Big brother

I was happily puttering in the kitchen this evening making supper (spaghetti day: plus sautéed fresh spinach and garlic and parsnip chips and hummus), when the phone rang. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, but the call was anything but ordinary.

It was a fellow from our local co-op, and he asked for me by name. Fair enough, I thought, I just wrote them a missive about some changes in the deli, and thought this might be a follow-up to my email. Though probably not, since I had already received a well-thought-out reply the same day to that one.

Nope, this cordial fellow wanted to let me know that the sun-dried tomato and chicken sausage I bought last  week--and ate last night--may have contained traces of turkey that were not included on the label. No problem here, no allergies to that particular bird. My guess is that they didn't clean the machine well enough between batches. Says the woman who uses the same workbowl on the food processor for slicing the parsnip chips and making the dip.

Even if it is kind of scary that the co-op knows that I bought it, but even that's not really scary, because I was using my member discount that day, so they scanned my membership card. So of course they knew. That they put together the data is nothing that mainstream supermarkets don't do when they extract demographic data to drive their marketing efforts by asking you to swipe your club card.

Of course, recalls were on my mind this week, as I just filed a spate of FDA recalls (and yes, Virginia, they are a daily occurrence, it's not just you). This batch featured a voluntary recall of Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (HVP) tainted with salmonella that's an unlabeled additive in many items, including spice mixtures that are sold as is or contained in other processed foodstuffs. Already I've seen recall notices for bouillon cubes, pretzels, Pringles, ready-to-eat bacon, and a curry spice powder sold in bulk. More will come.

In this case, the apparent abuse of the voluntary nature of the recall system and the hidden nature of the ingredient (the FDA does not require disclosing it on the label) is a particularly nasty combination, and one that food writer Marion Nestlé blogged about this morning. Her piece quite rightly calls for a stronger FDA, one that does not have to beg manufacturers to do the right thing.

So it is a reaffirmation that the co-op is doing the right thing: calling me to check and make sure things are right when they made a mistake.  While it was good of them to call (wouldn't you call your friend if you found out something you made for them was bad?), I also applaud their use of media channels to get the word out: they issued a notice on their website, and used Facebook and Twitter to spread the word. All things that, by the way, cost them nothing at all to do. I got to thinking that this is probably what was intended when the system of voluntary recalls was developed. Unfortunately, like all reasonable institutions, it is open to abuse by those who play the system to their own benefit.

If we had been talking about two schoolchildren, one who owned up to making a mistake and did their best to make it right, and one who had obfuscated a deed for their own benefit, the teacher's course of action would have been clear: reward the virtuous child, and both remove the privilege of trust and require retribution of some sort from the other. To subject both of them to a harsher regime would be a mistake, and the fallen angel must have a chance to re-earn his wings.

Blurred lines

I signed up for Twitter this week, adding yet another social-media outlet to my stable. I realized that the line between my personal social media avatar and my professional persona is becoming increasingly blurred. Experts remind me that I must mindfully consider what information I share on which site; how personal disclosure may affect my professional life and vice versa.

But the cyber realm is not the only place where delineation is not apparent, and I’m not so sure it’s bad thing. As I juggle my roles as an office worker (in my own home) and Minister of Household Affairs (a euphemistic title shamelessly cribbed from a colleague), I often find myself moving from desk to kitchen and back. Today for example, my computer was clamoring for me to update something and reboot, so I decided to take an early lunch break while it went through its gyrations. As I passed the kitchen window with its view of sun and buds and flowers, I couldn’t help noticing what a lovely spring day was beckoning. Opening the larder for an onion, I was greeted by potatoes and garlic sprouted past edibility. So after my tasty lunch, I gathered up the sprouted wonders and headed downstairs again, only glancing at my computer screen long enough to determine that no clients had any fires to put out. Leaving the door open a crack for fresh air (and so the cat could join me), I spent a delicious hour getting my nails dirty, tucking the potatoes and garlic into the earth. Like the bulbs I plant in the fall, I know I shall be seeing them in the kitchen again at the end of the growing season.

And I realized that just as the line between my professional and personal lives is at times ill-defined, the delineation between growing and preparing food and eating and health are indeed blurry lines, if there are lines at all. The food from my garden came into the kitchen to nourish us; and that which we do not use in a timely fashion ends up back in the garden, either as the seed or the soil.

How wrong we are to think we have come so far, with our industrially-prepared meals and compartimentalized lives, where work is separate from “life,” and where the process of bringing living food to what goes onto our tables and into our bodies is obfuscated. How appalling that we not not seem to realize that we wound ourselves with our unthinking acceptance of being stuffed into neatly-defined cubicles? How artificial it all seems, and how utterly foolish of us to not reclaim and embrace the ambuguity of that whole messy thing called life.

Order in the universe

It has been a difficult week. We flew out last Wednesday to our nation's capital, and are all a little ragged from meetings and museums and jetlag. During the week we learned that a good friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, and another lost her child and home in an incredibly nasty custody battle. Little One getting sick on the subway (an apology here to all riders of Washington D.C. Metro) was just icing on the cake.

And it's only Wednesday. Last week on Facebook, a friend posted as his status that he saw "great order in the universe on spaghetti night. And I knew exactly what he meant.

Weary in my soul, frustrated by my inability to change the universe, and eyes puffy from crying, at least I know what dinner will be. I know that it's a meal that everyone will be here for--no orchestra or firefighter training or meetings or whatever. And I know everyone loves it, and that I won't hear any complaints about how someone hates this or this tastes icky, or I burned it because I was being pulled in so many directions.

I can put on music and enter the zone, creative and comfortable, and the kids seem to know that all is right with the universe when Mom is making spaghetti. It smells good, and they seem content that there is something they can count on. There are no complaints about homework, and they are miraculously not fighting.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason this week has been so difficult was because we missed spaghetti night last week. I can't help but notice that tonight we eat and we talk--and we linger at the table. We are putting the order back in our universe with spaghetti, and it will get us through the coming week.

Hail to the ch(i)ef

Newspapers the world over are hailing Michelle Obama for her frank talk on childhood obesity, its causes and what we need to do to tackle it.

"It's time we all had a wake-up call. Our kids didn't do this to themselves. Our kids don't decide what's served to them at school or whether there's time for gym class or recess. Our kids don't choose to make food products with tons of sugar and sodium in super-sized portions, and then have those products marketed to them everywhere they turn. And no matter how much they beg for pizza, fries and candy, ultimately, they are not, and should not, be the ones calling the shots at dinnertime. We're in charge. We make these decisions." (http://bit.ly/9u2K6j)

This kind of statement, at a prearranged press event, is inevitably followed by thunderous applause. But are we really in charge? Do we really make these decisions?

It seems incongruous to me that the wife of the president should be tackling the problem from the same side as the rest of us, when she presumably has access to the ears of one of the most powerful men in the western world. Think about it: if our kids aren't the ones deciding, then who is making these decisions? Are parents really the ones choosing "tons of sugar and sodium in super-sized portions?" Are parents the ones "calling the shots at dinnertime?" The answer is yes and no, for while we are the ones who have to say 'no' to pizza for dinner, we as a society have stripped parents of a great deal of authority over their childrens' diets. And we as parents must assume some responsibility for allowing it to happen.

But let me back track: the seeds of the decisions that are making our children obese are not being made at the dinner table. The decision isn't even been made when a parent goes shopping. The decisions aren't even being made by that supermarket manager placing the order to stock the shelves. The people were pushing the buttons and turning the nozzles and driving the forklifts in the food factories are also not the ones making the decision ( we could say they're just following orders). No, the decisions are being made for us all in board rooms across the country, by people who can afford to circumvent the system that they themselves have created.

A couple of months ago I ran across a photograph of a younger Barack Obama teaching a class. What struck me was not that he was free of gray hairs, but what he was writing on the blackboard in front of him. The title of his diagram was "Relationships Built on Self Interest." He already understood the powers driving much of our society. And during his campaign he was the one who dared admit to the revolving door between business and government regulatory bodies that was creating a web of conflicts of interest so tangled that he himself seems incapable of dismantling them. And he promised us that he would stop this revolving door, where former agri-business executives assumed roles of responsibility within government agencies charged with regulating the selfsame businesses, and where people leaving these agencies find themselves offered lucrative positions in the same businesses.

I took heart when he took office and his first appointees seemed to buck this trend, and was nothing short of thrilled when the wind seemed to be changing, bringing with it proactive recalls driven by the FDA, rather than the empty gestured voluntary recalls. But the fresh wind of change seems to have lost some momentum. Appointees from business made it onto his lists after all, and recall notices from the FDA are leaning more toward the characteristic language and patterns that we know all too well.

Michelle Obama is proposing saving our kids by re-empowering parents. Indeed, she seems to be thinking along the same lines I was 10 years ago, when I had a small child to feed, and was unsatisfied by the choices being presented to me. My decisions at the supermarket were already made for me, so I had to find some place else to assert my parental choice. For me, it was a step by step process: I started by shopping the outside perimeter of the supermarket, reading labels, and asking questions, and eventually moved outside of the big box altogether. The gradual evolution has taken me to the point where even the coop seems to be a bit of a compromise, as I find I much prefer to press coins in the earthy palms of farmers' hands than swipe my debit card through a PIN pad device.

I and many like me are essentially doing an end run against the food industry (and they don't like it, judging from the rules they keep trying to get pushed through--think labeling). We're shopping at farmers' market, signing up for CSAs, and even planting vegetable gardens. I am very glad that Michelle Obama has started this conversation. And I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that she, like all the other strong, thinking mothers out there, is having this conversation with her husband. Because only if both parents are pulling in the same direction will the children be healthy.

Ode to oatmeal

I have been a bit under the weather, tired, not 100%, not firing on all cylinders, if you want to reduce me to an internal combustion engine. I could be an uncurable optomist and note that the slowing economy has made it easy for me to get my work done, but alas, "refilling my tank" by taking naps only seems to make me come up with more brilliant ideas that need tending.

Part of the problem is information. It's everywhere, and it means that even if I decide to lounge in my pajamas for half a day and wallow in tissue and pity, I can still take in information that is seemingly unrelated, even if I'm not capable of stringing together a few words into a coffee break read for you.

This morning is the case in point: A cup of tea from my Darling Husband brought bedside was the harbinger of a Day Off. No, said he, they can sort bugs without me, I’ll drive carpool, you stay in bed and rest up. I was too tired to put up a fight, downed the tea, and resumed snoozing. Upon awakening, I had only to reach over the side of the bed, where the aforementioned Darling Man had placed my laptop. Once the wireless bars lit up, I eventually learned that life was marching on (I read the comics before the headlines), that I had somehow once again managed to miss all but one of the films nominated for best picture by the Academy (and that was only because they have doubled the number of nominees), and that Ani in England had had a bowl of oatmeal five minutes prior. You would think I would be more compelled by the TED lecture posted on sharing data on medical conditions or the news item that a citizenship request for a man who required his wife to wear a burqua was denied by the French. But I kept coming back to that lowly bowl of oatmeal.

And so I ventured out from under my warm quilt to the kitchen and found it. There, behind the instant variety that lures Little One out of his own lair, next to the tub of homemade granola: the yellow paper bag that made the trek from the Olde Country, Irish oatmeal. Which explains that steaming bowl of warm goodness that is warming my belly far more than the hot water bottle ever could.

Quiet

It is that quiet part of year, where all seems still and asleep. If the rain stops, the only sounds around us are mechanical: no birds or babbling brooks, just freeway drone and heat pumps kicking in. My kids are more likely to be curled up under blankets with reading material than outside building forts. The backlog on my desk is as dry as a business text, except for the green-covered seed catalogue that I have been saving for the depths of the darkness.

And then yesterday happened. After an incredible soggy week, even by local standards, the sun dawned with just a hint of warmth. The warm water in the window-washing bucket actually stayed tepid for the time it took to wash the kitchen windows. I see a few bulbs poking out, and the little green buds are lending the palest of casts to the fruit trees. Of course, the sun is still weak and fleeting, limiting my time outdoors, but it prods me gently to dust off seed catalogues and think about planting some hope. I try to remember what sweet peas smell like and know I will sow some soon.

Fresh food is also at its low point: there are but a few stragglers in the vegetable drawers: a bunch of white turnips, a sorry wedge of cabbage and on the counter a lone acorn squash. I admit to resorting to mixed salad from California as even the local greens have all disappeared, and I'm not willing to give up on crunchy. We count the weeks (three!) until deliveries from the farm resume.

It is California that is saving us these days, as the panoply of citrus explodes at the coop: navel and blood oranges, tangelos, grapefruits, and lemons. Meyer lemons, those jewels of my childhood, warm, golden lemons, sweeter than sweet. I greedily snatched up an armful and gently lowered them into my shopping cart just as a mother lowers a sleeping baby into the crib.

At home, they clamor like children with their possibilities: Meyer lemon cake with honey-lavendar cream. Lavendar picked by the Little One in his gardening class last autumn. And since I'm already infusing the cream with the gentle purple flowers, I do a bit extra, and make a ganache for some truffles. With half a lemon leftover from that forray, I infuse some more cream with thyme, and use that for another herby-lemony combination. The final batch of truffles, to use up the last of the cream, is inspired by the lone comice pear in the bowl that will be my afternoon snack: Williams pear liqueur. I'm thinking I will be popular at pickup time after school with my little white boxes full of hand-dipped brown.

There remain ten golden beauties on the counter. Into a pot of boiling water go six of them, to be halved and salted and put up for Moroccan chicken in the coming weeks. I add chicken to the shopping list, to be ready when the preserved lemons are. And then there were four.

Four little lemons, just enough for a tiny batch of marmelade, perhaps with a vanilla bean. Another jar or two to tuck on the shelf of preserves, with a smear leftover for breakfast this week. It seems odd, preserving winter, but just as those boisterous berries of summer submit to the jar, to release their excess of summer in the dead of winter, so will these lemons impart their tiny, quiet rays of hope in their own turn.

Winter

It is winter's darkest hour; we passed the official marker just a few days ago, but even as the houses glow with icicle lights and trees in front windows, the earth sleeps. Unlike excited little boys straining to hear hooves on the roof. In the kitchen, the local roast is sitting on the counter salted, waiting to enter the hot oven in a few hours.

Our vegetable stores are slowly emptying from the bounty of the fall harvest: first the frost-tinged greens, made all the sweeter by Jack's kisses, then the crcucifers and squashes; we are now into the roots. A generous handful of Brussels sprouts made it this far, and by coddling them and sacrificing the outer leaves to the compost heap (oh, if I had chickens, how happy they would be today!), we will have greens on the table. Some of the parsnips and beetroot will join the roast and last of the fingerling potatoes in the oven.

We still have five weeks before our weekly deliveries from the farm resume. But all is not entirely bleak. We have pears, and the little bundles of sunlight that my family call "Christmas oranges" have burst on the scene. We are fortunate to live in an era and area where we may choose to eat local, and supplement those dark days with sunshine from faraway.

In some cases, very far away: A bottle of red wine from France will come off the rack, set aside for such a day. Spices that filled the corners of our cases when we returned from Morocco released their prize under the pestle yesterday, and joined nuts and candied fruits in holiday baked goods, some of which were offered on a plate in front of the fireplace last night by children waiting to be nestled snug in their beds. And chocolate from places so distant we have never been there, warming our hands in hefty mugs, drunk under warm wooly blankets and in the glow of candles on the tree.

We may be assaulted this time of year by the loud jingles and incessant chatter reminding us to consume for the sake of our loved ones, to save money by getting everything we need for our table from one national chain store at unbelievable prices. But I for one shall snuggle into the warmth of family and small treasures chosen or crafted with love, and let the bounty of the now faded sunlight grace our table and nourish our souls.

And so I send my wishes for warmth and peace to you in this quiet season.