Potlucks make me nervous.
I’m always worried people are going to bring the same thing. Or that there won’t be enough food. Or that someone’s child coughed all over the salad bowl and I’m going to get a cold that lasts months. Or that I’ll be the only one who will have made something “special” and everyone else will just get the prepared veggie tray from grocery store. Or even worse, that someone will use fish sauce or shellfish and I’ll end up in an ambulance.
What’s funny is: none of these have ever come true at any of the potlucks I’ve been to. Most times I walk away with cozy feelings, new recipes, and a few plates of leftovers.
Needless to say, I experienced much of the same panic when I decided to turn Plate to Palate into a potluck. Instead of this issue having a theme, it would include all kinds of food writing that readers could experience like a potluck, an assortment of dishes to graze on and discuss before moving onto the next.
At first my call for submissions was met with silence. I bit my nails and obsessively checked my email. Then, all of the sudden, a week before the deadline, there appeared an abundance of submissions. The luck of the pot!—an expression that goes back quite awhile.
For the history lover, potlucks originated during the Middle Ages in Europe as meals for unexpected or uninvited guests. In the late 19th century, folks in the US used them to simplify menu planning and cut costs for communal meals.
But potlucks are more than budget friendly green bean casserole or new takes on pasta salad. Potlucks bring people together. And the food creates lasting bonds. Which is why this issue is so dear to my heart. At this literary potluck, I met some new food writers and reconnected with ones from my past.
Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert’s collaborative prose poem is robust and hearty. The made-from-scratch bit by Terri Griffith will leave you mesmerized by its zest. There’s a bit of the old world cuisine in Greg Byrd’s thoughtful piece. Jeannie Kidera brings home the bacon with her salty and spicy essay. A tribute to local flavor is found Arielle Greenberg’s enlightening narrative, and in Anna Kauffman’s contribution her humor walks us through a bunny-free meal. Katherine Willis Pershey rounds out the potluck with an essay that captures the cooking’s childlike quality. As always, it’s my hope that you’ll dive right in and enjoy each morsel this issue has to offer. Maybe you’ll even be inspired to submit your own food writing for upcoming literary potlucks here at Connotation Press.
Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds, LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press). Recent poems can be found in Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, The Rumpus, and Salt Hill. She currently lives in Boston, works at a software startup, and blogs at The French Exit.
Rooney Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author, most recently, of the memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (Arkansas, 2009)
and the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010). With Elisa Gabbert, she is the co-author of the poetry collection That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008) and the chapbooks Don't ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2009) and Something Really Wonderful (dancing girl press, 2007).
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SOME NOTES ON HUNGER by Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert
As an adolescent, she found the emptiness of hunger at least as satisfying as eating.
Every major religion expects its adherents to fast. Low blood sugar can lead to syncope, hallucinations, which are open to (mis)interpretation.
This restaurant specializes in food that fascinates rather than satisfies.
As a metaphor, “hunger” only works for recurring desires.
She hungered for someone to characterize their lust for her in terms of hunger; You look luscious, sugar, she wished someone would say to her. Delicious, scrumptious: these hunger words felt so slushy.
Hunger can seem as daunting as a threat as when it’s a physical sensation. Some people fear hunger to the extent that they carry snacks everywhere.
The best hunger feels hollow like primordial darkness.
When you feel hungry in the afternoon, before heading to the kitchen, ask yourself if you're actually thirsty, tired, sad, or unsung.
Self-denial is a positive. Keep repeating that to yourself. Keep contemplating the tastes of things that have no taste, like bliss or loneliness.
It's not recognition I hunger for; it's connection. But then there’s bitterness. The storied “general malaise.”
Children whose mothers lived through a famine during their first trimester have a greater risk of becoming addicts later.
Tuberculosis, once known as "consumption," made emaciation glamorous. A collective neurosis?
No food truly has “negative calories.” Though chewing sugarless gum can count as exercise.
Vegetarians report frequent dreams about meat. Some people are never more relentless than when they are pursuing something “wrong.”
Is it obvious to say, what you dream about reminds you what you're not really getting.
Terri Griffith’s writing has appeared in Bloom, Suspect Thoughts, Bust and in the anthologies Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class and Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak about Health Care in America, ART from ART: An Anthology of Fiction Inspired by Art. She is the literary correspondent for the popular contemporary art podcast Bad at Sports and co-hosts the online reading series The Parlor. Her novel So Much Better is published by Green Lantern Press.
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Take Two Calf’s Feet by Terri Griffith
Like art, pornography, and love, everyone knows the meaning of the term “from scratch.” And just like these other words, when pressed, the definition is as hard to wrangle. The term is contextual, shifting meaning depending on who says it and when. I’m an adept cook, but I’ve never made puff pastry. I don’t know anyone who has. Even The Barefoot Contessa uses frozen, but I’m certain someone out there has a French grandmother who would rather starve than pull a box of frozen dough from her freezer. You can often find a cast iron Dutch oven on my stovetop simmering chicken stock. I make salad dressing. I soak beans.
The meaning of “from scratch” was perfectly clear to me until one day when I was browsing the Culinary Arts Institute cookbooklet Dishes Mother Used to Make (1941). I wasn’t reading, just paging through looking at pictures. There was a photo of what I at first thought was dessert—star-shaped, gelatinous. The caption read: “This pretty mold of nourishing calf’s foot jelly is made by the same recipe as the one mother carried when she visited the sick.” It then became clear that I was looking at aspic. The revelation came not from the ingredient list or attendant photo, but somewhere in the middle of the directions when I realized that the calf’s foot in “Calf’s Foot Jelly” was the source of the gelatin. It was stupid not to understand this immediately, earlier cooks would have.
But I’m not an earlier cook. To me, gelatin in its virgin state comes from a small orange package of Knox. I should know better. Still I find it difficult to imagine the average contemporary cook rendering gelatin “from scratch.” Then again, what recipe from the last hundred years would have us boiling calf’s feet? Effectively, a box of Knox is from scratch, in that it is the least processed version of the ingredient available.
In the I Love Lucy Episode (1952) entitled “Pioneer Women,” after figuring out that Lucy has washed more than 200,000 dishes in the ten years since her marriage to Ricky, Lucy and Ethel decide they want automatic dishwashers.
Ricky (to Fred): Isn’t it amazing how spoiled modern women are?
Lucy: Spoiled?
Ricky: Yes, spoiled. You think you got to do a little work and you’re hysterical.
Lucy: A little work!
Ricky: Why honey, this is the electric age. All you have to do is flip a “swish.”
Lucy (to Ethel): We flip a swish.
Ricky: Your grandmother didn’t have none of these modern electrical conveniences and they not only washed the dishes, they swept the floor, and churned the butter, and baked the bread…they made their own clothes.
Lucy: Sure and where are those women today? …They’re dead!
So Lucy and Ethel bet Ricky and Fred that they can all live as people did in their grandmothers’ time. They choose the date 1900 as the cut off and if the women can keep to the “Gay 90s” then they can have the money for dishwashers. Although their conversation is framed around the idea of technology, the show comes down to a parsing the concept of “from scratch.”
You don’t even have to watch this episode to know what happens—Lucy and Ethel spend the rest of the show trying to make bread and butter. As you’ve probably guessed, they were unsuccessful. Lucy is unfamiliar with bread making and relies solely on a cookbook to guide her. At one point she describes to Ethel what kneading is. Precisely because she has no idea what she’s doing, she finds that she’s used thirteen cakes of yeast instead of three.
It’s Fred’s grandmother who churned butter, so we know from this that she must have lived somewhere rural with access to large quantities of cream. Making butter from store-bought cream doesn’t make good economic sense. As Ethel says sarcastically of the half or so pound of butter she has just churned, “Imagine, all that butter and it only cost me twenty three dollars and seventy-five cents.” And that was in 1952.
Ricky’s bread baking grandmother lives in Cuba, and as he mentions elsewhere his family are farmers. This is a significant difference not in era, but in culture. Lucy and Ethel live in New York City, in apartments. They are show people: the Mertzs, retired vaudevillians, and Ricky Richardo, a bandleader. In later episodes, the Richardos own their own nightclub. Both the Mertzs and the Richardos are childless. Even in 1900 it seems unlikely that these women would have baked bread, much less churned butter. Neighborhood markets were abundant, bakeries close, fresh dairy delivered daily. Judging by Lucy’s complete lack of knowledge about bread making, no woman in her family ever baked a loaf of bread anywhere in her vicinity. For women like Lucy and Ethel, meals comprised of fresh bread from the bakery and milk-man delivered butter were from scratch.
On the Food Network show Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, our hostess schools us in the assembly method of cooking. Her website states: “Sandra Lee’s trademark 70/30 Semi-Homemade philosophy combines 70% ready-made products with 30% fresh, giving everyone the confidence to create food that looks and tastes from scratch.” For Sandra Lee the definition of “from scratch” is rather generous. Lee asks us to reassemble food that has arrived in her kitchen already in varying states of process. The “homemade” in Semi-Homemade Cooking often does not point to what serious cooks would refer to “from scratch” ingredients. In her recipe for “Mexican-Style Macaroni and Cheese,” Lee has the cook combine boxed macaroni and cheese with “Mexican” seasoning, finally topping the whole thing with packaged, pre-shredded Mexican cheese blend. In this recipe I can only imagine that the “fresh” ingredient would be the cheese.
But to be fair to Lee, it is not food that purports to be healthy or nutritious. Lee is selling something else. She is selling love. We can see this from the cocktails and tablescapes she constructs each week. The subtext of every episode of Semi-Homemade Cooking is, If you take these ingredients and fabricate them into something recognizable as food, you will demonstrate to your family how much you love them. In this way, Sandra Lee’s recipes, however misguided we may think them, are successful.
Famed cookbook author and former owner of The Barefoot Contessa gourmet food store from which she takes her nickname, Ina Garten makes a living cooking from scratch and showing us how to as well. Her cookbooks are slick and appealing. Hardcover, with big, beautiful pictures, of healthful, lovingly prepared dishes. Although Barefoot in Paris is one of my favorite cookbooks and contains recipes for “French Lentil Sausage Soup” and “Palmiers,” it also contains recipes for things like “Roasted Beets,” which is simply…well, roasted beets. In her other cookbooks you can find similar recipes for “Roasted Winter Vegetables” and “Roasted Carrots.” These are fine recipes and suggest things like the addition of thyme or a splash of vinegar, but they are essentially recipes for dishes that don’t need recipes. These are simple foods, which is exactly the point Garten is trying to make—That wholesome ingredients and simple preparation are all that are needed to create an outstanding meal. Even in the picture of the humble roasted carrots, the carrots are seductive and slick with olive oil, sprinkled with pepper and grains of kosher salt large enough large enough to see in the photo. The photo is pornographic in its detail and explicit availability.
Like Lee, Garten is a contemporary cook. She does not expect her readers to make puff pastry, nor does she expect us to make our own mayonnaise, though she does recommend specific brands. Whether this is intended or not, this recommendation of store-bought products reminds home cooks that we are not making every element of this dish from scratch. What she does is strip away the layers of processed food that we have grown so used to eating that they have become nearly invisible. This has the effect of throwing the few remaining processed items into stark relief against their elemental brethren: carrots, beets, a whole roast chicken.
How do we define what is “from scratch” and what is processed? Is flour processed? Cheese? Sausage? Canned chickpeas? Organic free-range chicken stock? Unprocessed sausage is just meat and where’s the fun in that? And what’s the difference between the bag of pre-shredded, “Mexican” flavored cheese blend, and a ball of goat’s milk cheese from my local natural cheese maker?
This return to breaking things down into recognizable components is central to both The Slow Food and Localvore movements. But we see this idea reflected in the general consumer market as well. In a recent Tostitos ad, a woman in her twenties who is shopping for her upcoming party is perusing the chip isle while her thoughts run as a voiceover. She thinks about chips and how much she doesn’t like one of the potential guests. The ad ends with her looking at a brown, natural looking bag of corn chips, which contains thirteen ingredients. She then picks up a bag of Tostitos and the voiceover says, “White corn, vegetable oil, salt. Yeah, three ingredients is good.” Suddenly these Tostitos Scoops are recontextualized as wholesome solely because they are simple, made of ingredients we can all understand. In the 1990s “white corn, vegetable oil, salt” would have read as a list of foods to avoid.
I am sure there are those who mill their own grain, as I am sure there are those who make puff pastry from scratch, still for most people a bag of flour is an elemental ingredient. It’s our renewed desire to know what we are eating—where it comes from, the quality of ingredients, how it was produced—that makes a short ingredient list selling point. Whether or not home cooks will return to rendering gelatin from hooves has yet to be seen. It seems unlikely.
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WORKS REFERENCED:
Berolzheimer, Ruth. ed. Dishes Mother Used To Make. Chicago: Culinary Arts Institute, 1941. Print
Garten, Ina. Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2008. Print
—The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999. Print
—Barefoot Contessa Family Style. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2002. Print
—Barefoot in Paris. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2004. Print
. Web. 11 Feb. 2010. <http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=ilovelucy>.
. Web. 12 Feb. 2010. <http://brands.kraftfoods.com/knox/>.
“Pioneer Women.” I Love Lucy: The Complete First Season. Original Air Date, 31 Mar. 1952. Paramount, 2005. DVD.
. The Food Network. Web. 12 Mar. 2011. <http://www.foodnetwork.com/semi-homemade-cooking-with-sandra lee/index.html>.
. Web. 13 Mar. 2010. <http://www.fritolay.com/ tostitos/index.html#/ad-gallery/unwanted-guests>.
Gregory Byrd is Professor of English and Humanities at St. Petersburg College in Clearwater, Florida where he fishes and sails with his wife and daughter. His essays have appeared in American Motorcyclist, Good Old Boat and St. Petersburg Times. His poems have appeared widely, earning a Pushcart Prize nomination and the Yellow Jacket Prize. His second chapbook, At Penuel, is due out this fall from Split Oak Press. Greg will continue his search for a "clean, well-lighted place" in Spring 2011 when he will be a Fulbright Fellow in Albania.
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The Zen of Restaurants by Greg Byrd
What we remember as places—cafes, pubs, churches, park benches, first apartments, particular empty streets in foreign cities we’ve visited—have a lot more to do with whatever time we were there than with the places themselves. It took me a long time and a certain amount of disappointment to finally figure this out. The catalyst for my epiphany was the recent change of a favorite Italian restaurant to a place that sells pierogies. The Italian place, which had been a Chinese place before that and a Pizza Hut before that, was perfect. They made their own bread, had tortellini like I had in a London Alpine restaurant, played just the right sort of jazz for a romantic night out when our daughter was on a sleepover, and served good wine. The wait staff knew when to offer something or to check up on us and when to leave us alone because we were having one of those old and intimate married conversations that included no new information at all but allowed us to look into each others’ eyes and hear each others’ voices while sipping red wine. Perhaps we only went to this restaurant three times but we had soon chosen it as one of “our” restaurants, planned to come back periodically on Saturday nights and talk by candlelight. Then the pierogi sign went up—potato dumplings would replace tortellini and merlot. I’ve enjoyed both the Russian and Polish pierogi handmade by folks from those countries and they are delicious in all their variety, but it’s not the same somehow.
We mourned that restaurant’s metamorphosis for some weeks as we drove past it to take my daughter to school. We would talk about how all the good places were gone, drift back in conversation to our favorite seafood place which used to serve mullet and grits on paper plates and cheap beer in plastic cups, where we could eat fresh fried mullet for only a few bucks and chat with the owner about fishing in Florida years ago. Where the waitresses often sported sunburned arms from earlier that day on the boat hauling in grouper. The place is upscale now—signature homebrews for sale, fancy sauces, china plates, a new location, touristy prices. And underneath each mounted fish is its common name, to keep folks from out of town from asking “what’s that one called?” We still visit the new place but it’s with a sense of loss as we look at the fancy menu, the full bar, a brighter space than the old storefront. The owner and his wife are getting older, as we all are, and I’m happy they’re doing well. I hope they will be able to retire and live easily on their profits. Lives full of long hours on the boat and in the kitchen deserve no less. Still, we wonder where to go for fish and I often end up getting out my mullet net and heading to a bridge.
My wife and I were standing on St. Petersburg Beach on college reunion weekend a few years ago, waiting for a call from some of my old classmates. We had agreed to meet at the Harp and Thistle, a small Irish pub on the beach. Although we lived only forty minutes away, work and family had kept me from coming in for a pint or to listen to music for a few years. I had never given permission for a thought that the place might not be there, that it might have changed, but we drove past the little building wrapped by its deck and found nothing but a structure. Signs and potted plants, everything was gone. When my friends finally called, they figured that I, the local, had played a cruel joke on them. I should have known the place would have been gone though.
In 1984, the pub was a hangout for the theatre and literary types from Eckerd College (many of us were grandfathered in at 19 when the drinking age changed to 21). We would take whatever money we could scrape together and crowd the little tables near the stage, drink pints of Guinness and pitchers of Bass ale while Gerry O’Kane warbled out Irish songs like “Whiskey in the Jar” and “Black Velvet Band.” The girls with us would swoon at his Irish brogue and we would all sing along those songs that tasted like good beer. Before I met my wife, I dated a wonderful German girl who returned to the Saarland when her visa ended. I roomed that summer in the spare bedroom of another student, paying $100 rent and helping her clean out her deceased parents’ rooms and garage. That long summer I haunted the Harp like a Young Werther, drinking all my meager pay and requesting the brooding “Carrickfergus” so many times that Gerry eventually stopped even acknowledging the request.
When we began dating, my wife’s Scottish face, blond hair and green eyes fit in perfectly at the Harp and Thistle and we both spent our time at table or bar, downing pints while she sang Irish songs in her beautiful soprano that was way too good for pub singing. The year we were engaged, the owners’ eldest daughter and her sailor husband were divorced. Bob Packer, the owner of the pub, stayed rather to himself and left the socializing to his wife Pat who, resplendent in a fashionable hat and dress, would greet everyone and point out the open seats. When we finally got married, the Packers attended the wedding and after the reception we all caravanned to the Harp. As my wife strode in with her bridesmaids and I with my tuxedoed attendants, the packed crowd turned to watch her and a piper began to play the wedding march. A large table was emptied for us and we toasted and received toasts. I sang as much as I could remember of the double-entendred “Lark in the Mornin’.” That was 1986. It was perhaps five years later that Bob Packer died and a few more past that when Pat sold the place. I heard once that all of the artifacts—the paddles over the bathrooms saying Gents and Women in Irish (Fir and Mna, I believe), the pipes screwed to the wall behind the stage, shillelaghs, too many other things—were sold along with the name. It didn’t matter, of course. You can’t sell something like Irish music in a small space, singalongs, dirges for absent lovers, singing badly in front of your wife who is the most beautiful bride to grace a pub on a Saturday night, discussing James Joyce while drinking Guinness. You can’t sell that.
The transience of these wonderful places used to create in me a brooding obsession to find the perfect place, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Hemingway might say. When I travel I like to find a good coffee shop, like Tate Street Coffee House in Greensboro, North Carolina, which I must also give up now, for it will change, too, from when I drank strong coffee there and read Tennyson, Malory, Derrida, Foucault, Whitman, Hemingway. Since my awakening on this matter, I have adopted a zen approach to restaurants: The place and the experience are one; the person and the place are one; the place changes and the person changes. Change is one. You will have to find a new Italian place, a new Irish pub, a new funky coffee shop. So it is necessary to “be here, now” while eating, drinking, singing, listening to the clanging of plates or a soulmate’s old stories while her green eyes sparkle with all of the magical places she has ever visited.
Jeannie Kidera currently teaches creative writing and literature courses at Western Reserve Academy in Hudson, OH. She has an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Bowling Green State University and is working towards an MA in Literature from John Carroll University. She spent the summer of 2007 in the International Writers Program at the National University of Ireland, Galway, a city to which she returns as often as possible. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in such publications as Whiskey Island Magazine, The Madison Review, New Letters, and Mid-American Review.
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Cleveland Doesn’t Need LeBron to Bring Home the Bacon by Jeannie Kidera
I’ve been living in the Cleveland area for eleven years now – a fact that recently made me realize I should probably stop explaining “I’m originally from New York” when I introduce myself and finally embrace the title of “Clevelander.” And I’m more than okay with this because as much as I love my home state and hometown (Rochester), I’m proud to call Cleveland my home by choice. Most people in America completely underestimate Cleveland and have no idea just how much it has to offer its inhabitants. Forget LeBron. We still have Michael Symon, a man who should matter more to people who love this city than “he-who-should-no-longer-be-named” and not just because Chef Symon continues to bring nothing but positive attention to our town. The man also gives us maple-bacon ice cream. I’ll give you a minute to read that again… BACON ICE CREAM. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Why should Cleveland stop whining about LeBron? Because we still have bacon, and as my friends and I always say, “Bacon makes everything better.” Even the floundering Grey’s Anatomy.
I’d grown tired of this show over the past few years, until this season’s finale that is. Just one scene sold me on the show again…because it involved bacon. A doctor is shot and is “believed” to be on his death bed. What enlightenment does he frantically impart on the other doctor trying to save him? “Eat more bacon!! I don’t care what they say! It’s not worth it! Eat more bacon!” Now this is a show and an idea I can get behind. And there is no better place to follow such sage advice than Cleveland, Ohio.
You’re still thinking about the bacon ice cream aren’t you? Me too…pretty much all of the time. Let me explain. At Lola, his downtown restaurant on East 4th St., Michael Symon serves a dessert called the “6 A.M. Special,” made up of brioche French toast, caramelized apples, and maple-bacon ice cream. It’s all death-row, last meal worthy, but for me, it’s all about the maple-bacon ice cream. Oh, the maple-bacon ice cream! Take the best vanilla bean ice cream you can think of, the kind that with its perfect tiny flecks of deep brown vanilla bean lets your eyes sneak a peak at the pure quality of ingredients about to grace your tastebuds. Now, brace yourself, dancing with those vanilla flecks are bits of salty, rich bacon, divinely balancing the brackish with the sweet. Trust me, if you think peanut butter and chocolate is the combo to beat all other combos, please try this.
If a fearful palate will stop you from going to Lola’s to sample what is one of the best desserts I’ve ever had, try easing your way in at Symon’s B-Spot (Woodmere). B-spot serves a Vanilla Bean Apple Pie Bacon milkshake (with optional shot of bourbon). The apple pie flavor is more powerful than the bacon flavor in this one, so it’s a less scary first step. Though I can’t fathom being frightened of bacon…ever. I promise after a few sips you’ll be cheering “More bacon, sir! The only thing this needs is more bacon!” Then head to Lola, trusting me fully.
The next morning go to Lucky’s in Tremont where I’m convinced Heather Haviland has a team of elves and fairies helping her in the kitchen because everything she serves tastes like magic. Seriously, if magic had a flavor it would be Lucky’s Pecan Bacon (or the homemade Rueben, but that’s for another article). Did you know you can make bacon even better than it already is? Chef Haviland does. I’m not totally sure how she does it, but I know it involves thick bacon that manages to be just crispy enough to still be satisfyingly chewy, brown sugar cooked down to a sticky glaze, and coating of soft chopped pecans. And elves, definitely elves. It’s nutty, it’s sweet, and it’s meaty. It’s impossible to go there and not order it.
While you’re out on the west side, you might as well swing by Cleveland’s own Malley’s Chocolates to pick up a box of chocolate-covered bacon. Again, if you love the happy marriage of peanut butter and chocolate, you need to indulge in the passionate affair between chocolate and bacon. It may be sinful, but you just won’t be able to help yourself. It’s okay. Your conscience will understand. I will warn you though, Malley’s chocolate-covered bacon is a gateway drug that could lead you to Main Street Cupcakes (Rocky River and Hudson), where they have not one but two cupcakes that involve bacon: a French toast cupcake made with bacon and garnished with bacon bits (the “Big Breakfast” cupcake) and a chocolate cupcake made with bacon and topped with a shiny chocolate ganache and more bacon bits (the “Good Morning Bacon” cupcake). It’s all so good that as a Clevelander I’ve begun to empathize strongly with the drooling cartoon dog in the ‘Beggin’ Strips’ commercials. So, Miami, you can have LeBron. Just don’t take our bacon.
Arielle Greenberg is the co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic (1913 Press, forthcoming 2011), and author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005), Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbooks Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, 2009) and Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). She is co-editor of three anthologies: with Rachel Zucker, Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days (Iowa, 2010) and Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (Iowa, 2008); and with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque (Saturnalia, 2010). Twice featured in Best American Poetry and the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, she is the founder-moderator of the poet-moms listserv and is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago. Currently she is on sabbatical in Maine and is trying out Mark Bittman's Food Matters eating plan.
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Oh You Can’t Get to Heaven in a Cart from Whole Foods by Arielle Greenberg
You know the camp song, yes?
Oh you can’t get to heaven
in a cart from Whole Foods
‘Cause a cart from Whole Foods
gives me the blues
If you’ve read my last columns here [hyperlink?], you’ll know that I spent the last year and a half on sabbatical from my job, living the Good Life in rural Maine and researching the new back-to-the-land movement there. This research meant I met a lot of small organic farmers, and meeting small organic farmers meant I ate a lot of amazing quality local food. And because the area where I was conducting my research has been long associated with homesteading, hippies, tourists, and food politics, it also means that I was in a place where good food, and good food sources, abounded: weekly farmer’s markets in every small town, farm stands, many CSA choices, independent gourmet groceries, and food co-ops. Midcoast Maine is a foodie’s dream come true.
But now I’m back in the Midwest, in Evanston, an urban suburb—a city of its own, really—five minutes over the border from Chicago, and I’m suffering mightily. Chicago has plenty of fantastic restaurants, of course (and too many mediocre ones), but with two small children and a budget, we hardly ever get to dine out. Besides, we love to cook and love to eat at home. So what’s an Evanstonian grocery shopper to do?
Here are the most visible options for food shopping in my neighborhood:
1) A pretty nasty-ass chain grocery store, Jewel/Osco, huge and pallid, replete with partially hydrogenated oils and shrink-wrapping;
2) A dingy “health food store” in a strip mall that sells overpriced vitamins and a small selection of outdated natural foods; and
3) Two—count ‘em, two!—Whole Foods stores within a three mile radius.
As someone whose regular shopping list includes items such as organic cashews, quinoa flour, local organic Swiss chard, free-range eggs and the like, of course the “best” option for me is Whole Foods. But I hate shopping at Whole Foods. I hate it.
I didn’t used to hate it. There was a time when I loved it: loved the good-looking but often bland deli fare, the beautifully arranged piles of exotic produce, the bulk granola. This was in my younger days, when I lived in places not chic enough to have Whole Foods, so that visiting a Whole Foods was a special thing to do on vacation someplace fancy. Whole Foods represented status, luxury of a mildly crunchy variety. Over time, though, I figured out that much of the beautiful produce that Whole Foods sells is not organic; I know that most of it is not local. I know that I can’t get eggs from small farmers, or raw milk, at my Whole Foods. I know that expensive and beautifully packaged does not necessarily mean high quality, healthy, or yummy. I also know that not every “organic” or “green” company is an ethical company (did you read the New Yorker piece about the founder last year?). And I know that Whole Foods is not a community cooperative.
Before my stint in Maine, I had never had the experience of shopping full-time at a local food co-op. I’ve been an erstwhile co-op shopper for a long time, and I even worked at my undergraduate college’s tiny little one-room collective, and at Syracuse’s long-running Real Food Co-op when I was in grad school. I’ve always liked the food co-op model and found groovy kinship there. But the food co-op was never my single, or even primary, source for groceries. The co-op was more for fun, for a change, for a specialty item, or for convenience. This changed as my politics around food solidified, and by the time I hit my 30s and started a family here in Chicago, I would have been glad to shop full-time at a local food co-op, except there is none. There is no food co-op at all in the city of Chicago or its northern suburbs.
There is an independent health food store called New Leaf in Chicago not far from me, and I try to shop there when I can, but it’s small and hit-or-miss, and it’s hard to justify driving there when I can walk or bike to Whole Foods, or drive over in five minutes to get sugar. And New Leaf’s still not a co-op. There is no place where I can join—literally, as a member—a community of like-minded folks who care about food the way I do, by investing some of my money and/or time.
In Maine, I shopped almost exclusively at the Belfast Food Co-op, the state’s longest running co-op. The Belfast co-op is a good-sized, friendly place, with five or so different local bakers providing bread, local grass-fed beef in the deli, and a beautiful array of organic produce brought over in minivans and trucks from farmers who also shop there. There’s a good selection of wine from all over the world, and fish fresh off the boats. It’s a place that does not bag its merchandise at the checkout—you have to bring your own bag, pay for one, or recycle a cardboard box they have lying around. It’s also the town hub, where I always ran into people I knew and got to have a nourishing conversation. When I’d order my vegetarian chili at the cafe, the cashier knew my name and member number without asking for them. And the incredibly popular and over-posted bulletin boards outside have everything you need to know about the town: the contradances and free movie screenings happening in town, who is hiring a babysitter, who is selling a motorcycle or a composting toilet. Shopping at the co-op was good for my pocketbook, my stomach, my health, my planet and my soul. I loved it. My whole family loved it—my oldest daughter would often spend our entire time there reading on a beanbag chair in the kids’ book nook—and we went often, as much as three times a day, as an outing, errand, social activity, and way to pass the time.
Back in Chicago, I struggle to find something equivalent. Food shopping occupies a huge place in the life of our family, in terms of our time and money: there is probably no other single activity we do more often. So I want to ensure that my family does as little of our shopping at Whole Foods as possible, because the Whole Foods experience—from the utter lack, often, of local vegetables or eggs, to the rushed and urban feel of the place, to the corporate model—does not feel good for my soul.
My current hunting and gathering plan for our family’s food sources is as follows:
Saturdays, when I can, I go to a nearby missionary church (the only time in my life I have ever set foot inside a missionary church!) where they have a once-a-week co-op with a very small selection of natural bulk foods, applesauce, olive oil, and other pantry items (no produce, few perishables).
Tuesdays I place an order for raw milk and butter through an underground CSA, which I pick up on Monday evenings at someone’s home, the drop-off point, nearby. I don’t even know the identity or whereabouts of my farmers: such is the seriousness of the crime that is distributing raw milk in Illinois right now.
Wednesdays from July through November, I pick up a CSA share from Angelic Organics, an organic farm about two hours away that also provides a fruit share from a national cooperative of small producers. We first joined Angelic years ago, when it was a pretty new operation, but by now it’s semi-famous (the founder, Farmer John, is the subject of a documentary film and the author of a cookbook). There are hundreds and hundreds of members, and over thirty drop-off sites around Chicagoland. From November to January I’ll pick up a winter share at a local drop-off point on Wednesdays from yet another CSA, this one in Wisconsin. As with Angelic, I will probably never know these farmers personally.
And every Sunday, I order food to be delivered from Fresh Picks, a local business that acts as a distributor for various area farms, bakeries, and others, so that I can get local organic and mindfully produced tofu, eggs, rosemary, chicken, plums and lots of other things. Fresh Picks also offers non-local staples like organic bananas, and from February to June, that’s where I’ll get as much of my produce as possible. I order through a website, and have a set shopping list that I work from. They deliver to our house on Fridays. (I should mention that we live in an apartment and have no soil of our own, so can grow no food.)
This plan is elaborate and complicated and decidedly urban, much more so than I’d like. We don’t have time, really, to access all these different channels for our food, and it means a constant juggling act of time-bound ordering and pick-ups and week-ahead meal planning: it’s not as easy as just running to the store.
And despite all these efforts, there are still gaps—children’s vitamins, mineral water, rice noodles—that we can’t get through any of these channels, which means I’ll drive down to New Leaf sometimes, or try to hit the Asian food market or fancy homeopathic apothecary, but that often enough—probably at least twice a month--I’ll still have to enter Whole Foods. And each time I do, jamming my cart past strangers who don’t make eye contact, foregoing my plan to buy fish for dinner because there is nothing that looks safe or sustainable, paying too much for some box of crackers, I’ll feel a little weepy and think about the heaven that is Maine.
Some amazing places to buy groceries along the coast of Maine, north of Portland and up to Acadia National Park, in order from South to North (not all of them co-ops, but all delightful in their own ways):
Royal River Natural Foods, 443 US Route One, Freeport. An oasis of healthy options in the land of shopping outlets.
Morning Glory Natural Foods, 60 Maine Street, Brunswick. Good selection in a charming college town. Try the local blueberry milk in the little glass jars!
North Creek Farm, 24 Sebasco Road, Phippsburg. A destination: very much out of the way, an enchanted place with a wacky, fascinating selection of gourmet and local foods, some from their own saltwater farm in season, and a cafe that serves the most delicious sandwiches, which you can eat in the fairy gardens surrounded by their free-range chickens.
Bath Natural Market, 36 Centre Street, Bath. Cozy little co-op-style store generally out of tourist range.
Rising Tide Community Market, 323 Main Street, Damariscotta. Newly expanded, bright and clean co-op with sweet posters of the farmers who grow the veggies you buy.
Treats, 80 Main Street, Wiscasset. Fancy little store with excellent baked goods, coffee, extensive wine and cheese selection, imported foods and pottery.
Good Tern Co-op, 750 Main Street, Rockland. Nice size and selection, especially of local dairy products.
The Market Basket, Route 1 and Route 90, Rockport. Long-standing and beloved gourmet grocery and deli, with excellent muffins and fancy take-out items. For the preppie set, but excellent quality.
Farmer’s Fare, 3 Cross Street, Rockport. Chic array of Maine products and produce plus a restaurant in a large, hip-rustic space.
Belfast Food Co-op, 123 High Street, Belfast. Maine’s oldest and largest food co-op, also serves breakfast and lunch. The real deal.
Rooster Brothers, 29 Main Street, Ellsworth. High-end coffee, fabulous cookware store, plus an interesting selection of imported teas, snacks, and sweets. Some meat, no produce.
John Edwards Market, 158 Main Street, Ellsworth. Yup—just up the street from Rooster Brothers, a more traditional health food store, with a good bulk section.
Blue Hill Co-op, 4 Ellsworth Road, Blue Hill. A sweet little co-op with a small cafe section and a great selection of teas, plus the only place I know of to buy small-batch, locally harvested seaweed.
A&B Naturals, 101 Cottage Street, Bar Harbor. Small but packed with healthy stuff and excellent baked goods. A great option in otherwise touristy Bar Harbor.
Anna Daly Kauffman is a Copy Writer and freelance rabbit enthusiast. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Bowling Green State University and currently lives and works in Bowling Green with her husband and two pet rabbits.
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Why I Can’t Eat Rabbit by Anna Daly Kauffman
My husband doesn’t like green olives. He gags at the thought of them and won’t touch a piece of pizza if a single green olive from my half creeps into his territory. My dad is allergic to shellfish and steers clear of most seafood dishes for fear that a piece of shrimp might find its way into his dish. Many people have food restrictions due to taste preference or allergy. I have just one food preference, but it’s not for either of those reasons. I can’t eat rabbit.
Some people are dog people. Some people are cat people. Some people are people people. Luckily for all these folks, their animal and human counterparts aren’t actively consumed in the U.S. I’m a rabbit person. My lot is different.
I’m not entirely sure what originated my love for bunnies, but it probably had something to do with being in the hospital for an ear surgery when I was 9. There was a black lop-eared rabbit named Buddy that hopped around the children’s play area. I was told that I could go pet him when I was well enough and seeing that bunny became my primary motivation for recovery. If I felt dizzy or if my head was pounding, I would think of Buddy and drink my requisite hospital chicken broth so I could be cleared to leave my room.
My affection for rabbits has only intensified with age. I’m 25 now and I not only own two rescued pet rabbits, but I also have a kinship for the great number of wild rabbits that call Bowling Green, Ohio home. Since Bowling Green has
cracked down on stray animals, the city’s wild rabbit population has far fewer natural predators to contend with for survival. I understand that this may be tremendously irritating to backyard vegetable gardeners, but for me, it is Heaven on Earth.
While I love the wild rabbits in my neighborhood and call each of them by name (seriously), I’m not naïve enough to miss the fact that rabbits are regularly hunted and eaten. I’m well aware of this and I’ve always known that although I could never personally kill or eat a bunny, others would. Mostly, this is something I try not to think about. Recently I realized however, that rabbit consumption can pose a significant social problem for me.
My husband and I made plans early in the summer to go to a gourmet restaurant with some new friends of ours. Reservations were made a month in advance and since the menu changed according to the availability of seasonal ingredients, the only assurance about the food we would eat was that it would be of exceptional caliber. As the date of this outing grew closer, so did my feelings of anxiety and fear. There was a very real possibility that rabbit would be on the menu. Would I be emotionally OK sitting across a table from someone eating rabbit? It seemed incredibly audacious to ask my dinner mates to consider my emotional well-being when making their food choices. It also seemed terrifying. Would they take me seriously – or would they order rabbit anyway as a seemingly funny joke at my expense?
This internal panic culminated in tears when I checked the restaurant’s website on the afternoon of our evening dinner date. Rabbit was indeed on the dinner menu. I considered backing out but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to eat incredible food and more importantly, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to form meaningful friendships. I anxiously pressed on. After informing our friends of my mild panic they immediately assured me that they would not choose a rabbit dish.
I had a wonderful time that evening drinking wine and eating obnoxiously delicious non-rabbit dishes. While I knew rabbit was cooked and eaten in my proximity, it surprisingly didn’t bother me. This was probably because the company I was with cared enough about my enjoyment to free me of my food anxiety. Without seeing rabbit on a plate in front of me, I was emotionally free to enjoy the people who were sitting around the table with me.
Although I ate foods I’d never tasted and had my mind completely blown by flavor combinations, I learned more about myself and friendship that evening than I did about food. My love for rabbits is beyond quirky; it is a serious personal reality that has genuine emotional effects on me. Rather than shy away from who I am, I need to be up front about my bunny love. Good people will respect that. Fortunately, most foodies are excellent people.
Katherine Willis Pershey is the Associate Minister at First Congregational Church of Western Springs, Illinois. Her collection of essays about ministry and motherhood is forthcoming from Chalice Press in 2012. She blogs at .any day a beautiful change. (http://www.kewp.blogspot.com)
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Le Petit Sous Chef by Katherine Willis Pershey
I could easily rattle off a month’s worth of childhood meals. Most of them originated from some sort of box, with a few home-cooked gems thrown in on weekends. Once, my mother made a low-fat lasagna recipe she’d seen on the evening news; though we all agreed it was fantastic, she complained that it took too long to cut all the vegetables. Cooking was never her bailiwick, and returning to her career as a librarian certainly didn’t alchemize meal prep into an enjoyable hobby. Her goal was simply to get reasonably healthy food onto five dinner plates before we had to dash out of the house for piano/dance/trombone lessons. Nowadays she cringes at the sodium-laden food she fed our family. While she’s no foodie – you couldn’t pay her to try sushi – you also couldn’t pay her to eat so much as a spoonful of Dinty Moore beef stew.
Since very little actual cooking happened in my household, I can count my childhood experiences of helping cook meals on one hand. I don’t know what I was doing while my mother was boiling water for spaghetti – probably watching the original Electric Co. with my sisters.
If you don’t cook as a kid, you have to learn to cook as an adult. I’m slowly doing this. After believing for far too long that my natural creativity (did I mention all those music lessons?) translates directly into the kitchen, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that my roast chicken tastes better if Mark Bittman told me how to cook it. Still, I like the stuff that starts with exactitude and ends with a flourish. Pizza, for instance. I scrape my knife across the tops of the measuring cups for the greatest precision, and then I dump loads of chopped toppings willy-nilly over the bed of dough and pesto.
Of course, there isn’t time to make pizza from scratch on a weeknight. At least the frozen section at Trader Joe’s beats the unsavory Salisbury steaks in the refrigerator of my childhood. Yesterday’s yellow mac and cheese is today’s gorgonzola gnocchi. It’s a brave new world.
But I do have help with dinner preparations, and I don’t just mean my pal Joe. I have a sous chef who is remarkably eager to assist me. While there are some basic kitchen tasks she can’t do yet (i.e., use knives), she stirs, pours, and paints olive oil onto eggplant slices with such exuberance it makes the whole thing feel like playtime. She is my daughter, Juliette. She is two-and-a-half.
My goal? That she won't even remember a time before she was cooking dinner with her mama.