Our approach to food production and food service is not value neutral. Through the creation of food, from raw ingredients to finished products, and through the giving or serving of food, we express a myriad of mores, social and cultural norms, anxieties, and personal neurosis. Though these webs of interrelated processes may be socially and personally challenging, their examination fosters community awareness and the opportunity to live, produce and consume with greater care and understanding, both socially and personally.

06 December 2010

Don't Worry...I'm Not A Professional

Okay, so I love Nigella Lawson.  I love her accent.  I love her old-school Italian looks.  I love that she studied at Oxford.  I love that she uses the word "bolstering" in on-air 3 minute segments.  (I do not always love her recipes, but that in no way diminishes my desire to be her new best friend.)

I wanted to share this little interview because I think Nigella (if I may be permitted to be so familiar) hits it on the head when she talks about our fear of not being professionals.  While we are, as a country, running around trying to find the most common man to run for the highest office (President Obama aside, who is anything but your "Average Joe"), we are putting others on the expert pedestal who do not belong there.  We are so afraid of being exposed that we look for, and create, experts to follow.

As in other aspects of one's life, this act is disenfranchising.  It produces a fear in the individual that he or she doesn't know and in fact has no business doing what is most basic, most necessary, and at times, most intuitive (feeding oneself, raising children, making the bed, etc...).

And here is the best part:  WE DO IT TO OURSELVES.  We believe the "experts."  We do not call bulls**t.  We do not own that which is most basic to our survival.

Let us all be, in our personal lives, what Nigella refers to as passionate amateurs.  Let us, like MFK Fischer, learn about food and life and love through living openly, passionately, hungrily.

And, for heaven's sake, let us respect, not fear, expertise when it presents itself.  Right now we have it backwards:  We want experts in the kitchen and average Joes in the White House.  My New Years wish for us is that we right ourselves...that we eat and vote with eyes wide open!

02 December 2010

Methyl Iodine

Not sure what to say about this. (Not because I have nothing to say- that does not happen-but because I am not sure how to organize my thoughts.)

I am worried for the farming communities exposed to toxins of all kinds and I want us, as a state and a country, to be moving away from the use of toxins (and genetically modified products) in our food production process.

I do not like Tokyo-based chemical brands potentially infecting migrant California workers because I do not see any hope in that equation for reparations or justice.

With our limited state budget, I think that the reliance on oversight as the primary means by which to control the unhealthy spread of this toxin is naive at best and dishonest at worst.

And I am concerned about the health ramifications of eating foods produced in soils treated by this toxin.  And because it can become airborne, I do not see a surefire method for completely avoiding the ingestion of it.

Bad job, California.  Bad job.

01 December 2010

Mary Frances Got It Right

I am probably going to get lambasted for this post.  But what the hell...it's only words, right?! :-P I think that there is real value in caring for others.  I take great comfort in feeding people, in helping them feel at home and welcome, and in producing for a moment a microcosm of the kind of world I would like to live in.  And here come the critiques:

The desire to care for others in a maternal fashion is merely the result of thousands of years of a certain narrative being forced upon women to keep them subservient.

If I want the kind of world where everyone is welcome, feels at home, is well feed and cared for qua individual, why don't I join the Peace Corps or run for office or do something (anything!) besides baking cookies and making cocktails?

Isn't this just the glorification of the commodifying of care?

And so on and so forth....

To those critiques I answer: maybe, I guess I could and absolutely.

So why am I okay with this? Let me start with critique number two.  MFK Fischer (and I am paraphrasing here) wrote in response to a similar critique that when she writes (or in my cases makes) food and drink she is also writing about love and affection and the need for it and the lack of it; That it is not out of a desire to escape all that is hard and cold in our world that one turns ones attention to the kitchen, but rather with the intention of making an impact on it, however small that impact may be.  There are many ways to heal the world's wounds.  This is one, and the one that feels most natural and effective to me.

Returning to number one, I suppose it may be true that what I feel deeply is really just thousands of years of training.  But it feels real to me and I cannot afford enough therapy to undo that much training, so there it is.

And lastly: Yes, it is, at root, a commodifying of care.  You come to my home or my bar and I give you a product.  That physical product cost something to produce and in the case of coming to my business I will have to charge you for it.  In the process of making the product and serving the product I show you care.  You are not charged for that care but it is part of our brand and nine times out of 10, you will tip based on that feeling.  Is this f***ed up? Yes.  Wouldn't it be better if commerce will not involved?  Probably.  But I want to live near my family and I want to make enough money to help support my not yet nuclear family, so I choose to engage in the commodifying of care.  It is up to you whether you believe that care is sincere or not.