Reading, Viewing and Listening Suggestions

Back to the Land

The new illustrated blog entry from Maira Kalman, the author and illustrator behind - among
other things - the "New Yorkistan" New Yorker cover from 2001, is a pretty wild and creative meditation on Thanksgiving. Check it out.

Waste

This video on food waste from the folks at Good Magazine is definitely worth a watch.

Food Stamps

In conjunction with some writing on "The Safety Net," the New York Times features this fascinating graphic on food stamp usage around the country. By clicking around on the U.S. map there, I discovered the following: 5% of all people in the Minnesota county where I grew up utilize food stamps; that's a 42% increase from 2007; 16% of the people in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, where I currently live, use food stamps; this is a 34% increase frm 2007; 31% of the people in Buffalo County, South Dakota, the poorest county in the United States, are on food stamps; in 2007, 11% fewer residents of this country, most of which lies on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, received food stamps.

Eating Meat

Jonathan Safran Foer discussing his new book "Eating Meat" on WBUR's On Point. Definitely worth a listen.

Fruit Season: All Along Alewife Brook*

Colombian Banana

Floridian Lemon

Californian Dates

These three photographs explore the following juxtaposition: warm-climate and tropical fruits that can be found in supermarkets in New England in late fall with - and literally affixed to - the leafless trees found here, none of which bear the above fruits. There's a jarring dissonance here, hopefully one which forces us to consider what we eat, how we come by what we eat, and how we look at - gaze at - that which we understand to be food, ready and readily available.

*In Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts

Chicken of the Woods!

This beautiful Chicken of the Woods - Laetiporus Sulphureus - is merely a small portion of the five or six pound mushroom which my friend Ben and I plucked off of a quiet oak tree just outside of the Holmes residence hall at Harvard University's Law School.

Under cover of darkness - with a short, rickety ladder in the back of the car, parked nearby, if necessary - we wedged the mushroom off of its fifteen foot high roost with a lengthy piece of wood we found in the darkened, dusty basement below the apartment where we live.

Dodging weighty chunks of the mushroom as we pried and they hurtled down at us, we stuffed our find into a cloth bag as law school students, laden with stacks of books, walked by on the sidewalk: likely on their well worn path to and back from the library.

Exhilarating as harvesting the wild and beautiful mushroom was - and would have been anywhere - the experience was most definitely heightened by the fact that we were doing what we were doing within feet of people knee deep in the study of the particulars of contract law: a fine and amusing juxtaposition.

Damn, that mushroom is tasty.

And now something I don't often include on these pages, a recipe:

Chicken of the Woods and Leek Risotto

(Small plates, serves 12)

Ingredients

Butter, 2 Tablespoons
Olive oil, 2 Tablespoons
Onion, 1 medium finely diced
Chicken of the Woods, a heaping handful cut into one inch x ½ inch strips
Leeks, 2 finely chopped
Rosemary, sprig
Arborio Rice, 1 ¾ cups
White Wine, 2/3 cup
Chicken stock, 6 cups
Salt and Pepper to taste
Parmesan, freshly grated

Procedure

Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the olive oil and onion, and cook for 5 minutes, until soft. Add the mushroom and leeks. Cook until softened. Add the rosemary and rice. Stir the rice until it comes transparent. Add the wine, stir and cook until the liquid is largely absorbed. Add the stock, one cup at a time, adding more when it has been absorbed. Stir occasionally. After about 20 minutes or so, the risotto will be creamy but al dente. Stir in the grated parmesan, to taste. To plate, spoon a large spoonful of the risotto on a plate.


* Thanks to Jen, who recently hired me for her sister's wedding shower, for the fine photographs.

The World According to Pollan

Well, Michael Pollan's at it again. Normally, I eagerly devour his writing, chock full of important insights and relevant, trenchant observations.

This time, his piece in the New York Times Magazine feels obligatory.

No doubt, Pollan is one of the most razor sharp and clear thinking public intellectuals out there; this showing - on how making healthy eating decisions is difficult these days what with all of the misinformation out there - sadly doesn't live up to his deserved billing.

That said, the associated interactive piece, which features the healthy-eating advice of New York Times readers, is really pretty cool. That, I recommend enthusiastically.

Paradise Lost

This is done by a pure nut-job.

Do not attempt this in real life.

Another option is to get a job and buy groceries.

Can't wait until they are contaminated by E. Coli

Besides the obligitory only in Cambridge...can we stop acting like this is normal behavior; it's a handful of wack-job hipster-wannabe's and they have a friend who "writes" for the globe

This is by far one of the most ridiculous stories I've read in a long, long time.

The above comments accompany a story run by the Boston Globe at the end of August. The story, about urban food foraging, profiles a local guy named David Craft and his pursuit of wild edible food, food which he is able to gather within the greater Boston area.

What strikes me about the comments posted by readers – and there were those expressing interest, curiosity and encouragement of wild food foraging – is not so much the ubiquitous poor quality of the writing but the utter vitriol expressed.

Where does this bitterness come from? Since when did the image of my grandmother – or your grandmother - picking blackberries for a pie become an object of ridicule? But maybe that’s just it: Grandma picking berries is safe. That’s old, quaint, relegated to the past tense, a hazy image in a fading black and white photograph. Me picking berries? That’s another story. (Actually, it really is another story.) Picking mushrooms? Um, don't even ask. Is contemporary life just too sleek, too commercialized, too packaged to include the image of the modern forager?

In his truly interesting and enjoyable book about goats, goat herding and cheese making, Goat Song, Brad Kessler traces the historical shift from hunting and gathering to pastoralism. Among hunting and gathering cultures, Kessler explains, “animals were equal, independent, numinous” (59). With the advent of animal domestication, pastoralists “used, misused, traded, or killed at will” the animals they kept (59). Kessler goes on to reference Friedrich Engels and his implication that the spread of pastoral economies led to the spread of wealth and power inequality.

One very real possibility, then, is that foraging in the modern world is a defiant act, a revolutionary act, a rejection of a world order defined by having and not having, by inequality.

A bit later in his book, Kessler discusses the notion that Adam and Eve, in Eden, were gatherers; that their punishment for disobeying God was a life – defined by backbreaking labor - of tilling the ground; and that the longing for lost paradise, on some paleo-historical level, is a longing for a life of picking low hanging fruit, a life of foraging.

So, in the eyes of the modern world order, at comfort in the domestication of most human activity – for what could be more domesticated than the act of watching others cook, or merely speak about food, on commercial television? – foraging is atavistic, backward, regressive, and dangerous.

The hunting for wild edible mushrooms then - captured though this ideological lens - has got to be just about the most backward activity out there.

Some people, in fact, hate, detest and are frightened by mushrooms themselves.

Some are poisonous. (Mushrooms, not people. Though that may be too.) They grow in the murk and muck of the forest, living off the dead flesh of the sylvan landscape; rotting, stinking logs, their roost. Undulating fairy rings, their choreography. Mushrooms exist in a world between worlds, a world of darkness and light, of life and death, of waking life and dream. The few mushroom varieties which have been domesticated, cultivated and made safe merely hint at the vastness of their wild, unruly, uncooperative genetic brethren.

It may come as no surprise then that Michael Thomas, in his affecting recent novel – Man Gone Down - about an unnamed man’s difficult journey through race, partnerhood and fatherhood in an American society set up to maintain the having and not having, includes the following passage: “I want to stay on the log, in the woods, in the dappling, slowly bleeding, and have the underbrush, the ferns, the buzzing, the moss and mushrooms cover me” (377). In the golf game of his life (for his life?), Thomas’ narrator loses his ball in the woods, and, for a moment, wishes to lose himself there. Among the mushrooms. It is a dreamlike world hidden away from the realities of the waking world in which he is struggling to get up. Up from down.

Lost paradise, in other words, beckons.

* The three accompanying photographs - of my girlfriend Amber delicately holding a black chantrelle; of a plate of oyster and black chantrelle mushrooms; and of those same mushrooms cooked with plenty of butter and cream, served with toast - all feature mushrooms gathered just a few weeks ago along a hiking trail in Maine's Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness.

Eggs

Egg stand on Route 2, just east of Bethel, Maine.

The Burr Cucumber

One of the great joys of summer has got to be the fresh cucumber.

Hell, one of the joys of summer, in New England at least, has got to be fresh anything.

While I could spend some time and space describing the beauty of the Cucumber Spoon Salad I recently had at the tremendous Eastern Mediterranean restaurant Oleana in Cambridge, or writing about the lime-juice marinated diced cucumber scattered across the top of a piece of za'atar-rubbed, pan-fried cod which I prepared recently, I won't.

See, I'd rather devote a bit of space to something I'd never seen before: a tiny, football-shaped, spiny cucumber, which I picked up last week at the Copley Square farmer's market, a two-day-per-week market watched over by the impressive eastern facade of the McKim Building at the Boston Public Library.*

A beautiful, diminutive cucumber relative, it strikes an impressive pose. It also, like the varieties of cucumber we most often see, is an entirely refreshing, bright and lively fruit.** Variously, it goes (or has gone) by the name burr cucumber, West Indian gherkin, Jamaican cucumber, maxixe (the Brazilian Portuguese term used at the farmers' market), and surely many other.

Why hadn't I seen this before? Where did it come from? (While the ones I bought came from a Massachusetts farm, I was curious as to where, historically, they came from.)

So, I decided to do a bit of investigating. (Serious nod to Google Books and its relentless army of book-scanning automata.)

Fearing Burr, appropriately named but presumably unrelated to the fruit in question, in 1874 wrote: "This species is said to be a native of Jamaica. The habit of the plant is similar to that of the Globe Cucumber, and its season of maturity is nearly the same. The surface of the fruit is thickly set with spiny nipples, and has an appearance very unlike that of the Common Cucumber" (The Field and Garden Vegetables of America, 189).

It's now known that the burr cucumber originated in Africa long before its 16th century journey aboard Spanish and Portuguese slave ships, laden with human cargo, bound for the Caribbean. From there, it eventually spread throughout the Americas. William Weaver, the great culinary historian, writes that it arrived in North America - from Jamaica - in the late 1790's, "with the idea that they would make excellent mini-cucumber pickles"*** (Since the 1790's? Really? I read elsewhere that throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the burr cucumber was widely cultivated in New England. Where did it go? Did it really go anywhere? Why did I see it for the first time just this past week?)

As such, a 1907 cookbook by Maude Ada Baumberger called Colonial Recipes, From Old Virginia and Maryland Manors, features a recipe for "Gherkin Preserves for Dessert," sandwiched between recipes for mincemeat and pastry dough. Her recipe, passed down from colonial times, she writes, involves, among a few other steps, soaking the cucumbers in brine for two months and soaking them later in alum water for a day.

In more flowery and evocative language, we get this description of the fruit plant: Julia Ellen Rogers, in her 1913 The Book of Useful Plants, writes about how the burr cucumber "wind their branching tendrils over the shrubby growth of neglected fence rows, along the river banks, and hang their spiny fruits where all can see, are the wild representatives we have of a great botanical family, that has furnished us many useful garden vegetables and fruits" (260).

Including those we have yet to meet...

* This exterior wall of the Boston Public Library bears the inscription:
THE PUBLIC LIBRARY OF THE CITY OF BOSTON. BUILT BY THE PEOPLE AND DEDICATED TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. A.D. MDCCCLXXXVIII

** It's like that old tomato thing. Growing from a flower and with seeds enclosed, botanically it's a fruit. By the virtue of culinary convention, it's considered a vegetable.

*** Weaver's entire article on the Burr Gherkin is here.

Bunny Love

The Place and Memory Project, which collects and tells the stories of places come and gone, ran its first radio piece on NPR this weekend. It was about the erstwhile Venz Rabbit Hutch Restaurant in Logan, Alabama.

Lots of rabbits. Stewed. Fried. Roasted. Grilled.

Fascinating story.

And it has garnered some pretty vehement backlash.

Farmers' Markets

The Boston Globe's got a great application on its website that allows you to search a map of Massachusetts for a farmers' market near you.

Click here.

Breakfast in the Shower

A few weeks ago, deep in the thick of the end-of-the-school-year scramble*, on at least two occasions, I ate my breakfast in the shower, conditioner frothed in hair and water spraying about. Henry David Thoreau would have been horrified. As would have Carl Honore, the Canadian writer who's recently taken up Thoreau's call to living intentionally and at deliberate speed.**

In retrospect, I too am horrified, hyperbolic as it may sound.

At the time, the rush was on. Summer loomed. As did much, much work.

After resisting the alarm clock for a good half hour, treating it with a significant measure of annoyance, I'd finally roll out of bed, my bare feet awkwardly fumbling onto the slightly dusty wood floor. In the bathroom, blinking into the mirror, blinking away the haze and film accumulated over the night, I'd turn on the shower. Stepping into the kitchen, I'd pour a bowl of cereal while the water heated up. Returning to the bathroom, steam rising, I'd place the sloshing bowl of milk and Cheerios knock-offs on the edge of the bathroom sink just before crawling through the shower curtains into the water raining down. When it came time to let the conditioner do its work for a few minutes, I'd reach out and grab my waiting bowl of cereal. It was time for breakfast.

The more recent toast, eggs over easy and broccoli rabe were eaten post-shower at the kitchen table.

And they were eaten much, much more slowly.

* Teachers out there will know what I mean.

** Carl Honore is the author of the 2004 book In Praise of Slowness.