I, Foodie

Ever since I've become acquainted with the term "foodie" it is something I would only use as a pejorative. To me it has always represented the worst of people who claim to live life according to the dictates of their pallet and stomach - prestigious chef seeking, organic obsessesd, clueless in the kitchen and always looking for the next hot trend. Food as status and a way to feel smug while nibbling on some locally-sourced canape at a Slow Food meeting. Anytime I've been called foodie I've taken offense, and subjected the person who threw the term at me to a rant of varying length and vitriol on why that doesn't apply and why foodies are scum. So it was quite a blow to the ego when I finally had to acknowledge that perhaps the term foodie could be applied to yours truly.

While reading Tyler Cowen's "Six Rules for Dining Out" he blithely referred to himself as a foodie. As a personal hero of mine in both the food and economic spheres I wondered how he could embrace such a term. Then reality smacked me upside the head.

It's like I'm struggling to climb a hill in San Francisco on my fixie, wearing skinny jeans on my way to some concert at Bottom of the Hill, but would take offense if called a hipster. To everyone else in the world the aforementioned creature is a hipster, yet they would reject the label.

If Mr. Cowen can use the term foodie while maintaining his credibility, integrity, and general awesomeness, perhaps I should get off my high horse and acknowledge that I'm a foodie. So fuck it. Next time someone calls me a foodie I'll embrace the term, point out my metaphorical skinny jeans and wax nostalgic about the Chef's Tasting. And give them a rundown of the salami that should be ready pretty soon from my curing fridge.

More on Organics

To follow up a previous post on organics and local food, here is a great video (beyond the fact that the interviewer is lisping libertarian hater Jacob Weisberg) on renowend chef Dan Barber and his feelings about organics:



My feelings are largely the same as his, but I am a little skeptical about pesticides "deadening" the soil. Every analysis of organic vs. non-organic food has shown no difference in nutritional content. What it really comes down to is taste - the carrot from the farmer down the road growing a special variety is going to taste better than the supermarket commercial variety organic carrot, whether or not it is technically "organic."

Thai Basil Ginger Sausage

This recipe is one I came up with myself and have been making quite a bit of recently. In the interest of recording it for posterity, here it is:

1600 g boneless chicken thighs, skin on

50 g garlic

50 g ginger

30 g Thai basil

1/2 cu fish sauce

1/3 cu rice vinegar

Combine in the right order and get this:

Ready to cook!

Ron Paul

Probably the best post I've read on the matter of Ron Paul's spectacularly racist newsletters.

Localism, Immigration, Economic Growth and Organics

The event that prompted this post happened a few weeks ago at the Mountain View farmers market. I had been meaning to write about it for a while and finally got it in a publishable form today.

Before I recount the event, a short history of organic agriculture:

For most of human history all of our produce and meat was organic. We were short, stunted and disease-ridden. Then modern, large-scale agriculture was developed. And most people stopped starving as children. Next thing you know we have 7 billion people on this earth.

Which is why I tell this story:

I was in line at the market, waiting to buy a head of califlour. The booth was Swank Farms from Watsonville, CA. A fine farm, offering nice produce for fair prices. At least as far as a kid from Carrot Top Farm's fecund lands thinks being charged for anything veggie-wise is fair. I was indignant about the price I got charged for my cranberry beans at the previous stand but sucked it up and tried to remind myself that the ability to pick near-unlimited amounts of fantastic produce for free is not a normal state of being. But I digress...

The customer ahead of me was up and stepped to the scale, handing his haul to the farmer.

"Hola, como estas," he said to the vendor. Without missiong a beat, the farmer replied with a "Namaste," and they both chuckled.

The notable thing here was that the customer was Indian, the farmer Mexican and based on their bantering regularly conducted business. Based on their fairly heavy accents, presumably immigrants. For some reason this got me thinking about the fact that industrial agriculture in the west has helped the creation of a society rich enough that it would attract immigrants from other lands who end up at a pricey farmers market where most of the vendors are organic. I think this really illustrates the limits of the local/organic movement that is so popular in northern California.

To feed a growing world population, and allowing enough people in developing nations to get off farms for economic growth to happen, large scale, non-organic farming is essential. It's only a rich society (and an agreeable climate like northern California's) that allows the luxury of choosing to eat locally and organically. That or you are a subsistence farmer forced by circumstances to live that way.

There is nothing I love better than great, super-fresh veggies grown right down the road. But significant parts of the local food movement seem to believe it is realistic that we go back to having two thirds of the population farming. Feeding the world is going to require pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and GMO crops. That's why I follow this rule - don't be too local and fuck organics unless they taste better.

Life Is Fleeting

RIP to someone I've know and respected for most of my life. If your family is what you leave behind, your legacy is spectacularly secure.

Update: Just got this article emailed to me.

Adventures In Ricotta And Pesto Making In Late Fall

While I generally am a fan of my apartment, one aspect of it really blows. The patio gets no sun after late September as it is blocked by the building as the sun's angle declines. This untenable situation has led to a happy discovery - namely that my room is a near-perfect greenhouse. I've had my planter box with basil sitting on my windowsill for the last couple months, and the basil (both Thai and Genovese) has been doing gangbusters. With my blinds becoming impossible to close, I decided that today was a day to knock my Genovese plant down to size. This is what I was dealing with:

I'd been meaning to make my own ricotta for a while, and decided a creamy pesto was the perfect vehicle to try it out. It was amazingly easy and makes buying the crap you get in the supermarket completely unecessary. Learn how here. Below are the curds draining.

I made some fresh pasta,

smoked a cigar while the dough chilled,

then combined the basil

that was almost first-of-the-summer good with this Cali extra-virgin olive oil (Corto Olive Co., highly recommended) I got today at Costco with the ricotta, some Parmesan, pecorino, toasted pine nuts and a little salt in my food processor. I made an executive decision to skip the garlic as I wanted to let the basil flavor take center stage. If you do want at add the garlic to a ricotta-based pesto, roasting it first takes the edge off and really complements the rest of the ingredients nicely. I finished it with a pat of butter and a splash of the pasta water to cook it slighly. The results were fantastic:

I got another planter box started today with some sage and arugala, and am already excited about getting the new box going. I leave you with this completely random picture of my brother that I feel really captures his true essence: