11 • SLOW FOOD NATIONS
Late June
North of the border, in Petite Italie, where everyone speaks French, it can be hard to remember where you are exactly. This was Montreal, outermost point on our elliptical vacation. Our Canadian relatives gamely asked what we wanted to see in their city, and we answered: Food! We wondered what was available locally here at the threshold (to our southerly way of thinking) of the frozen tundra. We lit out for Chinatown and Little Italy. Here, as in the United States, the best shot at finding locally based cuisine seems to involve seeking out the people who recently moved here from someplace else.
We passed a few restaurants that advertised “Canadian food” along with the principal ethnic fare. Our hosts explained this meant something like “American” food, more an absence than a presence of specific character: not Chinese, not Italian. Is it true that “American food” means “nothing?” I pondered this as we walked down a street of Chinese shops where butchers pinned up limp, plucked ducks like socks on clotheslines (if your mind’s eye can handle socks with feet and bills). It’s easy enough to say what’s not American cuisine: anything with its feet still on, for starters. A sight like this on Main Street USA would send customers running the other way, possibly provoking lawsuits over psychological damage to children. As a concept, our national cuisine seems to be food without obvious biological origins, chosen for the color and shape of the sign out front: arches, bucket, or cowboy hat. That’s the answer to the question, “Where did it come from?”
Of course that’s not the whole story. We have our New England clam chowder, Louisiana gumbo, southern collards and black-eyed peas, all regionally specific. But together they don’t add up to any amalgamated themes or national guidelines for enjoying what grows near us. The food cultures of other geographically diverse nations are not really one thing either; Italy is particularly famous for its many distinct regional specialties. But still that whole country manages to export a cuisine that is recognizably “Italian,” unified by some basic ingredients (i.e. pasta), and an intrinsic attitude. We recognize the origins of other countries’ meals when we see them, somehow sensing their spirit: Mama mia! Bon appétit. Pass the salsa.
If you ask a person from Italy, India, Mexico, Japan, or Sweden what food the United States has exported to them, they will all give the same answer, and it starts with a Mc. And it must be said, they’re swallowing it. Processed food consumption is on the rise worldwide, proportional to growing affluence. French metro stations are plastered with ads for convenience foods. On a recent trip there I queried audiences about the danger of France losing its traditional foodways, and found them evenly divided between “Never!” and “Definitely!” Working women my age and younger confessed to giving in to convenience, even though (as they put it) they knew better. They informed me that even the national culinary institute was going soft, having just announced that its chicken courses would no longer begin with “Feathers, Feet, and Viscera 101.” A flutter of conversation ran through the crowd over this point, a major recent controversy that had created radio call-in riots. I got an inkling that “giving in to convenience” means something different on that side of the pond. But still, these are real signs of change. Plenty of Parisians visit “MacDo” every day, even though it’s probably not the same customers going back every day. They’re in for the novelty, not the food value.
We are all, I suppose, dazzled by the idea of things other people will eat. There on the Montreal Chinatown sidewalk we stopped to admire what must have been twenty-five-pound fish chasing each other’s tails in slow motion in a half barrel of water. Lily and my young nieces inspected them closely, then looked up at me with eyebrows raised in the age-old question: dinner, or pets? I had no idea. We poked into shops that sold tea, dried mushrooms, and fabulous dresses that zip up the side so tightly they look painted on. We ate lunch in a bustling cafeteria where the goods ranged from fried squid to Jell-O.
Later we stopped in at a Lebanese market, which the kids also considered fine entertainment. They kept running up to show me intriguing edibles: powdered flowers in bottles; some kind of cola apparently made from beans; “Greek Mountain tea,” which looked to me like a bunch of weeds in a cellophane bag. An enormous glass case ran the full width of the store across the back, displaying cheeses. No modest yellow blocks or wheels were these, but gigantic white tablets of cheese, with the shape and heft of something Moses might have carried down from the mountain. Serious cheesemaking happened here, evidently. A young woman in a white apron stood ready to saw off a bit of goat, cow, or sheep cheese for me. We chatted, and she confirmed that these products were made in a kitchen nearby. I was curious about what kind of rennet and cultures were used for these Middle Eastern cheeses. She answered but seemed puzzled; most customers weren’t interested in the technicalities. I confessed I’d tried this at home.
“You make cheese yourself,” she repeated reverently. “You are a real housewife.”
It has taken me decades to get here, but I took that as a compliment.
Our search kept us moving through Montreal’s global neighborhoods until we arrived at the grand farmers’ market of Petite Italie. An arrangement of flowering plants near the entrance spelled out “Benvenuto.” Under an awning that covered several blocks, matrons with bulging bags crowded the aisles between open stalls spilling over with fresh goods. This was the place to shop, in any language.
I tried French, since I don’t speak Italian. Elles sont d’où, les tomates?
D’ici, madame! From right here, Quebec, the vendors replied proudly, again and again. (Except for one sardonic farmer who answered, when I asked about his eggs, “From chickens, madame.”) We were flat-out amazed to see what enterprising Quebecois growers had managed to bring out already, on the first official day of summer here in the recently frozen north: asparagus, carrots, lettuce, rhubarb, hothouse tomatoes, and small, sweet strawberries. Maple syrup and countless other maple products were also abundant, of course, here where a maple leaf is literally the flag. More surprising were the local apples, plenty of them, that had been stored since their harvest late last fall but still burst sweet and crisp under our teeth when we sampled them. English orchardists once prized certain apples for their late-bearing and good storage qualities—varieties now mostly lost from the British Isles, crowded out by off-season imports from New Zealand. Evidently the good storage heirlooms have not been lost from Quebec.
I picked up a gargantuan head of broccoli. It looked too good to be true, but the cabbage family are cool-season crops. I asked the vendor where it came from.
“L’Amérique du Sud, madame,” he replied. South America.
Too bad, I thought. But really, South America, where it’s either tropical or now wintertime? “Quel pays?” I asked him—which country?
“La Californie, madame.”
I laughed. It was a natural mistake. In the world map of produce, California might as well be its own country. A superpower in fact, one state that exports more fresh produce than most countries of the world. If not for the fossil fuels involved, this culinary export could have filled me with patriotic pride. Our country is not only arches and cowboy hats, after all. We just don’t get credit for this as “American food” because vegetables are ingredients. The California broccoli would be diced into Asian stir-fries, tossed with Italian pasta primavera, or served with a bowl of mac-and-cheese, according to the food traditions of us housewives.
Still, whether we get cultural points for them or not, those truckloads of California broccoli and artichokes bring winter cheer and vitamins to people in drearier climes all over the world. From now until September the Quebecois would have local options, but in February, when the snow is piled up to the windowsills and it takes a heating pad on the engine block to get the car started, fresh spinach and broccoli would be a welcome sight. I’d buy it if I lived here, and fly the flag of La Californie in my kitchen. Even down in Dixie I’d bought winter cucumbers before, and would probabl
y do it again. I wondered: once I was out of our industrial-food dry-out, would I be able to sample the world’s vegetable delights responsibly—as a social broccoli buyer—without falling into dependency? California vegetables are not the serpent, it’s all of us who open our veins to the flow of gas-fueled foods, becoming yawning addicts, while our neighborhood farms dry up and blow away. We seem to be built with a faulty gauge for moderation.
In the market we bought apples, maple syrup, bedding plants for our hosts’ garden, and asparagus, because the season was over at home. Like those jet-setters who fly across the country on New Year’s Eve, we were going to cheat time and celebrate the moment more than once. Asparagus season, twice in one year: the dream vacation.
We left Canada by way of Niagara Falls, pausing to contemplate this churning cataract that has presented itself to humans down through the ages as inspiration, honeymoon destination, and every so often a rip-snorting carnival ride. We got ourselves soaked on the Maid of the Mist, and pondered the derring-do of the fourteen men, two women, and one turtle who have plunged over this crashing waterfall in conveyances including wooden barrels, a giant rubber ball, a polyethylene kayak, a diving bell, a jet-ski, and in one case only jeans and a lightweight jacket. Both women and the turtle (reputed to be 105 years old) survived, as did nine of the men, though the secret of success here is hard to divine. The jacket-and-jeans guy made it; the jet-skier and the kayaker did not, nor did William “Red” Hill in his fancy rubber bubble. And a half-ton iron-bumpered barrel that safely delivered the turtle failed to save his inventive human companion.
If there seems to be, running through this book, a suggestion that humans are a funny animal when it comes to respecting our own best interests, I rest my case.
From the border we traveled southwest across the wine country of New York and northern Pennsylvania, where endless vineyards flank the pebbled shore of Lake Erie. Another day’s drive brought us into the rolling belly of Ohio, where we would be visiting friends on their dairy farm. Their rural county looked like a postcard of America’s heartland, sent from a time when the heart was still healthy. Old farmhouses and barns stood as quiet islands in the undulating seas of corn, silvery oats, and auburn spelt.
We pulled into our friends’ drive under a mammoth silver maple. Lily sized up the wooden swing that twisted on twenty-foot ropes from one of its boughs. A platoon of buff-colored hens ignored us, picking their way over the yard, while three old dogs trotted out to warn their mistress of our arrival. Elsie came around the corner, beaming her pure-sunshine smile. “Rest on the porch,” she said, drawing us glasses of water from the pump in the yard. “David is cultivating the corn, so there’s no knowing when that will finish.”
We offered to help with whatever she’d been doing, so Elsie rolled the wheelbarrow to her garden and returned with a tall load of pea plants she had just pulled. We pulled lawn chairs into a circle under the cherry trees, lifted piles of vines into our laps, and tackled the shelling. Peas are a creature of spring, content to germinate in cold soil and flourish in cool, damp days, but heat causes them to stop flowering, set the last of their pods, and check out. Though nutritionally similar, peas and beans inhabit different seasons; in most gardens the peas are all finished before the first bean pod is ready to be picked. That’s a good thing for the gardener, since each of these plants in its high season will bring you to your knees on a daily basis. Tall, withered pea vines are a sigh from the end of spring, a pause before the beans, squash, and tomatoes start rolling.
We caught up on news while steadily popping peas from their shells. Over our heads hung Stark’s Gold cherries the size of silver dollars. The central Ohio season was a week or so behind ours, and it was dryer here too. Elsie reported they’d had no rain for nearly a month—a fairly disastrous course for June, a peak growing time for crops and pastures. A few storms had gathered lately but then dissipated. The afternoon was still: no car passed on the road, no tractor churned a field within earshot. It’s surprising how selectively the human ear attends to human-made sounds: speech, music, engines. An absence of those is what we call silence. Maybe in the middle of a city, or a chemically sterilized cornfield, it really is quiet when all the people and engines cease. But in that particular dot on the map I was struck with how full a silence could be: a Carolina wren sang from the eave of the shed; cedar waxwings carried on whispery bickerings up in the cherry; a mockingbird did an odd jerky dance, as if seized by the bird spirit, out on the driveway. The pea bowl rang like an insistent bell as we tossed in our peas.
We heard mooing as thirty caramel brown Jersey cows came up the lane. Elsie introduced her daughter Emily and son-in-law Hersh, who waved but kept the cows on course toward the milking barn. Lily and I shook pea leaves off our laps and followed. Emily and Hersh, who live next door, do the milking every day at 5:00 a.m. and p.m. Emily coaxed the cows like children into the milking parlor (“Come on, Lisette, careful with your feet”) and warned me to step back from Esau, the bull. “He’s very bossy and he doesn’t like women,” she said. “I don’t think the cows care much for him either, for the same reason. But he sires good milkers.”
While Emily moved the cows through, Hersh attached and moved the pipelines of the milking machine. During lulls the couple sat down together on a bench while their toddler Noah bumped through the milking parlor and adjacent rooms, bouncing off doorjambs and stall sides in his happy orbit. Lily helped him into a toddler swing that hung in the doorway. The milking machine made a small hum but otherwise the barn was quiet, save for the jostling cows munching hay. The wood of the barn looked a hundred years old, dusty and hospitable. I couldn’t imagine, myself, having an unbreakable milking date with every five o’clock of this world, but Emily seemed not to mind it. “We’re so busy the rest of the day, going different directions,” she said. “The milking gives us a time for Hersh and me to sit a minute.”
A busy little pride of barn cats gathered near the bench, tails waving, to lap up milk-pipe overflows collected in a pie plate. I watched a few hundred gallons of Jersey milk throbbing and flowing upward through the maze of clear, flexible pipes like a creamy circulatory system. A generator-powered pump drew the milk from the cows’ udders into a refrigerated stainless steel tank. The truck from an organic cooperative comes to fetch it to the plant where it is pasteurized and packed into green-and-white cartons. Where it may go from there is anyone’s guess. Our own supermarket back home stocks the brand, so over the years our family may have purchased milk that came from this barn, or at least some molecules of it mixed in with milk from countless other farms. As long as it meets the company’s standards, with a consistent cream percentage and nominal bacterial counts, milk from this farm becomes just another part of the blend, an anonymous commodity. This loss of identity seemed a shame, given its origin. The soil minerals and sweetness of this county’s grass must impart their own flavor to the milk, just as the regions of France flavor their named denominations of wine.
David came in from the cornfield shortly after milking time. He laughed at himself for having lost track of time—as Elsie predicted—while communing with his corn. We stood for a minute, retracting the distances between our lives. Both David and Elsie are possessed of an ageless, handsome grace. Elsie is the soul of unconditional kindness, while David sustains a deadpan irony about the world and its inhabitants, including his colleagues who wear the free caps with Cargill or Monsanto logos: “At least they let you know who’s controlling their frontal lobes.” David and Elsie live and work in exactly the place they were born, in his case the same house and farm. It’s a condition lamented in a thousand country music ballads, but seems to have worked out well for this couple.
We carried dishes of food from the kitchen to a picnic table under the cherry trees. Hersh joined us, settling Noah into a high chair while Emily brought a pitcher of milk from the tank in the barn. Obviously this family had the genes to drink it. For the first time in awhile, I had C/T13910-gene envy. Dinner conversat
ion roamed from what we’d seen growing in Canada to what’s new for U.S. farmers. David was concerned about the National Animal Identification System, through which the USDA now plans to attach an ID number and global positioning coordinates to every domestic animal in the country. Anyone who owns even one horse, chicken, cow, or canary will be required by law to get onto the map and this federal database. Farmers aren’t cottoning to the plan, to put it mildly. “Mark Twain’s wisdom comes to mind,” David observed. “‘Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.’” But in truth he’s not too worried, as he doubts the government will be up to the job. Forcing half a million farmers to register every chicken and cow, he predicts, will be tougher than getting Afghan farmers to quit growing poppies.
The steer that had contributed itself to the meatballs on our plates had missed the sign-up. Everything else on the table was also a local product: the peas we’d just shelled, the salad picked ten minutes earlier, the strawberries from their daughter. I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. “Flour and sugar,” she said, and then thought a bit. “Sometimes we’ll buy pretzels, for a splurge.”
It crossed my mind that the world’s most efficient psychological evaluation would have just the one question: Define splurge. I wondered how many more years I’d have to stay off Belgian chocolate before I could attain Elsie’s self-possession. I still wanted the moon, really—and I wanted it growing in my backyard.
After dinner, the long evening of midsummer still stretched ahead of us. David was eager to show us the farm. We debated the relative merits of hitching up David’s team and driving the wagon, versus our hybrid gas-electric vehicle, new to us, now on its first road trip. The horses had obvious appeal, but David and Hersh had heard about the new hybrids and were eager to check out this technology. David confessed to having long ago dreamed up (while cultivating his corn) the general scheme of harnessing the friction from a vehicle’s braking, capturing that energy to assist with forward momentum. Turns out, Toyota was right behind him on that. We piled into the vehicle that does not eat oats, and rode up the dusty lane past the milking barn, up a small rise into the fields.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Page 18
