A cookbook that nourishes the body and the soul. Explore ancient traditions and learn how they can improve your life. This cookbook...
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Melissa McEwen
This blog is about the intersection between evolutionary biology and food. But also about practical applications, sustainable agriculture, and general tasty things. I originally started eating this way to heal from chronic health problems and...it worked!
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Melissa
We "know better" than to eat deadly traditional Soul Food, says Nation of Islam* minister Abdul Hafeez Muhammad interviewed in a new documentary aired on PBS called Soul Food Junkies. I was hoping for an in-depth exploration of the history of soul food, but unfortunately most of this documentary was self-deprecating in a rather familiar way. It's no coincidence that one of the trailers is titled moralistically "Soul food: sacrament or sin."
Filmmaker Byron Hunt's father suffered from obesity and died relatively young of pancreatic cancer. Influenced by the health advice from The Nation of Islam, Byron blamed soul food for his father's health problems and switched himself to a plant-based diet, cutting out all pork and red meat.
It is hard to talk about Southern food without talking about soul food, which is why I can identify with this story a bit. As the documentary notes, many white Southern children were raised by African-American slaves and later servants. The food they cooked for these children influenced their taste, which is why Soul Food and Southern food are so inter-twined. In my own family, there was a great-grandmother I never knew, who was obese and died young. It was the era of Ancel Keys, the era in which the zeitgeist was to blame fat. Also there were class-based considerations, Abdul expresses the sentiment that traditional soul food existed only because our ancestors were poor and didn't know better or have better choices. Many upwardly mobile white rural Southerner's shared this disdain for their ancestral food, deeming it "poverty food." My grandmother and her sister adopted what they believed to be a healthier more modern diet, a low-fat diet excluding things like pig's feet and real butter.
They threw the babies out with the bathwater. Just because you aren't fat doesn't mean you are healthy- different health problems started plaguing people in my family, inspring me to adopt a more traditional, as in 1700s, diet that has helped me conquer many of these problems.
Early on, Byron introduces traditional soul food as things like "ham hocks, collared greens, and fried chicken". One of those things is not like the other, one of those thing does not belong- and that thing is probably the most persistent item in both Southern and Soul Food. That's fried chicken. Minister Abdul says that while he eats lots of colon-cleaning salads, he just can't give up the fried chicken. How could he? It's the bane of many members of my family as well. It's so damn delicious- crispy, salty, sweet, fatty. It hits every damn button in our brain.
One time someone I know well told me that they had eaten a healthy meal of just protein. What was it? Well they had fried chicken for lunch. I hate to break the news, but fried chicken, as delicious as it is, is not a traditional food of our ancestors or a high quality protein or fat source. Older relatives have often told me of the days in which chicken was a luxury item, something special. It wasn't until the industrialization of chicken farming that it was economically feasible for lower and middle class Southerners to buy up wings and legs to fry in batches. Also, the other essential ingredients of modern fried chicken- large amounts of cheap fat (mostly refined vegetable oil these days) and refined flour and sugar, were not part of our great-great-great grandparent's diet. I've made fried chicken from heritage hogs and chicken raised on pasture and battered with heritage corn meal. It's damn expensive. And furthermore it's hard, which brings us to another point- that so much of the so-called traditional soul and southern food is eaten out, at restaurants that basically feed us hyperpalatable sugar-coated soybean-oil drenched factory-farmed garbage. It's nothing like the original African variants fried chicken, which is not battered in wheat or sugar, and is fried in palm oil, though some argue that the Southern propensity for fried food came from the Scots-Irish.
I didn't have high hopes for this documentary based on what I'd read on blogs like The Salt.
As the film recounts, soul food was survival food in the black South. Dishes were inspired by a need to make do with what slaves could access: greens they grew themselves, leftover meat parts like pig ears and feet, and cheap foods like rice and yams loaded with calories to fuel a field slave's work. Some of these recipes had origins in Africa. (Gumbo, we learn, was the West African word for "okra.")
While it's easy enough to eat a bucket of fried chicken. I'd really challenge anyone to get fat on a diet of locally-sourced pig offal, rice yams, and greens. That seems like a difficult challenge. And the problem is that the film does NOT recount the history of soul food. It is extremely confused. It spends a lot of time on rambling and guilt and very little time exploring the heritage of actual Soul Food. It's about as accurate as if you hired Paula Deen to do a documentary on traditional Southern food.
How did things like fried chicken, white bread, and mac&cheese get to be "traditional" soul foods? This documentary does not explore this at all.
In this documentary about soul food, fried chicken is mentioned and shown at least ten times. Never is there any mention of the fact it is a side-effect of industrialization of food ,and the same kind of pseudo-tradition that harms cultures as Indian fry bread. Offal and other soul food staples are derided as unhealthy, but no one explains why. It's no coincidence that one of the only scientific explanations about what makes food unhealthy in the documentary comes from Dr. Rodney L. Ellis who mentions the unhealthy properties particular to fried foods and foods with added sugar.
Interestingly, this interview with one of the people featured in the documentary, Bryant Terry, whose vegan cookbooks I enjoyed as a vegan and still find useful now (though admittedly I often add meat stocks and butter to the recipes >:) ), was interviewed in the past and expressed exactly this distinction between the monochromatic pablum of mac & cheese, bread, and fried stuff that dominates the screen in this documentary:
In reality, soul food is good for you. In order to understand why, you have to understand grits. As seen with instant grits, mass production and distribution has diminished the product's superb quality and has obscured the distinctive characteristics that make down-home hominy so darn desirable in the first place. The taste of instant grits boxed up in a factory can never compare to the complex nutty flavor of grits stone-ground in a Mississippi mill. So it's understandable that those who have only had that watered-down stuff (read: many of my friends in the Northeast) scoff at the mention of grits.
Similar to instant grits, instant soul food is a dishonest representation of African American cuisine. And to be clear, when I refer to instant soul food, I'm not just describing the processing, packaging, and mass marketing of African American cuisine in the late 1980s. I'm also alluding to the oversimplified version of the cuisine that was constructed in the popular imagination in the late 1960s.
The term "soul food" first emerged during the black liberation movement as African Americans named and reclaimed their diverse traditional foods. Clearly, the term was meant to celebrate and distinguish African American cooking from general Southern cooking, and not ghettoize it. But in the late 1960s, soul food was "discovered" by the popular media and constructed as the newest exotic cuisine for white consumers to devour. Rather than portray the complexity of this cuisine and its changes throughout the late 19th and 20th century, many writers played up its more exotic aspects (e.g., animal entrails) and simply framed the cuisine as a remnant of poverty-driven antebellum survival food.
To paraphrase food historian Jessica B. Harris, "soul food" was simply what Southern black folks ate for dinner.
Sadly, over the past four decades most of us have forgotten that what many African Americans in the South ate for dinner just two generations ago was diverse, creative, and comprised of a lot of fresh, local, and homegrown nutrient-dense food.
Most self-proclaimed soul food restaurants, a considerable amount of soul food cookbooks, and the canned and frozen soul food industry reinforce this banal portrayal of African American cuisine. Moreover, film and television routinely bombards viewers with crass images of African American eating habits and culinary practices that further distort and demonize soul food.
Unfortunately the documentary does not clearly make any distinction like this. I can imagine a lot of people not really familiar with Southern or Soul food watching this and it playing into their stereotypes about this kind of cooking.
One of the strangest reaction I get among the more conventional eating-healthy crowd is that traditionally-raised meat is too expensive. Yet these people often maintain that meat is unhealthy anyway, so isn't that a good thing? When price increases, demand decreases- people would have to eat less meat if they switched to buying from local pasture-based farms. But there is also a myth that people in the past were healthier because they ate less meat. In the South this is not true- before urbanization and industrialization Southerners, even the poorest, had access to meat. Economic historian Robert Fogel examined records and found that many plantation owners gave meat rations on an average of 6 ounces a day, not terribly different from meat consumption levels today. The little time spent with the excellent food historian in the documentary mentions that they were often able to hunt and fish, utilizing traditions from their original homelands.
It would have been very interesting to explore some of those further-back traditions, to explore why the health problems African-Americans disproportionately suffer from are almost absent in the people left behind in Africa and to explore the rich diversity of African food culture. How people used to get flavor from a large variety of plants, stocks, and fermented foods instead of from massive amounts of sugar or processed fats. Instead, they give screen time to people like former comedian Dick Gregory who rants that "Soul food will kill you!"
Later in the documentary Byron admits he wanted something to blame. His mother and sister point out that his father had food addiction caused by a lifetime of stress and eating fast food, not "soul food addiction."
Towards the end of the documentary there is a nod towards more systematic causes of some of the health problems African Americans disproportionately suffer from, but it gets a bit derailed. For example it goes from growing your own food (though with an emphasis on produce, which may not be the savior people think) to showing a raw vegan woman preparing some veggie rolls with imported nori and talking about how good she looks. There is an emphasis on creating new interpretations of soul food that are plant-based rather than probably the much simpler and more acceptable task of getting back to real traditions and cutting out processed industrial foods. There isn't much mention of other factors involved such as pollution and access to health care. For example, many African Americans are not screened for hemochromatosis, despite the role it plays in type 2 diabetes, and yes, pancreatic cancer. Many do not get regular screenings of important biomarkers and are only treated for things like heart disease and hypertension when they end up in the ER.
There also isn't much of an exploration of why so many African Americans switched from growing their own food to relying on fast food for so many meals. The history of disenfranchisement that left many without the empowerment to produce and cook their own food.
Overall, I find it extremely disappointing and regressive that a documentary shown on public television would spread so much misinformation and scare-mongering about traditional foods. I don't think that is the path for helping people eat better. But if anything this documentary showcases a rather unfortunate American tradition- preaching extremes rather than balance and moderation.
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Certainly healthy food advocates face an uphill fight in changing perceptions across the South. Take the scene at Arthur Cato's House of Southern Food in Hogansville, Ga., where the waitresses write in Magic Marker on wide pads. The grits come topped with butter. Lots of it. Fried catfish comes out of the kitchen in schools. The smoked sausage is dished out in large proportions.
"This is roots food," says Mr. Cato, wiping his hands on his apron. "I've never eaten anything else. I'm 77 years old, and I'm skinny as a rail."
At the Autagaville Cafe, a cinder-block restaurant in the heart of the Black Belt, Mary Wright shrugs off the food controversy, too. "No matter what we do, we're all going to leave here one day, so we might as well go happy and full," she says.
According to Wilson, the low-fat diet at Selma's gothic-looking high school caused a lot of "belly-achin' " as well.
Sorry, but a diet of foods like grits (not corn bread made with white flour), rice, crayfish, venison, muscadines and other berries, collards, mustard greens, pickled pigs feet, crab, offal-rich boudins made with rice, sweet potatoes, oysters, and other truly healthful traditional foods is not going to kill you, it may even make you healthier, as they foods are extremely nutrient dense. It is a shame that people might abandon these already threatened food traditions out of mis-placed fear. I will say though that there are some things they didn't know about that we understand a bit better- namely that re-using cooking fats for high-heat frying might lead to unhealthy oxidization of fats. In the rare cases I fry, I do not re-use the fat.
*I guess that religion is a bit like Seventh Day Adventism in terms of plant-based dietary holier than thou and since I criticized David Duke in my last post, it's worth pointing out that their psuedo-scientific views on racial separatism are not dissimilar
Melissa
Today I saw the headline: Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?
Which is appallingly stupid considering that quinoa is trendy among many segments of the health-conscious crowd. Like many articles of this genre, it also wants believe consumers have more power than they do. What would happen in Western health nuts stopped eating quinoa? Would this benefit the people there somehow? I guess it's more fun to blame trendy dieters than to face larger issues of water scarcity (and water pricing and allocation) and middlemen. It's the same faulty line of logic that many vegans use when talking about meat.
It is a bit amusing to consider how consumption of far away foods lets us turn a blind eye to their production (it's far), which is why I tend to advocate food systems that bring people closer to their food production- and its consequences.
The article also details failed attempts to grow quinoa elsewhere. Interestingly enough, I was researching yesterday traditional foods of the Midwest, and I'm not talking about Chicago Hot Dogs, but about what people were eating and growing here in the 1600s and before. Turns out the form of agriculture indigenous to this region utilized a relative of quinoa - Chenopodium berlandieri. As a cultivated crop, only remnants remain and from what I can gather, nothing of the kind grown for seeds the way quinoa is grown now. A leaf-heavy version is eaten in Mexico as a vegetable.
But echoes remain. All those lamb's quarters growing out of your patio are ghosts of The Eastern Agricultural Complex- possibly feral ancestors of domesticated crops, which explains some of their tenacity as weeds. I would think it would be possible to re-domesticate through selective breeding. It already makes a fine salad. Wild food enthusiast Euell Gibbons found the grains even of the modern weed somewhat easy to harvest:
“In rich soil,” he said, “lamb’s quarters will grow four or five feet high if not disturbed, becoming much branched. It bears a heavy crop of tiny seeds in panicles at the end of every branch. In early winter, when the panicles are dry, it is quite easy to gather these seeds in considerable quantity. Just hold a pail under the branches and strip them off. Rub the husks between the hands to separate the seed and chaff, then winnow out the trash. I have collected several quarts of seed in an hour, using this method.
“The seeds are quite fine, being smaller than mustard seeds, and a dull blackish-brown color....I find it pretty good food for humans.”
I think this also brings me to question certain studies that have tried to estimate the amount of wild grains foragers could have harvested- the ones we encounter now might be feralized crops, not true wild seeds or grains. That might also be why many are less toxic than truly wild seeds/grains. It's probably worth soaking and rinsing though since like quinoa, it may contain high levels of saponins.
Another former crop, Sumpweed, Jared Diamond says was abandoned because it was allergenic and smelled bad, but that didn't stop modern farmers from reshaping rapeseed, a crop that seems quite far from edible with its high levels of nasty erucic acid, into canola, which is now a novel and strangely unquestioned ubiquitous part of our food supply. Plenty of other foods that foragers and agriculturalists eat are toxic when harvested- that is often a feature, not a bug, as it keeps other competing pests away. Humans are smart enough to detoxify through soaking, rinsing, fermentation, and other technologies.
It's interesting how so many Americans look to afar for interesting foods while ignoring the ones in our backyards.
There is also a legend that quinoa is "cursed" which is why North American production has been so difficult, but I find it more logical to think that the Chenopodium that is Quinoa is adapted to a specific environment that we can't offer. There is also some evidence that ancient northern Europeans cultivated a type of Chenopodium as well, remnants of that perhaps are seen in England's Pigweed.
Melissa
Recently a friend sent me this piece on the "paleo" diet and libertarianism in The New Inquiry, which quotes me. It is well-written and thought-provoking, even worth reading if you probably disagree with the author's politics. I myself had thought of writing something similar for awhile, because at some point it's just too interesting how the diet-self-identity movements have become associated with various political leanings. My own are somewhat nebulous. To some corners of the blogsophere I am a beer-swilling Feminazi. Others seem to see me as a raw-meat eating proto-mini-Ayn Rand. Either way, I my interest in the paleo diet partially came from the very fringes of the libertarianish politic, from anarcho-primitivism, which is fairly far left-leaning and was associated with the more stereotypically leftish vegan diet until some of the leaders started suffering health problems from that diet and others figured out that the average edible plant on the market is part of the same destructive industrial complexes as the factory-farmed eggs they so assiduously avoided. Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth not only made anarcho-primitivists don hunting camo on the quest for wild venison, but became a cult classic among even those outside anarcho-primitivists, as the book contains elements that appeal to standard low-carbers to people dissatisfied with vegetarianism or veganism. Unfortunately, about the time that was published, Keith and her various associates also started to advocate terrorism, a very old-fashioned anarchist solution, as a solution to the "problem" of civilization, something many readers might not be aware of. I am glad that she and other primitivist piqued my interest in anthropology, but doing that also drove me further away from primitivism as what I learned about the paleolithic and about foragers did not match the picture that primitivists painted.
At the same time I was interested in primitivism, I was also studying economics, and started reading the more moderate libertarian (though I actually think it's more correctly classical liberal, as am I) blog Marginal Revolution, which is written by economists and linked to fellow economist Art De Any's now-defunct paleo blog. One of the authors there is Tyler Cowan, and like many libertarians he seems intensely attracted to skepticism and that which questions the status quo, something I also share. I think that is where Gary Taubes got pulled in, with his articles in the press like the Big Fat Lie in the NYtimes questioning the lipid-heart disease hypothesis. Interestingly, the reaction among the moderate libertarian crowd was not always initially positive- I remember this scathing article on Taubes published in Reason. And Tyler Cowan himself isn't exactly paleo, instead a champion of hole-in-the-wall ethnic cuisine.
And then there is was a third main strain that I think contributed to making paleo the "libertarian" diet, which is that a lot of the paleo crowd embraced buying from small local farms, a crowd that tends to both lean libertarian economically (or at least professes to) and also has been legitimately harmed by inappropriate government regulation. Everything I Want to Do is Illegal by Joel Salatin, in my opinion, is a seminal tome in getting libertarians interested in food issues. And also in pulling some of the more lefty crunchy local food crowd in that direction along with the fact some of them got tied up in red tape when trying to open their green businesses.
These three basic strains I think explain some of the seemingly nonsensical juxtapositions (why butter? why bacon?) you find in the "paleo" community. The wild foods and occasional romanticism about foragers the first (though that seems to be dying out), the anti-status quo love of bacon and butter the second, the passion for raw milk and grass-fed beef the third.
Some of these strains also explain why it attracts other groups on the fringe. I remember four years ago I was part of a committee organizing an open-source web app conference and brought up having gluten-free food. Let's just say it was not received positively. These days it seems like every sci-fi, software, or other nerdy convention has gluten-free, vegan, dairy-free, and other fringe food identity fare.
Unfortunately, the such diets haves also become popular with other political groups that are skeptical of the government, but more authoritarian on the political compass. Lately there has been a kerfluffle over Dr. William Davis of Wheat Belly fame, Jimmy Moore the low-carb creationist (doesn't believe the paleolithic era existed) figure associated with paleo for $ome reason, and Dr. Doug McGuff who wrote Body by Science appearing on David Duke's podcast. Moore also included Duke's blog in a list of best new LC/Paleo/Health blogs, though he removed it when people pointed it out after a period of denial. Then he wrote a long post about how his critics were using Gestapo-like tactics (wording since removed) to persecute him They couldn't be bothered to Google Duke before going on his show, but in summary David Duke is a race-separatist, the "nicer" face of Neo-Nazism ("we don't want to kill you, we just want you non-whites to stay far far away from us"), though once he was a leader in the much more virulent KKK. Duke believes that there is a Zionist media/government conspiracy that wants to dilute the special white "race" by encouraging race-mixing.
Moore said he only agrees with Duke about nutrition and Duke is "spot-on" in this matter. Unfortunately, Duke's nutritional views are tied together with his other views. In his intro to his Wheat Belly interview he says "The Zionist media is fueled by advertising revenue of foods which are bad for you! But the huge and growing establishment Medical industry and pharmaceutical industry are also fueled by growing unhealthiness. Although I love the taste of bread and wheat products, I recognize the wheat addiction that I and millions of others have — so I avoid wheat as much as possible in my diet." I don't think anyone would say that these people interviewed share such views (though it is interesting that on the defensive they hardly criticize Duke, I guess harsh words are reserved for the evils of wheat/sugar), but it highlights the appeal of certain ideas to the darker edges of the fringe, people for whom they fit into grand paranoid conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, it fits quite well with the general trend towards demonization of specific whole foods and entire food groups that books like Wheat Belly and fundamentalist Low-Carb ideologies typify.
When I see authoritarian articles about "sugar genocides" it makes me more than a little alarmed. I've noticed the mere mention of feminism induces mouth-foaming "help help we are being silenced by the feminists who want to damn us to a politically correct hell" among certain bloggers, but actual authoritarianism doesn't seem to bother them as long as its part of their mutual admiration society. And I think is a symptom of how little ground some of this stuff, scientifically, has to stand on given its reliance on such feedback loops for propagation. And in some ways, the spottier versions of "paleo" and some of the racist theories of people like Duke have a lot in common. As The New Inquiry article points out:
Incomplete or flawed interpretations of our biology have long been used to marginalize women, racial groups, even entire civilizations, and nutrition may well become the next variant in this pattern of discrimination.
Duke, with this theories about the superiority of the "white race," is a good reminder that bad science should not be taken lightly and unfortunately as some Creationist websites point out, various evolutionary theories have a long history of association with such hateful authoritarianism. That's why I'll keep criticizing it here, even though I get letters that say that criticism is unproductive.
So understanding the political background of the "paleo" diet gives many insights to some absurdities and troglodyte-like behavior encountered among that community and various orbiting communities associated with diet. And why it appeals to certain people. I have sometimes mused on the fact I have been treated more viciously (called a "cunt" in a vicious manner in response to an argument about science for example) based on my sex in this sphere than anywhere else, primarily by the anarchist blogger Richard Nikoley, which is surprising considering I work in a male-dominated industry not known for friendliness to women. It has not made me particularly interested in participating in "paleo" or what it has devolved into, especially given certain people in the community's willingness to turn a blind eye as long as the person in question is a member of their mutual admiration society. If anyone wonders why paleo, much like libertarianism, fails to attract a large number of female contributors, there it is.
Oops I wasn't done with this post and I hit publish, probably shouldn't have been up at 1 AM (thanks after-dinner coffee :/ ), so the comments from earlier on 1/3 are from only the first paragraph.
Melissa
I was fairly young when I started having health problems. One of them was headaches. I had severe headaches and then migraines starting when I was maybe 9. By the time I was in high school, headaches, constant infections, fatigue, and stomach problems caused me to miss over a month of class every single school year. One thing that helped quite a bit was Excedrin Migraine, a combination of ibuprofen and caffeine. I popped those things like candy. I bought them all the time, taking the maximum dose for weeks at a time.
When I was a senior in high school I was diagnosed with my first ulcer and given Nexium. I was diagnosed with another ulcer when I was a freshman in college.
I don't know why doctors never thought to connect my excessive usage of Excedrin Migraine to my ulcers.
I've eaten all sorts of things since I discovered evolutionary medicine. Some of those things were not probably the best things to eat. And sometimes I've had stomach aches, but I've never gone back to my original horrible messed up state.
Except once. I was backpacking through Europe with friends. Let's just say I didn't sleep so well and I also drank my fair share of brandy, mulled wine, and beer. I came down with what was probably strep throat, but the trip was almost over and I didn't know how I could get treated in a place like Budapest. So I took the max safe dosage of ibuprofen for over a week, all through Hungary and Austria. By the time I got back to home base in Sweden, I was having heartburn again. It took a long time for me to get rid of that. It was extremely unpleasant to say the least, requiring a strict elimination diet to fix.
And at that time I did my research and found that NSAIDs could damage the gut lining. Some studies have connected NSAIDS to impaired intestinal permeability in IBS patients. I stopped taking them.
Last year I purchased 23andme for myself and then I also got my dad a kit for Christmas. I ran both of our outputs through Promethease, a cool open-source program I've blogged about before. One thing that I noticed this time was genoset 191, which is related to poor NSAID metabolism. Being super lucky, I have CYP2C8*3 from my father and CYP2C9*2 from my mother. Several studies have shown this genoset is associated with gastric bleeding. Now that's an acute symptom, but you have to wonder it can cause more subtle chronic stomach problems as well.
Both my parents were taking NSAIDS at the time I realized this. Both have a history of stomach problems. My mother discontinued them on my advice and she said it helped.
But when you stop taking NSAIDs, you realize how much our culture depends on them. Last year I messed up my knee while exercising and was kind of sore for a couple of days. I rarely resort to pain killers, but it was affecting my ability to concentrate. The office first aid kit only contained NSAIDs- aspirin, advil, etc. I walked to the drug store in pain and bought tylenol. It doesn't work as well for me as NSAIDs, but it worked OK.
But not being able to rely on pain relievers also forces you to address the real source of problems you might cover up otherwise. It seems like at least once a year, I get bad neck aches. Ususally it's after a big project when I sit hunched over for too long, even though I know it will have consequences. Unfortunate Even a standing desk doesn't fix this for me. Apparently I can hunch while standing.
Usually yoga helps it, but my regular yoga teacher moved away. When I went to another level 1 yoga class nearby, that teacher was really pushy about inversions. Now, I think inversions can be safe, but I don't think they are safe for beginners or people with certain structural issues at all. That's not the way the human body evolved to move and you really need to have good core strength and flexibility (the latter which I do not have) to do them safely. And of course my neck got worse after that class, to the point where I started to get headaches.
And the 8 Steps to Pain-Free Back stuff only helps so much when it's that bad. I can't maintain the recommendations in the book if my muscles are cramped and miserable. So I decided to try other things. I went to the chiropractor next door to my office. Now I am suspicious of a lot of chiropractic stuff, but when my neck is in such a state, it really does seem to help and I can chose to ignore the office woo about food/vaccines/etc. Which is kind of hilarious given how pushy some chiropracters are about getting x-rays, which increase risk for several cancers. They had a video playing in the office of the latest place I went that was about chiropractic care having been around for 2000 years or something. I wondered how it was ever possible it existed before x-rays considering how annoyed they were with me when I said I wouldn't sign off on them.
The other thing I didn't like about the chiropractic stuff is that I didn't feel it was fixing the root causes, just treating the symptoms and frustratingly when I brought that up to the chiropractor, they just said I needed to come in more. When I dialed back on my appointments because I was busy, the pain came back.
I started seeing a rolfing professional on a whim. Rolfing was pretty interesting- is it almost like a massage, but one that tries to correct your structure by interrupting dysfunctional fascia. It provided me relief and the rolfer provided some insight into some of the everyday imbalances that seemed to plague me. I got the book she recommended, The New Rules of Posture by Mary Bond, which I'm currently in the middle of.
It's truly an interesting book in how it points out the potential sources of problems. For example, I was under the impression that I was doing the right thing in terms of my shoes and walking. I walk a lot and I wear flexible thin-soled shoes. Earlier this year I started having some annoying heel pain on my right food. The exercises in the book pointed out that this is my dominant foot, so that makes sense. Or does it? Turns out that dominant doesn't mean what you think it means, the drive for the act of walking according to Bond should be the buttocks and ball/toes of the non-dominant foot, rather than the heel strike, which is how I was driving.
Also the Bond and Gokhale books both pointed out that the fact that my dress straps on many of the sleeveless dresses slipping is not just a minor annoyance, it reveals that my shoulders have become rounded over time, probably from a mixture of hunching (I often put my elbows on my desk and lean onto my hands) and letting my shoulder muscles atrophy. There is also just a host of interesting information about posture in the Bond book, particularly that about posture reflecting mood and social structure. If you think about this it makes sense. How many times have you seen a timid animal hunch down with you tried to pet them? Or cats arching their backs when trying to menace another cat? Or a guilty dog hunch and look down at the ground when confronted? In humans you start to notice this as well, seeing the introverted child or overworked programmer hunching? Perhaps this explains why various studies have tied unhappiness to back pain. They always frustrated me because some used them to imply that back pain is psychosomatic, but in my opinion it seems more likely that unhappiness and unhappy situations can lead to poor posture and also that pain from that can lead to further unhappiness.
So for the new year I plan on finishing the Bond book exercises. And I'd like to try out Feldenkrais and the Alexander technique. More Rolfing too with some gentle yoga, and occasional visits to the chiropractor just to release tension. And perhaps instead of doing group workouts, focus on my own weight training with my own deficits in mind. Any other suggestions?
Melissa
An incomplete list of my favorites- I set the timer on 30 minutes to sift through my photos (makes me realize why I take them- Schwa, Ruxbin, Blackbird's dinner menu are absent because I didn't take any) and here is what I picked.
@home: lingonberry(frozen w/ no sugar/crap added from Erickson's Delicatessen & Fish), seaweed (Seasnax), reindeer pate (Smoking Goose Meatery), and buckwheat pancake (buckwheat from Chicago winter Greenmarket, soured in sour cream for a day, mixed with egg, cooked in butter)
@home: chestnut flour (Chicago greenmarket)-battered smelt with sambel oelek aioli
@Hotel Lloyd in Amsterdam: a dinner of caraway gouda, fresh lettuce, pomme frites, mint tea, and sweetbreads
also their cheesy/beefy/quark coffee delicious breakfast
@home: my unholy hybrid of crab stock black pepper potatoes from Fatty Cue, radish salad from April Bloomfield, and Momofuku pork belly
@Dahlgren's in Stockholm PERFECTLY cooked local lamb on earthy rye
@Frantzen/Lindeberg in Stockholm: raw beef tartare from an older dairy cow with SO much flavor, smoked eel, creamy bleak roe
@Publican in Chicago cooked by Chris Cosentino of Incanto in SF: noodles made with pig skin
Pork belly egg buns with sardine katsuobushi from my friends Nick and Shannon
@One Sister (now Elizabeth): oyster, mushrooms, meringues
Pork belly with sour cherries and herbs, cooked with "ancient roman" spice blend (cumin, coriander, black pepper, fish sauce, etc.)
@Next Sicily The most perfect tiny bit of handmade pasta with bottarga (fermented fish roe)
@Blackbird fluke with sea beans (soo deliciously oceanic) and lardo
Fantastic SE Asian food at SM Underground here in Chicago. Didn't get great pics, but the chicken curry wrapped in banana leaves was amazing.
Almost everything I ate at Vera (I eat their often since it's next to my office)- like this perfect spicy blood sausage hidden under these eggs, the skewers of tongue and octopus, and the divine uni deviled eggs
Seafood sausage at Saigon Sisters: I was skeptical, but it was just the right amount of fishy balanced with perfect curry spices and kaffir lime leaves
Another Asian-style sausage was this bone marrow sausage that used squid as a casing at Embeya. Every part was perfectly cooked, a feat considering that squid seems to overcook easily.
The absolutely perfect gravlax wrapped in turnip at Elizabeth. Salmon tasted completely balanced with the herbal notes.
Warabi Mochi at Next. I'd always wanted to try this mochi, made with earthy brown bracken starch. It was a little pillow of pleasure. I also loved the matcha. The sweetfish/ayu on the menu were also a revelation- their flesh really was sweet in just the right way.
Fish and custard? Who but Doctor Who would have ever thought this could work, but it did at Elizabeth, where I was served a Loup De Mer (Branzino) dish with just the right amount of terrestic custardy sunchoke and apple cider vinegar
The crispy duck heart hash at Au Cheval is the dish that made me like breakfast again, even though Au Cheval isn't open for that meal except on weekends. The crispy potatoes, creamy cheese, fatty gravy with bits of mineralistic duck heart, flecks of chives, and crowned with a perfectly cooked egg, yolk just waiting to be popped so it can join the fatty party.
No really, this is a bowl of new potatoes covered in autumn leaves at the Publican book release dinner for Faviken. But the potatoes are perfectly cooked and the summer butter you dip them in reminds you that simple foods can be absolutely perfect.
Everything I ate in Montreal was incredible, but I'll never forget this duck fat poutine at Au Pied Du Couchon
The silky beef tartare served by Thurk
More pork skin noodles, this time in a "Pad Thai" at the Trencherman's brunch that was actually more like a ramen down to the savory salty broth
Sweet potato with torched marshmallow ice cream from Jeni's was as good as it sounded...except better in every way. Better than the real thing. Grass-fed milk too and no weird gums or anything like that.
Senza's (the GOOD gluten-free restaurant) playful itty bitty cup of chicory "coffee" and flourless dark chocolate brownie with tiny marshmallows served at the end of the meal
The lardcore grits and cornbread at Carriage House, as well as the pimento cheese...I never had good memories of that stuff, but they make it with good ingredients and it is TASTY
My own simple lard-pastry buckwheat mini-mincemeat pies meat with real suet and some roadkill deer someone gave me
The boyfriend's perfect chicken ballantine stuffed with pork sausage, mushrooms, walnuts and arugula :)
Well, time's up, sure I missed a lot, but the whole point is that I ate well this year. If I can eat this well next year...life will be good.
Melissa
If there is anything I can say about this year for sure, it's that I ate well, perhaps better than I ever have. I had meals that went beyond what I ever imagined food could be in terms of intricate qualities, each ingredient like little clockwork pieces, gears whirring together perfectly in tune. I'm particularly thinking of two chefs here in Chicago: Iliana Regan, once of One Sister supper club now of her own restaurant Elizabeth, and Justin Behlke of Thurk supper club (named after his grandfather's last name). Now that Iliana has a restaurant, the merits of it have been debated in various reviews, but I think what is missing is the realization that this is something you can only get here in Chicago. I see that particularly as a bit of an outsider, having only lived here for a year. Sometimes I think back on New York City, not missing it, but thinking (not always fondly) of experiences I had there that I cannot have here. What defines a place, particularly the foods?
I have perhaps been thinking about this all year, seeded by my trip to Stockholm, where I ate at Frantzen/Lindeberg, a meal I still think about often. And then later by meeting Magnus Nilsson of Faviken and reading his cookbook. This New Nordic movement in Scandinavia has undoubtedly influenced Elizabeth and Thurk, but at this point it's a matter of how this translates to our own environment and how in turn it shapes the environment. What is so striking about the New Nordic movement is how it upends assumptions about local food, how it instead of just buying local for the sake of local, it has seeded the genesis of food businesses that are both local and striving to supply such restaurants with the highest possible quality foods, not just in the area, but possibly in the world.
I was talking to Justin about how difficult that is here with the way Chicago is structured, with its sprawl devouring nearby farmland so it's hard to have a the close relationship with producers that Magnus speaks of in Faviken. Some of the things I've eaten lately, sweetbreads out of a cow freshly killed right in the green pastures rather than a cold metal slaughterhouse, well I have to admit that yes, I wouldn't buy this, this is something that can only come from being near, even if it were legal to sell. It's too intimate and risky of an experience to buy from afar, maybe to even buy at all. And no, you couldn't buy it, since it did not come from an inspected slaughterhouse, though it's not like the law recognizes this as an inherently unsafe action since it would be legal for me to invite you over as a friend and serve it for dinner. The problem is that the laws impose burdens that small produces can't meet or that impair quality. The dearth of USDA-inspected slaughterhouses and quality control problems within them are serious issues for selling to restaurants. Troubles on that end are largely why I can not supply any of these places with much if any in the way of meat from my own family's farm. It is a problem I hope to solve someday, but working with Thurk is something ideal since it's home dinners with friends (of a ridiculously high quality) that are smaller in scale to test things with. Both chefs have expressed to me that they eventually hope to have restaurants in more agrarian settings that might allow them to do something more hyper-local.
Cured pork, pickles and mustard @ Thurk. Via JenMoran Photography.
Occasionally someone will tell me that I should become a food reviewer, but while I love writing about food and visiting good restaurants, I believe this would hamper me in many ways, particularly from having conversations(and sometimes arguments) with chefs and the other people that make restaurants work. I admit a bias- I originally met Iliana by dining at her home and she introduced me to many new friends. Justin I found on LTHforum, where he was looking for a place to host his dinners. Not knowing much of anything about him, I hosted his first dinners at my apartment before he set up his own apartment to host. And my risk definitely was worth it, I was lucky to host some really fun and delicious dinners.
But on another hand, I see why restaurant reviewers operate the way they do. I remember an essay I read in a poetry class, the author lost in my memory, that laid out why a poem's author should never explain a poem. If food is to be a form of art, it is something to be able to glean the art from it without context. Even so, this happens to be the case whether you know the chef or not, in the environment of harried plating, who has time to explain? And you are lost in this short moment on your own, to find what you will there.
From the Elizabeth Deer Menu: {sous vide and seared deer tenderloin with thyme and juniper, celery root tubes, pickled elderberries and sauce, amaranth and celery root porridge, ground deer meat, steel cut oats, parsley, seasonings loosely wrapped in cabbage, deer sauce with capers, parsley and shallot, with brown butter JenMoranPhotography
But what this food tells me is that it is of the Midwest a place, not as much as a culture. It tries to echo the land itself, nature forgetting all the people that have lived there, the people who in nature's course of time, lingered only for a second. Attempting to mirror the ecosystem itself, it has a complexity of tastes, species, aromas, and textures that at its height almost allow you to imagine that you are outside alone in the woods or in a pasture rather than sitting at a dining table.
From the Elizabeth Deer Menu: venison tartare on chard, egg yolk sauce, caper berries, pickled hawthorn berries, grains of paradise and horseradish whip JenMoranPhotography
But it is inevitable to see the marks of human hands even among the naturalistic deconstruction that often characterizes these menus, the cultures that have come and go, bringing plants and animals from others places to settle here with us, bringing ways of cooking and preserving food. For example, the pickles and sourdough on Justin's menu or the pirogis and gravlax on Iliana's. Iliana's also contains a characteristic storybook whimsicality and playfulness in her preparations.
Justin's Thurk menus are a little more minimalistic and rustic in style, more strict in their devotion to locality and season. He did a stint at the famous Noma and you can see some of that there.
Iliana's restaurant is now offering three different menus. I think the best one for someone looking for an introduction to her style is the Deer menu, which has a heavy focus on foraged and wild ingredients.
Justin is doing a couple of dinners at his apartment in January and there are still a few reservations left. He also has a long-fermented sourdough (which I tolerate very well, particularly with his signature brown butter :) ) class coming up at my place.
Thurk's Sourdough via JenMoran Photography
Of all the meals I've eaten this year, theirs have been the most memorable and I can heartily recommend them. And hope this style of cooking and dining prospers and grows here.
Melissa
It struck me as a sliced off lingering slivers of lovely red meat from the bones of the duck that I was doing something both very ancient and also very similar to the dreaded pink slime. Hear me out on this- pink slime's defenders talk about how it let's them use the whole carcass of an animal, which is an admirably thrifty concept. Of course it's been demented by desire for "low-fat" products, so the perfectly good little bits have to be mangled and treated like garbage in order to get the lean meat from it.
I wasn't concerned about fat or sinew. In fact, the fat was exactly what I wanted, but I'd take the rest too. The duck, along with the old lard breed pigs and dual-purpose cattle breeds, is an animal of the old farmstead, where farms had a level of diversity and self-sufficiency I don't see very often today. The duck, like a lard-breed pig such as the mangalita, provides a complete meal. On the foot, it is crafty and resourceful, able to defend itself and survive where modern breast-bloated birds (also in pursuit of the inferior lean meat) flounder. In the kitchen, it's an all-purpose culinary wonder. At the slaughterhouse, it's an anachronism, banished by many because those feathers that are so useful in life are difficult to pluck. Some farms I called have had to stop selling them for this reason. It's a shame, because really, duck is about a million times better than any other poultry except maybe goose, another hard to find old farm animal.
Home cooks also seem to be a bit intimadated by ducks. Some make the mistake of treating them like the more common chicken, which causes some problems. An average duck is more active than an average chicken, so the meat can be a bit tough if just roasted. Also, the fat, which is truly one of the best things about a duck, can turn into a problem if not treated properly. It's also just not chicken, it's meat is a bit like beef. You really don't want to overcook the nice juicy steak-like breast. Just roast the average pastured duck the way you might roast a chicken and you end up with overcooked breasts, tough legs, and a pan full of fat that you don't know what to do with. So I taught a class for Chicago Meatshare that showed how to do it right (or at least better than average) with a duck from Paulie's Pasture, a local farmer I sometimes order from.
The right thing to do, in my opinon, is to divide and conquer, yielding ingredients that will last dozens of very good meals. Luckily, you pretty much can break down a duck like you can a chicken (I learned how to do this mostly from Youtube to be honest). I did, into breasts (careful to keep the skin on), legs, wings, and carcass. Here is where it is different- this duck has globs of fat, particularly around the neck, but really everywhere. Those precious bits of fat I trimmed and put in a pot on low, starting a dry fat render. Usually I use my crock pot for that, but I wanted it to be ready sooner this time. Duck fat is like liquid gold, yellow like olive oil with probably the most appealing flavor of any animal fat besides butter. I wanted as much fat as possible. The bits of leftover solids in the pot are cracklings, I saved those for later too.
And then I did what pink slime tries so hard to do, but fails to, something that people have been doing for many millenia. Perhaps it was among the first types of food processing. In archaology it's called "bone grease processing" and appears to have become very popular during the upper paleolithic as a way to obtain as much precious fat as possible. I stripped little bits of meat from the carcass, my homemade "pink slime" after breaking down into the basic parts, reserving those to use later. Then I broke the carcass up and covered it with water in my crockpot, leaving it on low to make broth. In ancient times they smashed the bones, creating tell-tale fragments, in order to get as much of the inner bone fat as possible. The broth itself has plenty of great stuff and I reduce it and put it into ice cube trays. But you should also get a second smaller yield of duck fat from that, which you can seperate with a fat seperator or simply by cooling it in the fridge where it will collect on the top. That fat is a bit less pure so I use it soon for cooking everything from omelettes to vegetables.
I've been experimenting lately with flavor schemes. I have several that I use in my kitchen. The main principle I use is savory/sweet/acidic. I use all three elements in every dish, often adding spicy to the mix. Some ingredients have several elements. The main ones I used here are:
Northern: Hen of the Woods Mushroom/Birch Syrup/Cider/Lingonberries/Mustard
Asian-ish: Tamari/Fish Sauce(I used Red Boat)/Rice Vinegar/Sambel Oelek (garlic chili paste)
French-ish: Stock or Broth/Mirepoix (celery, onion, carrot)/Cider
The skin-on breasts were the first thing I cooked. Because, well, they are impressive, tasty, and quick. All you really have to do is season with a bit of salt and pepper, cross-hatch the skin with a knife, and place in a medium-hot pan, without any oil, skin side down. The skin renders and produces more than enough cooking fat for the breasts and many other things. That's all the fat I needed for cooking for the rest of the night. I wanted the breasts nice and rare because honestly, it's just damn delicious that way. I did medium-high for 7 minutes, low for three minutes, flipped, then cooked on low for an additional 4 minutes. Then I let them rest in the pan for a bit while I softened the frozen lingonberries in a pan. In another pan I cooked some hen of the woods mushrooms in some of the leftover duck fat. I also glazed the breast with a bit of some sour cherry mustard I had. I sliced and garnished with thyme. I wanted this dish to reflect the flavors of autumn and northern forests.
The next dish was a bit more pedestrian, but no less delicious. I simply took some leftover haiga rice and fried it in the duck fat with the little bits of meat and egg, adding my "Asian-ish" elements to make a delicious fried rice.
The main failure was that I browned than braised the legs with the "French-ish" flavors, random autumn vegetables (sweet potato, celeriac, blue potato), and some homemade stock I had for an hour in a dutch oven...which was really not enough time to make the legs tender, but they were still OK. If I had more time, I would have done a confit or a rilette. Luckily, I did save the wings, which I browned and braised overnight in a crock pot and they came out really nicely, especially with a nice mustard cranberry glaze and the leftover vegetables.
I broke down the duck fifteen days ago and I am actually sitting down eating another meal from this same duck this evening, a ramen I made with the duck broth cubes, the Asian-ish flavor palette, and some over-salted pastured pork a friend gave me, garnished with carrot and seaweed. If you ever over-salt something you can sometimes save it by making a soup or other brothy dish out of it, which is one reason I don't pre-salt my broth before storing it. I used these 100% buckwheat noodles, which are pretty amazingly easy to cook, particularly compared to regular buckwheat soba, which turns to glue if you look the wrong way while it's boiling. I also have used the broth in risotto (also added some duck cracklings to that) and congee, which uses leftover rice in a broth that I flavor with the Asian-ish flavor palette. Overall, I probably got 20-30 meals out of one duck. I can't wait to cook one again!
Thanks for the photos Erik! Also, I couldn't have done the class without Tom, my "sous chef", and all my awesome attendees!
Melissa
When I was in high school and college I struggled with insomnia. The worst was when I lived in the dorms. Snoring roommate I hardly knew five feet away from me, sodium lamp light streaming in through the blinds, the ever-constant noise of slamming doors and drunken college students. I was constantly sick, constantly tired, almost always teetering on clinical depression. I missed class constantly, only getting by because like most colleges, the classes were a colossal waste of time and I could pass the tests just be reading the books. Recently when I was telling someone that the college I attended later in Europe didn't have such factory-farm-like housing and I did better health-wise there, someone said "well, dorm-living is a rite of passage." I kind of wanted to tell them off, tell them about how miserable I was and how it kept me from doing my best, but I guess some people are lucky and are able to endure it better. But the fact that the next door clinic was always full of legions of the chronically sick and the psychologists were constantly booked told me otherwise.
I tried everything to get to sleep. I even built some hybrid ear-plug/headphones and tried all manner of podcasts, classical music, even insipid "whale singing" and "relaxing sea sounds." I tried sleep masks, I even tried using Benadryl. Every night I lay there for hours past midnight before I could fall asleep.
When I studied in Uppsala things started to get much better for me. My room was so comfortable and noise-isolated there, it got much easier to fall asleep. I still had some occasional trouble though. The main trouble since then seemed to become distraction. It was just so easy to watch "just one more" episode of whatever show I was into on my laptop. Or play "just one more" hour of video games. "Just one more" often became a lot more. And I would often fall asleep under the glimmering light out of pure exhaustion well past midnight. Up until two months ago, it was really bad because I was in a studio apartment, my Macbook light tempting me all night, my video games stored under my bed in easy reach (I purposely buy simpler games out of the delusion I won't get addicted, but it doesn't always work out). At some point I was playing video games AND watching Netflix at two AM, a perfect storm of over-stimuli. My smart phone sat charging on my nightstand. I realized that I was "sleep walking" or something at night, checking my email at 4 AM without even realizing it and waking up to an inbox full of mostly already "read" messages. I was like "this has got to stop."
Luckily I moved into an apartment with multiple rooms of my own, something I've never had. I took my bedroom and made a rule that there would be no electronic devices in there besides a lamp, a radio, and the old un-backlit kindle. The windows are covered with blackout curtains. My phone charges in the kitchen. I go there at at 11 or midnight, start to read, and fall asleep easily.
Now that it is winter, I've also programmed my thermostat to drop to 45 F at night, extra motivation to go to bed. It reminds me of staying in a log cabin in the woods, heated by wood, and at night it gradually gets colder as the fire dies. And you are virtually forced to wake up naturally in the morning to put more wood in.
I've also been experimenting with daytime temperature. I keep it at 50 F when I'm away, but 61 F when I'm there. But I'm wondering if I could gradually go lower and adapt to it. I don't hope to match the achievements of legendary Cold House Journal folks, but I admire their fortitude and thrift. They make me feel rather weak.
Unfortunately I sometimes work in an office where my co-workers like to keep it at 75 F (WTF). When we walk to lunch, some of them look like they are about to die from the cold, even though it's hardly even cold for Chicago yet. I have to wonder if just not getting used to colder temperatures makes them less likely to be active.
A walk in the woods
I walk 20 minutes to work and I'm too stubborn to stop in the winter, particularly after living in Sweden where I saw people bike and walk everywhere even in the deepest dark winter (dark as in you need lights for your bike at 1 PM), so I can't afford to not be cold adapted. It is interesting that in the past I've really struggled with winter. I grew up in Georgia and I used to think I wasn't cut out for the winter because of it. My mother always kept our house pretty cold. I had to sleep under two comforters and an electric blanket. I blamed cold on being sick all the time. In retrospect, I wonder if the low-fat and later vegetarian and vegan diets were why I was constantly miserably cold all the time. The worst was when I was a raw vegan. I felt like I was never warm in the winter, even when I turned up the thermostat as far as it would go. Now these days, fueled by a good hearty beef stew, I feel able to easily endure the winter chill.
It also doesn't surprise me at all the researchers have tied indoor heating to obesity. "Good fat" known as brown fat, which burns calories, is activated by cold. People tend to gain weight these days on traditional rich holiday foods, but maybe they wouldn't if they paired them with traditional cold temperatures.
I'll never forget looking at my window in Sweden and seeing dozens little preschoolers playing in the snowy woods. They play outside every day. No matter what the weather. Here I walk by the local school on my way to work. The playgrounds and ball fields are eerily and starkly empty.
Melissa
It's amazing for me to think that it was 2008, the year when I lived in Sweden, when Magnus Nilsson was getting his little restaurant in the North of Sweden off the ground. That so much has changed since then, not just for me, but for the entire idea of Swedish food.
Perhaps it is because Swedish is a small country, that a relatively small food movement can have an impact the way it has there. Back when I moved there, traditional Swedish food was considered an austere thing fit only for pensioners eating brown bland things while staring off into the dark Nordic rain. As Jonathan Gold, a food critic I otherwise respect very much, said in a recent interview:
JG: Look at Europe, for example. You have the land of plenty—in the low country, plenty of meat and cheese—it’s the cuisine of abundance, and it’s boring. Guys like [René] Redzepi are making huge inroads in Nordic cuisine, but the cuisine of southern Sweden is, like, giant portions of meat and gluey gravy eaten in complete silence in ten minutes.
But how wrong! And unfair!
First, Sweden has a long tough history, one of poverty and famine. In my archeology seminar there, we saw the remains of peasant houses, built before the potato arrived there, with huge cellars for turnips and rutabagas. The people's bones were gnarled from malnutrition, their whole lives surrounded by nutritious game that they were forbidden to kill, as it belonged to the king. Many traditional Swedish foods are just scrap meat extended with scraps of bread bread or potato starch. Many traditional sausages, and the famous meatballs, are often more bread than meat.
But there are gems in Swedish cuisine, though most often they have not been available to the average visitor. Husmanskost, the traditional Swedish food, is hard to find in a restaurant. There isn't much of a culture of eating out, it is something special, and until recently, nice restaurants were completely dominated by French and other foreign styles of cooking. To a visitor, the experience of Swedish cuisine, which is characterized by foraging and cooking at home, was largely very remote. IKEA's food, which while satisfying on a long shopping trip, is a bland caricature made with industrial crud livened up with a dash of real lingonberries adulterated with sugar. It hasn't done much to enlighten.
And then there is the fact that a lot of it relies on ingredients that are not going to show up in Ikea anytime soon.
In retrospect, it was only a matter of time. Swedish dairy is the best I've ever tasted, and yes, I've been to Switzerland. Herbicides are forbidden in woods, so foraging for plants like mushrooms and berries is widespread. It is legal to serve hunted meat in restaurants. And the flavors that have been alienating to many foreigners in the past, the funky fermented ones, are now fairly trendy.
When I lived there, there was already another movement afoot, which was the low-carb high fat (LCHF) diet, popularized by doctors like Annika Dahlqvist. Even within a year, "old fashioned" high-fat foods were becoming easier and easier to find, a rebellion against the reign of the insipid virtueless canola oil which had wormed itself into all manner of foods.
Living in Sweden was my chance to do something I'd always wanted, but never had the guts to do, which is to walk around forests and eat things growing there. In America this is considered insane, particularly when it comes to mushrooms. Mere children in Sweden forage for mushrooms, but the idea of me harvesting them as an adult woman who has taken mycology classes at university makes some of my more urban relatives a little upset. I was at a park earlier this year with a friend and I reached into a tree as we walked by and grabbed a handful of mulberries.
"You are really going to eat those?" my friend said.
"Yeah, they are mulberries" I replied
"Are you really sure? I mean they could be ANYTHING!!!"
"Um, yeah, I think I'll be OK"
The comments on Reader's excellent article on Chicago Chef Iliana Regan, who is perhaps the person most similar to Magnus here are pretty telling, with many commenters dismayed at the idea that people would serve foraged food in a restaurant, even incorrectly stating that foraged food is illegal to serve.
Reminds me of this essay on poisonous plants
Of course, it isn’t true, but the fear of wild plants runs very deep in Western civilization. While it certainly is true that people can poison themselves with wild vegetation, the fear that we attribute to plants is monstrously out of proportion with the actual danger they pose. Like many profound and unexamined fears, this one breeds irrationality, causing many people to suspend all logic and refuse to participate in rational discourse...
Our culture is spellbound and beguiled by the story of someone mistaking a poisonous plant for an edible one and dying from the error. It is a magnetic motif with a suite of admonitions that we find economically and socially useful: don’t stray too far from the beaten path; what civilization has given you is better than you realize; Nature cannot be trusted; be normal and live a predictable life of routine. These messages are compelling when a torturous death is presented as the cost of disregarding them.
Of course there are some wild edibles that are a bit dangerous since they resemble a few poisonous plants, but mulberries are not one of them in Illinois. With attitudes like this it is amazing the human species existed for most of its history eating wild plants every single day. I've had similar experiences discussing butchery. It if were really rocket science, we wouldn't exist. Butchering small game and deer is not difficult.
Not only that, in America, landscapers plant sterile fruit trees so we can enjoy the blossoms without all the "inconvenience" of fruit. In the Autumn in Uppsala, an apple or a plum was a convenient snack found in nearly every roadway or park. And since herbicides are forbidden in forests and there is a "right to roam," wild foods are accessible to all.
My roommates thought I was strange because I really was very interested in the very old foods. To be honest, not all of them are good. The liver pate I had is only good if you stack butter on it an inch deep. It seems to be mainly flour anyway. Many of the cheeses are a bit boring. Mucous-like fermented milk known långfil might still be a hard sell even among fermented food lovers, though I find it a bit fun to eat. I'm not really crazy about falukorv, the ubiquitous fairly flavorless cheap sausage. Falukorv comes from the legacy of poverty and industrialization, in general the best, the foods that make up the Scandinavia's terroir, are from a time much longer ago, that I fell in love with when I read Sigrid Undset's novels about the Middle Age farms nestled within forests and mountains.
“It’s good when you don’t dare do something that doesn’t seem right,” said Fru Aashild with a little laugh. “But it’s not so good if you think something isn’t right because you don’t dare do it.”- Kristin Lavransdatter
Magnus' work is considered by many to be modernist, and in its plating perhaps it is and the perfectionism is very classically French, but it is profoundly conservative at its core, hearkening back to those times. When I met him during his book tour at Publican here in Chicago, it was as it he had walked right out of the pages of Undset's Kristin Lavransdattar. The core ingredients would have been recognizable to the people in those books and even to the people living in Sweden before the advent of agriculture and later, Christianity. It is fitting that he starts his first chapter with a Norse legend.
Much has been written about Noma, but Noma really is a modernist restaurant, utilizing the region's terroir to great affect, but creating very globalized concoctions. To contrast, many of the techniques and recipes in Faviken, Magnus' new cookbook, would be familiar to his great grandparents. For example, messmor, a caramelized fatty spread made from whey, or calvdans (Calf's dance), an extremely rich creme brulee of sorts made with colostrum, the first milk of a cow after birthing a calf. These are old country foods. Or even really his great^24 grandparents. For all the papers on starch granules on Neanderthal teeth, who is actually bothering to gather these foods? Wild legumes for example, how many of you have even thought of these? It's not like agricultural foods came from nowhere, there is strong evidence their ancestors were utilized in the wild seasonally in small amounts long before the first farmers. Magnus uses them in several recipes, precious morsels, hard to gather, paired with things like raw or lightly steamed sea creatures.
There is a tendency to think of those people in that long ago past as being utilitarian creatures, only thinking of the basics of food, reproduction, and shelter. Forgetting that these peoples stretched across the world, thousands of tribes we will never know. As striking as the diversity is between different foraging people now, that is but a small fraction of what was then. It has become clear that their paintings and sculptures and possibly texture arts were finely honed and painstaking, requiring much devotion to craft. It's hard to imagine food was immune from this. Bits of yarrow and chamomile found on Neanderthal teeth, were they medicine as speculated by the archeologists or could they have been flavorings? If gathering food was so much of your life, how could flavor be something you could not consider? Could not turn into an art? These are chefs we will never know. Some puritans consider the art of food a decadence, but the delights we now enjoy on that front, are a product of millions of years of evolution, they are not trivial at all.
Magnus is a hunter, and his restaurant features his game. Having worked in local food infrastructure for some time now, I think he also personifies the kind of chef that a farmer would love to work with, the one who doesn't just write out his menus a month in advice and call the farmer looking for 30 grass-fed tenderloins, which of course is an impossible order for a small farmer to fill, and ends up buying his items labeled "grass-fed' from unspecific farms from some food service distributor. I find a lot of these restaurants end up emphasizing toppings on burgers more than the actual meat itself, which is often fairly mediocre in flavor.
Magnus cut ties from his food distributor and does his own butchery, buying whole animals from small farms he works closely with because he recognizes that each animal has its own what I would call micro-terroir, it's life story written into every sinew, bone, and streak of fat. I remember when my family bought our herd, some folks told me that a lot of the cows I owned were useless as meat because they were older than a year. Thankfully we started working with a more knowledgeable meat processor, AKA someone who actually likes meat for meat, like Magnus appreciating the grassy, the gamey, the earthy. The pictures of meat in Faviken look like blood oranges, a depth of ruby red that comes from an animal that has roamed the pastures and forests of Northern Sweden. Magnus explains in his book that he prefers older dairy cows because of their deeper more complex flavor which he enhances through dry aging. According to him, this meat has real marbling caused by the use of the muscles as the cow ages, interspersing it with fat, whereas corn-finished young cattle marbling "is just blubber."
Faviken is unfortunately quite remote and I didn't make it there when I last was in Sweden earlier this year, but I did eat at Frantzen/Lindeberg, which is certainly influenced by Faviken's style. One of the dishes I had was a tartare made with meat from a 7-year-old dairy cow named Stina, topped with tallow. It was a dish I certainly won't forget. I was reading a discussion online today about buying grass-fed meat from Target and using it to make tartare. It was labeled comes from "farms." Which farms? Which cows? Which butcher ground the beef? When was it ground? When I eat raw meat, these are things I like to know. These are things that affect my trust, as well as the flavor, especially given the drought this season, which causing some farmers to cull cattle that would normally be sent to a feedlot and fattened on corn. What I've learned is that cattle lines that have been breed for feedlot finishing are not the same cattle that finish well on grass, if they are finished at all. I wasn't aware until my family opened our farm that a grass-fed cow should be finished for optimal flavor and texture as well. I learned this the hard way, after one bull that we didn't finish ended up being maddeningly inconsistent in terms of flavors. Once we started finishing, the meat had better flavor in general and was more consistent.
It is a bit strange for Magnus to have a cookbook, given how tied his work is to the very specific part of Sweden where he lives and works. But I see the Faviken Cookbook as more more a style guide to Rektún mat- "real food" in all its glorious anachronistic devotion to specific farms, specific lands, specific trees, specific places. It is easy to dismiss this as being just the style of food for a fancy restaurants, but few restaurants achieve this style to any meaningful extent, yet I met many people of varying backgrounds that manage to eat this way for every day and for every meal. Maybe not in the intricate manner of some of the recipes in the book, but in the overall approach to sourcing and appreciating food.
Dry-aged grass-fed tartare using McEwen Farms beef with fresh sourdough and brown butter from Thurk, a pop-up restaurant I've been hosting
Louise McCready Hart: Your philosophy about food is called Rektún mat.
Magnus Nilsson: It means real food. It is something my grandfather used to say when I grew up and it has so much meaning to me.
LMH: In the US, different organizations talk about real food as in not processed, not manipulated.
MN: It's food from the surroundings, from the farm and the earth.
LMH: I like your idea for a drivers' license equivalent for meat-eaters for which the test would be raising and getting to know the animal before killing and eating it.
MN: I think that would make a huge difference.
That's always been my own aim when buying food, to really know and understand where it comes from and cultivate a relationship and knowledge in every step. And why I started Meatshare, for example, to be able to do that in a way that is actually often more affordable than buying green-washed products from a supermarket that are divorced from context. The more I buy this way, the more passionate I become about it and it's one of the reasons I've avoided turning the concept into a "startup" where I would be forced to cut corners, instead of growing slowly and learning carefully as I go. Reminds me of this blog post from a farmer:
In the past year, we have been contacted by nubile entrepreneurs who have launched websites to connect farm products to customers. Except for one or two who are owned or managed by people who understand food and farming, most of the sites are run by twenty-something foodies who don’t know the difference between a rib or riblet and have never heard of rillette, confit or other meat goodies. And they are clueless about seasonality of food, inventory control, shipping and distribution. The only thing they have going for them is decent marketing and a snazzy website. I decline their offers to sell our products because we prefer to sell directly to consumers at the farmers markets and our farm store. We want to shake the hand of the person who cooks and eats our food. We enjoy face to face discussions about recipes, cuts of meat and sharing educational tidbits such as getting the tenderloin from the pig or loin chops but not both unless it is a mutant pig...While we applaud entrepreneurs, we think that food site managers need some education. They need to learn meat cuts, the seasons in which meat is available. Ideally they need to spend some time on the farm docking lamb tails, castrating rams and dealing with livestock mauled by coyotes and neighbor dogs. Perhaps then they’ve earned the credentials to sell my leg of lamb. If they pick it up at the farmers market and ship it themselves of course!
Unfortunately, I haven't encountered many meat-related startups that don't cut corners. I can't completely blame them though. You are working within a system created by monopolies and government regulations that makes it very difficult not to if you want to generate a fast-growing nationwide business. Sometimes I wonder if there is room to care about much of anything, much less the life and death matters at the core of this, in such a system? During this election season, I mused on what it really might mean to be a conservative, to want to conserve the good in the old ways as you move forward, and how little of that I see in those politicians that call themselves conservatives, besides that which is very shallow and easy, or even profitable, for those who live for that profit to follow.
The skinny waterfalls, footpaths
wandering out of heaven, strike
the cliffside, leap, and shudder off.
Somewhere behind me
a small fire goes on flaring in the rain, in the desolate ashes.
No matter, now, whom it was built for,
it keeps its flames,
it warms
everyone who might shay into its radiance,
a tree, a lost animal, the stones,
because in the dying world it was set burning.- from Lastness by Galway Kinnell
In contrast, I can work with really small farmers and hopefully come up with methods that work on that scale. It's interesting to compare Faviken to some of the farm/restaurant collaborations I've seen here. Unfortunately, most use poultry currently in a way that is modern and I feel is unsustainable for a farm that wants to be truly self-sufficient. First, they must rely on commercial hatcheries, which many feel, quite rightly, are a source of cruelty, because they do not breed their own line of chickens. Secondly, the breed they use is the Cornish Cross, which is a type of chicken that can't really free range because it is so deformed since it has been bred for that large insipid breast meat that has unfortunately become so popular. Contrast that with the chickens Magnus uses, slow-growing dual-use hardy Brahma.
Modern poultry farming is, with very few exceptions (at least in Scandinavia), a sad state of affairs with the fast-growing unhealthy birds deprived of the opportunity to pursue even some of their most basic instincts. Most of the animals, which are merely a tool for production of cheap meat, are no more than a few weeks old when they are slaughtered, having never set foot outside the coop in which they grew up. For some time after that experience, I didn't serve chicken or any other farmed poultry. At least not until I met Mr Duck, our poultry supplier. He is a man to whom I am very grateful for changing my views on poultry farming. For the last couple of years we have been developing our own breeding program, one that came about because of Mr Duck's sound philosophy of keeping poultry, and the fact that we couldn't find the quality we wanted any other way. Healthy, slow-growing birds, which live a happy life with plenty of outside space, good food and someone to care for them properly will produce better meat than most of what is served in restaurants...Our hens are fed a mixture of different cereals (mostly crushed barley) and kitchen scraps. They are never given anything to eat that would not be fit to serve a human. Commercial bird feed is strictly banned, as are cereals not native to our part of the world, such as soybeans and corn. We apply a very careful selective breeding program so that the birds stay the way we want them, generation after generation. Any bird that does not fully share the characteristics of our breeding stock immediately becomes part of a different stock. - Magnus
I think this book is rather useful for farmers who want to really do things in a traditional self-sufficient manner. I have it next to my set of other farming books, which includes that which inspires, as well as practical tomes. It is next to my Wendell Berry book of poetry and other volumes of farm poetry that serve to remind me and inspire me;
Like a man, the farm is headed
for the woods. the wild
is already veined in it
everywhere, its thriving.
To love these things one did not
intend to is to be a friend
to the beginning and the end.
- Wendell Berry, Work Song
I also hope it influences chefs. Even some really innovative chefs I know have set menus. And I see way too many "sustainable" restaurants that have just one set menu item, such as the now-ubiquitous natural/grass-fed burger place that typically sources from very large middleman and covers up the low-quality with all manner of elaborate toppings. They ask for products that fit their menus, rather than asking what the land and the season provides and shaping their menus for that, as Magnus and his chef friend, Sean Brock, of South Carolina. If Sean Brock came out with a cookbook, I'd definitely also have to add it to this shelf, as he has been so instrumental in bringing back old Southern foodways.
Brock and his chef de cuisine, Travis Grimes, rewrite the menu at Husk every day, based on whatever arrives in the kitchen that morning. The food comes to the table in cast-iron pans and on carved wooden platters, the savory dishes paired with acidic sides: raw oysters and pickled ramps, rattlesnake beans with buttermilk sauce, sorghum-fried green tomatoes with goat cheese and wild peaches. "It's just a sea of plates all the time," Brock said. This is how Sunday dinner was eaten at his grandmother's house. You took a bite of biscuit, a bite of banana pepper, a bite of creamed corn, each taste enhancing the next, each ingredient given its proper attention.- True Grit, The New Yorker
An editorial in the Times today lamented that those who might be interested otherwise in "art" have devoted their energies to food, explaining "meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range — comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger, say, or sorrow, or a thousand other things." That is difficult for me to swallow, having felt upon this journey here, sorrow, anger, sadness, a deeper connection with something I felt was missing from my life for a long time, since I was a young girl in yellow boots clambering upon miles of creek land and pine forests in Georgia, some of which now is gone.
I remember once I found a bird, a woodpecker dying upon the brown pine needles, perhaps of age, or of accident. I didn't want it to die, so I brought it home in a box, hoping the next day my family could take it to the nature center. But in the morning it was gone. We buried it in a red clay ground, as we dug the soil clamored with black beetles and little pink worms, waiting there for their meals. I don't think things like this happen on the concrete playgrounds where later, as a young college student, I took my young charges to "play" beset with rules. They eat the food of death, which is all food, but do not think about death in their sterile playpens.
I remembered the bird when I was in Budapest, and by some enormous luck there was an El Greco exhibition there, paintings of radiant gloom and pathos, as if every story he portrayed was in an underground grotto only lit by pale cloudlight. The wings of angels like the wings of the birds I had known, that bird, and others I would know. Of living and dead commingled. Not all flavors I like are those of joy or delight. My favorite tea, after all, a puer'h of ancient leaves, so polarizing in its flavors of the leaves on the forest floor after many rains. There are other puer'h teas I own that taste like the bottom of the ocean. I think it makes people uncomfortable in the way that occurs when someone leaves the head or the feet on a bird served to eat. It functions as a Memento mori, all things that live must also die. For me, all these things are intertwined.
Et in Arcadia ego- even in the idyllic world, death is there
It's also, I think, easy for those who are older to miss the facts of the days, that things are not going very well for "the lost generation" and many who would have otherwise been painters, writers, or musicians out of necessity are working in food. It is only natural that they would want to transform it into art. There is also an apocalyptic mood, a sense that the world is in decline, that is fostered in my own life by a general atmosphere of decay both in the city and in the place I grew up, where infrastructure is crumbling and housing prices have declined precipitously. I think that makes young people want to learn things that might come in need if the decline continues- butchery, hunting, growing your own food, basic survival skills if the world goes to hell.
When I was young I wandered the back fences where the honeysuckle grew. I've been many places, but never had a dessert as sweet as that I found when I pulled out the stamens. Each flower a different fragrant floral dust of sugar upon my tongue. I remembered that reading this book, I remembered fondly those days that will never be again.
The quartet also bears the subtitle 'Under the Ancient Maple Tree'. Hovhaness remarked about this quartet: There grew a "Marvelous tree on my uncle's farm in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, where I had many happy times. From under its branches were spectacular views in every direction. Later, lightning struck the tree and destroyed it. This piece is my memorial to that beautiful tree."
Melissa
How hard it is to read a scientific study? Should you bother to learn? I recently commented on a blog post on that subject.
Reading a study to figure out what to tell other people what to do is hard. Almost all the people who plant a pubmed reference in front of you to tell you to eat magic macronutrient XYZ or to avoid food X forever lest you perish from cancer are unqualified to pontificate on the subject. That includes many people with fancy titles. The people really qualified to talk about these things are not going to be pontificating. Nutrition science is too young for such surety.
But there is a much lower bar to be able to look up a reference and say whether or not it actually even possibly supports what the author who reference it was saying. That's fairly easy a lot of the time, since apparently many news outlets don't seem to care to fact check. I took a science journalism class in college and was taught a very meticulous and accurate way of writing that I don't see very often. A perfect and wonderfully topical example cropped up recently. The headline reads "Uh-Oh, Paleo: Cavemen Ate Less Meat Than Previously Thought." Surprisingly, the Fox News title, while stupid, is not completely inaccurate: "Secrets of the Caveman Diet." I get the feeling they are more interested in the SEO value of the paleo diet than ancient diets.
It took me more time than I would have liked to find the actual paper because they don't even link to the abstract. It turns out this paper is open-access, so anyone can read it, and that makes not linking to it even more suspicious. Well, I understand why. Just do a ctrl-f for "paleolithic." Don't bother with "caveman" because that's not even a technical or meaningful term. When I did that my computer made that annoying noise that I keep forgetting to disable that means it didn't find that word at all. Well, let's just try "paleo." Aha, something...but it's in the references...it's a paper in the journal " Biogeochemical approaches to paleodietary analysis." I could Google "paleodietary" and realize that the term encompasses all archeologically-studied diets from any time period, but without even reading anything, I've gained a lot of skepticism for the conclusions of news articles. The Fox News article is crafty and does say "first farmers" but makes a tenuous connection to the paleolithic.
I can then read the abstract and the discussion, the least science-y parts of the paper, which have several standouts anyone who is reading this blog post can probably pick up. Oh look at this sentence "This larger value goes some way to resolving the conundrum of interpretations of very high animal protein intake in isotopic studies of prehistoric farmers." Wait, so this whole thing was comparing to prehistoric farmers and not hunter-gatherers? Another minus point to the news articles. If you are a good reader, you can also figure out that the reason they did this study is that stable isotope analyses was based on animal data and they wanted some human data to compare that to.
If you want, you can delve further by reading a bit about that method. Considering how many of my readers are procrastinating computer coders with the next tab over open to their GitHub account or some API, I think a lot of them can handle this. The Fox News article, just like my science journalism teacher taught, describes this method.
To see how much meat ancient people ate, archeologists rely on the fact that protein is the only macronutrient that contains nitrogen. Different foods have different ratios of heavy and light nitrogen isotopes, or atoms of the same element with a different number of neutrons. So in a given ecosystem, scientists can reconstruct ancient diets by measuring the fraction of heavy-to-light nitrogen isotopes in fossilized bones.
But the body also preferentially stores heavier isotopes of nitrogen, so scientists calculate an offset to adjust for that tendency when determining what a person actually ate. Historically, the offset was derived from studies in which animals were fed diets with different protein amounts. [7 Perfect Survival Foods]
Using that offset, many studies estimate that between 60 and 80 percent of the prehistoric human diet came from proteins, with most of that from animal sources.
I'll just Google "isotopes diet." If you've taken a basic college level class in geology or archeology you probably know to Google "stable isotopes diet." The first results are a free and fairly readable paper and a blog post by a physical anthropology professor, John Hawks. Neither of these is easy to read, but if you can read .php or .ru files or are just a good reader, you can probably figure out the basics of the method. Fox News starts to get it right. But that last sentence is flat-out wrong. Isotope analysis is a way to determine trophic level of the protein in the diet, so where the protein might have come from in the local ecosystem. It is simply not capable of telling you what percentage of the total diet was protein.
There are more complexities to the method I could go into, such as potential inaccuracies of the method, but that's the overall gist of it. I'd note that I've also seen this method butchered in books popular with paleo dieters, claiming that because some skeletons from the paleolithic indicate they got most of their protein on the same trophic level as arctic foxes that their diet was like that of an arctic fox. That's the kind of thing this study is relevant to- whether or not we can extrapolate animal data to humans accurately in stable isotope analysis of diet. That's probably not as good for sexy headlines or SEO though, is it? The reality is that if we applied this we'd find paleolithic humans ate many different diets, with plant protein increasing with sedentism and with certain local ecologies. But in the wild plant proteins are not easy to come by. Most of them are not digestible by humans and many that are, such as certain wild legumes, are seasonal. And in the end, both of those articles fail to make the issue relevant in any comprehensible way, the blisstree taking nonsensical potshots at the paleo diet:
Many contemporary paleo diet gurus advocate a diet that’s 50 percent or more animal products (though contrary to what some people think, this doesn’t just mean chowing down on bacon and burgers — paleo dieters stress the importance of eating lean meat, fish and eggs that come from grass-fed livestock). This is based on the conventional wisdom that paleolithic humans ate a diet of between 60% and 80% protein, mostly from animal sources.
First, I don't know where I can get grass-fed fish but it sounds cool and if you know any sources, email me. Second of all, since when are animal products just protein? The ones I eat have plenty of fat. Maybe there is a parallel universe where I eat a 60% protein diet and have already wasted away from rabbit starvation, but in this universe I don't know anyone who eats an 80% protein paleo diet. Most people naturally gravitate away from absurd protein intakes because it's unappetizing and makes you feel bad, though lately I've found many people persist on diets that are exactly that for years and even decades. I don't like feeling bad or eating bad food, so I've never had that long-term problem.
We don't know what percentage of a paleolithic hunter-gatherer's diet was protein, we don't know that for "caveman" or for early farmers. It's just not knowable right now and probably never will be. We do know that for modern humans, there seems to be a physiology ceiling for protein intake which John Speth addresses quite readably in his excellent, though bizarrely expensive (worth getting on interlibrary loan) book, which requires humans not eat like an arctic fox, but be innovative and seek out either fat or carbohydrate in order to avoid potential costs of high protein intake. But that ceiling is controversial.
So there, those two news articles are essentially debunked and we didn't even have to discuss various nitrogen isotopes or anything really truly technical. In the end, we realize that the study in question doesn't tell us how those in the past really ate or what we should eat now. It's just a little piece of a large completely unsolvable puzzle. To even be able to realize that gives you immense power not to be deceived.
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