Cooking at home — from scratch — makes it possible for many of us to afford to eat local and organic foods. But the No. 1 barrier people have to cooking at home is time. And, for amateur cooks, following recipes is much more time-consuming without strong knife skills.

The more capable you are in the kitchen, the more flexibility you have when it comes to buying and eating whole, less processed (often more affordable) foods. For instance, two people can get three meals out of one whole chicken for about the same price as buying two pre-cut boneless, skinless chicken breasts. (Of course, the vegetarian equivalent may not apply exactly, but you’ll eat more veggies for your dollar if you’re comfortable cutting and cooking them at home.)

Not that everyone who cooks has knife skills. I cringe in fingernails-on-chalkboard agony when I watch home cooks — and yes, the occasional pro — try to steady a whole onion with a dull blade and their fingers fully extended. What should take about 30 seconds takes 5 minutes, and that’s without a trip to the first aid kit or the hospital. Then they move on to the chicken and I have to look away.

The single most important thing you need to improve your knife skills is a sharp edge. Nothing is more dangerous in the kitchen than a dull blade; it ruins the food and slows you down. If you have the means, there are spectacular knives to be had out there to suit virtually any taste or style. (Here’s a great guide to knives from chef and cooking instructor Samin Nosrat.) The main advantage to the expensive knives, apart from the envy of your friends, is that they hold an edge longer, require less maintenance, and last longer. But the cheap-o blades will suffice if you have a good sharpener and run them across a honing steel before each use.

Let’s talk about the difference between sharpening and honing: Sharpening repairs an edge; honing maintains it. You’ve probably seen the chefs in their stovepipe toques at the carving station during Sunday brunch, methodically rubbing their carving knives against what appears to be a steel rod on a handle. That rod is electroplated with industrial diamond dust, and it removes the spurs, wire edge, and other minor flaws on an edge to keep it sharper longer. Not nearly as expensive as it may sound, the diamond dust is the same manufactured diamond that is in the needle of a good turntable. It will last forever, and all it needs for care is an occasional wash with warm soapy water.

Eventually, however, every knife needs to be taken to a sharpening stone. There are dozens of styles of stones but they all do approximately the same thing — they remove small amounts of metal to recarve the V-shaped edge needed for effective cutting. The more effective your honing (and the better the quality your blade), the less you’ll need a sharpening stone.

Grip is also important element. Grasp the handle of the knife as if you were shaking hands with it, and wrap your index finger around the hilt for better control (not extended forward along the spine). Don’t hold it too firmly, this will only lead to accidents and make you tire sooner. Your guide hand (that’s the one holding the food rather than the knife) should always have the fingers curled under, a little like a hermit crab. This way the guide hand’s knuckles act as a guide as they meet the flat side of the knife.

Cutting techniques vary widely according to the food’s shape. But it’s a good rule to always keep the largest, flattest side of the food face down on the cutting surface. This provides stability so it’s less likely to roll or slip away from you. One other great safety tip: Always place a damp rag under your cutting board. This keeps it from slipping around and causing accidents.

Of course, like any other useful skill, proper knife handling requires practice. The nice thing is that it’s practice that yields delicious results. All the details behind good knife skills could fill a book, and, in fact, they have. I highly recommend The Complete Book of Knife Skills by my friend Jeffrey Elliot with James P. DeWan. It’s full of step-by-step techniques and extremely accurate photography, as well as information about the proper care and handling, and the history of knives.

So get into your kitchen and start practicing. You’ll save money and time and start eating better. And you’ll learn to respect, rather than fear, the blade.

For some folks, this season is about peace and good tidings. For others, it’s just about the presents. In my family, the holidays were, and still are, all about the food.

There are many items that must be on the table at my house, or it simply isn’t Christmas. Among these are the wild rice dressing, cornbread, grandma’s cranberries, and mom’s bourbon pound cake. Now that pound cake is a very closely guarded family recipe, but the other recipes are below.

Wild rice

Photo: WhitneyI would have never thought wild rice dressing could be improved upon until I discovered the magnificent flavors of real Manoomin, a traditional Native American “rice” that is hand-harvested and hand-parched in the Great Lakes region of Minnesota. If don’t you live in Minnesota, the real Manoomin can be ordered online from the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a group that works to restore native foods and traditions. It’s a bit more expensive than the industrialized “paddy rice” coming out of California, but it is worth every penny. The flavor is far richer, far more intense, and the nutritional value is far higher. Add to this the spiritual benefit of knowing you’re helping a community in need become more self-sufficient, and it becomes downright rewarding.

Kurt’s Mom’s Wild Rice Dressing

It’s easy enough to make this dish vegetarian (or vegan, in fact). Simply leave out the sausage, increase the mushrooms, substitute vegetable broth for the chicken stock and olive oil for the butter.

1 pound Manoomin wild rice, washed three times in cold water
4 cups chicken broth
1 pound pork sausage (I use homemade but any high quality breakfast sausage will do)
1/4 pound butter
2 portobello mushrooms, or about 10 crimini mushrooms, diced
1/2 onion, minced
1 tablespoon parsley, chopped
1 stalk celery, diced
1 pinch fresh thyme

Preparation

Boil rice in broth for 20 minutes.

Brown pork in butter until fully cooked. Add remaining ingredients. Simmer for 10 minutes, then mix in rice and remaining broth. Bake covered at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, then uncovered to desired consistency (I like it to get crunchy on top).

Serve immediately or store (it freezes well). Makes about 8 servings.

Photo from the video Tamar Adler Talks About An Everlasting Meal.

Kurt Michael Friese: I think Americans have been sold a bill of goods: I think they’ve been coerced into believing that cooking is a chore akin to washing windows, something to be avoided if possible and then done as quickly and grudgingly as they can manage. Too many people believe they don’t have the time. That’s the most common excuse anyway. And of course they do — it’s all a matter of priorities.

Tamar Adler: My sense is that there are three variables. A study that came out earlier this year found that 28 percent of Americans stayed out of their kitchens because they were scared they didn’t know how to cook. The other two variables are obviously time and money. The same study found that one-third of Americans spent more time thinking about what to cook than actually cooking. In other words, we have a very skewed relationship to the act of cooking.

The thing about priorities is that if we don’t know what cooking actually means — that is, the kind of cooking that makes deep sense in our lives — then of course we don’t have time, or money.

It takes a very long time to cook in a way that isn’t sustainable, and it’s very expensive. And it makes sense to feel bullied by being told to make something that takes a long time and costs a lot of money a priority. But of course, that’s not what we’re saying. It just takes a lot of explaining and careful guidance to show the whole picture of cooking, and how much it can give you, if you do it with a certain mindset.

Kurt: I have long said that I may be a part of the last generation to have learned to cook at his mother and grandmother’s apron strings. And if people are no longer learning to cook from their parents (because their parents didn’t learn either), then we need to find some new ways to teach them. One thing I’ve called for is something I call The Public Hearth.  

Tamar: That sounds wonderful.

Kurt: What did you want to achieve with your book? The first thing that pops into my head when I’m asked about why I write about food is MFK Fisher’s response to the same question: “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine is drunk, and that is what I say when people ask me, ‘Why do you write of food, and not of love or war?’”

Tamar: I have two answers. One is also MFK Fisher’s, which I’ll paraphrase: People who live to eat are not so much bad as boring, and in fact she says she knew only two such sorry souls. I know a few, and it’s true I don’t mind them so much as pity them. But she knew a good many people, as do I, who would be better for considering their appetites seriously, and not obsessively, but as we allow ourselves to consider our sleep, and caring for our children, and enjoying sunny days. Because our appetites our unique to us, and considering them makes us more responsible and happier, healthier beings.

The second answer is mine, and it is that the means of producing our food has been meanly wrested from our hands, and we need it back. It sounds like a great communist exercise when I put it like that, but it’s fundamental to our sovereignty to have the means to feed ourselves.

Kurt: Very true. And what I spend a lot of time pointing out to people is that cooking is the simplest, purest, most tangible way we can convey our love for our family and friends. What we feed our children is both metaphorically and literally what they become. That’s what I mean by priorities. 

So I try to teach people the real basics of cooking. How to make a stock, the difference between braising and roasting, how to break down a chicken, etc. General knife skills, too — nothing is a greater time-saver for the home cook than strong knife skills.

Tamar: I want to get away from admonishing people that their priorities are wrong. The great, lucky thing is that when you know how to throw your scraps into a pot to make stock — then how when you have stock, all you have to do is poach an egg in it and toast some stale bread — feeding people well is freeing.

I wrote my book to be on the side of everyone who’s scared, and everyone who wants to prioritize cooking, but can’t see how to — for whom it’s a priority they feel they have to trade off because they’re not skilled enough.

They have [so few] advocates now. You are one, and Samin Nosrat is one, and I’m trying to be one. Michael Pollan in his next book is going to be one, and we have to keep it up.

Kurt: And it’s the same entities scaring them from cooking as feeding them the stuff that confuses what’s healthful and not.

Tamar: Yes. I had a few great conversations with trendologists when I was writing my New York Times op-ed on the value of a grandmotherly perspective on cooking — like the one we have on Thanksgiving — and both said that food companies were trying to get people not to cook.

And because [companies like] Kraft or Velveeta, with their Cheesy Skillets, and organic premade burritos, etc., cater to a lot of the trends — i.e. people wanting to feed their families organic food, and artisanal food –  what those really things mean, and how easy and affordable it can be to engage them, gets obscured.

Kurt: You would not believe the number of calls we receive at my restaurant every year asking if we are open on Thanksgiving. I suppose I should be honored that they’d want me to cook this important meal for them, but it makes me sad that they can’t or won’t do it themselves.

Tamar: Maybe we should touch on the idea of the professionalization of cooking. We think we’re supposed to be chefs. We idolize chefs, we think we’re supposed to be able to cook like them. We go to restaurants and imagine that what we get is cooking. And that the alternative is premade.

Kurt: There has been a move over the last two decades to make chefs into rock stars, and while I wanted to be a rock star when I was 15, I no longer do. I like that the attention is beginning to shift toward the farmer, who after all is doing most of the hard work. We chefs too often are, in Tony Bourdain’s parlance, “People who swan around in white coats and take credit for other people’s toil.”

The most obvious thing people could learn from the pros, though, is mise en place.

Tamar: I am, again here, a little contrarian. Chefs are amazing, but a lot of what they do is organizational, and about the incredible difficulties in staying inspired while running a volatile organization — dealing with a million moving pieces and people with different needs, and equipment that breaks down.

Home cooks need to learn from skilled, grounded home cooks. They can learn mise en place, but they get that from the Food Network. What they don’t get from the Food Network, or from the lionizing of the restaurant or from many food magazines is [suggestions like] save onion skins, or make frittatas from anything. I think that’s what grandmothers used to teach.

Kurt: As my mother told me back in the ’80s, “quiche was not developed as a test of masculinity, it was developed to get rid of leftovers.” I worry about what people learn from TV because it’s too much like porn: People who are prettier and more talented than you doing things you’ll never do in places you’ll never do them. It stresses people out to think that they need to live up to that standard.

Tamar: Exactly. Two days ago I did a shoot for Martha Stewart Everyday Food, and the editor-in-chief stopped the art director from putting things in little perfect bowls because she didn’t want to make it aspirational. She wanted it to be approachable for home cooks, which made me really happy.

This brings us to the difference between having an intimate knowledge of food versus fetishizing it.

Kurt: Yes. Is there a more fetishized food than bacon?

Tamar: Bacon is a great example. Bacon is a sort of magic food, a little like olives, or anchovies, in that if you have a little, anything else you have seems special. If you have a tiny bit of bacon around, simple pasta with butter and cheese becomes a wonderful version of carbonara. Or an egg, fried in [bacon] fat, seems rustic and hardy. If you have olives, you can make olive paste, which disguises the fact that other than that you only have toast. A couple of anchovies transform anything, from pasta, to salad, to stale bread. But I didn’t feel able, in my book, to say that bacon was magical for all those reasons, because instead of understanding bacon as deeply economical, and all it takes to transform a staple into a great, rustic meal, we [now] understand it as something that needs to go into bourbon and chocolate. Even into peanut butter! We manage to pervert the most useful things, and in so doing, lose the ability to really marshal them.

Kurt: The same thing happened to skirt steak.

Tamar: We need to rebind cooking to the sort of simple love we have for our pets and children, unbind it from passion and rebind it to tenderness.

Kurt: That’s an excellent point. But I also believe traceability is vital — knowing the source of your food and shaking the hand that raised it when possible. Also understanding the importance of biodiversity — becoming aware that there is more than one kind of squash, or apple, or pig, and that we need there to be more than one kind. It also helps to learn about food from as many different cultures as possible. Eating their food with them is far better than “walking a mile in their shoes” to get to know that culture.

Tamar: And part of it being important to you is knowing that it can be important without being everything. It can matter, but not matter to the exclusion of all else. In order for that to be true, we need to know how to cook, and the kinds of cooking that are not time-intensive and denatured — like the stuff on Top Chef or Iron Chef — but the quiche which uses leftovers. 

Kurt: Where do you think class comes into it?

How do we get the single mom in a trailer with four kids to read [your] book? Or at least to understand its ideas?

Tamar: That’s what I wanted my book to do. We need to keep our message focused on cooking, and on the sort of cooking that’s economical. We need skills classes to be affordable. [I want] to get a grant to get my book handed out at community centers, and get FoodCorps to teach how to make pasta with eggs, and make good soup from a can of chickpeas. We need to make cooking into the second part of food justice, and food sovereignty, and talk about feedings ourselves as something we deserve to be able to do.

Kurt: Indeed. It’s even patriotic!

Tamar: Yes, it is patriotic. I really wanted Sam Kass and Michelle Obama to read the book, because I want to get the message to people who need it.

Folks across the country know something is wrong.  There’s just something about the system we’ve created over several decades that is inherently flawed. Some blame the government, others big banks, still others blame political parties, but all agree that there’s something that’s just not quite working the way it should.  People are losing homes, jobs, and health coverage at an alarming rate because of the societal turbulence in the enormous yet formless thing we call the economy.

Enter Change.org and their 10 Ideas for Change in America.  Taking advantage of the concept of “the wisdom of crowds,” Change.org launched a campaign to find 10 great ideas.  It began with thousands that were submitted by ordinary individuals and organized interest groups alike.  These were whittled down through online voting to a more manageable 70 or so, and right now the voting is getting down to the wire to choose which 10 ideas will be presented to the White House – as in formally presented to senior people there, not just sent in an envelope to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  You can (and should!) vote too.

All, or nearly all at least, are worthy ideas.  Each has its merit and is worthy of consideration.  But for those with an interest in food, three of them rise to the top quickly, and first among equals is Slow Money.

The idea is a simple one: invest as if food, farms and fertility actually mattered. Get anyone who invests money (and if you have a 401k or an IRA, that’s you too) to direct just 1% of it toward small food enterprises and local food systems.  Get at least that small sum of money out of the hands of Wall Street, huge banks and multinationals and use it, quite literally, as seed money.  Invest in local farms, food systems, artisans, brewers, bakers, cheesemakers and so on and keep that money close to home.

We’d create a thriving economy that makes real, healthy food, instead of a fake one that just makes money for bankers.  One that invests in people and the land, not in some distant amorphous concept called Wall Street.

In their book Inside the Apple, a Streetwise History of New York City, this is how Michelle and James Nevius describe the building of the palisade for which Wall Street was named: “The wall had two major problems: it wasn’t needed and it didn’t work.”

Also interested in investing in the land is the American Farmland Trust, whose idea for saving farm and ranchland is doing quite well in the balloting, as well as an initiative to put a garden in every school.  Both are important concepts you’ve heard me advocate for vociferously for years.

Slow Money is new and novel though, and needs more voted before this thing wraps up at 5pm EST this Friday, 3/12.  Please visit Change.org, vote for these 3 ideas and any other 7 you feel are worthy.  It’s fun, important, and it only takes a couple minutes.  Thank you.

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the impression I get when watching many of the recent spate of food documentaries. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system; on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, not their strategy.

That’s how it’s gone with the British 2009 documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several 10-minute segments via YouTube (Part One) because it hasn’t been released in the U.S., primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the director (Tracy Worcester, who spent four years making the film) by the film’s main villain, Smithfield Foods. The world’s largest pork producer, Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million pigs per year in 15 countries, accruing annual sales around $12 billion. The UK’s Channel 4 ran the film last summer despite four letters from Smithfield threatening litigation, but since no U.S. insurer would back the film’s release here, it has become essentially a black-market film. Score another one for corporate censorship.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly doesn’t show their company in the most favorable light. Right off the bat, the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities. We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots. An owner of a small family farm in Poland who this large corporation has pushed out of business says, “I don’t know whether I should retire, hang myself, or leave the country.”

Watch the trailer:

In the early ’90s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers in Poland. Today there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by Smithfield Foods. Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms with two to three minimum-wage jobs. Smithfield accountants and shareholders might laud the boost to the company’s bottom line, but one protester in the film asks a different question:

Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it is called “tyranny,” but when the oppressor is a multinational corporation, it is called “efficiency?”

It was precisely this form of “efficiency” that the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when he said “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”

Smithfield is not the only corporate specimen under Worcester’s microscope; she takes large financial institutions to task as well. In an interview with noted Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in absolutely everything—making one-third of all political contributions in the United States (a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision). Big Money’s influence, along with that of many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope of laws throughout the U.S. and the world. My daddy used to call this the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

That influence is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair. As Pig Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the damages they cause, to the environment and to human health, then any small farmer in the world could out-compete them. But they don’t, because the game is rigged.

So most of the time, agribusiness will take its profits and steam obliviously onward. But if anyone points out that the wreckage these companies leave in their wakes, they have scads of lawyers and PR professionals to make certain no one hears. Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand.

Watch Part One of Pig Business >

A version of this post appeared on CivilEats.com.

It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan’s name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.

I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin’s piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this:

Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. But as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s viability.

What struck me first about this statement was that it came the same week that talking heads in the media and politics (And even Donald Trump?) were blindly arguing that all this snow was proof that climate change was a hoax (perpetrated to what end? I’ve always wondered). The irony is that these bigger storms are likely a symptom of that same climate change, caused in no small measure by industrial agriculture.

Then I noticed the condescension. These so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement. Mr. Darlin, we are part of a national movement, an international movement in fact, led by dozens of very worthy organizations working hard to create a food system that is good, clean, and fair. Our current system is none of these things. I happen to sit on the board of directors of one such organization, Slow Food USA, which has 26,000 members nationwide and over 100,000 members worldwide. Pretty sure that alone qualifies as a movement, but as I said we are not alone.

What Mr. Darlin seems not to understand though is that there is so much more to this movement. We are not a bunch of yuppie foodies stuffing our craws with foie gras, as he and others might have their readers believe. The system we envision, as I said, is one that is:

1. Good – meaning that the food tastes good and is nutritious
2. Clean – meaning that producing the food has only beneficial and not negative effects on the environment in which it is produced, and that there is nothing in the food that isn’t food (and if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it is not food now)
3. Fair – meaning that the people who produce the food should be justly compensated for their work.

This is not an effort to create some Utopian state, nor is it a recreation of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” (another accusation Darlin hurls). It is a wholehearted effort to improve the lives of everyone who eats. We do not say: good food for us, we say good food for all! And when Darlin states, “People who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, wholesome hobby — but one that can make little sense economically,” he needs to do a bit more research than reading William Alexander’s “The $64 Tomato.”

In fact, during World Wars I, II and the Great Depression, for example, more than half of America’s produce came from privately held or community-based “Victory Gardens.” But Americans have been sold a bill of goods, by Big Ag and other industrial interests, that has us all thinking that cooking, much less growing our own food, is a chore akin to washing windows, one to be avoided whenever possible and then done grudgingly only when absolutely necessary. In fact, cooking is far more important. It is an almost spiritual act to provide nourishment to our loved ones, yet as a society we have come to mistake frenzy for efficiency, which has led to believing we are satisfied with expedient mediocrity, and in the balance as always it’s the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, with respect to making “little sense economically,” I’ve often pointed out that where I live in Johnson County, Iowa, there are about 50,000 households. If each of them redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward getting something locally — from a farmers market, a CSA, a local brewery, or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26 million in our economy every year. Now imagine same statistic in a major metro like Mr. Darlin’s native San Francisco.

We are not idiots and none of us expects to see the brick-by-brick dismantling of McDonald’s worldwide (well OK, some may wish it, but that’s different). But there is a massive amount of room for improvement and we want to see it. No health care system, no matter how it is reformed, can deal with the $157 billion we spend annually in the US alone on obesity-related illness. We live in a world with a billion people starving and another billion overweight and yet undernourished. Children born in the US have a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes before they are old enough to vote, and among minorities that ratio rises to one-in-two.

Clearly the industrial model, which may work just fine for Darlin’s primary field of computers, is not working for food. There must be a better way and we are out to find it. Trying to stick us with an elitist tag when we are trying to help farmers and raise healthy children simply won’t wash.

She has the reader picture the son of undocumented migrant workers entering his first day at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, home of the well-known Edible Schoolyard project, “where he stoops under the hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.”  Her callous disrespect for labor only begins there, but the real problem with her argument lies in her stubborn refusal to accept that a good idea may have sprouted from an ideology other than her own.  She goes so far as to describe it as:

…A vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).

Flanagan has chosen to ignore the core purposes of these gardens, only one of which happens to be cultivating a respect for hard work, and only one other of which is a healthy respect for real food. While she notes that the work of the garden has migrated into each of the classrooms, she ignores the obvious point that this demonstrates: There is nothing taught in schools that cannot be learned in a garden.  Math and science to be sure, but also history, civics, logic, art, literature, music, and the birds and the bees both literally and figuratively. Beyond that though, in a garden a student learns responsibility, teamwork, citizenship, sustainability, and respect for nature, for others, and for themselves.

The disdain for the left-of-center viewpoints of those who started the Edible Schoolyard is evidenced in her description of Chez Panisse, the restaurant of Edible Schoolyard’s founder Alice Waters, as “an eatery where the right-on, ‘yes we can,’ ACORN-loving, public-option-supporting man or woman of the people can tuck into a nice table d’hôte menu of scallops, guinea hen, and tarte tatin for a modest 95 clams — wine, tax, and oppressively sanctimonious and relentlessly conversation-busting service not included.”  Flanagan’s attempt at snob-bashing populism and appeal toward the sensitivities of those on the right is misplaced, however, because these school garden ideas, while begun in this particular case by those with left-leaning tendencies, actually hold appeal across the political spectrum.  They not only encompass a love of nature and the kind of touchy-feely sensitivities that give conservatives the willies, but also the bedrock principles of tradition and ownership and self-reliance that would be equally at home at a hippie commune or a tea party rally.

While it is rightly noted that the grades at the school quickly improved, the contention that “a recipe is much easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible” is not only insulting to professional chefs and food writers (like, well, me), but also is patently false. There is a world of difference between writing a recipe and writing one well, as anyone who as ever come across the words “but first” in a recipe will attest.  The more important point though is the one that Flanagan glosses over: that the passion for learning developed in a garden, driven home by the lightening-bolt of awareness when a kid bites into a vine-ripened tomato she grew herself, is worth essays on ten plays even if Arthur Miller or Shakespeare wrote them all.

Where the argument really goes off the rails though is when Ms Flanagan posits:

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it? What is the goal of an education, of what we once called “book learning”? These are questions best left unasked when it comes to the gardens.

Not “enjoy,” Ms, Flanagan, respect. This, as I mentioned, is where her disdain for manual labor, something that everyone on the planet (beneath the upper 2 percent or so of income earners) contends with every day, becomes instructive. It is predicated on the idea that labor is something to be freed from, ostensibly through strict adherence to “book learning.”  Worse, it perpetuates the misguided dogma of the last several decades that distances us from our food and insists that cooking is a chore, like washing laundry or windows, which should be avoided at all costs as if it were beneath us. This in turn not only makes her seem elitist herself, but also leaves Flanagan’s ideas of education as merely a means to create consumers, rather than citizens.

What follows in the essay is a misuse of statistics that boggles the mind, where she blames a decline in math and English among Latinos at MLK on the gardens. In legal-ese (and Latin) this is referred to as a Post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, “It follows therefore was caused by.”  Another example of this would be that since all addicts were once babies, then mother’s milk leads to heroin addiction.

This is followed up by an argument that the rampant increase in childhood obesity and early-onset diabetes is not caused by a lack of access to healthy food nor the prevalence of sugary, fat laden food in schools. Rather she cites, ironically, George Orwell, to argue that it’s because poor people prefer that food. Please. And for the record, her research into two grocery stores in Compton as proof that poverty and food deserts do not go hand-in-hand is blindingly shortsighted.

There are more errors of reason, but let me cut to the chase. Flanagan sums up by saying this:

(W)e become complicit — through our best intentions — in an act of theft that will not only contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass but will rob that group of the very force necessary to change its fate. The state, which failed these students as children and adolescents, will have to shoulder them in adulthood, for it will have created not a generation of gentleman farmers but one of intellectual sharecroppers, whose fortunes depend on the largesse or political whim of their educated peers.

The belief that we will create better citizens by teaching to the test (an idea she advocates for repeatedly and vociferously) is one that will lead to a generation of closed-minded automatons incapable of learning, thinking, or fending for themselves. We are far better off with a generation of citizens who understand that sustenance comes not from factories or laboratories but from the soil and from hard working hands, both of which deserve the respect garnered from experience. We need citizens who are healthier than the generation before them; throughout most of human history the rich were fat and the poor were skinny, yet today in America it is quite the opposite. Fixing that requires direct experience and interaction with our food, something no schoolroom lecture can provide.

This is not advocacy for some weird Maoist Great Leap Forward where everyone must leave the cities and go farm. It is knowledge of one of the truest clichés known: You are what you eat. And as one of Flanagan’s carefully-book-taught computer programmers would point out, Garbage In — Garbage Out.

Chowing down for better school lunches in Iowa City.Photo: Kurt Michael Friese

At those picnics, including one right here in Iowa City, more than 20,000 people gathered around tables in parks and farms and school grounds to tell Congress to fix the School Lunch Program. Most of the discussions at these events and in the press afterwards centered on improving the food itself through increased Federal spending and local food initiatives. But there was another topic directly relevant to Labor Day: the call to create green jobs with a “School Lunch Corps.”

As the platform promoted by Slow Food states:

We can’t serve real food in schools without investing in school kitchens and the people who prepare and serve lunch. This spring, President Obama signed the Serve America Act, which expanded Americorps and reinforced his call for Americans to serve their country. Right now, our nation has an opportunity to train young and unemployed Americans to be the teachers, farmers, cooks and administrators we need to ensure the National School Lunch Program is protecting children’s health. President Obama has called for an end to childhood hunger by 2015; let’s answer that call by putting Americans to work building and working in school kitchens nationwide.

It bears emphasizing that the School Lunch Corps idea is not an attempt to vilify today’s lunch ladies–or squeeze them out of a job. No one at Slow Food is devaluing the hard work of the thousands of people who work in school kitchens, commissaries, and cafeterias. These folks are dedicated laborers, many of them Union members, whose hands are tied by sometimes outlandishly picayune regulations.

For example, to be permitted to serve a simple but healthy dish of red beans and rice in a school cafeteria–according to Iowa City Schools food service director Diane Duncan-Goldsmith–kitchen workers must add meat or cheese. Doesn’t matter that the dish is already a complete protein. Regulations, serving no one but dairy and beef interests, insist that main dishes must contain meat or cheese. This raises the cost and the calorie count, but adds little to the nutritional value of the meal.

Most of the food served in school cafeterias comes packaged in paper or plastic or cans, and is shipped in from an average of 1500 miles. Multiply that by the 30 million meals served in schools everyday and the impact on greenhouse gasses and the waste stream become readily apparent.

All this doesn’t even touch on the potential health effects of the food our children are eating. The keynote address at our Eat-In was delivered by Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-IA), who sits on the House Education and Labor Committee, the panel with jurisdiction over the Child Nutrition Act reauthorization. Mr. Loebsack emphasized the connection between healthy kids and the future of our entire health care system, noting that one in three kids born after 2000 will contract diabetes before they’re old enough to vote; among minorities that number rises to one in two.

Thus a diet that puts more emphasis on whole grains and fresh vegetables, with meat as a side dish or condiment rather than the center of the plate is, as ever, the only healthy, viable alternative. As an example, the dish I brought to our Eat-In was a slight twist on classic tabouleh, with everything but the grain coming from my restaurant’s garden (I haven’t tried to grow quinoa yet).

Quinoa with fresh veggies–coming soon to a school cafeteria near you? Quinoa Tebouleh
2 cups quinoa, cooked
1 cup green lentils, cooked
1 medium red onion, diced
2 medium ripe tomatoes (1 red, 1 yellow if possible for color), diced
1 cucumber (“English” or hothouse variety preferred), diced
1 sweet bell pepper, seeded and diced
3 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced paper thin
1/2 cup chopped cilantro and/or spearmint
Optional additions: 1/2 cup olive oil; 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Simply toss all ingredients together, season to taste with salt and pepper, and refrigerate one hour to overnight. Serves 6-8

Note: Quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wah) is a South American grain. It’s extremely nutritious and cooks up just like rice. Also, the lentils should be tender but not mushy.

Consider the egg. Photo: Kurt Michael Friese

UPDATE:  The owner of the hatchery in the video mentioned below has spoken out, says there were violations of procedure but makes no apologies.  He calls “instantaneous Euthanasia” “Standard industry practice.”  Read the story here.

Iowa is the number-one producer of eggs in the country, with more than twice the number of laying hens than Ohio, the number two state. There are nearly 20 times as many hens here than there are people, producing a shade over 14 billion eggs a year. As one might expect, their living conditions are less than ideal.

A cursory glance at the website of the Iowa Egg Council does not reveal any of the images of the way the laying hens are treated, but rather concerns itself with recipes, coloring books for the kids, and “Eggbert’s” somewhat rosy history of egg production in Iowa. A search of their site for the term “battery cage” yields a goose egg. But battery cages are one of the major reasons why Iowa out-produces everyone else – we have lots of them.

Across the US there are about 280 million hens in battery cages at any given time, cages that so severely restrict their movements that they cannot even spread their wings. They can’t nest, bathe in the dust, perch or forage, all instinctive chicken behaviors. Completely depleted of calcium in a few short weeks, their bones break and they are shipped off, dead and dying, to soup plants and pet food factories.

Then of course there’s the small issue of the effluent these factories produce, which must be stored lest it leak into the environment, which inevitably it does. The fumes threaten the health not only of the workers at these facilities but of the neighbors on the surrounding farms too.

While it’s true that none of this is news, it is interesting to note the ways people have opted out of participating in this heinous activity, and the ways that Big Egg has attempted to mask their misdeeds.

Here in Iowa City two years ago the student body of the University of Iowa voted to ban those eggs, insisting that only “cage-free” eggs be served to the 31,000 students and 15,000 staff members who live, work and learn in the Old Capitol. Sadly though, taking them out of the cages does not usually lead to bucolic lives on Old MacDonald’s farm.

Cage-free eggs come from chickens raised in warehouses in their thousands, beaks mutilated to prevent them from pecking each other to death due to stress, and exposed to ammonia and hydrogen sulfide gasses. Of course these are all hens. The male chicks were ground up alive soon after hatching and made into feed or fertilizer. They don’t lay eggs and are therefore of no use to the industry.

Yet all of this is only part of the reason why I don’t use such eggs in my restaurant. Our eggs come from Steve Rogers of Highland Vista farms, who runs his operation based on the model of sustainable-farm folk hero Joel Salatin. His chickens live on pasture, with the freedom to come and go from the coop as they please. They’re locked up at night to protect them from predators, and the rest of the time they scratch and forage on a different patch of pasture as they are moved about the farm. They live very happy, natural chicken lives and you can taste it in the eggs.

They cost us about three times what the factory eggs cost, or about $54.00 for a case of 15 dozen, which breaks down to about 30 cents an egg. Pricey? Perhaps, but it means 60 cents worth of the plate cost of the huevos rancheros we serve at brunch every Sunday, and when it comes to freshness and flavor (not to mention nutritional quality) there is simply no comparison.

We occasionally serve a very simple egg-based dessert over seasonal fresh fruits called Zabaglione (the French call it Sabayon). It always wins raves for it’s rich decadence. But each time a customer asks if we add turmeric or saffron to make it so yellow, I smile and say “no, that’s what eggs are supposed to look like.”

A little zab’ll do ya’.Photo: Kurt Michael FrieseZabaglione
6 egg yolks
2/3 cups sugar
2/3 cups Marsala wine (or substitute rum, or Grand Marnier, or whatever turns you on)

Place a stainless steel bowl over a simmering saucepan of water to create a double boiler. In the bowl, whisk the eggs briskly and constantly with the sugar. While continuing to whisk, drizzle in the Marsala wine. Continue to whisk until the mixture becomes light and fluffy, a lttle like whipped cream at soft peaks.

Serve immediately over your favorite fresh fruits. Serves 4-6

Are corndogs a vegetable?

Nowhere is this more evident than in our schools, where our kids are not taught about food and cooking, not even the “Home Economics” of my high school years. No, instead the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) teaches something called “Family and Consumer Science.” There you have it — we are not raising citizens, we are raising consumers. Our children are being taught one way of surviving in this modern, fast-paced world: the way of conspicuous consumption.

A recent federal mandate required that every school district write and implement a “Wellness Policy” that addressed, among other things, the epidemic of obesity and childhood diabetes now rampant in our youth. This was a noble endeavor; however, it needed to be more than a mere academic and bureaucratic exercise. What is called for here is a true revolution, one that, like all revolutions, will be very difficult to conduct in the face of the stalwart forces of the status quo. The fear of change is a very difficult one to overcome.

Like all of us, our children are what they eat, and they cannot be expected to learn and grow effectively on fat, salt, and corn-sweetener-laden government-subsidized surplus. What is offered to them today is the result of the entrenched bureaucracy at the USDA, the immoveable object of parental indifference, and the irresistible force of union and administrative fear of change. Unlike the rest of the student’s school day, the lunch period is conducted not by the curricular side of the school system, but by the maintenance side. Meanwhile, the hardworking members of the ICCSD Food Service staff are restrained by inefficient kitchens, ludicrous time restraints, and a budget that is laughable at best. How well would you expect to eat on $1.60 per day?

We need a paradigm shift. From the parents and the rest of the taxpayers in the district, we need an understanding that spending more money is not “just throwing money at the problem,” it is an investment in the health and well-being of our children and our community. Parents must no longer choose to ignore the situation to the proven detriment of their children. From the teachers’ unions we need the flexibility to see that there are other models for the school day and the school year that can be effective besides the one we have in place, which was created over 100 years ago to fit an agrarian calendar so that kids could be home to tend to the farm when needed. The school year in the U.S. is 180 days long. It is 240 in Germany–and 243 in Japan. School days and even school weeks are longer too. A longer school day will provide the time necessary for children to eat healthily. Today they have 30 minutes or less, and most of that is spent standing in line.

If we move lunch away from the maintenance side of the equation and over to the curriculum, food will gain the attention that is necessary for it to demonstrate its own importance. We cannot continue to teach one thing in health class and peddle another in the lunch room. Teaching about food, its history, its culture, its etiquette, and its importance to our health and community will ensure a more productive and enjoyable future for our kids. To those who say “don’t try to tell me what I can and can’t feed my kids,” I say this: First, the USDA is already doing that, and in a demonstrably unhealthy way. Second, they may be your kids, but they’re our future.

This Labor Day, Slow Food USA will formally launch its Time for Lunch campaign with “Eat-Ins” scheduled all over the country — as of this writing, 227 in 49 states (step up, Mississippi!). In partnership with Sustainable Table, The Center for Ecoliteracy, Roots of Change, Edible Communities, and other organizations, Slow Food is calling on Congress, during its reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, to put real food on our children’s lunch trays. To do so, they must double the federal contribution to school lunches from $1 to $2 per meal.

Modeled on the sit-ins of the 60s, these Eat-Ins are potluck picnics to raise awareness. They are a call to action for our kids, alongside Slow Food’s signature celebration of local, sustainable, traditional food. Here’s a simple salad that’s delicious and ample enough to bring to to an Eat-In near you.

Anchovy, Goat Cheese and Romaine Salad
8 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon kosher salt
40 anchovy fillets — rinsed and chopped
6 ounces red wine vinegar
1 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon black pepper
6 heads romaine lettuce — rinsed and coarsely chopped
12 ounces fresh goat cheese — crumbled
1 cup red onion — minced

Place garlic, salt, and anchovy fillets in food processor; pulse until chopped. Add red wine vinegar, and then puree. Slowly add in olive oil while motor is running. Add black pepper. Toss greens with vinaigrette. Garnish with goat cheese and red onion.