by Paul Graham
The pão inspired me too. It cried out for meat—marinated, grilled tri-tip and chimichurri made of the first herbs of the year, and some new potatoes on the side. The papadum drew me further into Indian cuisines. Socca, once I’d mastered it, paired well with braised beef, or ground lamb.
And yet, I could not be too hopeful. These foods and the meals I made with them satisfied us, but they also gave me insight into why most cultures with traditions of cooking flatbreads from grains of poverty immediately converted to wheat when they could finally get it. Either they worked wheat into their diet in addition to their native grains, baking risen, wheaten loaves alongside their flatbreads, or they abandoned their flatbreads almost entirely. Even though I soon had a cupboard full of flours from which cultures around the world would have happily made the focal point of their meals, I noticed that—for as much as I enjoyed socca, or blini, or crisp breads made from lentil flour, and as easy as they could be to prepare, and as stimulating as it felt to once again be eating a food with a history and tradition that had some heft to it—I did not crave these foods. I did not find myself making them every day, or even thinking about them every week. I only craved the pancakes we made from Pamela’s GF flour blend, and as far as ancient grains eaten by the lower classes were concerned, that didn’t count.
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*1 Another hot topic in celiac forums. Do the probiotics work? The scholarship on microecology is compelling, and I wouldn’t have continued to pay fifty bucks a bottle for billions of flora if I didn’t believe—and feel—that they were doing something beneficial.
*2 For a truly nerve-wracking but authentic experience, you can let the embers burn down into ashed-over coals, rake them into a single layer, and ladle the batter directly onto the coals. Then you must brush the ashes off the flatbread, which cooks ten thousand years ago had to do all the time. Bonus points for going old-school and using your fingers instead of tongs. I don’t recommend it.
*3 This variety of buckwheat flour is grown in northern New England, primarily in southwestern Maine, and it can be difficult to find outside the region.
It was June in the year of the Death of Bread.
At Dan and Megan’s stall at the market, I filled bags with our first CSA produce of the year, our fifth with the Kents. Dan wrote the offerings on a chalkboard that he hung from the support lines in his collapsible tent. You filled up, and off you went. He couldn’t have made it any easier for his subscribers short of putting the veg in their fridge for them. We bought from other farms too, especially during the late summer and early fall months, but at least in terms of produce, we had come to think of Dan and Megan as the people who quite literally fed us, along with Kassandra Barton and her family, in nearby De Kalb, who supplied our beef, pork, chicken, and lamb.
The quantity and variety of CSAs and farmers’ markets in the North Country always start small, no matter the farm; we’re not the Central Valley of California. May and June typically provide humble offerings from the cool, drowsy earth: salad greens, radishes, spinach, young shallots, and sometimes turnips. This year, apparently Dan and Megan had started their summer squashes early, in the greenhouse, because here they were already, both yellow and green, the skins bright and firm. I wouldn’t welcome them as warmly in August when we’d had our fill, but in mid-June there seemed to be endless possibilities.
From this slow trickle of the year’s first veg, Bec and I made salads, simply dressed. We made frittatas and omelets from our friend Ellen’s eggs, and went without our Artisan bread. Even simple stir-fries seemed to shine. I threw handfuls of spinach into some of last summer’s tomato sauce, blistered ramps in smoking-hot oil, and served them all up with rice pasta and cheese.
Off and on throughout the winter CSA season, a thought had buzzed through my head, and it returned as I filled the bags at the spring market: You’re lucky. I was lucky to be within easy reach of the growers and ranchers I had come to know so well; lucky to be able to front the money at the start of the season for a CSA subscription (we pay in advance, taking on in some senses the risks of the growing season with the farmer); and lucky as well to have the time required to prep and cook what my growers provided. Local agriculture had given Bec and me many gifts already: pleasures at the table, health, friends, and a sense of community. Ideally, everyone would be able to have these gifts, if they wanted them. Which led to a nagging question: How much harder would it have been to adjust, to “comply” with the GF diet, and simply to heal, if I didn’t have access to these wonderful foods? How much slower would my recovery have been? How did people with celiac disease who lived elsewhere do it?
I knew something that I would never be able to prove: the reason I had recovered faster than my doctors or even my friends had predicted, going from completely trashed to mostly healed in four months, was that I had been eating almost entirely whole foods, real foods that came out of the nearby fields: cabbages, carrots, onions, winter squash, potatoes, frozen summer vegetables, frozen berries, greens. My diet was far from Paleo, but these formed the backbone of our everyday eating. I sometimes recalled the day back in February when I had watched the slow, bemused smile on my GI doc’s face after I told him I was choking down raw beet juice—which tastes nasty and does not belong in anyone’s diet unless their blood panel or personal trainer commands them to drink it.*1
“Okay,” he said, looking down and nodding into his hands, and I thought, Race you in July. Now we were only in the first week of June, and I knew I could own him already.
I did not believe that whole foods were a panacea; some things, many things, cannot be corrected or cured by diet alone. And yet, though I had gotten sicker than many of the people I’d been reading about in the celiac forums and blogs, I had recovered faster, my own missteps and self-glutenings notwithstanding. Even my sense of despair seemed to be less intense. My diet was the one big difference I could point to. Some of my recovery was also just plain good luck; my intolerances to fish and dairy had not lingered for long, and no new complications had appeared. For all of these reasons, it began to seem odd to me that few people in the forums and blogs I followed were talking about a whole-food (not necessarily a local-food, though that might help, too) strategy for recovering from celiac disease. As recently as 2013, a “Gluten Contamination Elimination Diet”—not quite modified-Paleo, but close, with its focus on plain white and brown rice, fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, and basic seasonings—had been trumpeted in some gastroenterology publications for its positive effects, though it didn’t seem to be catching on. The GF diet I most frequently encountered was couched in terms of substitutions for glutenous processed foods, many of which were high in sugar, starch, oil, and fat—known causes of gut inflammation, and not what a person recovering from celiac disease (or any other digestive disorder, for that matter) needs. A good nutritionist would have told me to avoid the mountains of crackers, sweets, energy bars, and other processed GF foods, but I had done it automatically, habitually, and because the CSA veg just kept coming whether I felt like eating it or not. It seemed a commonsense approach to recovery that everyone should be trying. I thought that all of the advocacy groups should be shouting it everywhere. My bafflement grew as I later attended conferences, panels, and expos, and at times listened to experts talk about the gluten-free diet without once mentioning those things which I had come to believe were most important: learn to cook; make the time to do it; eat whole foods.*2
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At the same time, I had also noticed that celiac disease was complicating our practice of locavorism. For as hopeful and grateful as I sometimes felt about the pounds of vegetables that we carried into our house every other week, I had been dogged by an awareness that the demands of the GF diet were repeatedly shoving us out of the 150-mile circle within which we had been eating as much as possible for years. Up until January, the most important local (or, to put it more accurately, regional) staple we bought, next to meat and produce, was also the easiest staple to take for granted—wheat f
lour. Our AP flour came from the bulk bin at the co-op; the grain had been grown, milled, and blended nearby.
When our dietary influences swung from West to East and North to South, tilting heavily in the Pan-Asian direction, our ingredients and influences also moved closer to the equator, landing us squarely in rice cultures, not wheat cultures. Not much rice grows in the North Country, no matter what the variety. Neither do the iconic spices of Asian cuisines, the curries, or, obviously, the coconut milk. The ingredients for socca, papadum, and all of the other flatbreads we enjoyed did not come from New York. Even those GF dishes that looked like the foods we used to make from local flour—tagliatelle, lasagna, spaetzle, and quiche crust, all of which depended upon brown rice flour—had more in common with Vietnamese rice noodles or pad Thai. We had always eaten rice, of course, but never in such volume. And if we fled from Asia for a few days and took our dietary cues from Latin America, our locavore practice also broke down. We had plenty of local sweet corn, fresh in August and September and frozen in the winter for as long as our supplies held out. But I wasn’t going to nixtamalize*3 my own masa and make tortillas, not when I could find excellent handmade corn tortillas from Brooklyn. At least Bec was growing the serrano and habanero chiles, tomatillos, scallions, and cilantro.
GF baking left an honest locavore with no place to hide. Tapioca root doesn’t even grow in our part of the world, let alone in our zip code (at least some of the rice we bought came from the southern United States). Sorghum will grow around here, but you tend to find it in syrup form, not as flour. I still didn’t know where the hell xanthan gum came from; judging by the name, Mars.*4 Almond flour, flaxseed meal, buckwheat: all foods from antiquity, but not common to my region. And not inexpensive compared to their commodity counterparts, either.
The widening distance between where our staple ingredients all grew and our kitchen counter, or table, raised a question: What would have happened to me had I lived one or two hundred years ago and celiac disease had come a-calling (provided I survived infancy and childhood)? Depending upon where I lived, it would not have been possible to convert to rice, or chickpeas, or even corn. When I told my doctor that I imagined the onset of celiac disease I’d had in November would have killed me centuries ago, he disagreed. What would have happened, he said, is I would have gotten sicker and sicker, until someone started spooning me broth. Gradually, I would have recovered. At some point, I would go back to eating wheat, causing me to get sick again. This cycle would continue, making me an invalid, which is how I would remain until something else finished me off, probably pneumonia in the middle of winter. Comforting.
When I started buying so much rice, tapioca, sorghum, and other products, I did it so easily that I hardly registered the “rules” I was breaking. I was simply trying to fill in the holes left behind by wheat. Once I realized that I was acquiring food from across the world and forsaking my local diet, I felt as if my hand was being forced in yet another way. The discoveries of flatbreads, which had given me hope, were also making me a hypocrite. The one available regionally sourced GF starch outside of corn was my mortal enemy in the kitchen—millet. Which I refused to buy. So it appeared that when it came to grains, at least, I believed in locavorism as long as I had access to a steady supply of wheat.
The only solution was to relax. Lighten up. Be thankful that I lived in the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth, and so had access to the staples I cooked with now: rice in the form of both whole grain and finely ground flour, the roots, the beans. As compensation, I could think that much more carefully about using my local foods with them. That way, the beliefs we had taken pride in for years—our investment in community growers and our vote with our dollars against industrial foodways—remained at least somewhat uncompromised.
Later on, I would look back on that winter and early spring and see something else: that without my knowing it and without my permission, celiac disease was making me a better cook. By necessity, I became more fearless and innovative. I curried local winter vegetables in Thai and Indian spices, learning in the process that butternut squash and—of all things—celery root from ten miles away love coconut milk from five thousand miles away. I became a scholar of stews and ragouts made from the other hearty winter veg we received. I learned to stop caring much at all about which ingredients were “traditional” to a recipe. I mastered Bolognese and then shepherd’s pie, which I filled sometimes with the conventional beef but just as often with lamb, leftover chicken, and even just vegetables. I became a devotee of flatbreads with winter vegetables and meats that I roasted, braised, and grilled. Never had my range expanded so quickly.
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Once spring and then summer arrived, the CSA also helped by bullying me around a little in the kitchen. Every Friday, which was pickup day, and for several days afterward, my fridge was filled with several pounds of produce. I eagerly anticipated many of the offerings: snap peas, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, mustard greens, onions, strawberries, kale. Some of it, however, was strange to me: daikon radish, collards, kohlrabi, and pungent Asian greens. My task was clear—do something inspired with all of it, the weird and the recognizable. If some of the veg would freeze well (peppers, for example, or corn), I could do that. Bec could make a chutney or a salsa or some other preserve. But I could not waste it, not even the escarole and the dandelion greens, two foods that I had never in my life deliberately sought out, nor even seen on a plate until the day they came looking for me. I knew the growers who had sweated and worried over these plants from seeds to harvest, knew their struggles against bugs, weather, and plant diseases. If I threw away half of what they provided because I convinced myself that I did not have the time or the desire to cook it, or because I thought I didn’t like to eat it, I would be doing something worse than wasting money. I wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye the next time we met.
Sometimes I had to work quickly, too, because these vegetables required attention faster than conventional produce, which has often been hybridized for shelf life, sprayed, or gassed (or all of these). I had to find other foods to pair with the eggplant, the mountain of Swiss chard, or snap peas; often, I had to compose a new meal. Even in my gluten-eating days, approaching local eating with creativity day after day could be tough, and now the lack of familiar wheat-based options could sometimes make it even harder. Gone were the days of simply slicing vegetables, tossing them with some oil and seasonings, and dumping them on a pizza. A man and his wife can eat only so many salads in a week, so many stir-fries. It wasn’t a good idea to be consuming dozens upon dozens of eggs in the form of frittatas and omelets, no matter how much I loved them. And it’s just not as possible to hide the less-desirable vegetables on bruschetta when you lack good, crusty bread (hiding something you don’t like on something else you don’t like: bad idea).
Not that this is a new problem, exactly. It isn’t. The plentitude and scarcity inherent to small-scale farming have presented a challenge to cooks since the first kitchen gardeners walked out to the vines early in the morning light and beheld, to their surprise, far more beans or tomatoes or cucumbers than they had bargained for. I had known for a long time that these forces could be a good thing. Surrendering some options, usually those foods that we had once chosen to eat—like salad greens in January, tomatoes in March, or chicken for a whole spring when our rancher’s freezer emptied faster than she expected and no local birds were to be found anywhere else—led us to discover more options, in the long run, and develop a richer repertoire as we learned more ways to cook what we had on hand.
And now, focused on using my CSA veg before it became mushy or moldy, or entered a state of active fermentation, I sometimes forgot that there were other, glutenous foods that I used to eat regularly. Not always, but I tried to let the influx of summer squash, lettuce, turnips, spinach, and other produce nudge me back into an old, familiar rhythm, one that fit the GF life as well as it had fit my life before, and maybe even fit it better. Those baby turnips, I learned,
lose every trace of bitterness when they are slow-cooked in a casserole with bacon; broccoli can indeed be grilled; garlic scapes make a beautiful pesto to spread on the zukes after they have been salted, drizzled with olive oil, and grilled. And if I braised the kale, roasted the carrots, quick-pickled the radishes, and could find in the fridge some yogurt or sour cream for a Mexican-styled crema, I was well on my way to some outstanding vegetarian tacos. A little focus, a little reorientation, and I was cooking—at the height of the growing season, when it’s never too far to the next good thing—with hope and gratitude.
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*1 More guesswork on my part with the food-as-medicine approach, but this may have worked. I began juicing—pun intended—on raw beets when I read studies that indicated their high mineral content increased oxygen transport in red blood cells, and improved overall blood health in elite athletes as indicated by their VO2 max (blood-oxygen uptake) readings. It sounded like a good thing for an anemic guy to be drinking. So I juiced several pounds of raw red CSA beets a week and kept it in a mason jar in the fridge. My tasting notes? Thick and punishing from the cloying sweetness of beet, with unforgiving shockwaves of schist, quartz, and mud.
*2 One reason I believe this isn’t getting as much mention as it could is that the foundations and organizations are being sponsored, to one degree or another, by the GF prepared-products industry.
*3 Another case of grain poisoning (kind of) concerns the pellagra outbreaks in regions where people depended upon corn for the bulk of their calories. Unless the corn is treated with lime—a process called nixtamalization that dates in Mesoamerica to before 1,000 BC—its nutrients, in particular niacin, are not able to be absorbed by the body. The nutritional and metabolic effects of pellagra are similar to malabsorption, but more visually horrifying. Soaking corn in an alkaline solution such as lime renders the nutrients usable by the human body.
