the time (four hours later) that you plan to discard it.

Most of the markets where my business vends are only four hours long. If we take our cheese out of the cooler at the beginning of the market and discard it at the end of the market, we are complying with the spirit of this rule. But if the health department shows up and we haven't written down that we took the cheese out at, say, 10AM when the market started, they write it down as a red, critical violation.

I'm not downplaying the importance of genuine food safety, especially at farmers' markets. Food should be kept sufficiently cold or hot, surfaces should be kept clean, and folks handling food should never have bare hand contact with ready to eat foods. In addition, food should be handled conscientiously at every stage in the process, from the time we purchase ingredients, to the time we prepare it in our kitchen, to the time we serve it at the markets. But lumping together this failure to record the time we took the cheese out of the cooler with genuinely serious violations like failure to wash hands after using the bathroom does a disservice to vendors, customers, market administrators, and even health inspectors.

Although there have been articles in recent years claiming that health regulation at farmers' markets is particularly lax, farmers' market booths are actually more meticulously regulated than any other food service establishment I've ever known. Market administrators enter into an agreement with the health department requiring them to provide proxy inspections of booths handling potentially hazardous foods on every single market day.

This is the equivalent of having a restaurant inspected every single day that it is open to the public. (Most restaurants are inspected only once or twice a year.) The inspections certainly aren't as thorough as the ones the health department performs. For example, a market manager probably wouldn't notice if my hand washing water was a few degrees cooler than it should be. But the market managers rightfully take this responsibility very seriously, because all of our livelihoods and reputations depend on not making the public sick.

So why the media hype? I think it stems partly from the fact that farmers' market booths are so out in the open and transparent. You rarely see a restaurant kitchen as exposed as a market booth, and this leaves market vendors open to a higher level of scrutiny and judgement. If the cook at your favorite restaurant drops your food on the floor, he can pick it up and plate it and you'll never know. (Ever hear of the three second rule?) That could never happen at a farmers' market because someone would inevitably see and report the incident to a market manager, resulting in an earnest talk about how the reputations of all vendors are on the line when a single vendor puts customers at risk.

It also doesn't help that many smug, self satisfied market patrons play down the importance of food safety at farmers' markets, claiming that farmers' market food is inherently safer than mainstream industrial food. Artisan food producers do tend to care more about the food they produce, there is some evidence that grassfed beef does tend to have lower levels of e coli than factory farmed beef, and a foodborne illness from a farmers' market product is much easier to trace and address than one caused by a huge outfit that distributes product in many states, under multiple brand names. But that's no reason to be complacent, and food mishandled by small producers is just as likely to make you sick as food mishandled by industrial behemoths.

Last weekend a reporter from KUOW showed up at the Ballard Farmers' Market with a health inspector who works closely with local farmers' markets. The inspector performed a couple of inspections, including one of my booth, explaining about the regulations and checking temperatures and handwashing stations. As far as I know, the story hasn't aired yet, but it struck me as an effort to show another side of the story, about the hard work that we actually do put into keeping our booths and our product safe.

I'm assuming the reporter felt okay about what she saw and heard, because she swung back around after the interview and bought a quesadilla.

Food Knowledge

I've been teaching cooking classes regularly lately, and I keep bumping up against a paradox: people come to cooking classes to learn something they didn't previously know, from someone who has culinary skill and experience. Yet I'm convinced that most of my students know more than they think they know, and my objective is to help them build enough confidence to experiment, and to draw on their existing knowledge.

Food knowledge belongs to all of us. Folks were choosing foods, and preparing and eating them long before anyone ever wrote a cookbook or started a cooking school. Even people who don't really cook nearly always manage to feed themselves day to day, and folks who sign up for cooking classes most likely have at least a bare minimum of curiosity and familiarity with foods, knives, and cutting boards.

The way I see it, if you prepare a meal that tastes reasonably good, and you don't cut or burn yourself and nobody gets sick, you've done something right. Some of my favorite meals are incredibly simple, and incredibly tasty. The other night I sauteed some lovely peppers with garlic and olive oil, tossed it with fresh pasta, and ate it with grated cheese, and it was one of the best things I'd ever tasted. Sure, it helped to start with good ingredients, but sometimes I feel that, as a cooking instructor, the most important thing I can do is give students permission to keep it simple.

There's no glory in this, and I really don't dazzle anyone. Once a student wrote on a feedback form that I didn't have enough of a "backstory." But I like to think that when folks leave my cooking classes, they'll actually go home and cook. And that's what it's all about.

This Summer

In a way it's hard to believe that summer is almost over, especially here in Seattle where it only got going in earnest a few weeks ago. I turned 50 this summer, and I started feeling tired right afterwards. I think I mostly just gave myself permission to feel tired, after more than 20 years of pushing myself through the long days and small, everyday crises involved in running a small business on a shoestring.

So I've been pushing myself less this summer, working to define my role in the business. I do the purchasing, because it involves keeping track of so many details and prices. I keep an eye on the big picture, and I figure out ways to communicate big picture insights to the crew. I try to keep them motivated, challenged and engaged. And I crank out quesadillas during the busiest times: special events, the Ballard Market, and the dinner rush at Columbia City.

Because of the terrible weather earlier this summer, the farmers' markets got a slow start this year. There was hardly anything except greens available until nearly July. We didn't really see chiles or corn until nearly the middle of August. There were plenty of cold, damp and dreary market days, when produce wouldn't have sold even if it was available. Things have picked up for the farmers the past few weeks, but for much of the summer they largely seemed stressed and broke.

As a prepared food vendor, I've actually benefited in some way from their struggles. Spring tends to be the busiest time of year for my business, at least when the weather cooperates. Folks are excited that the markets are starting up, but there isn't that much to buy so they buy dinner. Once the heirloom tomatoes and the flats of berries show up, customers have a lot less money leftover for discretionary purchases like prepared food.

I'm thrilled that my business has done well this summer, but I'm also fully aware that farmers' markets are about farmers, and something is very wrong when the farmers are struggling and the quesadilla vendor is thriving. I try to give back every way I can, by buying ingredients from my market neighbors and prioritizing their needs when they're hungry.

I also like to think that maybe the farmers benefitted in a roundabout way from my spring sales: customers who came to the market early in the season and didn't find much produce to buy may have enjoyed the dinner they bought at one of the prepared food stands and felt like the excursion wasn't a total loss, so they kept up the habit of coming to the market until the selection became more bountiful.

Hot Sauce

This time of year, I tend to be up to my elbows in tomatoes and chiles. It's a wonderful problem to have: What am I going to do with all these beautiful ingredients?

Here's a new hot sauce recipe that I've been making the past few weeks. I can't get enough of it. I eat it with chips, with tamales, on fried eggs. I find myself planning my meals looking for opportunities to use it.

Hot Sauce (makes 2 cups)

2 ripe happy tomatoes
6 serrano chiles
1/2 teaspoon olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Arrange the tomatoes on a baking sheet. Rub the serrano chiles with olive oil and arrange them on the baking sheet as well.

Roast the tomatoes and chiles for about 40 minutes, until the tomatoes are a bit droopy and the serranos start to brown.

When the tomatoes and chiles are cool enough to handle, remove the cores from the tomatoes and the stems from the serranos. Puree the tomatoes and chiles in a blender until the mixture is smooth. Add the vinegar and salt, and puree a minute longer.

Choice

There's a scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love in which a character wanders through a marketplace where a waiter for an outdoor eating venue is reciting daily specials. I've heard that moviemakers making historical films employ historians as fact checkers, but in this case someone wasn't doing his job. The practice of giving diners a choice of what to eat actually evolved hundreds of years after Shakespeare's time, in Paris around the time of the French Revolution.

Innkeepers had sold meals to hungry, paying guests for millenia, but choices were limited to what that innkeeper happened to be offering on that particular day. Eating establishments in Paris before modern restaurants came into vogue were usually locations where a proprietor served the same thing to all of his guests, at designated times rather than whenever they happened to wander in the door.

The tradition of a "restaurant," where diners come on their own schedules and order off of a list of choices, caught on in Paris around the same time that the Industrial Revolution was getting into gear across the channel in England. Rural homesteaders forced off their land began moving to the cities, taking jobs in factories, and working for wages. They became the earliest modern consumers, spending their hard-earned income on afforable luxuries that helped them unwind after long, grueling work days.

Today we take for granted the act of visiting a store and choosing from hundreds or thousands of options. We craft identities based on whether we choose organic or exotic food products, or whether we're partial to high end chocolate. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals first, and then members of a tribe, country, or community and, for better or worse, much of our identity as individuals is tied up in what we buy and how we eat.

As a business owner, I struggle with this. Vending at farmers' markets, my livelihood depends on feeding as many customers as possible as quickly as possible. The more choices you offer, the longer it takes folks to make up their minds. Limiting the number of options also cuts way down on waste. I'm aware that I sometimes lose customers because I don't offer the option of choosing different types of tortillas or different types of cheese, but this business model mostly works for me so I stick with it.

As I was serving this month's Humble Feast Dinner, it occurred to me that this type of dining event is actually more like the pre-industrial common table than a modern restaurant setup. There's a buffet with multiple courses, but they're the same offerings for everyone, and we serve at a set time. This month we came up with a novel approach: we set up a taco bar. Rice, beans, beef, seitan, salsa, hot sauce, cheese, marinated cabbage, pickled carrots and jalapenos. I doubt any two tacos were the same.