Correlation, causation, snack-cakes

Apropos to all this foodie business...

I recently read this article in The Atlantic about the rise of obesity in America. This is how it starts:

In 1948, Congress doled out $5 billion to Europe in the first installment of the Marshall Plan, the World Health Organization was born, a simian astronaut named Albert I was launched into the atmosphere (he died), and doctors in Framingham, Massachusetts, an American everytown that once was a seat of the abolitionist movement, began a pioneering study of cardiovascular disease. Its initial results helped persuade the American Heart Association, in 1960, to push Americans to smoke fewer cigarettes and, a year later, to cut down on cholesterol. Today, thanks to a long-running public-health campaign, Americans have lower blood pressure and cholesterol, they smoke less, and fewer die from cardiovascular disease. In fact, from 1980 to 2000, the rate of deaths from cardiovascular disease fell by at least half in most developed countries.

Would that we had had similar success battling obesity.

The article goes on to tell the familiar story of the alarming increase in overweight Americans, from 45% of the total population in 1960 to 68% in 2008. It lays out the various problems in determining why the so-called obesity epidemic is happening and possible methods of curbing it. But what struck me was that opening paragraph. Read that passage again, skimming for content and making a few obvious extrapolations: in the 40s and 50s, Americans are smoking like chimneys... in the 60s, people finally wise up to lung cancer and start to cut down on smoking... around that time, they also start getting chubbier.... Today, Americans are probably the most stringent non-smokers of all the developed Western nations. We're also the fattest. Um. Wait.

I've seen scores of articles on obesity that compare today's food industry to the tobacco industry of yore -- manipulating consumers through advertising, tinkering with the addictive properties of their products, shadily shilling to kids and minorities. But nowhere have I seen anyone discuss the very glaring fact that heavy smoking drastically curtails appetite, both physiologically and physically, giving people less time to snack. Could it be that all this talk of increased sedentary lifestyles, overgrown portions, high fructose corn syrup, etc., are all missing the point? Could it be that, since the coming of modernity, we denizens of the developed, industrialized world are simply bored and looking for a quick, relatively cheap drug to keep us riding a dopamine high, and various mass-producing industries are happy to feed that need? Could it be that nicotine once did the trick, and now it's soda and family-sized Cheetos bags? Everyone loves to cite the "French paradox" as some amazing mystery of modern dieting. How is it that a society priding itself on staples like cheese, baguettes, and macarons can have the slimmest women in all of Europe? Is it because they have a happier, healthier, granola-crunchier relationship to their food? All signs point to not really. But, they sure do smoke a lot!

Anyway, I don't think I'm saying anything super revelatory, but it's strange that there hasn't been more publicized discussion of this. Given that recent efforts to cut down on smoking in various puff-happy parts of the world -- for instance, Japan -- have coincided with sudden mysterious spikes in obesity levels in those countries, speculation invites itself. What if, rather than plastering restaurants with calorie counts or encouraging unrealistic levels of athleticism in the general population, the solution to this "epidemic" can only come with the invention of a new drug, addictive and short-term euphoric but not detrimental to health? A real-life soma, perhaps? Scoff at the dystopian element if you will, but mark my words...

Navel grazing pt. 2: lunch

A friend of mine once said, of the weird and unpalatable-to-Westerners traditional Czech foods like lardy pork and fried cheese -- "It's a starvation culture. Any place that's experienced hunger is going to have a different relationship to food."

That idea struck an unintentionally personal chord in me. In college, I went through a year-long experimental phase of eating no more than 1,000 calories a day. After losing 40 pounds and ending up the spitting image of an Auschwitz internee, my attitude to food had, quite fittingly, begun to resemble that of the Eastern European starvation culture from which I originate. Suddenly, something like chopped raw onion or cabbage was no longer just an ingredient -- with a little seasoning, it could actually function as a meal. More importantly, no scrap of leftover could go to waste. After years of mocking my grandmother and mother for their propensity to polish off foods that had obviously already gone south, I found myself blithely biting into soft, acrid fruit or hunks of stale, mold-speckled bread, all in the name of stubborn starvation-induced frugality.

A rather grim beginning for a lighthearted food blog entry, I realize, but this really does confirm for me that taste is nothing more a mechanistic response to environment and has the ability to get radically rewired. Though I'm fortunately no longer pathological about it, I still find that my attitude to food has a decidedly peasanty aura: when I cook, I like to make big, hearty meals that can get repurposed into creative leftover cuisine, and my favorite dishes tend to be eat-again things like soups, stews, and casseroles. I'm also obsessive about not letting groceries go bad, but actively tailoring my cooking to make use of anything that's in danger of entering expired territory. Lunch is the perfect example of this in action. It's a liminal meal, and as such is forgiving of a bit of derivativeness from the night before. When I cook during the week, my lunches tend to be comprised of dinner leftovers, sometimes hastily refurbished¹, and sometimes as-is hunks of meat, fish, and veggies. On weekends, though, lunchtime is the time for quick and tasty pantry-clearing, ranging from a simple pasta sauce concoction², to the more time-consuming strata or panade³.

At the midpoint of sophistication between these two culinary poles stands the exotic-sounding but actually stupidly easy and rapturously delicious Spanish omelet, otherwise known as frittata. I love frittata. It's the dish I make most frequently, and the thing I could happily eat every day, if the thought of skyrocketing cholesterol didn't give me slight pause. The greatest thing about frittata is that you can put literally anything in it -- and as much or as little of that thing/things as you want -- and it will be filling and tasty and good. All you need is some eggs and cheese, and the rest can be totally improvised. The basic recipe is this: take anywhere from 4 to 8 eggs (I usually use 5 for a 2-person meal), beat them up in a bowl with some seasoning and grated hard cheese of your choice, and throw them in an oven-proof pan along with whatever other ingredients you want to use (cooked veggies, meats, toasted bread cubes, herbs, greens). On medium heat, shovel the mess around the pan until the eggs begin to form curds but are still pretty wet on top (~3-5 min). Top with a generous handful of shredded cheese and pop under a broiler for a few minutes, or until the cheese on top is golden-brown and the omelet has pulled away from the pan. Let cool slightly. Take a moment to appreciate your tremendously privileged, well-fed position in life. Eat.

1 Take: a handful of shredded roast chicken bits, the last of the arugula beginning to wilt and cling to the bottom of the bag, the wedge of cheese that spared my knuckles from being brutalized by the grater. Make pasta, reserve cup of hot cooking water. Put arugula on bottom of large microwave container, finely dice cheese & throw on top of arugula. Pour hot pasta & water on top of greens and cheese, add a pat of butter, chicken & a pinch of preferred herbs & spices. Close container, shake, toss in school bag and waltz out the door.

² The last roasted red pepper and the marinating liquid in the jar (I've since learned to make them yourself: highly recommended) + leftover soy chorizo from Vegetarian Wednesdays (new household tradition) + 3 cloves of garlic, minced + generous dousing of paprika & cayenne + olive oil and a med-heat pan = delicious quick pasta sauce.

³ Technically, this was my dinner last night and as such does not belong in the "lunch" category, but I still love my version of this recipe too much not to share: Take that half a loaf of stale bread you've got lying around your pantry/freezer, leftover cooked veggies (I used marinated & roasted broccoli, red pepper, eggplant, zucchini, and sweet potato), pantry protein of choice (a can of chickpeas), any other deliciousness you might have in reserve (a hunk of leftover polenta), a cup or so of shredded cheese (Parm & aged cheddar), and some stock. Cube bread, drizzle with olive oil, toast. Layer on bottom of 2-quart casserole dish, add layer of veggie filling, layer of cheese, and another layer of bread-filling-cheese. Top with hot stock, bake covered in 350-degree oven for 45 minutes, uncover & bake for another 15, top with more cheese & stick under broiler for another few minutes or so. Let cool 10 min, garnish with a little chopped greenery (basil) and dig in.

The poetics of space

A house that is not my house. A bed that is not my bed. A soap that is not my soap. An eight-point compass with the directions rearranged. A globe that is not my globe. A fistful of waxy colored candy that is not my fistful of waxy colored candy. A sense of longing that is not my sense of longing. An ice-chip fisheye that is not the playing marble of my wayward youth. An orange peeled on a plate. A needle that is not my needle. A crooked door that is not my crooked door. A hush that is not my hush.

My biggest problem is these lyrical limbs, doctor. They're forever tangentially stretching, unfolding to encompass the expanse of one discrete space, yet always forgetting that even in the narrowest of confines, there exist hairline fissures deeper than ocean trenches, garbage pails more cornucopic than banquet halls, viscous stains more commodious than the cosmos. And always always always, at the moment of maximum contact, in the cradling embrace of the wood and plaster nook in the fleshy, fibrous crook, there's that rough slap from the back of the turned-away mirror, like the reddish blackness of the inner lid. You might say it's the place you can't see that you see from, (-- though you could say that about the overexposed negatives of someone else's vacation photos), the point at the fulcrum that ensures the pivot of the hinge, (the double-blind taste tests of someone else's dreams...) the desperate jump that proves the paltry surmountability of the abyss. (A door that is not a door to a house that is not a house.) I guess you might say that's the place I've been looking for, doctor, through the endless tessellated refractions on the right side of the mirror. Help me find it. That elusive blind alley where sight begins.

Navel grazing

Let's get serious for a moment and talk about a subject near and dear to my heart: food. Now, on a scale ranging from Kobe Beef And Quail Egg Connoisseur to Ketchup-stained Fried Food Schlub, I'm quite solidly in the middle. a) I'm more intrigued than horrified by KFC's Double Down (though I hear it's disappointing even for the non-gourmand). b) Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits is one of my favorite eating establishments, ranking easily among 400-dollar dinners at top urban eateries. c) I've been known to consider the following as meals in themselves: chunky peanut butter from the jar; an entire papaya, seeds and all; a can of refried beans. But, I also appreciate delicacies generally reserved either for the abjectly starving or the finer palates of the gustatory bourgeoisie: organ meats, fish eggs, mollusks.

That's why I was equal parts titillated and chagrined to read this, a week-long food diary by the New York Times' new food critic, Sam Sifton. Titillated, because the eye-popping calorie counts and daily drink totals redeem my own tendency toward hedonistic overconsumption. Three beers and a tumbler of bourbon? In the SSB household, we call that a Tuesday! Chagrined, because the people who commented on the entry were irascibly self-righteous. How can you eat like this? How can you drink so much? Don't you know that if you don't eat more vegetables/eat less bread/cut out alcohol and coffee and dairy and sugar... you'll DIE?!? Of all the myopic idiocy that happens online, it's incredible to find such a stupefying sense of moral outrage applied to the fucking food diary of a fucking food critic.

Since I'm not a professional eater, I won't bore all two of my readers with a similar project, a week's worth of food, calorie, and exercise totals (let's just say that, calorie-wise, I'm probably not all that far below Sam, scaled to relative size and gender). But I will bore you with the highlights of my typical daily meals, starting with my favorite and most important meal of the day: breakfast!

I love breakfast. If left to my own devices, I tend to wake up ridiculously early, and, generally, the thought of breakfast is what does it -- both because I have a fairly humming metabolism and tend to wake up starving, and because I have a hopeless caffeine addiction and always wake up NEEDING coffee. I love breakfasts out -- decadent eggy dishes, bagels and smoked fish, sides of sausage, bacon, homefries, and biscuits. I also love unconventional breakfast choices, like toast smeared with hummus, or goat cheese, or mashed avocado. But lately, I've settled on a pretty good, cheap, and easy basic breakfast formula. It is as follows:

Coffee

For the past four years, I've been making my morning cup of joe in one of these babies:



The technical term is "cezve" (pronounced "jez-vuh") and in the former Soviet Union, this is still how most people make their coffee. You dump in a few tablespoons of grounds, cold water, and maybe some sugar, put it right over the flame of a gas stove (electric works, too), and let it go till it boils (my little one-cup cezve takes exactly two and a half minutes). Take it off the stove, throw a tablespoon of cold water over the top to bring the grounds down, let it sit for a few minutes, and presto -- Turkish coffee. I'm no coffee snob, but I have no idea why this hasn't caught on yet in the States over the stupid, wasteful dripper thing. I've had French press coffee, so beloved of the hipster coffee-teriate these days, and it doesn't really taste any better. If it's the presence of grounds in your cup (horrors!) that bothers you, you can always strain it through a tea sieve before serving. Plus, cleaning a French press looks complicated. To clean a cezve takes ten seconds at the most: all you do is dump out the sedimentary grounds and rinse it under the tap. You don't even need to scrub. Hot new elite coffee thing in five...

Oatmeal with Parmesan

I got the idea for this somewhat unorthodox creation from cheese grits, which are among my favorite Southern foods, as well as cheesy polenta, a staple of the nouveau highbrow Southern cooking trend. If you can put cheese in other grains with such overwhelming success, I reasoned, then why not put it in oatmeal, that homely healthy breakfast staple? Don't get me wrong; I love oatmeal in all its forms. It's another one of those things I grew up with in the former USSR (hrm, pattern...): every morning, my dad would fix me a big bowl of oatmeal and butter, and every morning I'd burn my mouth because I couldn't wait till it cooled to dig in (hrm, another pattern...). Then, when we moved to the States, we discovered the relative benefits of Quaker Instant Microwaveable Oatmeal packets. Pros: It takes only a few minutes and one dish to make, and it's got a ton of sugar and weird freeze-dried fruit -- the cornerstone of any American teen diet. Cons: By ten o'clock, you're starving again. Having returned to the more wholesome "old fashioned" Quaker Oats in college, I could still never quite satisfy some inherent craving for a more rib-sticking bowl... until one day, midway through 3-minute microwave spin cycle, I threw in a heaping spoonful of ground Parmesan, stirred, and popped it back in the oven. The result was better than buttered oatmeal, or oatmeal cooked in milk or cream. It was creamy, cheesy, savory, and absolutely delicious. To this day, it's my go-to breakfast. I've experimented with various cheeses -- everything from lowfat cheddar (gross) to crumbled feta (doesn't melt right), but Parmesan is far and away the best. This dish will run you about 200 calories with two tablespoons of parm and your regular half-cup oatmeal serving size. You'll also get some protein, calcium, and possible weird looks from your significant other. Ignore. Enjoy.

Apple

Quite simply the single greatest fruit on the planet. Cheap, portable, filling, delicious. Living in places like Seattle, Ithaca, and Boston, I've been continually spoiled by excellent seasonal apple variety. I tend to go for Cortlands, Empires, Macs, and Honeycrips. Braeburns and Galas are okay, too. I get into Granny Smith moods sometimes, but I have terrible teeth and cringe when I sense the acidity eating away at my already paper-thin enamel. I have to be pretty desperate to eat a Red Delicious, but I'll still do it over no apple at all. Unless I'm in a very public place, I eat them whole -- skin, core, seeds, and all -- which means that anyone I've ever loved has had to put up with finding lone, disembodied apple stems strewn about their floors, desks, beds. Apples! The best!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my baseline breakfast.* Simple, filling, nutritious, and just a touch decadent. That's how I roll.

Tune in next time for Lunch and Dinner!

*I say baseline because it's rarely just that for the entire morning. I'm partial to crack-of-dawn five-mile runs, which means that around 9 or 10 o'clock, I need a caloric supplement to make it to noon -- some yogurt or cottage cheese right out of the tub, a spoonful of peanut butter, a (cough) blueberry cake donut from Dunkin Donuts (my favorite!). I am a hundred and twenty pounds of lean, mean eating machine.

La Nouvelle Orleans n'existe pas

So, this past Sunday, HBO's big New Orleans-based series Treme premiered, to much fan-fare and excitement. I don't have HBO; I didn't watch it. But, in this postmodern day and age, I'd say that makes me most qualified to write about it. Right? Pace Baudrillard? Naturellement!

Having seen the previews and read a handful of reviews (Billy's is, of course, the best), I can say that I'm familiar enough with the concept that the creators are going for -- and, also, that I'm moderately perturbed by it. Like anyone who's spent a considerable amount of time in New Orleans, I, too, am guilty of constructing and perpetuating the standard mythologizing rhapsodies about the city. It's free! It's wild! It's an aesthetic and cultural roller coaster!, etc. However, happy as I am to wax nostalgic about a place that also happened to have been the locus of my coming of age, I'm skeptical about nostalgia in general, and deeply conservative regional nostalgia in particular. Treme, to me, seems like the culmination of a strange and somewhat schizophrenic fantasy project that started the minute the levees broke, sending thousands of evacuees to Google Street View to watch a shroud of murky green water creep over most of Uptown. Because, let's be honest. No matter how ethnically diverse the cast, the intended audience of this show is of the same demographic, the same class/race that inhabited said Uptown, and the one most responsible for propagating the aesthetic-cultural myth of the city in the wake of Katrina; i.e., a) affluent and b) white. It's a textbook example of a liberal white American coterie searching for authenticity vis-a-vis the ethnic Other, and, in the process, gently moving from the role of respectfully distanced observer to guardian, protector, patron... (izer).

So, this is where things get a little ookie. It's our (white middle-to-upper class) responsibility to preserve New Orleans culture, to rescue it from the twin perils of Bush-era neglect and post-reconstruction corporate whoredom. And, by all accounts, Treme has attempted to do just that, to squeeze as many insider references to the food, music, geography, politics, and social ritual of the city as possible into each hour-long episode. Except, with my dead sexy Masters in a minor regional literature, I can tell you exactly what happens when an artist attempts that kind of project. It's a tale as old as Chateaubriand and Sir Walter Scott: either s/he misses one detail and gets mountains of flak for sloppy inattentiveness and insensitivity to cultural specificity, or s/he compiles so much detail that the entire project sags under the weighty effort of being both super-studied and "genuine." But what's the point of being slavishly imitative of reality if a) reality is, by definition, ephemeral, fluctuating, and irreducibly prosaic, and b) if the kind of art we (white upper-to-middle class) like is all about opening up metaphorical channels, suggesting multiple readings and broader, cosmic connections? If art -- as opposed to, say, ethnography -- is more complex creation rather than reductive recreation, then how does the freezing of one particular temporal cross-cut of a place say anything about what that place actually is, was, or will be? And, finally, for a city so invested in authenticity and peculiarity, how does one reconcile the urge to perform this aforementioned freezing operation with the danger of reducing it all to a caricature, a kitschy tchotchke ready-made for tourist consumption? The more obscure and hermetic the references that get name-dropped, the more Google-fu will be performed by the adoring hip masses in order to decode them -- and, before you know it, your next door neighbor in Williamsburg knows more about muffulettas and second lines than your average inhabitant of the CBD.

I can address some of these concerns with the triple punch of empirical observation, social theory, and paraphrased chocolate snack-treat commercial: just as there's no one way to eat a Reese's, there's no one way to show a city. A city is a phantom, an astral projection, a collective hallucination based on Benedict Anderson's idea of the "imagined community." It's not just the sum total of underappreciated jazz musicians, giant grease-laden sandwiches, or parade rituals that one can research, catalog, and copy. It's an unquantifiable gestalt of every individual's experiences, wishes, drunken half-memories, and fantastical exaggerations. In short, and to bring this back to the part of the world I'm most scholastically qualified to discuss, it's the difference between 18th century sentimental travelogues and Gogol's Dead Souls. One is uncritically engaged in the contradictorily simultaneous praise and patriarchal protectorship of "the noble (peasant) savage"; the other is one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time. And it isn't because Gogol got the local costume right and Karamzin didn't -- they're both equally distorting and misrepresenting, but the difference is, Gogol can fucking write, and write he does: experience, fantasy, hallucination, the whole nine yards.

So, these are the questions I would like to ask the creators of Treme and everyone involved in the obviously Herculean task of the show's production: who exactly are you addressing, what exactly are you preserving, and why?

But maybe they've already answered those, or are planning to, or trying to, and I just need to get on the media boat and watch.

Rebirth

It's amazing how instrumental weather can be in shaping social consciousness. For the past seven months, I've had next to no awareness of living in a neighborhood with actual neighbors. When it's 30 degrees and the inappropriately festive sounding "wintry mix" is pouring from the sky, my universe shrinks to a chain of warm, closely confined spaces (home, subway, office, subway, home) linked by sprints through the intolerable wasteland of outdoor nonspace. And then yesterday, it's 70 degrees, dappled sun and resounding bird song. I'm reading out in the backyard and listening to the conversations in the house next door, where the windows are thrown open, Floor Two is calling the kids in for dinner, and Floor Three is hollering at Floor One in a boozy Boston accent:

"Paaaauuul.... You fuckaahhh... What are ya doin'? Come ovahhh and drink with us!"

"I don't have anything to drink!"

"We have stuff to drink! Get ovaaah heaaaah!"

And suddenly a lump of optimism swells up in my throat and I get kind of hopeful that a head will pop out of one of the windows and call me in, too. I'll come up to Floor Three and get handed a Bud Lite in a Bruins coozie, or maybe even a plastic cup full of Yellow Tail, and I'll deploy strategic local idiom in a chat about the weather ("That rain last week -- wicked crazy!") or pretend to know some rudimentary thing about sports ("Erm, yeah, how bout them Sox!"), and for once I won't feel like quite such a rootless transient, floating through 25 years of life with no national, regional, class, or social ties. I'm so friendly and easygoing and nice! I can fit right in!

It doesn't happen. But I have another four months, at the least, to doggedly hope it does.