I never wanted the blog to sink into restaurant reviews, but one restaurant is still in my mind since mid-January... It was such a good dining experience that it is worthy of note.
First:
El China de Puebla, located at 3143 Broadway in New York City, forever will be ingrained in my heart, and tastebuds. Run by Ian Nal, the place is simply decorated but stylish, with a big banana tree in the middle of the restaurant, and a gorgeous bar home to any number of intriguing bottles. The reason(s): primarily, the Mexican flourless chocolate cake. Served warm but next to a beautiful bit of ice cream, and with hibiscus coulis, the dish is simply OUT OF THIS WORLD. And coupled with Ian's excellent wine pairings, the meal was particularly magical; Ian is a sommalier, in addition to having a dynamo knack for knowing what works in this mexican-asian cuisine dining establishment. I have been meaning to say thank you to Ian for a long time now for the excellent meal or two (I had to come back after the first great experience!) - a huge thank you!
Mexican-Asian fusion is no easy feat to pull off - at one hole-in-the-wall place in NYC during the same two weeks I ended up with a "veggie tacos" consisting of a hard (but made mushy by juices) corn taco shell filled only with Chinese-style steamedvegetables, including snow-peas and bamboo shoots! El China de Puebla's quesadilla with shitakes and huitlacoche flower was immensely refreshing. As far as I'm concerned, El China de Puebla mastered executing fusion cuisine, somehow classically New York in its eccentricity, diversity in the menu, and its seriousness about doing food and drinks well. It goes way beyond the fixed notions we might have had about what constitutes a single cultural cuisine in its fusions.
The legend behind the China de Puebla is also worth noting: El China was an Asian princess who was sold by the Spaniards into servitude in Mexico in 1620, and became well-respected for her beauty, piousness, and generosity. She always wore typically Mexican colors (red, white, and green) and as such became an iconic figure of Mexican womanhood. The story is a compelling reminder about the consistency of cultural diaspora over extensive periods of time and over impressive geographic expanses.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
A Tale of Two Breakfasts
Breakfast 1.
Itapeva, SP - MST settlement, Insituto da Agro-Ecologia Laudenor de Souza, 8:00 am, 16th February, 2008.
To the background of chirping bird and insects, we start off a sunny Saturday morning eating at wooden picnic-style tables, on handmade wooden benches seating about 10 people at each table. Coffee and tea, both sugary-sweet, are set out on top of two crates, in gallon-size thermoses, from which we 30+ visitors gratefully pour the hot beverages into our red and green plastic mugs. By 8:30, we are eager to eat and get on with our day, though our hosts are reticent to let us begin eating the spread on the table because the cafe-com-leite isn't ready yet; the milk is taking a while to heat up. We manage to politely convince them that the coffee-with-milk can come later, but that it is too tempting to wait any longer for the food.
The rest of the breakfast, which includes fresh pineapple, cakes topped with pineapple and shredded coconut, as well as the typical french-bread style rolls, accompanied by a mild white cheese, are all homemade. Not only that, the ingredients are all local; the cheese and rolls come from a local cooperative run by the MST, and the cooks have been up since 5:00 am making the cakes. No doubt the pineapple comes from one of the nearby fields, which surround our dining area with an abundance of fruits and vegetables. There is something immensely satisfying about it to me, in its simplicity of presentation and closeness within the field-to-table process of producing the food. The pineapple is wonderfully sweet and fresh.
Among other highlights from the discussion the night before, one of the messages that sticks with me is what a student in the school told me: "We've banished the word subsistence from our vocabulary. What we are doing is not subsistence, because subsistence suggests a condition that comes before mere existence. Instead, what we are doing is self-sustaining ourselves. One of the primary parts of our struggle is about food sovereignty. We are aiming to be self-sustaining, growing for our own consumption, and not for exportation. If we can be self-sustaining, we have greater freedom." I reflect on this as I eat my all-local, all-organic breakfast, produced fully by the people with whom we have been talking with over the past few hours.
It is a satisfying, bountious, and nutritious meal. I wish there was an option of stronger, unsweetened coffee, but I leave the breakfast feeling wholesome. Late in the day, someone else in the MST tells me that one of their main tactics for mobilizing people towards their cause is "making constrasts blossom" - that is, making clear the lack of social and economic justice in society by pointing to its inequalities. I understand it as a compelling strategy, in theory at least.
---
Breakfast 2.
Punta Grosso, PR - Barbur Plaza Hotel, 7:30 AM, 17th February, 2008.
It is another clear, sunny day in Brazil, and I'm well-rested after a night in fresh hotel-bed linens, air-conditioning, sleeping in a cushy bed and having a nice warm shower. The breakfast room has some tinkling mu-sak playing as I enter which somehow manages to strike me as strange, although there's nothing especially irksome about the music in itself. The tables are set, seating four-per table, on padded modernist-style metal chairs, complete with arm rests, decent china, fork and knife, a generous supply of napkins on hand (the soft kind of napkin, none of that wax-paper thin stuff so common in Brazil!). Two uniform-wearing server-types stand ready at the back of the long, highly filled breakfast table, putting on airs of attentiveness (airs, because when water and eggs soon ran out, they were no where to be found to help out).
The spread is bountious, to say the least; three types of sliced bread, french bread rolls with and without sesame seeds, granola, two types of chocolate cereal, oat bran, yogurt, milk, colhada (a buttermilk-style cross between milk and yogurt), ham and turkey slices, and three types of cheese, goiabada, butter, margerine, cream cheese, and an assortment of jams were available. In addition there was a a hot tray containing scrambled eggs, sausages, hot dogs, and cheese-bread (pão de queijo) plus two types of chocolate cake, lime pie, guava-topped cheesecake. In addition to fruit salad, there was also sliced papaya, pineapple, and honeydew melon, as well as whole plums, apples, and grapes. A selection of about four juices were all on the voluptuous table; this impromptu list I'm sure is still omitting many of the items present. The presentation was beautiful, the food tasty, the options overwhelming. I found my black coffee and it was delicious. Frankly, I found the meal somewhat frustrating, since it was tempting to try to taste everything, but physically impossible to imbibe and ingest all of the options that were available. I did leave breakfast, though, having opted for a nutritious, satisfying meal, and successfully resisted the temptation to eat the cake first thing in the morning.
I have no idea where the foods came from that were served at the hotel; I have no idea who prepared the dishes; I have no idea what, if any of the items served, were organic or pesticide-covered. I have no concept of how any of the workers at the hotel felt about their working conditions, nor what the true costs of my meal were. I do know that it presented a wealth of variety, and was available only for the elites whom could afford paying for a night's stay at the hotel. And I do know my reaction - the food was good, the options somehow instinctively pleasing to my aesthetic sensibilities. I also, however, later in the mel had feelings of frustration at the immense variety of foods available for consumption, despite being so thrilled at the many options.
The 5-star hotel's meal and the MST's meal were both utopias of food, of a sort. Today's was a meal made possible only through the realities of a capitalist system of food production, labor, and consumption; yesterday's, only through the reality of another worldview, wherein social cooperation, proximity to food production, and the non-marketization of food exists, in conjunction with a social vision that prioritizes organic eating as a social responsiblity. The sheer quantity of options and fancy presentation of the meal had also nearly out-shined the fantastic, and totally satisfying breakfast that I'd partaken in only 24 hours earlier, despite my own love of local, organic foods and closeness to their means of production. Honestly, I felt sort of strange about having enjoyed the second breakfast as much as I did - but equally as honestly, I frankly enjoyed it quite a lot.
Tonight the MST school directors' words about letting contrasts blossom echo in my head, for that is just what the two breakfasts represented; a stark contrast, experienced. It strikes me that much of my feeling about each meal is an aesthetic instinct, my reactions to them socially conditioned towards acknowledging different aspects of each as healthier, more wholesome, or more appealing. How can the experience of both meals guide me towards a sense of which utopia feels more instinctively and rationally just? What has each meal taught me about the decisions I want to make in my own life about food choices and the politics behind eating practices? These are the questions to grapple with not just in reflecting on these two breakfasts, but with every meal.
Itapeva, SP - MST settlement, Insituto da Agro-Ecologia Laudenor de Souza, 8:00 am, 16th February, 2008.
To the background of chirping bird and insects, we start off a sunny Saturday morning eating at wooden picnic-style tables, on handmade wooden benches seating about 10 people at each table. Coffee and tea, both sugary-sweet, are set out on top of two crates, in gallon-size thermoses, from which we 30+ visitors gratefully pour the hot beverages into our red and green plastic mugs. By 8:30, we are eager to eat and get on with our day, though our hosts are reticent to let us begin eating the spread on the table because the cafe-com-leite isn't ready yet; the milk is taking a while to heat up. We manage to politely convince them that the coffee-with-milk can come later, but that it is too tempting to wait any longer for the food.
The rest of the breakfast, which includes fresh pineapple, cakes topped with pineapple and shredded coconut, as well as the typical french-bread style rolls, accompanied by a mild white cheese, are all homemade. Not only that, the ingredients are all local; the cheese and rolls come from a local cooperative run by the MST, and the cooks have been up since 5:00 am making the cakes. No doubt the pineapple comes from one of the nearby fields, which surround our dining area with an abundance of fruits and vegetables. There is something immensely satisfying about it to me, in its simplicity of presentation and closeness within the field-to-table process of producing the food. The pineapple is wonderfully sweet and fresh.
Among other highlights from the discussion the night before, one of the messages that sticks with me is what a student in the school told me: "We've banished the word subsistence from our vocabulary. What we are doing is not subsistence, because subsistence suggests a condition that comes before mere existence. Instead, what we are doing is self-sustaining ourselves. One of the primary parts of our struggle is about food sovereignty. We are aiming to be self-sustaining, growing for our own consumption, and not for exportation. If we can be self-sustaining, we have greater freedom." I reflect on this as I eat my all-local, all-organic breakfast, produced fully by the people with whom we have been talking with over the past few hours.
It is a satisfying, bountious, and nutritious meal. I wish there was an option of stronger, unsweetened coffee, but I leave the breakfast feeling wholesome. Late in the day, someone else in the MST tells me that one of their main tactics for mobilizing people towards their cause is "making constrasts blossom" - that is, making clear the lack of social and economic justice in society by pointing to its inequalities. I understand it as a compelling strategy, in theory at least.
---
Breakfast 2.
Punta Grosso, PR - Barbur Plaza Hotel, 7:30 AM, 17th February, 2008.
It is another clear, sunny day in Brazil, and I'm well-rested after a night in fresh hotel-bed linens, air-conditioning, sleeping in a cushy bed and having a nice warm shower. The breakfast room has some tinkling mu-sak playing as I enter which somehow manages to strike me as strange, although there's nothing especially irksome about the music in itself. The tables are set, seating four-per table, on padded modernist-style metal chairs, complete with arm rests, decent china, fork and knife, a generous supply of napkins on hand (the soft kind of napkin, none of that wax-paper thin stuff so common in Brazil!). Two uniform-wearing server-types stand ready at the back of the long, highly filled breakfast table, putting on airs of attentiveness (airs, because when water and eggs soon ran out, they were no where to be found to help out).
The spread is bountious, to say the least; three types of sliced bread, french bread rolls with and without sesame seeds, granola, two types of chocolate cereal, oat bran, yogurt, milk, colhada (a buttermilk-style cross between milk and yogurt), ham and turkey slices, and three types of cheese, goiabada, butter, margerine, cream cheese, and an assortment of jams were available. In addition there was a a hot tray containing scrambled eggs, sausages, hot dogs, and cheese-bread (pão de queijo) plus two types of chocolate cake, lime pie, guava-topped cheesecake. In addition to fruit salad, there was also sliced papaya, pineapple, and honeydew melon, as well as whole plums, apples, and grapes. A selection of about four juices were all on the voluptuous table; this impromptu list I'm sure is still omitting many of the items present. The presentation was beautiful, the food tasty, the options overwhelming. I found my black coffee and it was delicious. Frankly, I found the meal somewhat frustrating, since it was tempting to try to taste everything, but physically impossible to imbibe and ingest all of the options that were available. I did leave breakfast, though, having opted for a nutritious, satisfying meal, and successfully resisted the temptation to eat the cake first thing in the morning.
I have no idea where the foods came from that were served at the hotel; I have no idea who prepared the dishes; I have no idea what, if any of the items served, were organic or pesticide-covered. I have no concept of how any of the workers at the hotel felt about their working conditions, nor what the true costs of my meal were. I do know that it presented a wealth of variety, and was available only for the elites whom could afford paying for a night's stay at the hotel. And I do know my reaction - the food was good, the options somehow instinctively pleasing to my aesthetic sensibilities. I also, however, later in the mel had feelings of frustration at the immense variety of foods available for consumption, despite being so thrilled at the many options.
The 5-star hotel's meal and the MST's meal were both utopias of food, of a sort. Today's was a meal made possible only through the realities of a capitalist system of food production, labor, and consumption; yesterday's, only through the reality of another worldview, wherein social cooperation, proximity to food production, and the non-marketization of food exists, in conjunction with a social vision that prioritizes organic eating as a social responsiblity. The sheer quantity of options and fancy presentation of the meal had also nearly out-shined the fantastic, and totally satisfying breakfast that I'd partaken in only 24 hours earlier, despite my own love of local, organic foods and closeness to their means of production. Honestly, I felt sort of strange about having enjoyed the second breakfast as much as I did - but equally as honestly, I frankly enjoyed it quite a lot.
Tonight the MST school directors' words about letting contrasts blossom echo in my head, for that is just what the two breakfasts represented; a stark contrast, experienced. It strikes me that much of my feeling about each meal is an aesthetic instinct, my reactions to them socially conditioned towards acknowledging different aspects of each as healthier, more wholesome, or more appealing. How can the experience of both meals guide me towards a sense of which utopia feels more instinctively and rationally just? What has each meal taught me about the decisions I want to make in my own life about food choices and the politics behind eating practices? These are the questions to grapple with not just in reflecting on these two breakfasts, but with every meal.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Alice Waters on Charlie Rose
Alice Waters on the Charlie Rose Show
Check it out, if you've got a decent internet connection and 22 minutes to spare, you won't be disappointed. Alice Waters from Chez Panisse is great. Her bit on the "Delicious Revolution" is a nice way to start thinking about the relationship between food and education - engaging students in the process of growing, cooking, and eating food together. Plus, this quote is right up my alley: "Food and nourishment are right at the point where human rights and the environment intersect." You might also be interested in the Chez Panisse Foundation, which works on integrating food into school curricula and making school lunch a part of the academic curriculum.
Check it out, if you've got a decent internet connection and 22 minutes to spare, you won't be disappointed. Alice Waters from Chez Panisse is great. Her bit on the "Delicious Revolution" is a nice way to start thinking about the relationship between food and education - engaging students in the process of growing, cooking, and eating food together. Plus, this quote is right up my alley: "Food and nourishment are right at the point where human rights and the environment intersect." You might also be interested in the Chez Panisse Foundation, which works on integrating food into school curricula and making school lunch a part of the academic curriculum.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Beef, Europe, and Amazonia
This week, the EU decided to (again) ban beef imports from Brazil, on the basis that the nation's beef producers weren't doing enough in its hoof-and-mouth disease inspections to ensure beef safety. By most Brazilian accounts I've heard, the gesture is much more about European protectionism than about legitimate health and safety concerns about Brazilian meat.
But the affects are more wide-reaching: with this major export market closed, now Brazilian meat prices will fall. And with falling prices, ultimately, there is less incentive for ranching to take place.
One region in Brazil is particularly notable for its relationship to the Brazilian beef industry, which has grown since 1990 levels of domestic-only production to today being the world's largest beef exporter. 80% of that growth has taken place in Amazonia.
It's important to remember here that Brazilian cattle ranching, unlike North American or European ranching, is based on a grass-fed approach, so the Brazilian ranches consume lots of land-although the beef may taste better, its level of productivity per hectare is very minimal- only 1 head of cattle per hectare. In the Amazonian context, ranching, which is responsible for 78% of forest destruction, all-too often involves making unviable small-scale family farming, rural violence (slavery, human rights abuses stemming from illegal land claiming), and also the significant environmental damages (carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, soil deterioration) caused by the clearing of the rainforest. The system is so intensive on Amazonian lands that pastures generally turn infertile in 10-20 year time horizons, making for a predatory model of ranch expansion. Also significantly driving the process is the fact that Brazilian land ownership is still "unregulated" - that is, the government doesn't really know what lands belong to whom, and with enormous problems of falsifying land titles, land can be bought illegally for incredibly cheap prices, and turned into pasture before the bureaucratic environmental agency (IBAMA) and land reform agency (INCRA) have time to react.
Before laying full blame on Brazil though for Amazonian forest destruction, it's important to remember another major driver in the process is the international market. Heavy agricultural subsidies in developed countries depress commodity prices internationally. Together with trade barriers, the subsidies (think: absurdly subsidized corn in the U.S., which feeds most American beef) forces developing countries to expand their agricultural frontiers, so that they can cope with unfair competition in international markets. Chicago Public Radio's Worldview Program had a great interview about food subsidies (especially Ethanol) the other day (and I am featured on the first half of the show talking about other stuff).
Meanwhile, the demand-side of the equation is stunning: the New York Times reported this week that global levels of meat consumption have quadrupled since 1961. There are now 284 million TONS of meat in the world; the average person in the world is eating twice as much meat now than fourty years ago. These statistics also made my eyes bulge:
"...an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation."
If each person in the U.S.was to cut back meat consumption in the U.S. by 20%, it would be the equivalent in terms of greenhouse gas emissions of switching from a normal sedan to a Hybrid car. E.O. Wilson (famous biologist and Harvard professor), contends that we could feed a world population of 10 billion (estimates are we'll get there by the end of the century, at this rate) world if everyone turned vegetarian.
I'm sure we can do more to moderate meat consumption, but a whole-world-gone-vegetarian scenario is probably not to likely considering the sort of innate joy I see in many peoples' eyes as they chomp into a hamburger or relish in Brazilian churrascerias' all-you-can-(m)eat approach. So what else can be done? Some Brazilians are arguing for slaughterhouses to have greater rigidity in the standards of meat they accept; cattle from ranches with environmental fines or links to illegal land claiming simply could not be accepted. Other proposals from Brazilian environmental researchers propose changing the model of ranching that is done to one involving agro-ranching-forestry, wherein farmers would both grow their own grains, replant forest, and raise cattle in a rotational system, estimated by some to quadruple the productivity of land needed for ranching, and eliminating the need to clear trees to make way for cows.
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