I miss my market

One of the great things about where I live is the weekly farmers market 50 yards from my front door.  Anything you could want, produce, milk, cheese, eggs, potatoes, grains, sides of beef, honey, chocolate cake…all there, all fairly cheap and its all just…food.  I’ve been trying to get more interested in my food lately, beyond thinking about just what I want for dinner (pizza, obviously).  It amazes me how little we know about food.  Not just the intricacies of what particular diet is the secret combination to good health (Atkins!  South Beach!  Grapefruit and Pistachios!), but what it is I’m eating, where it came from, how it go so darn tasty, etc.  I was reading an article about our food system the other day, and the author pointed out that as kids grow up they get the founding of the United States pretty much every year, but are never really taught simpler everyday wonders, such as how to make bread.

So, here are a few unconnected thoughts:

It amazes me to go to a grocery store.  Beyond the sheer variety, and the huge number of things that, until a recent advance in chemistry, wasn’t even FOOD, its just the idea that out of a few hundred or so plants and animals, we can have tens of thousands of different types of food, all carefully formulated, packaged and advertised for each of our carefully segmented demographic markets.   And the ingredients are amazing too…its all chemistry.  I’ve been trying to avoid eating too much sugar/corn syrup, and its impossible to find stuff without any in it.  Bread, crackers, juice, soup – the other day I was looking for corn, and almost all of the cans had corn syrup or sugar in them as well.  It’s a frickin’ vegetable, not a Snickers bar!

I’m always amused watching M cook, because we have very different styles.  I stare at the recipe carefully, get out all the ingrediants before starting, and slavishly follow the rules.  She’s more of a “this needs more leavening to account for the humidity, and then I’ll need to eyeball this much of this weird spice and heat it for, oh, this long and then stir counterclockwise until I can see Orion’s Belt, because its a Tuesday” type of cook.  Recipes shmecipes.  But when you think about it, cooking is really becoming a lost art.  60 years ago, most people could cook, and do so with whatever is at hand.  “A little butter, some flour, two onions and a chicken…I can work with that.”  Last weekend M made spaghetti sauce from scratch, I think because we had diced tomatoes and some peppers.  But if you think of a typically spaghetti meal, the one everyone can cook, are we really cooking it?  Pre-made sauce, noodles, bread, parmasean cheese, wine….none of it is really being cooked.  What if it was wheat, a cow, some tomatoes and a plot of grapes?  We don’t really know how to make food anymore, unless you work for Lean Cuisine.  I think real cooking is becoming a lost art.  Not that I’m going to rush out and milk a cow tomorrow.

I have a bunch of other little thoughts like these, but that will have to wait for another day, cause I need to go to class.