Community Gardens

Today, our class visited two p-patches. The first observation I made during this field trip was how many of the plants were not focused on cultivation fruits and vegetables. When Professor Anagnost first mentioned at the beginning of the quarter that she was taking on a p-patch, I imagined this as a PEA-patch, where all that was grown was peas. I later figured out that there was a wide variety of species here on these community patches, but was shocked to realize upon exploring them that most of what was growing was actually flowers. Although the flowers were quite breathtaking, especially the field of irises (I'd never before seen a black flower), I would have thought vegetables would have been a larger priority because generated a more "meaningful" product.

During Teresa Mares' lecture on community gardens, I began to understand how vital they can be to neighborhoods. I was intrigued to hear that earlier in the century, 44% of all fresh fruit and vegetables were grown in these community garden settings- not the industrial monoculture agriculture centers we now have. In the discussion on the South Central Community Farm in Los Angeles, I felt anger that the collective space had been bulldozed over to pave the way for another Walmart Distribution center. I could only imagine the uproar this would have caused. The similar scene that popped into my mind was that at Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 where a man was attempting to stop some advancing tanks. Having invested blisters, sore backs, and countless hours of weeding/hoeing/watering, the "farmers" of the South Central farm surely depended on the area and felt a right to it.

I am hopeful that gardens such as those we visited today will become widespread throughout the United States. I wish I would have heard of the opportunity earlier in my college career. Now that I'm a junior, I don't have enough time left in Seattle to get on a 16 month waiting list and take advantage of it. Where ever I do end up, I look forward to taking part in a community garden, understanding where my food originates from, and discerning the difference between a pea plant and that of a cucumber. I was pleased to see Lori had brought her son along so that she could "plant a seed" in his mind about these things.

Also, I just found out today that my boyfriend's mother is going to help me grow broccoli (my favorite veggie) this summer!!! I am excited....

Slow Food

While in college, I have grown accustomed to picking up meals on the go and spending little to no time actually preparing them. Yesterday, I visited my boyfriend's parents house in Vancouver, WA and had a lesson in Slow Food. Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma defines the mission of slow food "to remind a generation of industrial eaters of their connection to farmers and farm, and to the plants and animals we depend on" (259).

The menu for the night was salmon burgers with corn on the cob, salad, whole potatoes, and bread, all followed by blackberry pie. Getting the meal together was a full family effort. My first duty was making the salad for the family of 5. When first assigned the task, I thought I would be pulling leaves from a polyethylene bag similar to those that Pollan discusses on page 176- precut, prewashed "summer greens." But then I was handed a bowl of gigantic leaves of lettuce and spinach still attached to each other. I had not realized how mammoth a spinach leaf was; I was indoctrinated to believe that golf-ball sized spinach leaves from the bags were standard while these extended the length of my hand (not including the stem!). The salad alone took 25 minutes for me to complete. I had to wash the leaves, remove the rotty areas, hand tear them into bite sized pieces, as well as gather all the toppings of cut up pear, sunflower seeds, cranberries, chopped walnuts, and shredded asiago cheese.

It took a considerable more amount of time to create this salad, compared to a bagged one with separate packets for the toppings and dressings that I had grown used to. It was definitely a job I'd only have time to do on a lazy weekend, not a normal hectic school day. But the act of preparing the meal in the kitchen with the other members of the family made for quite a social occasion. My boyfriend was removing the skin from the salmon fillets, while his brother was rolling out the homemade crust for the frozen blackberries that had been picked from the vines around the perimeter of their house last summer.

When I finally sat down to eat the meal, I realized that this is what Whole Food meant by "whole foods." Nothing contained more than a handful ingredients and everything had originated from somewhere relatively local- even the wine we drank it down with. It was all a fine lesson in eating slow food and "local" whole foods, but certainly something that can only happen only infrequently because of time permitting.

Chicken in a Biskit

It was questioned today while I was camping whether I had actually had a childhood. Supposedly, there was a staple food of my friend Katie's childhood that I never had the privilege to eat. "Chicken in a Biskit" is made by the same company that boxes Cheese Nips. It is a "baked snack cracker" that encompasses the taste of chicken.

This product reminds me of our experience in class last week when we investigated the taste behind chicken flavored ramen. What does chicken taste like? Similar to the ingredients of the ramen flavor package, both products contain actual cooked chicken. Number 12 of 13 ingredients in Chicken in a Biskit is dehydrated cooked chicken. There is more Sugar, Salt, MSG, and "Natural Flavor" in these chicken flavored crackers than chicken itself.

When I questioned what Katie thought was the best part about the snack was, she enjoyed that it was super salty, not the chicken flavor. She craves salt. When I brought up ramen, Katie commented that she isn't attracted to the meat flavor in the soup, but the salt factor. She prefers beef ramen over the chicken because it has a higher salt content on her palate. This attraction to salt is not surprising; salt may be the cheapest spice to stimulate taste buds.

Upon sampling a few of the crackers myself, they tasted like a buttery bouillon cube. It was similar to that of ramen, but more diluted. The visible salt flecks on the cracker were definitely detectable in my mouth, making me thirsty after I swallowed the snack.

This cracker certainly failed in encompassing chicken flavor. Shortly after eating this snack, I came across Pollan's experience of eating the Polyface chicken. He remarks that his "chicken smelled and tasted exactly like chicken.... it [was] a more chickeny chicken" (271). What is the capitalized idea of Chicken we hold in our heads but seldom taste anymore... I can assure you it undoubtedly was not contained in these chicken flavored crackers.

You are what you eat, and I am corn

After diving into Michael Pollen's novel, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I was shocked to discover how vital of a food staple corn is- more than 25% of the items in a supermarket contain corn. Pollen clarifies that "corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins" (19).

It amazes me how distant I am from the food I eat. The closest I have ever been to a growing plant of corn was in a Corn Maze last Halloween. When I recollect on my thoughts of corn before reading this book, I never would thought of myself as a big corn eater or correctly guessed how much corn I actually consumed. I would have only considered the corn that I "directly" ate, meaning that it appeared on my plate on the cob, or among other kernals, or even as popped corn. But as Pollen states, this represents only a tiny fraction of the corn we eat. Each American is personally responsible for consuming a ton of corn every year (85).

After taking a few years of chemistry, I have gotten in the habit of looking at food labels curious to see if I could understand the name of ingredients that compose the food. But somehow it never occurred to me that the ingredients were all basically derivatives of Zea mays- corn. Upon first realizing this, I believed this to be a positive thing. After all, corn is a vegetable, vegetables are healthy, therefore whatever contains corn must be healthy and good for the body. But this line of reasoning is completely flawed, because the corn gets processed so heavily in the "wet mills" and broken down into countless simple compounds that no longer reflect the original nutrition of the cob.

Upon reading the recipes for the Mess O' Greens and Hoppin' John that we prepared in class today, I was relieved to discover that none of the ingredients contain derivates of corn. That is until I thought hard about the bacon... which came from a pig... and most certainly was fed corn. Oh well, I suppose corn is now one of those elements that mankind will never rid itself of because of the way we have come to depend on it. After all, we are corn's koala!

Practice, practice, practice...

I spent my first prolonged period on the UW farm yesterday. I arrived there before anyone else in the class and wander around to see all that was contained in the area. I became mesmerized by the bee boxes and was delighted to discover a sassafras tree in the conical garden. The bark of this tree gave off the root beer scent when "scratched-and-sniffed." It truly seems like an exotic place, and I only began to fathom how much work was put into its upkeeping.

When people started to arrive, we got to work building the fire in the cob oven for pizzas. I realized, like many of the other newbies there, that I had no idea how to build an effective fire or chop wood with an ax. The only capacity in which I helped was by crumpling the newspaper that was used as a fire starter.

Even when it came to helping work on the farm, I discovered how "green" I really was- in terms of lack of knowledge. It was my task to water some of the beds and tubs of crops with a watering hose. But I felt like I needed to be walked through every step of the process: where the hose was located, how to attach the wand, and how to "delicately" water so as to not crush the germinating seedlings with a cascade of water.

I suppose the theme behind making the fire and watering the plants is practice makes perfect. While I was doing these tasks, a riddle one of my professors taught on the first day came to mind: An old New Yorker is approached in the street by a Texan and asked, "Pardon me sir, but how do I get to Carnegie Hall?" He slowly replies, "Practice, practice, practice." Now that I've had experience in watering the plants and seeing how the fire is setup, I hopefully will be more independent on future visits to the farm. Though it will certainly take more muscle bulk in my arms before I can chop wood like Keith!

After the cob oven had burned sufficiently for an hour, it became time for pizza making. I was surprised at the crowd that had shown up. Among the people there were two students from my year long Physical Chemistry class. I'd never spoken with them until that point because it is a 100 person lecture filled with both Chemical Engineering and plain ole' Chemistry students. As a plain ole' chemistry student, we don't really interact much with the chemical engineers inside the classroom. But the cob oven had brought us together in this social gathering, and suddenly we were discussing our hopes, aspirations, and wacky chemistry professors.

Finally, I must comment on the pizzas produced by the cob oven. They were truly stellar. Using the dough and pesto that Professor Anagnost prepared, the peppers, tomatoes, and carmelized onions she dumpster-dived, basil and garlic pasta sauce I had leftover from a spaghetti dinner, and kale I simply picked from one of the farm plants, I created a pizza that put Pizza Hut to shame. In less then 3 minutes, Master Cob Pizza Cooker (aka Prof Anagnost) presented me with my dinner.

The interaction around the pizzas brought the idea of the UW Farm completely together. Keith and others began the farm partly because they wanted to share the knowledge and crops grown with the larger public. After only spending a bit actually working on the farm, I thought it was mighty righteous for Keith to invest so much time and energy in the farm, only to share the profits (food harvested) with people he will never meet. I realized I'm more of a miser in that sense, and wouldn't be so apt to share at no charge with people who hadn't lent a hand, etc. Bring this back to the pizza, I expected that whoever made the pizza would be the one to eat it. But, again, it was all focused on sharing. This is what made the experience amazing because we got to sample everyone's pizza and then discuss what made it awesome and unique. I learned that sharing of food enhances people's relationships.

Stigmatization of a Trash Digger

When the term trash digger is thrown around, the image that pops into my mind is that of a bum delving around in a huge dumpster behind a greasy Thai restaurant or pizza joint. But upon attending the Colloquium Series in Anthropology entitled "Food for Thought: Approaches to the Anthropology of Food," I myself benefitted from the term dumpster diving after sampling a delicious dish that contained "recovered items." Professor Ann Anagnost had made a fresh spinach frittata with the spinach she obtained while scrounging around the dumpster behind QFC on Roosevelt with David Giles.

David Giles' panel talk dealt with the issues of dumpster diving and when is food waste. He discussed how the food that generally ends up in the dumpsters and compost bins of QFC/ Trader Joe's/ Essential Bread/ Naked Juice isn't necessarily thrown away because it is no longer safe to eat. It may just have a minor dent or be approaching its expiration date. Because there is something newer and more enticing to the costumer waiting to take its place on the shelve, it is simply thrown away. 

Even after explaining this to people I know, they still find it ridiculous to imagine removing something from the trash can and using it. My boyfriend is persistent that anything I would take from a trash can would make me sick- even after I explain to him what David Giles' talked about. Maybe I will just have to force it on him and serve him some banana bread with dumpster dived bananas or a hamburger with dumpster dived onions. I speak with experience in reiterating what David Giles said about how he knew a tiny minority of people who had actually gotten ill from eating something dumpster dived, while he can name dozens of people who have fallen sick from eating Jack in the Box!

Not all Pesticides are Created Equally

One comment passively made in the movie The Future of Food is that "nerve gas developed during World War II was slightly modified to make insecticides. As a chemistry major, I know that a single atom can make a huge difference in whether a compound is hazardous or beneficial. For example, chlorine is a toxic gas. But when it is combined with a little bit of sodium, it makes sodium chloride, or table salt.

My dad is an entomologist- this means that he studies insects. Part of the research he does is developing the chemicals that are the same as the pheromones. Pheromones are the chemicals emitted by organisms that allow them to communicate between individuals of the same species. One function they serve is locating a potential mate. So his lab creates molecules that are chemically the same as the pheromones that bad insects (pests) emit in a agricultural field. His product doesn't actually kill any insects, it just confuses the male insects in their quest to find a female, thus preventing them from mating. But, the USDA still considers his product a insecticide. Therefore, I think it is too much of a generalization for the book to claim that insecticides are a derivative of nerve gas.