A Look Forward
Here I am again. Clocking in 24 hours of travel in the last 72, plus an 8 hour meeting, plus a fancy wedding, and, lo and behold, blogging gets relegated to second place. And next week I’m off to Hawaii again for the first time in a decade. I can’t wait to visit all my old haunts.
What’s coming up. More on milks and cheeses, aguas frescas, ensaimadas, and naco food.
Plus I’m planning on using Michael Pollan’s Farmer in Chief article in today’s New York Times Magazine.
For the many, many non-US readers of this blog, Michael Pollan is a journalist at the University of California who in the last few years has taken on the mantle of major spokesman for the “food movement” (that is those who are dissatisfied with the current system of food and agriculture in the United States). Since the NY Times has such credibility, Pollan has the power to sway public opinion in a big way.
Although I agree with him on various points that I’ll talk about, in many respects I am deeply suspicious. So I’m going to take the time to figure out where I stand. I can’t do it all in one post. Not good for readers, not possible to research, not possible to write. But it will be a continuing part of the blog for the next few weeks.
Oh, and finally, thanks to Marty Martindale of Food Site of the Day for featuring my blog.
Pollan’s is expert in writing that engages the emotions – aside from all the rest of it. His rhetoric/phrasing can be almost sing-song, very appealing.
As a side note I’ve been wondering about college feeding/dining after running across Corby Kummer’s piece on Yale and Alice Waters (‘Goodbye Cryovac’/Atlantic Monthly 2004). I know that ‘ethical’ food is a growing trend in colleges but wonder how succesful it is proving to be (and how much it might be raising tuition costs to boot! where it is being implemented).
Well. Could be just my way of finding another way to question the academic world with its lovely throttlehold on our culture, but I do think the question is about more than that. :)
Make that first word Pollan, not Pollan’s. That sounds like a fish market. Or a haberdashery.
Karen, as someone who knows about institutions and food, I’d be very interested to hear more about why you have your doubts about the ethical food movement on campus. I share your doubts but perhaps for different reasons.
And don’t we all wish we could write like Pollan!
My doubts are mostly intuitive at this point, Rachel. I’ll try to think the thing through and see what I come up with in a few days, though – and will add a comment.
I’d love to hear your reasons for your doubts too. :)
Right now I am extremely cranky, having just re-read MFK Fisher’s “Garum” from her “Serve it Forth”. More even than wanting to write like Pollan I’d like to write like MFK.
This must be around the seventh time I’ve read this story (Garum) over the years, but for some reason this is the first time I realized that she is telling a tale of Romans who have banqueted in excess who then use something she calls a vomitorium for purging themselves of the food. I’m upset because I can’t understand why I never caught that she wrote that before (a vomitorium is an exit from a building not a thing to vomit into!) and can’t understand why in the years since the story was printed in 1937 no editor or publisher ever chose to correct it somehow!
I’m very cranky because I had a picture in my mind of how this all was in Ancient Rome and it was partially based on MFK’s story. Now I don’t even know if they did vomit in order to eat more and if so whether they did it on the floor, lacking this imaginary utensil called a vomitorium.
Sickening, all the way around. The topic itself and the fact that I do not know the truth now.
Aside from being once more depressed about my recently-drooping past-idealism of MFK herself. :(
Meh.
The ethical food movement on campus: The Corby Kummer article (which can be found online here offers a very nice scenario of how it did work, at that point in time (is it still in existence in the same form? I really wonder!) at one college within Yale University.
It’s a really heart-warming tale of how the sad gloomy tastes of the usual cafeteria food were overcome by fresh vital delicious locally farmed foods – after the warriors of Good Taste and Finesse managed to wrest free the old ways of Dependence Upon the Greedy Corporation from those who obviously did not know any better.
To me these stories always have the hint of an underlying farce. I can not read them ‘straight up’, having seen too often in real life that there is no black and white but rather a lot of other colors that get really mixed up as power shifts hands and new things happen that are supposed to be a nice and clean but that end up being every bit as messy and distasteful as the old things. Salvation really does not lay in a home-farmed carrot.
It was a wonderful story though, the Kummer tale of the success of the ethical food movement on campus that year, and how really fantastic it would be if all campuses could eat that way – if all people could eat that way! There were several points within this story of momentary success that lingered in my mind afterwards as being worthy of thought.
This happened at Yale. Not a place lacking resources in the first place. In terms of measuring where this happened as opposed to the majority of other campuses there is a huge difference. It’s like comparing a legitimate Renoir on the wall to a mass-printed shiny paper poster of the same scene. Most campuses are not Yale and will never be. They lack the resources, the power, the $$$, and perhaps even the brainpower and determination. Certainly this would be even more true of the average Community College – those schools which are like the Wal-Marts of higher education. After all, everyone needs a college degree of some sort to get any sort of decent job today, and not everyone can afford it.
That season at Yale Kummer tells of: How did the ethical food program in that one small college on that large university campus (elitism within elitism here?)(not to argue against elitism but it is good to recognize it where it is for what it is) manage to get started?
Well! It started that year because Alice Water’s daughter was attending Yale as a freshman that year. And Alice just happened to somehow meet the president of Yale, whose daughter knew Alice Waters daughter as they both had just had happened to attend some other private school where ethical farming was taught to the gentry whose incomes allowed them to send their children along this path of private school-to-Yale-as-we-get-our-hands-a-little-dirty inbetween Latin classes.
Goodness! I am having a fantasy that instead of the now-discarded Debutante Balls the new thing will be to have an Agricultural Fair where one can ‘come out’ and show how big they managed to grow their pumpkins with feeding the earth only dried leaves from Sak’s new gardening department mixed with sustainable caviar from Iceland (as we must do our parts to save them too).
So you have Yale. Alice Waters. The President of Yale. Their two children entering college whom of course as parents they want to feed as well as humanly possible. Then! Voila. Waters finds an ‘anonymous’ donor to fund the whole thing.
Personally I wonder about the anonymous part. If I were Waters or Yale President I’d put up the money myself and just say it was anonymous.
Yale wins with a gold star added to it’s stack of gold stars. Waters wins with a gold star added to hers. Great public relations and marketing job done all around. The college kids win, as long as the money holds out or till the program can be self-supporting or if not then some other anonymous donor can be found to support it or until an increase in tuition is made to cover the operational costs.
This is simply not what happens at most colleges.
To move to a different area of looking at this: It was noted in the article that it was difficult to re-train the cooking staff, who were accustomed to mostly opening jars and cans and packets. Production cooking. Production cooking must be consistent in most places. You’ve got to have enough of one kind of thing to be able to serve one consistent thing to lots and lots of people. Otherwise people can actually get angry. They want the food they had yesterday. They do not really (for the most part) want to be told that it is not available due to the (locally sourced) crop not yielding the expected amount. Apart from that even, they want pizza and they want it with tomatoes. How far does one stretch the rule, and who decides? Messy, time consuming and cumbersome. Universities in particular are cumbersome machines of committees that seem unable to decide anything but which usually take the safest route possible that will offend the least amount of people. I’d like to put a university committee into a town meeting somewhere and ask them to decide a simple question then tell them not to leave the room till it was decided. My guess would be that they would have to live in that room for the rest of their lives – or at least till somebody could not stand living one more moment without a Pizza Hut pizza a Coke and a Cheesecake Factory cheesecake. That might make one or more of them cave in enough to fudge their vote. A dish of local parsnips tossed with whole wheat pasta – I don’t know. I don’t think it would do it for the majority of them. They would live there forever.
So let’s say the money has been found. The administration has okay’d the program. Actually this has happened at a number of campuses – style does matter in terms of luring college students along with their parent’s dollars.
Let’s say that the cooks have been re-trained and are happy enough about it. Now there’s the facilities and ethics question: If this is going to be done for one group it must be done for all. It must be made fair. In order to have that happen, new facilities with kitchens that are actually designed for cooking, not package-opening – must be built. Ah. Where will the money come from? Why for goodness sake it looks like all that money is tied up in doing something for the football team! Oh well.
Am I ranting? Yes. Am I against ethical food on campus? No. It can happen.
I’ve heard stories of how some of these programs have run from the inside by some of those who have participated on a management level. Some of the things that are unlikely to be discussed in public are the details of how one manages when the local farmer says ‘oops the kale died’ and the promise to the diners who are paying for local kale through the nose has been ‘local kale’ capitalized, romanticized, and almost religion-icized. How does a manager of a facility get local kale when there is none to be had? Substitute another local ingredient? Not always possible in production cooking. Remember, people want consistency in what they eat and many are not all that flexible. The amount of emotional meltdowns I’ve seen in my time when the exact thing a person at the table wanted was not available to them is truly amazing. Managers want to avoid this because it reflects on them and on their job capabilities. What will they do? They will fudge.
The local kale will become not local kale. Surprise surprise.
Yes, I’ve heard it from the horse’s mouths.
Some of the campuses are working with the larger vendors who have promised to source locally. Personally, I do not trust that as far as I can throw it, having known the ways of operation of the larger vendors in general but of their salespeople in particular who come to hang out in the chef’s office for as long as they possibly can wasting time trying to be buddy buddy and always trying to send along nice lump sums of money as Christmas gifts. Why would they do that? Oh. Just being friendly I guess. No strings attached? (???)
One other thing happens in the operations of ethically-promised food on campus. The first is that because of the fact that the food is coming in from here there and everywhere as opposed to one vendor with control systems set in place, there are receipts for all kinds of payments floating around on a daily basis. The opportunity for anyone who wants to make a bit of money on the side as a manager is simply sitting there waiting to be taken. And it is taken. And this often is not discovered because nobody on a higher level is going to double-check those receipts against what was received on the log and/or then check that that item was used in an actual menu. The operational workings of a food-service facility within another institution (when the core goals of the umbrella institution are vastly different than producing food) are arcana in general to those overlooking them.
All in all I think one can depend on a thing actually being what it says it is if there are the systems in place to be able to check that it indeed is. There. That is actually science, isn’t it. Proofs and checks. I’m positive that in most of the scenarios played out on campus in terms of ethical food really being what it is touted as being: it isn’t.
Rather Oliver Twist-ish and all. But there you have it.