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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Foodie Food Storage
  • Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:34:19 -0700


Foodie Food Storage
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/01/22/foodie-food-storage/
Sharon January 22nd, 2009

One of the questions that comes up a lot is how people who are accustomed
to eating mostly high quality, fresh foods adapt to a diet of stored and
preserved foods. People are concerned that this means an inevitable shift
towards canned, processed and lower quality food than a fresh diet would
allow for.

My own opinion is that this is actually a false dichotomy - and not a trade
off I’d personally ever accept. The problem, IMHO, is not the issue of
fresh foods vs. processed, but of making a real dietary shift that actually
means that you are eating the best of your seasonal, preserved and fresh
foods, rather than trying to reproduce your old diet. “Foodie” food
storage - food storage for people who love to eat and to eat delicious,
high quality meals - begins from the recognition that it is truly a way of
eating, and one that changes with time and season.

Consider a summer meal - grilled chicken skewered with rosemary, sweet
roasted corn with butter, new potatoes with parsley and lemon and lightly
steamed green beans dressed with garlic vinagrette. Now imagine, if you
can do so without becoming ill, the industrial food storage parody of that
meal. Skewered canned chicken cubes, sprinkled with dry rosemary. Aged
potatoes steamed and sprinkled with dry parsley. Canned green beans with
garlic powder and cream style corn. I suspect all of us have had something
like this in a hospital or cafeteria somewhere. This, of course, is the
nightmare of all foodies ;-).

But the question must arise - why on earth would you try to duplicate a
meal that is fundamentally rooted in place and time - in the garden summer?
The same is true about foodie pantry eating - it begins, as all good
artistries do, from its limits. Like a sonnet, it is shaped in part by
what you cannot do - but the limits can be freeing as well as restrictive,
opening new kinds of art that aren’t possible when everything is open.

The weak links in food storage are meat, milk and eggs. Most of the
non-fossil powered methods of long term storage aren’t something you want
to work with every day - salting, smoking and sausaging result in food
products that are extremely tasty, but not really healthy for everyday
inclusion in your diet. Powdered eggs and milk taste little like the
alternatives.

But then again, it is worth remembering that the peasant cuisines that we
base much of our best food upon never contained meat, milk and eggs in the
quantities we have them now, never ate them all year round. That is, no
one ever ate osso buco nightly, or cassoulet daily. And the cassoulet was
born as a way to extend small amounts of meat with beans and other foods.
That is, the perception we have of most cuisines is a false one - few
societies as disconnected from agriculture have ever eaten animal products
as we do - as a universal, seasonless food.

So the first reality of food storage is that we’re headed back to the
peasant cusines - as they existed for ordinary people. That means fewer
animal products all around - maybe none, since it is perfectly possible to
produce brilliant, delicious food without it, or perhaps eaten as we once
ate them, as the foods of France, Italy, Turkey, China, and other places
evolved. This involves sorting through the perceptions we’ve created of
those cuisines - the cookbooks are written mostly for Americans and their
huge, seasonless quantities of milk, eggs and meat, and the restaurant
menus emphasize these foods that were once special.

This is not a great loss, quite honestly. It isn’t just that the cheap
meat available to most of us is a pale imitation of real meat, thin of
flavor and not very good for you, but those peasant cuisines were good as
they were - we don’t need the sugar and fatted up versions - osso bucco
every night is no treat.

Fresh vegetables can continue to be part of your meals, but seasonally so -
and that means for those of us in cold climates, learning to love our
winter vegetables, and to appreciate the cuisines that evolved around
winter vegetables - around kales and cabbages, turnips, appples and squash.
This is not a loss, it is merely different.

Diets rich in staple foods - rice, potatoes, wheat and oats are ones where
highly seasoned foods shine - and that’s the place for home preservation.
The accent of carrot-ginger chutney against the plate of rice, dal and
palak paneer, homemade cinnamon-tomato ketchup with baked sweet potato
fries, the intense flavors of soy, garlic, vinegars, hot sauces, pickles,
kimchi, mint, sweet fruit sauces and chutneys - these are the
transformative accents that make simple superb.

One of the reasons I live the life I do is to eat well - we were never
wealthy, could never afford all the good things that we most enjoyed -
until we began to grow our own and raise our own we could never afford all
the raspberries we cared to eat (and that’s a lot). Until I foraged I
never had all the morels I could want. In fact, I’ve never understood why
it was that people who consider themselves “foodies” so often think of
good food as something that you can buy - the truth is that many of the
best tastes are things that literally cannot be purchased in most places -
parsnips dug in a February thaw, with all their staches turned to sugar,
corn picked after the steaming pot of water comes to boil, bread baked in a
wood burning oven. The peasant life isn’t just a practical strategy for
dealing with less of everything - it is a way of getting more on your
dinner plate.

I don’t see any contradiction between being a foodie and storing food -
but I do think that the degree to which you extract pleasure from your food
storage diet depends on your willingness to shift the foods you are
preserving and storing to the center of your meals at the times that suit
them. It is one more step in a seasonal diet - the experimentation with
recipes that don’t involve eggs when eggs are not abundant, or which do
take advantage of your abundant quinoa, your potent dried hot peppers and
the very best of your local harvest, preserved in its essence to carry the
warmth of the summer season into the coldest, darkest tastes of winter.

Sharon





  • [Livingontheland] Foodie Food Storage, Tradingpost, 01/26/2009

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