Sunday sermon

At knitting group last week, our budding novelist recounted her adventures in researching mega churches for her book. It was incongruent, to say the least, for her Unitarian self to be seated in the midst of impersonal showmanship and speed collecting and communion.

And so it was for me, as I found myself invited to a “health lecture,” which turned out to be a thinly disguised advertisement for a line of dietary supplements. They are sold under a multi-level marketing scheme, using sophisticated marketing tactics and a network of independent distributors. The high priestess’ slick PowerPoint presentation was a quasi-sermon designed to confuse and frighten people; her message of salvation was a sales pitch.

The basic message was this: there are bad things in your foods: try to avoid them, but since that’s so hard and you’ll probably fail, you can take this supplement to be safe. The baddies were the usual suspects, high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats, artificial sweeteners, unpronounceable additives. The good guys are the men in lab coats who tell us that fruits and vegetables are the best thing in the world for us. But, this being post-Reagan America, failure is an option: there’s just no way we can eat right. Just as we reach the depths of despair, though, she shares the Good News. The lecture sponsor’s bottle is projected on the screen, tucked in amongst beautifully styled and airbrushed produce. Here it is, she says, the only scientifically-backed answer: Our Product.

The complaint with mainstream medicine in this country has long been that it focuses on treating the symptoms rather than searching for and addressing the underlying cause(s). Even though the good doctor professed to have studied naturopathy (and the poor fellow who introduced her couldn’t pronounce it), her bedside manner was that of an MD. She presented the bulleted lists of additives that food giants can hide in our foods, mentioning in passing that labels were becoming more difficult to read, both in terms of labeling loopholes and shrinking font sizes (even as the population’s eyesight ages). But even though this clearly points a finger at a system that allows such wrongdoing, she does not encourage us to look deeper, say, to the political influence of the food manufacturing industry. Nope, her answer is not to fix the broken system, but to take a pill to cure us.

It’s a rare practitioner who will take the time and interest to follow up on a symptom that is not easily diagnosed. The nature of the dietary malaise that our society suffers from is complex to be sure, but the difficulty is compounded by the fact that it is vital to our survival and it affects our actions every day. It’s no big deal to leave our car in the garage for a day or two, but we can’t easily fast for the same period. Without a high level of commitment, it’s just not going to work. If she tells us to go home and throw out everything in the larder that contains the baddies, what will we eat for breakfast? Lucky for us, company sale reps for the supplement are present. No doubt, any supplement is an improvement over fast food, but what we are in dire need of is an understanding of the external forces at work, and what we can do to counter them. Yes, we need to look to the health of our individual bodies, but we cannot ignore the larger organism, called society. If we do not feed ourselves well, we will all suffer. The answer is not the easy to swallow (and profitable to sell) little bottles of pills, but opening our eyes to the big picture.

Our gut tells us that something just isn’t right about the whole thing. Our collective power as consumers carries far more political clout than we can imagine. If we educate ourselves about the food industry, we will realize that by buying our food as close to the source as possible, we will change the landscape for the better. Imagine if no one showed up at the mega-church, but instead gathered in small, interconnected groups to worship. Imagine if no one went to the supermarket, but instead met up with neighbors at the farmer’s market.

Life gives you lemons

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Or lemon tart. Or custard. Or lemon-blueberry muffins. Meyer lemons, those schoolbus-yellow stars of the most lemony desserts, are in season. It is a very brief season indeed, and by the end of the month, they will be impossible to find again until next year. I always buy them when I see them, and try to find ways to get them to the table. This year, we had little lemon boudini (somewhere between a custard and a soufflé), a light lemon cake dusted in powdered sugar (half went to the neighbors), and lemon-blueberry muffins (these to celebrate the beginning of midwinter break).

I understand the Meyer’s one brief shining moment, as a white pot embossed with Tuscan-looking fruit sat on our back patio during my California childhood, and in it lived a small Meyer lemon tree. Its twin pot held kumquats, but we knew which one would bring the most joy to our table. It was a small tree, so we could hope for two or three lemons at the most, but that was plenty for a sugary lemon cake.

When I moved to Germany, it was lemon season, but there were no local lemons in that northern clime. Instead, people counted the days until asparagus season. This didn’t compute for me, since the green spears were ubiquitous year-round in the Golden State. For a few brief weeks, Germans made hollandaise, steamed little new potatoes, pulled corks from green bottles, and sliced the ham thickly. And then it was over, and we were back to broccoli and pork chops.

Barbara Kingsolver’s chronicle of a year of living off local foods is on my nightstand. My evenings seems to have been preempted far too often these past two weeks, and I am only two chapters in. Still, in one of those two chapters, she has taught me the why of the wait. The plant sends up shoots that can only be harvested and eaten in a very short period of time. And more importantly, only some spears can be harvested, as the plant needs some greenery to survive its retreat underground for another winter. Maintaining the bed’s viability over the years is as much part of growing asparagus as is learning to make hollandaise.

Our family’s kumquat did not survive the cold, dark years when we lived in Portland, but we spoiled the lemon tree, wrapping it in quilts on cold nights and bringing it inside to the warmest southern window we could give it. It got scraggly over those years, but the embossed pot now sits in the California sun on my mother’s back deck, and still gives her lemons.

Corn chips calling

An end cap at Whole Foods called to me today: “Look! Corn chips! You can make chili-Frito pie!” Apparently, that was what their marketers were thinking too, as they conveniently flanked the bags of organic yellow chips with cans of chili, mild on the left, hot on the right. Lucky for me, I have some Trader Joe’s vegetarian chili in the larder. I also had to double back to the cheese section (tasting fresh mozzarella balls and goat milk gouda as we passed) to pick up some jack cheese to grate over the whole mess.

As I grate the local Beecher’s Just Jack, I reflect on what Michael Pollan might think of this quasi-food. I haven’t quite finished his latest book, but have the basic gist. (I set it aside to read Pastwatch: the Redemption of Christopher Columbus, which I stayed up too late to finish last night.) The meal barely meets Michael’s basic criteria, and though I’m positive my great-grandma didn’t put it on the table, I bet my grandmother may well have done so: she was, after all, a Californian.

Chili-Frito pie is comfort food, and in its mainstream incarnation, wildly irresponsible, from its GMO corn chips fried in hydrogenated oils, down to the petroleum- and water-intensive beef by-products mass canned in a featureless cannery somewhere many miles away, and topped with an rBST-laden cheese food. Our version is a moderate improvement, but still quite processed. Organic (and thus non-GMO) corn has been ground into masa for the chips, non-GMO soy made into tofu for the chili. We won’t overeat: two cans for four people, two of whom are growing boys, is about right. Mostly plants: a vegetarian chili manages fine on this count, and the local cheese stands alone (high-ho the Derry-o, the cheese stands alone) as the lone animal product. There’s a salad on the table too, which adds some well-needed leaves to the mix. Have you noticed that the spinach gets sweeter as the days get longer?

My menu choices bring up an interesting conundrum that Michael, for all his good intentions, does not grasp, I think because he is not a mom. The reason I was at Whole Foods instead of the co-op or the farmer’s market is because I was between violin lesson and the Post Office and parent-teacher conferences, and I knew we were out of milk and bread and salad. Whole Foods was conveniently situated (between the Post Office and home), and conveniently situated also applies to the end cap display with what is now our supper. Stopping by the store gave us a chance to have lunch at home (leftovers). Yes, I could have made this a better dinner by making the chili myself from local grass-fed beef (or making fresh tofu from the soymilk I make myself), but then I wouldn’t be writing this; I’d still be in the kitchen. And convenience food would have been on the menu for lunch. Instead of supper.

The whole truth

The sign outside Starbucks in Benaroya Hall screams, “Did you know a nonfat grande latte contains 35% of your daily calcium?” I’m reminded of a Six Chix cartoon several years ago, where a granny is being handcuffed, presumably being arrested for fixing the grammar on a billboard: “Got Do you have any milk?” I fight the urge to scour my pockets for a big red marker, and realize there’s not enough room on their snazzy reader board for the whole story. Calcium may be present in cow’s milk, yes, but it’s not in a form that is bioavailable for humans can easily absorb (it’s great for calves)—supermarket milk is fortified with vitamins A and D to help, but it still doesn’t change the fact that the animal proteins in dairy products cause calcium loss (vitamin C would be useful here too, but they didn’t add it to the carton, since it would sour the milk). Unfortunately, along with higher concentrations of calcium, nonfat dairy products also have higher concentrations of those pesky proteins, so they’re no improvement, unless you’ve been convinced that all fat is Evil.

Then there’s that little problem of the caffeine in the coffee part of the drink. The jury is still out on just how much milk you have to add to the coffee to counteract the widely-known fact that caffeine leaches calcium from the body. It would appear that a mostly-milk latte is an improvement over just a dash of milk, but there is no clear consensus—we just don’t know.

Clearly, that grande latte is not as great as the reader board makes it sound (unless you’re a very sleepy calf). So what to do? It’s not like there are no other sources of calcium out there, with better bioavailability and no calcium-leaching animal proteins. Indeed, the list is long and varied: Molasses, dark salad greens, cabbage, broccoli, green beans, cucumber, peas, soybeans, squash, beans, nuts, cocoa, kiwi, maple syrup, brown sugar, tomatoes. Did you note those foods also are a great source of other good things as well? And did you notice that cocoa was on the list?

The problem here, though, is more than the nutrients and their inner workings in our bodies. Michael Pollan Eater’s Manifesto deals with this subject extensively, noting that we have abandoned traditional diets in deference to the scientists, whom he likens to high priests on the altar of the church of nutritionism. His thesis is that by focusing our attention on the small bits—vitamins, minerals, etc.—that make up our food, we are headed down the wrong path. We blindly follow scientists who identify and sing praises for the nutrient du jour (just read the papers for the latest study on [name nutrient here] found in [put food name here]). This somehow assumes that these scientists even know what they all are, and more importantly, that they completely understand the living dynamic of how nutrients interact with other foods and in our bodies. In other words, we don’t know a lot more than we do know.

I doubt I can change the world by going door-to-door with my message that people are following the wrong religion. Which is why I shall continue to buck the trend and quietly (and not so quietly) eat food, real food, that I prepare myself whenever possible. And it shall include my morning cup of cocoa, made with a rotating selection of politically correct chocolate products and either homemade soy or almond milk. Not to mention that even with my indulgent chocolate spending habits, it’s cheaper and frankly, tastes a whole lot better. Maybe mom did know best: she certainly is a lot more forthcoming with the full story than the green mermaid.

Year of the rat

My father always said that he and my mother stopped at two children, because he had read at the time that one in three babies born in the world were Chinese, and they didn’t want a Chinese baby. These were different times, and my grandparents were staunch Republicans.

Today is our annual pilgrimage to Uwajimaya, the Asian supermarket up the hill. My shopping list includes things the co-op is lacking, such as wood ear mushroom and lily pod, but I assure you, they're for a traditional dish, not for a witches' cauldron. The list also includes recognizable items like sake and fortune cookies (always add, “between the sheets” when reading your fortune).

Every year about this time, we get together with some old friends; she and I bonded when we applied for unemployment together after being laid off during the tech bust of ’92. We get together around this time of year because we love Chinese food, and we know that if we don’t schedule a date many months in advance, our calendars fill up and we’d never manage to see each other. The date has evolved from tossing a coin to see which yuppie couple buys the take-out to splitting up the menu and messing up one kitchen or the other. This year, they’ll have to clean up after my mu-shu.

I spent the last week doing what management-types call sharpening my saw: With the addition of more board work (Create new task: learn to say “no” more often), I simply had to get my ducks in a row. I’ve upgraded software, and for the first time since I got email (right about the time I was laid off), I have an empty email inbox. No, I didn’t throw out emails like soybeans to drive away the devil, I just learned to file them where they belonged—on a task list, not the inbox. I feel like a new woman, and fully intend to keep up this good habit.

I find that this is the time of the year that I tend to adopt new habits: The holiday frenzy has died down, and it’s a good time to curl up with my thoughts (and seed catalogues). Sometimes changes are seemingly small, like buying heads of lettuce instead of bags, sometimes of greater personal import, like controlling portion sizes (and losing weight) and emptying my email inbox so I can focus on what actually needs to be done. Perhaps I really was the third child: That would make this my new year, and what better time to make a resolution.

Brown steel

Little One came bounding into my office yesterday afternoon with his latest treasure: a crumpled brown paper bag. It seems that his friend Opa R had supplied him with some rolling stock for his new train set (actually my brother’s old one), and he had an idea for the paper bag. We can use it to make popcorn, he said. I smiled and absently told him that was an excellent idea, and gave it no more thought.

When I was a young girl, my uncle worked for American Can Company. In addition to cans—they pioneered the aluminum can (they’re now called Alcoa)—they made lots and lots of steel cans, and as a sideline, steel lunchboxes. Every Christmas, our family would exchange a box of luxury paper goods from my father’s employer (we called it the “bumf box”), for two steel lunch boxes from his family. We were the envy of all our classmates, as we had the latest, most coveted lunchboxes in the multi-purpose room, and we had a new one every year. Remember, they were made of steel somewhere outside of Kansas. They were built as solid as a Chevy, and a good lunchbox could make it through your entire elementary career if you took care of it. The thermos was the limiting factor, being made of glass.

The year before he retired, my uncle sent along the cream of the crop: a Snoopy doghouse for me (I loved Snoopy when I was 11), and a Land of the Giants lunchbox for my brother. I loved my lunchbox, so when I dropped the thermos and heard the telltale crack, I wept. Its replacement was an orange vinyl Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus lunchbox. The black plastic handle broke early on, to be replaced by one made of clothesline using my mother’s new macramé skills (hey, it was the 70s). My brother, however, was more stoic. When his Land of the Giant thermos met its demise after three full years (he was really careful), he refused another lunchbox, and switched instead to a brown paper bag.

Freudian analysts might say it had something to do with a teenager wanting something to do with his father (Daddy still worked at the pulp mill, where they made Kraft paper for the brown bags), but I think it was a question of convenience. My fastidious brother managed to make a single paper bag last an entire semester: it went to school with his peanut butter sandwich (Skippy creamy, grape jelly), and came home folded in thirds in the left rear pocket of his Levis 503s (more than once it got washed with the jeans, and yet he still used it afterwards). I recall how we admired it on the last day of school, all soft and leathery from the wear, before we finally threw it out.

My mother had bought a package of small paper bags, thinking she would have to replace them frequently, but he only used half a dozen or so (there was a mishap with an overweight bully that caused the messy demise of both bag and PBJ). When I moved out, my mother placed the bundle in the box of things she was sure I would need (one in a continuum of confusing gifts), and I’ve been moving with them every since. They’ve finally found a use recently as a way to pop real popcorn in the microwave. Thrift runs in my family, as I reuse them until they’re brittle and singed before chucking them in the compost bin.

I found a bright shiny metal lunchbox at the thrift store two years ago, and Little One used it happily. Unpainted metal, he could drum loudly on it, stick stickers on it, and generally bang it around with impunity (we use stainless steel thermoses). When the plastic handle inevitably broke, his kindergarten teacher wove a new one out of bright orange cotton. I fixed the hinge a half-dozen times before giving up, and switched him to the ubiquitous-at-a-Waldorf-school basket. But he didn’t like it, since the handle didn’t fit in his cubby. I toyed with the brown paper bag, but given what he did to Detroit steel, that didn’t bode well for our forests, so I grabbed an oversized dishtowel, placed his lunch in the middle and tied up the corner. It serves as a lovely tablecloth when he unwraps it, and when it comes home muddy, I can throw it in the wash.

I found Little One’s paper bag in the kitchen this morning, quasi-folded and tucked behind the canister of popcorn. Soft and leathery, it reminded me of my brother. Call it Freudian, but we’ll pop popcorn in it until it can give no more, and then quietly bury it in the compost to give it back.

February bites

A good friend of mine started a part-time job last week at a local non-profit. I talked to her yesterday, and she noted how working at the same thing all day was mentally quite fatiguing. I couldn’t agree more: my days have been a flurry of emails and actual, real-life paying work, which leaves precious little time for digesting new information and writing. So, after sending off various and sundry invoices (there is a silver lining to the work cloud), I whipped up a few quick tidbits in between ticking things off my to do list.

Michael Pollan and I curled up with a cup of cocoa last night (actually, I don’t know what he was having, since it was only the words in his book, In Defense of Food that actually saw me in my jammies), and I laughed out loud when I got to his rule about avoiding foods “containing ingredients that are … unpronounceable.” For as long as I can recall, the menu posted at our couscous bash lists ingredients so folks can make the choices that work for them. And at the bottom, it reads, “this cook doesn’t use fillers or weird polysyllabic ingredients (except zucchini).”

Darling Husband wanted to go dancing the other night, and I was feeling sluggish, so I motivated myself by dressing up and putting on a face. I think back to those peer-pressure days in high school when I got up early to put on makeup every day, and what a freeing moment it was when my Darling told me he disliked the smell of makeup and how it made kissing me less pleasant. I have learned over the years that his instincts are usually spot-on, and the Washington Post confirms it—makeup may help us feel good, but it is only skin deep, as women slather mercury, asbestos and formaldehyde on their bodies and then wonder why pregnancy seems elusive or they’re feeling bloated. The database at http://www.cosmeticdatabase.com/ reassures me that my Burt’s Bees stuff is fine, but the stuff I used to battle my teenage zits contains endocrine disruptors. And unfortunately, the soap I use to wash the makeup off scores higher on their toxicity scale than the makeup itself. It’s a bit daunting to wade through the ingredients list, but I shudder at the thought of my father’s lye soap, which would no doubt meet Pollan’s requirements.

Alaska’s in-flight magazine tempted me with a blurb about the Chocolate Fest in Portland last weekend. Darling Husband was ready to jump in the car without packing so much as a toothbrush, but I reminded him that we had children who can’t manage without us for the weekend (yet). He was crestfallen, as he had clearly hoped to witness and partake of the world’s largest truffle. Undaunted, I prepared our own little chocolate fest, a tray of representatives from Amore here in Bellevue, Recchuiti confections in San Francisco’s Ferry Building (just a few of those left), and a big box of truffles from Kingsbury chocolates in Alexandria. I can tell you that we made a dent in all the boxes, and thoroughly enjoyed it, but our sampling was less than scientific, which is how it should be.