by Adam Gopnik
With the Red Hook and Decker Farm vegetables on hand, I decided to make Saturday dinner the centerpiece of our local-eating moment, featuring one blowout meal of good things from around the boroughs. But I was more determined than ever to collect that chicken, and, with my friend Peter Hoffman, the owner of Savoy and Back Forty, and a devotee of localism and seasonalism both, drove up to the Bronx to get it. We pulled up at the meeting spot I had chosen with Freddie, near the coop, and there he was.
“So, you got the chicken?” I said, looking up at the sky in my sunglasses.
“Yeah, I got the chicken. This one.” He pointed down at one of his handsome whites. The chickens pecked and clucked.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I was hoping you would, you know, make it ready for us to eat.”
For the first time, Freddie turned toward me. “You want me to kill it?” he said. “I don’t—I can’t kill my chickens! I raise ’em. I love ’em. I thought you wanted it—you said you wanted a chicken.” We looked at each other head-on. “It’s, like, all bloody and all, I don’t like to do that,” he said, with apology and annoyance mixed. Then a little anger crept in. “I thought you wanted a chicken. To raise! Not to kill!”
I withdrew with what dignity I could, and left, expelled from the Garden of Happiness. Peter and I drove over to Arthur Avenue, where venders make their own ricotta, and sausage hangs from the ceiling, and started to head home.
Just then, bombing down Third Avenue in the Bronx, we caught sight of the biggest, gaudiest, most alluring slaughterhouse either of us had ever seen. Musa’s, it was called, with a broad, wooden front painted rather in the manner of Haitian folk art. Lambs and goats gazed through wooden slats onto the sidewalk, where local children fed and petted them. A giant hand-painted “Lookee! Lookee!” sign pointed to the young animals, and a frieze of paintings above suggested all the kinds of animal you could have killed for your dinner.
We went inside. It wasn’t just a slaughterhouse but more like a pagan temple: the small animals awaiting sacrifice, calves and kids and lambs. We picked out a chicken from a coop crowded with whites and browns and reds. It was white-feathered, and protested briefly with a squawk as it was selected, weighed, and disappeared into the back room. The smells of a slaughterhouse—not horrible, really, just deep, a farm smell in the city—filled the air. A few minutes later, a bag came out, with the chicken, still warm, cut up inside. It wasn’t, of course, precisely the city chicken that I had hoped for. It was an upstate chicken, most likely, that had come to town just for the hell of it, but its life cycle—born elsewhere, arrived in hope, lived in cramped quarters, ended its New York existence violently and unexpectedly at the hands of someone with a fatal amount of money—seemed to make its life local enough to qualify. I took it home to roast.
* * *
Localism, like its companion, seasonalism, has become so much a part of the equipment of the conscientious eater that it is difficult to sort out its rights and wrongs with any kind of detachment. People get worked up about it. When I mentioned my local-eating escapade to some of my friends who are most attached to the slow-food movement, they were, I could sense, a little upset, even offended, at what they saw as the frivolity of the attempt. Localism’s no joke. I could see that they thought this, and though I certainly didn’t mean it as a jeer, I did mean it as a small joke, not at the expense of the values of the localists, which I share, but at the expense of some of its pieties.
It seemed to me that the real spirit of localism—the thing most worth taking from it—is the joke: the playful idea of the pleasure of adventure, the idea, at the heart of most aesthetic pleasures, that by narrowing down, closing up, the area of our inquiry, we can broaden out and open up the possibilities of our pleasures. We live in a food world where everything is possible—every day we see arriving at the supermarket green beans from Kenya and oranges from South Africa and chickens from God knows where. And where everything is possible, little registers. To return to a world of limited choices—these Brooklyn eggplants, this Staten Island pepper—was to once again force the flower of invention, to make the cook, even one of limited powers, think again, act more resourcefully, invent rather than merely imitate.
For the plain truth is that the ecological merits of localism are more disputable than its supporters allow. There is a sane set of counterarguments that insist that local eating only looks green. Critics point out that the “carbon equations” of local food eating, which insist that transportation costs are necessarily hugely wasteful, are dubious. In a now famous—or notorious—op-ed in The New York Times, the historian James E. McWilliams, who calls himself a lover of farmers’ markets and even a locavore, insisted that careful researchers, in peer-reviewed studies, “found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.”
Though some of this criticism sounds oddly strident, and suspiciously serves all too well the interests of the big industrialized agriculture, it does recall what have turned out to be persistent truths about prosperity. The central truth of our food-time is not that we have moved from efficiency to waste, but that we have moved from general famine to what is, in historical terms, abundance. What may really matter most for the world’s food efficiency is exactly the “division of labor” that Adam Smith in the eighteenth century rightly saw as the birthright of modernity, and the birthmark of increasing wealth. If some in New Zealand raise lambs, while others in New York eat them, the whole may be a far more efficient use of resources than if we tried to raise sheep on our fire escapes in holistic self-righteousness. It might look more efficient, but it would just be frivolous. Adam Smith’s central refutation of the “physiocrats” of France, who insisted that the wealth of a nation all derived from its farms, was to show that wealth derived from productivity alone, and that the division of labor into small component tasks, though it might seem ugly and inefficient—wouldn’t it be better to have one shed making pins than to divide the labor of pin-making across Europe?—was actually far more productive. It is still somehow counterintuitive to think that it is more efficient to divide food production into many sheds among many people, some very far removed, than to concentrate the work all in one place, but it is certainly so.
There is also, in some of the slow-food and localist rhetoric, in a fashion that also dates back to Adam Smith’s time, a kind of hovering puritanical-cum-Catholic suspicion of imported goods, and particularly imported food, as inherently decadent and wasteful. Smith used the example of wine to show that there was nothing effectively “decadent” about buying from abroad, any more than if Champagne were still part of Britain. (It is not an accident that Smith chose wine, since few of his British readers could imagine a life without it, and they all knew that it couldn’t be made on their island.) The consumer benefits most by buying goods from wherever they are most cheaply made. That principle holds even when the costs are counted in carbon miles. If Kenyan green beans take less total energy than Plattsburgh tomatoes, then we should revel in them no matter how far they have to travel.
And then, apart from the inevitable statistical tussles about exactly how much fuel is used for how much food, the one word that never occurs in the evocation of the lost world of small cities and nearby farms is “famine.” When it comes to local eating, we have been here before. Our peasant ancestors, who lived locally and ate seasonally from the fruit of their own vines and the meat of their own lambs, were hungry all the time. There is, in the localist, slow-food, seasonalist, and even organicist literature, a disturbing whiff of anticosmopolitanism, of the old reactionary-agrarian dream of giving up
urban mongrelization for pure peasant life. It’s perhaps too little noted that while President Obama has become an apostle of localism right down to a vegetable garden in the backyard, the real epiphany of his fine first memoir occurs when he goes to Kenya in search of his roots on a plate, and discovers that there is no “authentic” African food—that it’s all a hybrid mix of seasonings and methods, of styles and influences and borrowed practices, some of them only half a century old, and all mixed up; the primeval pot is a naïf’s fantasy.
It is even perilously easy to construct a Veblenian explanation for the vogue for localism. Where a century ago all upwardly mobile people knew enough, and had enough resources, to get their hands on the most unseasonable foods from the most distant places, in order to distinguish themselves from the peasant past and the laboring masses, their descendants now distinguish themselves by hustling after a peasant diet.
The best argument for eating the local tomatoes instead of the African green beans is that they really do taste better. We hear a lot about the “fact/value” distinction: the famous philosophical idea that distinguishes “what is” from “what ought to be” and insists that no fact, no matter how strong, can determine our values. But we should perhaps pay as much attention to what we might call the “act/value” distinction—the distinction that makes us see that it is not necessary for a thing to make something else good happen in order to be good in itself. What if, after all, all our beliefs about sustainability and the planet and food turned out to be false, or redundant, or of very minor value? Would we then give up going to farmers’ markets and stewing organic lamb and all go out to Wendy’s? I think it would still be worth cooking slowly, shopping locally, using the whole beast, not because these are acts that will demonstrably do something good but because we believe these things are good in themselves. We like them now. They don’t ward off our later ills; they provide our present pleasures.
Or what if the truth was that we could take a single small green pill that would give us all the nutrition we need and help sustain the planet at the same time? Would we gladly give up dinner in order to take it? This idea isn’t a joke or even a far-fetched thought experiment: the best evidence of the moment is that an extremely low-calorie diet is by far the best “life extender” we know. How many of us take it up? Not many; the loss in the meaning of the table is too great. Like the pig, we’ll all die anyway.
The act/value distinction is a helpful one. It keeps us in the present tense. “It’s good for you because it tastes good,” though far from perfect, is generally stronger wisdom than its opposite, “It ought to taste good because it’s good for you.” Stronger because it appeals to an increase in joy, because it addresses the fact of appetite, stronger because it speaks to first principles of pleasure. The fragility of life means that our goal is not to extend it but to enjoy it, for the simple reason that we can’t really extend it and we know right now if we’re enjoying it. The fiercest arguments about ways of eating tend to be the hardest to settle, while the most “frivolous” ones are the most definitive. You should drink wine, eat chocolate, have dessert, fill your plate, even have that steak, because they fit your hunger. And you should eat locally because it connects you to your landscape, city-bred or countrified. We can at least be definitive about that—that a life lived with a face on our food is a richer life than one lived without it. We can have our cake and eat it, too, if you are willing to see that the only point of having cake is to eat it.
We can never know for sure what is cause and what’s just correlation—what’s merely the happenstance of simultaneous acts and what is the true order of virtuous succession. Perhaps red wine makes our hearts healthier; perhaps it is only that wealthier people with already healthy hearts are the kinds who choose to drink red wine. We don’t, or rarely, know for certain what makes things happen. We do know what things are like when we eat or touch or watch them now. The best argument against violent video games isn’t that it makes kids violent later; it’s that it shows kids violence now. It isn’t what it does; it’s what it is. We don’t know, for certain, what food will do. We do know what dinner is. That’s enough.
So I made our local dinner. Gabrielle, her boyfriend, Craig Haney, the Hoffmans, and our family gathered around the table. We had Bronx chicken with Staten Island peppers, sweet and hot, and rooftop basil; tilapia tagine; a big pot of green beans; turnip purée, redolent of elephant dung; super-spicy Brooklyn arugula salad. Aside from the spices and the olive oil—which we allowed ourselves under what the writer Bill McKibben first called a “Marco Polo exemption,” common to localism—everything in the dinner hailed from, or had at least seen its first or last days, within the city limits of New York. It was subway localism, short-term localism—a quick sprint, rather than the more dutiful long haul. But it could be done.
If there was something to be learned, it’s that the question of locality is one that can be either narrow and parched or broad and humanizing. As usual, the frivolous reason is the better reason, and the “better” reason looks a bit frivolous. To shorten the food chain is to pull it close, close enough to put that face on one’s food and a familiar place on one’s plate. To eat something local is to meet someone nearby. We had put the city, from Brooklyn ingenuity and Bronx Zoo manure to a slaughterhouse on 168th Street, on a plate, and eaten it up. The plates had stories, where they normally have only food.
The one thing that puzzled me was why Olivia, normally a major fresser, hadn’t eaten any of the chicken dish; it was a touch tough but, still, tasty. She had, instead of eating, done some highly skilled, three-card-monte-style food pushing around the plate. (Seven-year-olds know that you won’t get busted for food-pushing-on-the-plate, only for food-rejecting.) “I did try it,” she told me at last, the next day. “The problem was, it tasted just like pigeon.”
9. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Salt, Pork, Mustard
Dear Elizabeth:
Today I want to write to you about salt and family, perhaps not in that order. Of all the meals I make, the one I think the children like most is an odd one, not predictable: long-brined pork, served with Brussels sprouts braised in balsamic vinegar, which sweetens them, and mustard-shallot sauce: salt and pungent, mustard and brine. It isn’t what one thinks of as child-friendly food, necessarily, but there is something about the assembly of pungencies that appeals to them.
Was mustard as much a symbol of France to you as it is to me? Someone told me once that you could make anything taste French simply by slathering it in mustard, and, quick to believe, I began to do it. Salmon covered and broiled in old-fashioned whole-grain mustard; tuna in dry mustard mixed with water and honey; there was a broiling period in my life. I think of our first days—I mean, Martha’s and my first days—in our tiny, six-foot basement apartment, and I smell the smell of Paul Corcellet mustard sauce.
And when did brining start? In one way, of course, it started long ago; kosher folks and kosher butchers all salt-brine their food. My own cooking mother would have despised the idea, draining juicy blood and replacing it with desiccating salt. I first came across it where I think my generation did, in Cook’s Illustrated back in the early nineties, in a famous piece on roasting turkey. The brine solution to keeping turkey moist seemed absurd—we all believed in basting then. I would baste the turkey for hours and hours, with carefully composed solutions of tangerine juice and olive oil and cloves… all to absolutely no effect. The baster merely paints the skin of the bird, and whatever goes on underneath goes on.
So brining overtook basting—dunking our food instead of drawing on it. (If Roland Barthes were alive, he could get paragraphs—no, pages; no, pieces—out of that difference.) The turkey was the first to go, into kosher salt. The salt fetish is, as I’ve said, in part a reflection of our urge to turn ourselves into pro cooks—who salt their food with a heavier hand than we do—and partly an urge, I think, to restore, at least unconsciously, some of the old grandmotherly kitchen, where things brined and marinated and pickled and al
tered, while the family waited.
Family food, I suppose, is what I mean—brining is for family food. So, with family thoughts in mind, I approached the sauce. First you dice shallots. (And I hear my mother teaching me: first cut, slice; next cut, chop; next cut, dice.) Then—and this I think is so important; it’s the one thing I know to do that isn’t in all the books—you have to slowly sauté the shallots before you put them in the pan that you’ve cooked the meat in. If you put the shallots into the super-hot pan where you’ve sautéed the loin, the way it always says to do in the books, then all they do is scorch and remain slightly raw. If you cook them first for, say, eight or nine minutes, slowly, so that they’re already sweet and even slightly caramelized, and then put them in the pan where the meat cooked, you can cook them in that hot pan even more, till they’re really browned and nice, and then instantly deglaze the pan with the red or white wine. It makes a perfect shallot base. Then you cook the wine right down till it’s almost dry, and then you add about a cup of chicken stock. (I like the expensive but silky veal and chicken stocks that Eli Zabar sells in New York, but the truth is that any decent supermarket stock will do. I know there are people who make their own, and that’s admirable, but, as so often with cooking, the gain in delight is not truly worth the expense of labor.)
Anyway, you then cook it down till it’s the right sauce thickness. That’s tricky, you know: you want it not the least bit soupy, but on the other hand you don’t want just a glaze of shallots. You ought to stop it just half a minute before it’s right, as it will go on reducing a bit. Then you can add mustard. It’s nice to chop in some tarragon, or just brush in some thyme—you know the way, treating the thyme like a toothbrush, turning a couple of stems upside down and then pushing down with your thumb and forefinger in a circle, so that all the little leaves rain down into the dish. If you let a bare stick fall in, too, I don’t think it changes the flavor, and it looks kind of pretty and country that way.
