I was cooking today. Asian soup with shitake and oyster mushrooms, fried tofu, green beans, ramen noodles, green onions and garlic. The mushrooms were dried (much cheaper that way) so I soaked them for hours until they regained their original texture. I watched them come back to life, poking at them now and again and finally slicing them to help the water reach the dry center. The water turned brown with mushroomy goodness and I used it to add flavor to the soup. The tofu I cut into perfect cubes and fried in sesame oil. I added salt just as they got warm. The green beans were a few days old and starting to look a little sad. I picked through them, cut the good parts into tiny pieces and then warmed them slightly in the sesame. They turned bright green and became soft-crunchy deliciousness. Finally they all went together, with some organic chicken broth and a bit of soy sauce. Yum!
It takes creativity, planning, time and effort to prepare delicious food. It is hard to be inspired to do it every day. After all your hard work you get a few minutes of enjoyment while eating it, then a kitchen full of dirty dishes. But today, as I was taking my time, the process reminded me of how food can be sacred. It can be the opposite of greasy, unhealthy fast food. It can be fresh, organic, flavorful and nutritious. And making it can bring joy.
With a baby crawling about, I have learned to start early. For a complex meal, I try to break it into parts so that I can be interrupted to take care of his needs and not run out of time. Early in the afternoon I put the mushrooms in water. Later I fried tofu and chopped green beans. Then I made his dinner, fed him, and we played for a bit. Happy and full, he crawled about while I moved on to the next phase. It was not a fast process, but never stressful either. By the time Ben walked in the door at seven all I had to do was throw everything in the pot and heat it up.
Perhaps I was thinking about food because of a show we saw last night. It was on OPB, independent lens called King Corn. It was about food that is the opposite of sacred. Basically, these two friends get their hair tested and discover that it is primarily corn. Apparently you can learn about your diet by the composition of your hair. So, being the curious and free spirited type, they decide to get back to their roots and move to Iowa for a year.
They borrow an acre of land and using all the current technologies and methodologies they grow corn. Because it is impossible to make money off growing corn, they start out by getting a subsidy from the government. They get the second half once the corn is grown. They use farm equipment (with help) to till the land, inject it with ammonia fertilizer and plant thousands of seeds. Once the corn sprouts, they kill off the weeds with a mass spraying of chemicals the corn is engineered to resist. The corn they grown is called yellow dent and is efficient because it can be processed and grown very close together.
I won’t try to summarize the whole movie, but after a year they have grown many bushels of corn that tastes so horrible they can’t even it it. So where does it go? They sell it, for a loss, and it gets processed into corn syrup, ethanol and animal feed. In processing all nutritional value (which there wasn’t much to begin with in yellow dent) is lost. Corn syrup is in everything. But besides sweetness, it basically adds empty calories which contribute to obesity and diabetes.
Cows, not evolved to eat grains, are fed corn because it makes them fat. It also turns their stomachs to acid and makes them so sick that if they aren’t slaughtered in time die anyway. The meat they produce is so fatty it shouldn’t even be called meat, but it tastes just fine to Americans ground up and served as fast food.
The whole thing seems so backwards and stupid. Why don’t w get rid of those stupid subsidies and let the farmers start growing healthy food we can actually eat? That alone would probably save us billions in health care costs. I bet farmers would love growing a variety of organic vegetables instead of one tasteless mega crop.
I think growing corn for ethanol is a bad idea too. It takes way too much land, gasoline, fertilizer and energy to process to be a worthwhile fuel source. If we eliminated the subsidies the inefficacy would become apparent. For a country that believes in a free market the government has an awful lot of control over the food supply. I understand that for some things stability is more important than profit, (like electricity, health care?) but it’s kinda scary what happens when a government interferes in a way that makes an important resource (food?) less available. Someone needs to start regulating the regulators. Some powerful cats are getting rich and the rest of us are just getting… fat.
Great, Jess. Now I have that Cranberries song stuck in my head “Zo-ombay, Zo-ombay, Zo-omba-AY, a-AY, a-AY” It’s in my heeeeeeead, in my heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeead…
WAIT! WHY DID IT COMMENT ON THIS ONE! It was supposed to be on the Zombie one… oh, I’m confused. This is Tori, by the way…