Best Food Writing 2013 (8 page)

To be fair to ramps, they didn't start this trend. The 21st-century seasonal-food movement began four decades ago, when Alice Waters founded Chez Panisse in Berkeley. She established the hallmarks of seasonal cooking: locally grown ingredients, simply prepared. These days, the “simply prepared” part is what many critics of slavishly seasonal menus lament. It's not the zeal for seasonal produce that's the problem, they say; it's the lack of imagination that chefs bring to the task of cooking it.

But the point isn't that a dish has to be complicated to be worthwhile, or that a gratifying restaurant experience requires culinary acrobatics that a home cook could never perform. I've had enough plates of first-of-the-season asparagus kissed with grill heat and olive oil to know that the simplest dishes can have the power of a thunderclap. My problem with seasonal menus is homogeny. It's not knowing where I am and whose food I'm eating. It's feeling like the chef cares more about being in sync with the season—and if I'm being paranoid, the culinary zeitgeist—than he or she cares about creating an original dish, or for that matter, pleasing me.

It's still a question worth asking: Is damnably simple food the problem with all this seasonal cooking? The answer, even on the other side of a kale spree, is no. “It's our job to seek out the best ingredients,” says Jason Fox, the chef at Commonwealth in San Francisco. “We can't pat ourselves on the back for that and then not take considered steps to turn those ingredients into something magical.” When Fox gets his hands on spring's first ramps, he might whip them into a chilled soup garnished with tempura-ed ramp tops, baby fava beans and a dollop of aioli spiked with Meyer lemon. Seasonal, yes. But also totally inspired.

Feeling less like a fool and an ingrate, I began to look at the bright side again—and it proved, of course, to be a big, beautiful bright side. At Chez Panisse, the chefs continue to unfurl hyper-seasonal menus daily. But fried rabbit with sweet-and-sour onions, currants and broccoli? That doesn't make me tired; that makes me hungry. Even if too many chefs let “seasonal” stand in for “good,” there are restaurants in every corner of the country doing ingenious work with the best of what's grown around them: Commis in Oakland, California; Le Pigeon in Portland, Oregon; Lantern in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to name only a few. The chef at the restaurant I work for in Brooklyn changes his menu regularly, without fanfare. You're not expected to applaud him for noticing that celeriac is in its prime—you are expected to applaud him for thinking to marry it with mascarpone, scallions and Piave.

Fingers crossed, we're in the midst of a significant but finite period in the evolution (or perhaps, more accurately, devolution) of American cuisine, moving back to an era before factory farming and before anytime-anywhere produce was the norm. If so, I expect only more
seasonal food to come. I also expect, or at least hope for, a rebalancing. Let a reliance on seasonal produce become a given. Let fearless, pioneering restaurants that apply original ideas and techniques to seasonal produce prosper. And equally important, let stellar restaurants without a seasonal flag fluttering out front continue to thrive. We need them to remind us what going to a restaurant is supposed to be about in the first place: pleasure.

When Sara Jenkins opened her second New York City restaurant, Porsena, last winter, she created a minor stir by declaring that the menu wouldn't be especially seasonal. “I buy not-local asparagus in February,” Jenkins told me. “Even in ancient times, food was shipped left, right and center. We get so obsessive about things that we tend to make eating a chore. It's one thing we've never really picked up from Europe—how to take great pleasure in eating.”

In that spirit, I resolve to stop thinking of eating a cherry tomato in January as the equivalent of smoking a cigarette inside or telling a politically incorrect joke. And the next time I see a grim-faced soul ingesting what's clearly not his first kale salad of the season, I'll quietly slip him the following recommendation: any month but August, the sliced tomato salad at Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn (or any steak house, really). And a bowl of seasonally agnostic spaghetti with clams at Porsena, which is no slave to the farmers' market—only to excellent cooking.

 

 

T
HE
T
ERRIBLE TRAGEDY OF THE
H
EALTHY
E
ATER

By Erica Strauss

From
Northwest Edible Life

From her flourishing Seattle-area organic garden, former restaurant chef Erica Strauss breezily dishes the dirt about her “suburban homestead” lifestyle (yes, she raises chickens too) on
nwedible.com
, her popular blog site. Here she has fun with the food world's version of political correctness.

I
know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.

Before Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:

            
I eat pretty healthy. Check it out: whole grain crackers, veggie patties, prawns, broccoli. I am actually pretty into clean eating.

After Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:

            
Those crackers—gluten, baby. Gluten is toxic to your intestinal health, I read it on a forum. They should call those crackers Leaky Gut Crisps, that would be more accurate. That veggie burger in the freezer? GMO soy. Basically that's a Monsanto patty. Did you know soybean oil is an insecticide? And those prawns are fish farmed in Vietnamese sewage
pools. I didn't know about the sewage fish farming when I bought them, though, really I didn't!

                  
The broccoli, though . . . that's ok. I can eat that. Eating that doesn't make me a terrible person, unless . . . oh, shit! That broccoli isn't organic. That means it's covered with endocrine disrupting pesticides that will make my son sprout breasts. As if adolescence isn't awkward enough.

                  
And who pre-cut this broccoli like that? I bet it was some poor Mexican person not making a living wage and being treated as a cog in an industrial broccoli cutting warehouse. So I'm basically supporting slavery if I eat this pre-cut broccoli. Oh my God, it's in a plastic bag too. Which means I am personally responsible for the death of countless endangered seabirds right now.

I hate myself.

Well, shit.

All you want to do is eat a little healthier. Really. Maybe get some of that Activa probiotic yogurt or something. So you look around and start researching what “healthier” means.

That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60-year-old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you'll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.

You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.

You're hardcore now, so you go way past cave-person. You go all the way to The Inuit Diet™.

Some people say it's a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let's do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.

Even though The Inuit Diet™ is high in vitamin D, you learn that every disease anywhere can be traced to a lack of vitamin D (you read that on a blog post) so you start to supplement. 5000 IU of vitamin D before sitting in the tanning booth for an hour does wonders for your hair luster.

Maxing out your credit line on seal liver forces you to continue your internet education in healthy eating. As you read more, you begin to understand that grains are fine but before you eat them you must prepare them in the traditional way: by long soaking in the light of a new moon with a mix of mineral water and the strained lacto-fermented tears of a virgin.

You discover that if the women in your family haven't been eating a lot of mussels for at least the last four generations, you are pretty much guaranteed a $6000 orthodontia bill for your snaggle-tooth kid. That's if you are able to conceive at all, which you probably won't, because you ate margarine at least twice when you were 17.

Healthy eating is getting pretty complicated and conflicted at this point but at least everyone agrees you should eat a lot of raw vegetables.

Soon you learn that even vegetables are trying to kill you. Many are completely out unless they are pre-fermented with live cultures in a specialized $79 imported pickling crock. Legumes and nightshades absolutely cause problems. Even fermentation can't make those healthy.

Goodbye, tomatoes. Goodbye green beans. Goodbye all that makes summer food good. Hey, it's hard but you have to eliminate these toxins and anti-nutrients. You probably have a sensitivity. Actually, you almost
positively
have a sensitivity. Restaurants and friends who want to grab lunch with you will just have to deal.

Kale: it's what's for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast.

The only thing you are sure of is kale, until you learn that even when you buy organic, local kale from the store (organic, local kale is the only food you can eat now) it is probably GMO cross-contaminated. Besides, it usually comes rolled in corn starch and fried to make it crunchier. Market research,
dahling . . .
sorry, people like crunchy, cornstarch-breaded Kale-Crispers™ more than actual bunny food.

And by now you've learned that the only thing worse than wheat
is corn. Everyone can agree on that, too. Corn is making all of America fat. The whole harvest is turned into ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, chicken feed and corn starch and the only people who benefit from all those corn subsidies are evil companies like Cargill.

Also, people around the world are starving because the U.S. grows too much corn. It doesn't actually make that much sense when you say it like that, but you read it on a blog. And anyway, everyone
does
agree that corn is Satan's grain. Unless wheat is.

The only thing to do, really, when you think about it, is to grow all your own food. That's the only way to get kale that isn't cornstarch dipped. You've read a lot and it is obvious that you can't trust anything, and you can't trust anyone and everything is going to kill you and the only possible solution is to have complete and total control over your foodchain from seed to sandwich.

Not that you actually eat sandwiches.

You have a little panic attack at the idea of a sandwich on commercial bread: GMO wheat, HFCS and chemical-additive dough conditioners. Some people see Jesus in their toast but you know the only faces in that mix of frankenfood grains and commercial preservatives are Insulin Sensitivity Man and his sidekick, Hormonal Disruption Boy.

It's okay, though. You don't need a deli sandwich or a po'boy. You have a saute of Russian Kale and Tuscan Kale and Scotch Kale (because you love international foods). It's delicious. No, really. You cooked the kale in a half-pound of butter that had more raw culture than a black-tie soiree at Le Bernardin.

You round out your meal with a little piece of rabbit that you raised up and butchered out in the backyard. It's dusted with all-natural pink Hawaiian high-mineral sea salt that you cashed-in your kid's college fund to buy and topped with homemade lacto-fermented herb mayonnaise made with coconut oil and lemons from a tropical produce CSA share that helps disadvantaged youth earn money by gleaning urban citrus. The lemons were a bit overripe when they arrived to you, but since they were transported by mountain bike from LA to Seattle in order to keep them carbon neutral, you can hardly complain.

The rabbit is ok. Maybe a bit bland. Right now you will eat meat, but only meat that you personally raise because you saw that PETA
thing about industrial beef production and you can't support that. Besides, those cows eat corn. Which is obscene because cows are supposed to eat grass. Ironically, everyone knows that a lawn is a complete waste in a neighborhood—that's where urban gardens should go. In other words, the only good grass is grass that cows are eating. You wonder if your HOA will let you graze a cow in the common area.