Monthly Archives: March 2009

Pizza

Must be time for pizza in the loca-sphere! (See here and here.) Factoid: the day of the year with the highest pizza sales is Good Friday.

With the Dark Days Eat Local Challenge over, but still a long-held desire to make pizza, I tried it myself. (Pizza-making is part of my family’s past.) This one is half sausage.

pizza

I used the pizza crust recipe in the Kitchen Aid instruction guide (last time I’ll do that) with wheat from Wild Hive Farm.

I used my own Marinara sauce that I canned (jarred) in October with tomatoes from Don Taylor’s Farm in Danbury. I used cheese from Sankow’s Beaver Brook and sweet Italian sausage from Ox Hollow Farm.

The crust was rather bland and dry. I need a better recipe.

Saturday’s Forage (3/21/09)

The first day of spring was a chilly forty something degrees. This week’s forage began at the Wholesome Wave (Westport Farmers Market) in Fairfield where I scored:

  • a bouquet of kale from Two Guys from Woodbridge
  • pork chops and stew beef from Ox Hollow Farm
  • Veal for scallopini and Pleasant cow cheese from Sankow’s Beaver Brook
  • several loaves from Wave Hill Breads
  • yogurt, butter, and heavy cream from Trinity Dairy of Enfield
  • fresh spinach from Starlight Farms
  • carrots and onions from Riverbank Farm
  • a bowl of clam chowder for Westport Aquaculture

Whilst completing my veal purchase, I overheard some women talking behind me, the one telling the other in a disparaging voice, “Don’t buy the veal-you know how they raise them.” Clearly, she didn’t realize that the Sankows aren’t them. Veal is a natural product of a dairy farm—it does not have to be the unnatural product of an industry. I agree that the CAFO method of raising veal is atrocious. In fact, I didn’t eat veal for many, many years because of it. But this veal is not that veal. This veal is from Beaver Brook, a family farm where the farmers and staff face their customers eye-to-eye, week after week and invites the public to come to their farm.

On the way back north, I stopped at Agway from some planting media.

Then on to New Morning Natural Foods, Woodbury, CT to round out my week’s groceries. Locally speaking, this included:

  • raw milk from Stonewall Dairy
  • mozzarella cheese from Nanuet, NY (who knew?)
  • Christine’s Coconut Ding-Rings (wheat and gluten free) from Shayna B’s & the Pickle in Union, CT

And that was my fun and exciting forage!

60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl, and Alice Waters

I’ve had a week now to think about the 60 Minutes segment on Alice Waters. I should have been the perfect audience for this segment, yet felt distinctly dissatisfied after it aired.

In this segment, Leslie Stahl presented the slow food movement as elitist. Because as we all know, cooking from scratch, buying from local farmers and/or growing your own, and paying more to do so is elitist. “Good food should be a right, not a privilege,” says Alice Waters. “It needs to be without pesticides and herbicides. Everybody deserves this food. That’s not elitist.”

The segment gave only the briefest of mentions to the problem of obesity in America. It did not discuss the differences between slow food and fast food as a means to solving it. It puzzles me that the outrage over the “American paradox” hasn’t tipped. (The “American paradox” is that a person can simultaneously be obese yet malnourished.) Sticking with elitism made better copy.

One of Stahl’s main issues was the $4/lb grapes (which were organic from specialty seeds). She thought the extra money ($1.50/lb based on the current Stop & Shop price) was “the rub.” Alice responded that people make decisions every day about how to spend their money and that some people buy Nikes. Here’s where Alice dropped the ball. Here was her moment to talk about the difference between real and perceived value, between price and value, and between pay-me-now vs. pay-me-later. She could have said one more sentence: that a swish on your sneakers doesn’t make it more valuable and yet people don’t seem to have a problem paying for that.

Alice could have mentioned that food grown without poison is worth more. That we will pay for the herbicides and pesticides in the future with health costs and land and water costs. That people’s “busy-ness” is a function of manufactured needs and delights and how little else says family values more than cooking healthy food from scratch and enjoying it together.

Leslie Stahl decided that “Alice Waters lives in a different world” because she doesn’t have a microwave. While she was critical of what Alice was willing to give up (time, convenient appliances) and what Alice took on (a fireplace in the kitchen, the patience to slice, dice and cook), she admitted that this was the best breakfast she’d had in her life.

Leslie is right that it is a luxury to be able obtain fresh-picked food. I’ve been a locavore for well over a year and it does take a significant amount of time and fancy scheduling to get local foods to the table. You have to find them. You have to prepare them. You have to preserve them. Where Alice Waters won’t eat frozen foods, I have to-I live in a different zone. But mine were once fresh-picked, cooked by me, and frozen by me. My food “hobby” has replaced a number of other hobbies I used to have. I’ve made those choices.

I maintain that I would have more “free time” if it were not for the way food is bought and sold and the local, state, and federal laws governing the same. I would prefer to get local food during the week on the ride home from work the same way I can get non-local food. I was counting on the availability and the laws changeing as a function of demand and supply. But with Leslie Stahl stating that my need for real food is elitist, she may have set back the critical mass on demand.

Thanks CBS. Thanks for presenting the slow food movement as something Alice Waters wants to force us all to do. Thanks for describing people who think her ideas are sound as her disciples. Thank you Leslie cutting-your-own-tomatoes-is-elitist Stahl.