Welcome to the blog for Colgate University's interdisciplinary course on food. This is the place to keep up with what students in the course are experiencing in their work at Common Thread Community Farm and through their everyday encounters with food.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

The Lost Appeal of Lobster

Around the holidays, it seems that everyone is looking to indulge - in their spending, their drinking, and their diets. Thus, it is time for champagne and filet mignon, and the ever-expensive seafood, particularly lobster. Like every writer-wannabe, I've acquainted myself with David Foster Wallace's essay, "Consider the Lobster," which he wrote for the magazine Gourmet in 2004. (Read here: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster).  In the essay, Wallace is covering the Maine Lobster Festival - supposedly of interest to the niche readers of Gourmet. But what he finds is nothing more than a glorified state fair - pounds and pounds of lobsters boiled alive and served with copious amounts of butter and potatoes and more butter. This supposed decadence is blind to the history of the lobster. It used to be a food reserved only for prisoners. Lobsters are the "insects of the sea." And the fantastic spectacle of the world's largest lobster cooker is only a slaughterhouse in a different shape. Lobster gets a reputation as the world's freshest food because you can kill it at home yourself. Wallace repeatedly returns to the image of a lobster, grabbing at the side of a pot of boiling water or clanging at the lid until eventually, the clanging stops. The lobster gives up. The boiling water has won. 

Wallace goes into much more detail about the lobster nervous system, the history of lobster, and other related information (at least related in a DFW sense...). He isn't attempting to go on some type of ethical tyrant, but is more questioning the validity of our ideas of gourmet or high class food. If we're concerned about the taste shouldn't we be concerned about the process? I'm ad-libbing here, but somehow this idea has stuck. No part of eating lobster has been appetizing to me over the past few months. I've developed a bizarre guilt, for some reason only about lobsters, as I've moved ever so slightly beyond the realm of ignorance. It's not so much the ethical reason for me either, but I think it's because of how I've been introduced to lobster, how it's been framed for me. I was always freaked out by the lobsters in the grocery stores - I would call them monsters and not get too close to the tank. I thought they were ugly, and even after they'd been boiled and turned a bright red, dressed finely on one of the fine china plates, I still found them ugly. I know that I really only ate lobster because I had been told to do so - because I was made to believe it was decadent and expensive and "Gourmet." 

It's interesting to question where our ideas of a supposed hierarchy came from, or where any of our beliefs came from at all. The recent trends toward lobster macaroni and cheese brings to mind an Italian maxim that the head of our language school in Venice taught us one day during a cooking class. She said that the Venetians know it is a sin to mix land and sea - you don't mix fish and meat, seafood and eggs or dairy products. It's supposed to show respect for where the food came from and for the people who went to get it. Since fishermen had to go to the Adriatic and meat and products from land animals had to come from the mainland, it was thought to be greedy for your meal to require two journeys. Lobster mac and cheese is removed from this maxim, and removed from the histories that made it possible. When you take a bite of lobster mac and cheese, what ideas are you ingesting?

cooking outside a culture

Though while I'm at school, my roommates cook a large variety of foods, what I would consider to be New-Age Fusion type foods - tofu, tempeh, cheese-free cheesecakes, vegetarian quiches - but at home, the majority of our food is Italian. Tomato sauces, garlic, basil, parsley, oregano, olive oil and balsamic vinegar are found in the majority of our meals. Desserts or holiday cookies are cream based or almond flavored. Thanks to my dad's Italian heritage, mom makes biscotti or fresh bread on Sunday mornings if she's in the right mood.

But it wasn't always that way for my mom. Her family is English and Irish, mostly, and her dinners growing up were more of a meat and potatoes type of cuisine, with Tuna-Noodle casserole during lent - a sin to my father's Italian taste buds. But through her interaction with his family's culture, her cooking repertoire and tastes expanded. She now gives her own secret recipe of pasta sauce with a brick of parmesan cheese as Christmas presents. The food my mother chooses to make now, what she has focused on perfecting over the past few decades of her life, is indicative of what she interacted with and where she settled down. Italian cooking was her expanding her own horizons.

But now, decades later as I'm becoming more conscious of the food I eat and what I learn how to cook, our world has expanded as have our food repertoires. When it's my turn to make dinner and I start off with Middle Eastern Tabouli, my family didn't exactly know what to make of it. (recipe found here: http://www.food.com/recipe/tabbouli-tabouli-tabbouleh-salad-parsley-salad-197922) Or if I tell my mom about the great soup my roommate made, she has never used half of the ingredients because it's a traditionally Korean dish. She lacks confidence in her use of curry. Clearly, the breadth of our cultural interactions have increased over time, as have our recipes.


Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Using my affinity for convenience for good...

This morning I laid in bed, eating a clementine - the small, easily peeled, seedless and orange-like fruit that comes in crates of a couple of dozen. I didn't feel too well so I was happy to get some Vitamin C in my system, hoping to ward off any illness.  But my easy morning serving of fruit was interrupted by an unwanted seed that I bit down on hard about half way through my clementine. I was mad at that seed.

But this is just an example of how spoiled we are in our current food system. That I assume that a food won't have seeds in it, despite it being the natural course of reproduction?

Granted, the clementine is not the result of biotechnological engineering, but cross-breeding over 100 years ago between the mandarin orange and the sweet orange, but my assumption goes to show how much we are conditioned to see food as for our convenience, rather than having histories of its own - even supposedly "natural" foods.

This focus on convenience is one of those things I learned throughout my childhood. As the child of two working parents, school lunches were filled with the seemingly radioactive fruit roll ups and prepackaged crackers that came with ease, not with effort. I find, in my adult life, some of this focus on ease persists no matter how hard I try to reconstruct how I think of food. I somehow still like to eat things that come from a box.

Instead of fighting my own nature, I've started to buy things that come from a box more consciously. Brands like Annie's  or other organic or good-for-you prepackaged or frozen food. I think to make these good food trends stick, we have to make some of them easy.