Are you a Lover or a Hater?

Too tired to put up much of a cerebral post tonight.

However, I've been pondering breakfast over the past few days. Why do some people prefer sweet and others savory?

Mark Bittman's piece in the NY Times last week gave some unusual breakfast ideas and challenged Americans to try eating a savory breakfast for a change. Why do most Americans think of breakfast as a sweet meal? We eat danishes, donuts, cinnamon rolls, sugar cereal, pancakes, and waffles. Even peanut butter is sweet tasting.

If I stray from oatmeal for my morning meal, I go for toast and Marmite--you don't get much more savory than that. In the words of Nigel Slater, Marmite is, "Savoury tar for your toast. As shiny as a lovingly polished army boot, saltier than a mouthful of sea water, stickier than treacle, and somehow the work of the devil."

You either love it or hate it. I love it. Most likely, if you did not grow up on it as a child, you will hate it.

How does the taste for savory or sweet breakfast develop? Why so much sweetness in the American morning meal? And what about you? Marmite: are you a lover or a hater?

The Economy Sucks, So We Dine

I no longer dare to open the newspaper in the morning.

I put on the teakettle, fire up the stove, and let my oatmeal bubble away happily while I peel and eat an orange. Five to seven minutes later I give the oats a stir, pour the steamy goodness into my bowl, and sit down at the kitchen table with my tea and porridge, ready to open the paper.

But, for the past week I just can’t do it. I can’t open the paper. I don’t want to read bad news. I don’t want to know about more people who don’t have jobs. I care. I really do. My heart bleeds for them. But it gets me down. I know the economy is bad, and I have hope that it will get better, soon enough.

No, I push the Chicago Tribune to the side, and I reach for Bon Appetite, or Gourmet, or Gastronimica, or even go and pull one of my cookbooks off the shelf—one that I have not looked at in a long time. I knew there was a recipe in there that I have been meaning to try.

Restaurants are shutting down left and right. When a recession hits, the first place that people start pinching pennies is in their dining-out-budget. That makes sense. Yes, people cut back on restaurants, they cut back on movies, they cut back on clothing, on cars, on TV’s, and on, and on. People give up small luxuries. But people still have to eat.

All of a sudden, people lug out their slow cookers, dust off their old recipe books, and discover (or re-discover) the wonders of slow cooked rump steak. We begin to roast the whole chicken, instead of buying boneless-skinless breasts, and we remember how wondrous root vegetables can taste—all for so cheap! Yes, Americans are learning to cook again, because although money may be tight, food is still essential.



But being human and all, eating is more than just cooking your own food. Eating is more than ingesting calories for calories sake. We eat for so many other reasons besides nutrition—for flavor, for the experience of new place and culture, for comfort, or for celebration. But most of all, we eat to be social. Isn’t that what going out to a restaurant is all about? We go with friends, with family, with lovers, with wives, with husbands, with business associates, with prospective PhD students. Yes, some people dine out alone, but nine times out of ten, you dine out with someone else.

Even in these economic times, people cannot stop being the social animals we are. Forgive my corniness, but our social ties are priceless. And eating together is an intimate act. It builds and maintains relationships, and that is something that we cannot and will not stop. The economy will not put us in holes, shoveling re-fried beans into our mouths merely to survive. No, even in the meekest of times, people eat together, and that is one of the facts of life that makes us human.

So I rather than looking at the paper, I planned a dinner party. Hummus, olives, and nuts to start. Pot roast, mashed celery root, and braised leeks to feature. Chocolate and frozen grapes for the finale. It was wonderful. We ate, we drank, we pulled out instruments, and we played and we sang. We clutched our bellies feeling like we feasted as kings. But more than than, we feasted together. And we toasted,

“The economy sucks! So we dine…”







**All these photos (except the last one taken by yours truly) were taken by my friend Charlie at our dinner party--that is him playing the guitar.

"Microbiopolitics": Why does raw milk have such a bad rap?

When Ben and I first started dating he made a batch of chocolate white chocolate chunk cookies—black and whites he called them. I was having a terrible day at the library, trying to write another section of my master’s thesis. My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I had a text message from Ben.

“I am being domestic and baking cookies. Black and whites. Want to be my guinea pig?”

Sweet! You pretty much can’t find a better excuse to shut down your laptop, pack up your books, and leave the deafening silence of the library—a boy and COOKIES!

Half an hour later I was walking down his hallway. The smell of baking cookies was wafting out of his apartment. He was pulling the first batch out of the oven as I walked in the door.

“Hi! How goes the thesis?”

“Ugh,” I grunted.

“Wanna cookie?”

“Um, yes!”

Delicious. This boy was definitely racking up points on the keep-o-meter.

“So, how much cookie dough did you eat?” I asked, knowing that when I make cookies, I only ever get half the yield because inevitably I eat half the batch in dough form.

“Um, none of it. It has raw eggs. I don’t want to get Salmonella.”

What?! Salmonella is something that I am fully willing to risk for the sheer delight of cookie dough. But that is not the point of my post today.

You see, Ben’s cautionary tactics in avoiding raw eggs are quite common. He was merely following the rules of food safety that we all learned at some point in elementary school. Raw eggs are dangerous. They make you sick. That is what we were brought up to believe.

Now, I am not saying that raw eggs don’t pass on salmonella, because they can. But it is not the egg’s fault. It’s our fault. Well, rather it is the fault of dirty, crowded, and substandard egg farms and packing plants. It is the same with raw milk. Raw milk does not make you sick itself. Careless processing and handling causes it to be contaminated, and only then does it make you sick. But as a society, we are terrified of microbes in dairy, and we think that these bad microbes are inherent in dairy products. I am not sure why dairy has such a bad rap, because clearly, raw dairy is not the only thing that can make us sick.

Peanuts can kill us too. Apparently.

I hate to admit that I am not surprised. It’s tragic that individuals had to die in order for other people to wake up and take a look at some of the gross problems with our industrial food system. I’ve written before on disease and contamination in industrial processed food, and I mentioned that the need to seriously re-vamp the way our food system works is not only an issue of public health, but it is also one of national security (as argued by Michael Pollan).

However, I am not going to talk about the peanut recall today, nor about food and national security. Rather I want to go back to cheese and point out a certain irony: the FDA does not allow the sale of un-aged raw milk cheese in the United States because it is a potential bio hazard. But in the past year, how many people in our country have died from tainted spinach, tomatoes, and now peanut butter?

Yes, of course raw milk cheese can carry deadly pathogens, but so can peanut butter, clearly. So why outlaw raw cheese and not peanut butter?

Heather Paxson, a brilliant anthropologist at MIT, calls this type of query an issue of “microbiopolitics”—a term she coined to “call attention to the fact that dissent over how to live with microorganisms reflects disagreement about how humans ought to live with one another.” In other words, how the politics of dealing with microbial health standards reflects the politics of our society in general.

This post, however, is about cheese, not peanut butter. Even if we just stay in the realm of dairy there are plenty of microbiopolitical issues to discuss. First off, pasteurization.

The claim: Pasteurization stops and kills the undesired spread of milk-borne pathogens, pathogens that used to kill thousands of people. Now, people don’t get sick from milk or dairy products because of the modern marvel of pasteurization.

Counterclaim: Pasteurization destroys nutritional value and makes milk taste bad.

The truth: Both of these claims have some truth and some, um, questionable assumptions.

First of all, pasteurization does not necessarily destroy nutritional value. Milk still contains a great deal protein, and pasteurization does nothing to change that. However, there are also many types of bacteria in milk that may actually be good for you, and when you pasteurize, you kill all the bacteria and microorganisms, good and bad. This is means that you do not get the health benefits of what good bacteria may be there. I have even heard that some people who are generally lactose intolerant can drink raw milk. Scientists think that the beneficial bacteria aids in the breaking down of lactose. That is only speculative, but still interesting. Nonetheless, pasteurization does not make milk non-nutritive, but it does kill off some possibly potential health benefits.

Second, the flavor factor may not have to do with pasteurization, per say. Rather, the flavor of the milk depends first and foremost on the quality of the milk. That being said, all types of pasteurization are not created equal. In my previous post on the politics of pasteurization I explained the difference between “good” pasteurization and “bad” pasteurization. Basically, “good” pasteurization is trickier and more time consuming, but results in killing any unwanted germs while not “cooking” the milk. “Bad” pasteurization basically blast heats the milk super fast, and then cools it down supper fast, so that you kill all the little nasties, but basically cook the milk, which completely alters the flavor.

Obviously, “bad” or “flash” pasteurization is much easier and more cost effective, so the majority of milk that you will find in the super market is flash pasteurized. However, if you are lucky enough to buy milk at a farmers’ market, or at a grocery story that carries milk from smaller dairy farms, you will find that you milk tastes sweet, as it should. It has an entirely different flavor profile, and while this may have to do with the fact that it is carefully pasteurized as opposed to flash pasteurized, it more likely has to with the fact that the milk comes from happy cows. Seriously.

You see, good milk comes from happy cows. Just as good wine is a snapshot of the weather and soil that the grapes grew in, and just as honey is a freeze-frame of the flowers that the bees feasted upon that season, milk should be a reflection of the different grasses and clovers and flowers that they cow happily munched upon. So it makes sense that the milk from a cow who is out at pasture, dining on sweet clover and green grass, will taste infinitely better than milk from a cow that is squashed in massive corals, knee-deep in its own feces, injected with artificial hormones and anti-biotics, and fed schlep made from corn, soy, and reconstituted waste. The logic is common sense if you stop to think about it. I promise that I am not being overly romantic about happy cows. Not only are happy cows happy (which is very nice), but they also produce tastier and healthier milk.

And how does this translate to cheese? Well, that is quite obvious. Good cheese comes from good milk. So this whole fuss over raw-milk cheese is a little more complicated than just saying that un-pasteurized cheese tastes better. Because, you see, yes, the pasteurization process does affect the flavor of the cheese, but what will more profoundly affect the yumminess of the cheese is the quality of the milk. Higher quality milk, meaning milk from small dairy farms with happy, pasture fed cattle, is either less likely to be pasteurized, or if it is pasteurized, it is done in the careful, “good” way.



So onto the “microbiopolitics” of the matter.

Pasteurization does stop a lot of disease, but it is merely a band-aide for a wound that could be prevented in the first place if we had smaller and cleaner dairy farms that paid more attention to the quality of the milk over the quantity.

This is what is so interesting to me. Even if you pasteurized milk, it can still be contaminated after the pasteurization process, like what happened with the peanut butter. Obviously, we do not pasteurize peanut butter because, well, peanut butter comes from peanuts, and not from a living animal. But still, due to dirty, sub-par processing facilities, the peanuts in that plant in Georgia were contaminated with Salmonella.

The problem with microbes in our dairy is not a problem with the microbes. It is a problem with the care we take in distributing our food. We run into these contamination problems not because of the foods we eat, but because we now heavily rely upon huge, massive, industrial plants that are more concerned with the bottom line—quantity instead of quality. This does not only potentially harm the consumer, but it is obviously harmful to the animals involved as well.

Clearly, pasteurization also is not a magic cure, because why then is un-pasteurized cheese perfectly legal in Europe? In fact, many of the cheese shops that Ben and I visited on this past trip to England did not sell cheese made with pasteurized milk. I must have looked a bit of an idiot as I stood there asking the cheese monger, “And this cheese? Is this made with un-pasteurized milk? And this one? What about this one?”

“They are all made with un-pasteurized milk, dear,” replied the lady at the Chester Cheese Shop.

Oh. I see. This is not due to any sort of snobbery on the part of the Cheese Shop. No, this is simply because in this small cheese store, the owner only carries cheese made on small farms around the UK, and all of these farms simply don’t pasteurize their milk. And this cheese…this cheese was some of the best cheese I have ever tasted. Was it good because the milk was raw? I don’t know. Maybe. But I think that more likely it was because the milk was just good quality milk from happy cows.

Eating amazing cheese in England made me start to ponder the politics of pasteurization. As I thought more and more about it, I began to see that the politics of pasteurization are wrapped up in so many other political and cultural elements of US society. Once again, I find myself asking somewhat unanswerable questions…all issues of “microbiopolitics.”

If raw milk cheese is perfectly legal under EU regulation, why are we so terrified of it in the United States? And why did dairy get such a bad rap over here? Why are we terrified to eat raw milk cheese, or drink un-pasteurized milk, but we gobble down raw fish in sushi restaurants all over? Why do we assume that products like peanut butter are free of microbes and germs? And if you want to go even deeper, how does our fear of germs and microbes in our food reflect the politics and mindset of our society? Heavy sh*t man…

If you are curious about more issues related to microbiopolitics, I sincerely recommend that you read Heather Paxson’s work. It is brilliant. Her ethnographic research is absolutely fascinating, as are the conclusions she draws from it.

I could continue to talk about cheese for ages, and there are so many other interesting intricacies and cultural elements to delve into. But I don’t want to bore anyone with too much cheese. As my brother found out on his last trip to England, too much cheese can be a bad thing…for your digestive system at least.


P.S. I re-did the "About Me" section of my blog. You can check it out via the like on the side bar. Now you probably know more about me than you ever wanted to know.

Back to an old question: What is American Cuisine?

Ah, hello! While I take a momentary break from cheese, I want to welcome everyone just stumbling upon my blog through Daniel’s post on Neuroanthropology. I am flabbergasted and extremely flattered to receive a mention on such a cool site. AND, I am still waiting to hear what other people would consider to be American cuisine.

It is funny. I wrote that post back in August, and I remember my mind spinning as I struggled with a way to define American cuisine. Like I said, I can easily tell you about American food, but as for the big picture and culture around American food (how I would define a “cuisine”)…can you actually sum it up? I don't think that you can. Nonetheless, I believe that it is still important to ponder such unanswerable questions.

For that matter, I think that someone will always find flaws in any type of generalization, and that is basically what a “national cuisine” is—a generalized way of describing how the people in a certain nation state eat. That being said, it is still easier to generalize certain cultures over others, and I think that it is particularly hard to generalize the food culture and ideology of the United States as whole.

However, I am still going to take a stab at it. I am going to pose a possible answer to my own question after having been abroad for a month and gaining a little outside perspective.

As I have been saying in my previous posts on English grocery shopping experiences and English cheese, the main difference I notice between the food systems of the UK and the US is one of scale. This is obvious. The US is a HUGE country, geographically and demographically. Outside of the US I have spent the most time in the UK and South Africa. All of these countries (I am including Scotland and Ireland here) have cuisines that are based on smaller scale food systems. This is perhaps why I notice much more fresh produce in the cuisines of the UK and South Africa, and much less processed food. This is not to say that processed, packaged food does not exist in these countries, because it does. However, processed food in the United States is so pervasive that I think I could generalize and say that as a nation, our national cuisine is one of industrial food.

Am I happy to say this? No. Not at all. In general, I do not eat processed food. Yes, I eat the occasional packet of M&M’s, and there are some nights that I just open a can of soup for dinner. However, like I said, if we are talking, “national cuisine” we are making generalizations. If I were to generalize the dominant eating practice and culture in the US, I would say that it has to be large portions of cheap, fast, processed food. But there is still more to my argument.

Cuisine is also something of perception—how we perceive other people’s eating habits. Like I said in my previous post, we often speak of “Italian cuisine,” which we Americans perceive as pasta and pizza. When we think of Japan, we think of sushi. France, we would say escargot and crepes. Even when we think of Canada, we think of maple syrup. Right, so when labeling a “national cuisines,” we pretty much name dishes. However, ask a non-American, “What do Americans eat?” They most likely will not name dishes—-they will name brands. Coke, McDonald's and Oreo cookies are the most likely examples. The following picture is evidence.



I took this picture in the food hall of Fortnum and Mason —a very posh department store in London. Anyway, in the food hall, they have a “foreign food” section with imports from various countries. There are spices and curry powders from India, dried seaweed from Japan, Serrano ham from Spain, cheese from France, and maple syrup from Canada. And then…from the US….Aunt Jemima syrup and pancake mix, Karo syrup, Betty Crocker cake mix, Skippy peanut butter, and Duncan Hines frosting…nice. (Also not pictured are the Oreo cookies that were on another shelf.)

There are hundreds of other studies showing the flow of “American” food into other nations—primarily meaning McDonald's, Burger King, Coca Cola, and so on. James Watson at Harvard and Yunxiang Yan at UCLA have both done ethnographies of McDonald’s in China, and both found that many Chinese families take their children to McDonald’s because they want them to be more “Americanized”. In America, if we are feeling like branching out and eating the “cuisine” of another country, we want to go to the most “authentic” little Italian restaurant we can find, not eat Nutella. Interesting...

So then, my stab at generalizing America’s “national cuisine” is to say that it is one of industrial, processed food. There are obvious flaws in this argument because it is a massive generalization. Fresh and “small scale” food exists here, obviously. I can certainly say that as an American, I don’t eat McDonald's or much processed food at all. However, I am sure that you can find some Canadians who hate maple syrup and Italians who don’t eat much pasta. You always run into problems when you generalize.

So then, I turn back to Sydney Mintz, and I reflect on his question in Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom, “Why is having a cuisine important?...Could it be good not to have a cuisine?” While I think that it is an important exercise to critically examine the way we eat, maybe there is no point in stamping the US with a “national cuisine”. Maybe it is a good thing that this is an unanswerable question. Because in the end, all the best questions don’t really have answers.

Cheese Epiphanies: Raw milk and the politics of pasteurization

I had my first cheese epiphany in England. I was six.

As a kid, I was not just a picky eater (weren’t we all?), I was an annoyingly picky eater. I didn’t like chocolate flavored things, but I liked chocolate. I wouldn’t eat anything that formerly lived in water. I didn’t like hamburgers or hot dogs (I always went for the chicken strips). I didn’t like chunks in my yogurt or ice cream. And I only ate yellow cheese.

My mother did not buy “American cheese” (the processed stuff). In all regards, she raised me eating extremely healthy food in comparison to many of my peers. I was the kid with the organic plantain chips in my lunch instead of Doritos, and I only ever had the all-natural fruit leathers in lieu of fruit-roll-ups. However, no matter how hard she tried, the only cheese I would eat was yellow cheddar cheese. Yes, she did buy the organic Wisconsin mild cheddar from the food co-op, but it was still yellow cheddar cheese, and it was the only cheese I would eat. Then I went to England.

I remember being at a cheese shop with my mom and my aunt, buying the cheese for the week.

“What type of cheese to you want, Melissa,” said my aunt.

“Yellow cheddar cheese, please.” (I was a polite kid).

“Well, they only have white cheddar cheese today,” my aunt replied.

I think that I pulled a face, and my mother told me that I had to try it. I reluctantly put a piece of the English white cheddar in my mouth, and to this day, I distinctly remember a completely new flavor sensation on my tongue. It was sharp and salty, but creamy and smooth at the same time. It was…interesting. All I knew was that I liked it. I was sold on this white cheddar stuff. In the following months, even after returning to the US, I would begin my explorations into cheese, becoming an avid lover of Munster, Swiss, Brie, and feta. Oh how I loved feta (well, still love feta). I could not believe that I wasted so much time eating only yellow cheddar. (It did take me until I was eighteen to enjoy any sort of blue cheese, or cheese with mold in it--a shame really. Now my attitude is the moldier the better. I love the way a blue Cabrales curls your tongue).



While I grew out of my picky eating habits at quite a early age, relative to most children, my younger brother remained un-adventurous in the food realm for quite some time. It’s funny because a few years back he had a similar cheese epiphany. I am not sure if he quite knew it, but I remember watching his cheese epiphany, and it was also in England. My family was back in England (staying in Suffolk with my Aunt and Uncle), and I brought back a wedge each of Sage Derby and Double Gloucester from the farm stand. (Derby is mild, firm, white cheese, and a well made Sage Derby is made by chopping up fresh sage leaves and mixing them in with the curd. Double Gloucester is a traditional English farmhouse cheese made from the whole milk and cream of two separate milkings and then let to age for six to nine months.) I set out the cheese at lunchtime, and I remember him eating his first slice.

“Holy shit that cheese is good!” he said. (My brother is not one to sugarcoat his language). I think he almost ate both wedges, and then said, “We need to go and get more of that cheese tomorrow.” I then made fun of him, and told him that if he kept up like this, he would not crap for the rest of the vacation (what are big sisters for?).

Looking back on both mine and my brother’s English cheese experience now, I know that it is no coincidence that both of us had our cheese epiphanies in England. Yes, you always hear of people having their enlightened cheese moments in France, but I have never been to France (sad, I know...I’ll get there some day). However, I think that it boils down to the same thing—the first experience of a cheese that is made in small quantities from high quality, and most likely, un-pasteurized milk.

You see, cheese should be a living, breathing, changing food—much like a good wine. In fact, if we are going to use wine as a metaphor, farmstead cheese can be likened to any good quality wine (and I mean good quality wine, not necessarily expensive wine), where as supermarket cheese can be paralleled with boxed wine. Like wine, cheese should be a reflection of the land and climate where it comes from. That is why a Wisconsin cheddar tastes different from an English cheddar, and why the same cheese recipe one year will taste different the next. The different grass that the cows, sheep, or goats eat, which all depends on the amount of rain and sunshine there is each year, completely changes the flavors of the milk that the animals give, which will completely change the flavors of the cheese.

Now, maybe "completely" is bit of a strong word, because all of these flavors that I am talking about are quite nuanced and layered. Yes, most of the time if you know your cheese, you can tell a cheddar is a cheddar. But what is amazing about cheese is when you get a cheddar that has hints of honey or lemon or pepper. All these flavor nuances come from high-quality milk, and as I said in my previous post, good cheese comes from good milk, and good milk comes from happy cows (and sheep and goats). But the story does not end there.



As I said, cheese should be a living, breathing, changing food. This means that it should be made from fresh, raw milk, which can be difficult to find in the United States. Although the laws vary from state to state, for the most part there are very rigid guidelines against un-pasteurized, or raw, milk in the US. Because milk comes straight out of the animal, alive and full of living organisms, this means that it is very perishable and open to contamination. French microbiologist Louis Pasteur discovered a way to make milk “safe” while also giving it a longer shelf life with his invention of the pasteurization process. As cheese aficionado Steven Jenkins puts it, “It was a great day for humankind, but a sad one for many of the world’s greatest cheeses.”

Milk in the United States must be pasteurized. There are two different ways to undertake the process, un-officially considered “good” pasteurization and “bad” pasteurization. In “good” pasteurization, the dairy farmer heats the milk to 144 degrees F (62 degrees C) and holds it at that temperature for 30 minutes. If this temperature is carefully maintained, most likely the temperature is low enough to not result in milk with a “cooked” flavor. “Bad” pasteurization almost always results in milk that tastes “cooked”. In “bad” pasteurization, the farmer heats the milk to 160 degrees F (71 degrees C) and holds it there for only 15 seconds. You can see why “bad” pasteurization (also known as “flash pasteurization”) is cheaper, easier, and thus the dominant practice in the US. However, by essentially cooking the milk, and killing all the bacteria (good and bad), you are destroying all the flavor nuances that result in delicious cheese.

According to US law, cheese made from raw milk must be aged at least 60 days at a temperature no less than 37 degrees F (1.7 degrees C) before being sold or imported. This means that all those delicious, fresh, soft cheeses that you find in Europe, cheeses that are made with fresh raw milk and meant to be eaten right away—the runny, gooey, delicious cheeses—are illegal here in the US, considered a potential “bio-hazard”. So yes, you can get un-pasteurized cheese here in the States, but only to some extent.

However, pasteurization is only part of the picture. As I said, good cheese comes from good milk. The other advantage to farmstead cheese is that it comes from the milk of animals that all fed on the same pasture at the same time, as opposed to milk from an industrial dairy where the animals are fed corn and mush. If cheese is a reflection of the land and climate in which the animals live, what do you expect cheese from an industrial dairy to taste like? Cooked milk—pretty much.

Once again, the difference between English and American cheeses comes down to an issue of scale, to some extent. However, there is more at play. Why are Americans so obsessed with pasteurizing milk? Why is cheese made from raw milk considered a potential “bio-hazard” where as we gobble down raw fish at sushi restaurants every night? When we have salmonella out-breaks in peanut butter, do we really think the cause of microbial infestation in our food supply is solely from raw milk? It all gets a little fuzzy here, and quite interesting. Why raw milk? Why not raw fish, raw nuts, raw fruit, raw vegetables, raw meat?

This post is getting quite long and bogged down with information, so I will leave it there for tonight and pick up on these questions later. I think that a grilled cheese sandwich is calling my name.

This Land is Your Land: Plant a Victory Garden

Around the time of Obama's election, I wrote a few posts about my hopes for the next administration's stance on food as well as a post on my hope for Obama's choice of White House Chef. While my prediction (or hope) for Alice Waters as White House Chef did not come true, there is still a strong urging amongst a group of food activists for the Obama's to plant a White House victory garden, something that I mentioned in both of my previous posts. Mark Bittman featured a post on his NY Times Blog about victory gardens, mentioning Roger Doiron who made a video to show the Obama's how a victory garden could be done.

I watched the video just today, and it is great. Please watch it below. If I had a lawn I would make a garden in a heartbeat. I am jealous of all of you who have space to plant a garden. I will suffice for now with my window boxes--however, I may try to grow some tomatoes and peppers in pots up on the roof of my building this summer. I'll let you know how it goes. Oh, and back to cheese and English adventures in coming days...

Cheese and "The Little Guys": Neal's Yard Dairy and The Cheese Shop

Cheese. I think it deserves to be considered its own food group. There are books, articles, and songs all written about cheese, and deservedly so. Not only is the stuff just so darn good, but it’s so intricately tied into certain human histories and cultures—even the bad stuff. I mean, when you think of American food, you have to think of “American cheese” and Kraft Singles. Yes, there are amazing cheeses being made in the US, and yes, “American cheese” is crap, but you must admit that it still comes to your mind. Swiss cheese makes you think of the Alps; stinky blue cheese makes you think of France; Gouda makes you think of Holland; Feta of Greece; Parmesan of Italy; Manchego of Spain; and on, and on.



When most people think of English cheeses, myself included, they think of Cheddar or Stilton, which are easily the most popular and widely known varieties of English cheese. But just as there are increasingly more incredible farmstead cheeses being made here in the States, the same goes for England. While there, I tasted some of the best cheeses I have ever had, and all of these cheeses were made on small family farms that had maybe twenty-five cows, max.

It is no surprise that cheese made on a smaller scale will taste better. Cheese making, especially making natural rind cheese, is labor intensive. To make these natural rind cheeses, the cheese-maker must essentially baby-sit the cheese for months, possibly even years, washing and turning the wheels constantly. Not to mention, the cheese-maker must have the right environment in which to keep the cheese (you don’t get natural caves everywhere like you do in the famous cheese making regions of France). However, both of these steps do not even matter unless you have high quality, sweet tasting milk. The bottom line is that no matter how long you wash or age cheese, if it does not come from good milk, it will fail to impress. Good cheese comes from good milk, and good milk comes from happy cows (and sheep, and goats)…but not all happy cows (and sheep, and goats) come from California. (Sadly, there are many very un-happy cows on California’s industrial dairy farms, but more on that later.)

Two places in England must be mentioned: Neal’s Yard Dairy and the Chester Cheese Shop.

A native Londoner friend recommended Neal’s Yard Dairy to me. He said, “Melissa, you HAVE to go to Neal’s Yard Dairy. Not only do you get cheese, but with every cheese you taste or buy there, you get a story.” Now, he did not mean that the cheese mongers gave you a little bed-time vignette with every sliver of cheese, but rather they can tell you about the farm and the farmer/cheese-maker where every single one of their cheeses come from.




You can read about the history of Neal’s Yard Dairy on their website. It is quite a fascinating tale. However, there is one very important aspect of it that I would like to pull out. Randolph Hodgson, after earning a food science degree, was the first cheese-maker for Neal’s yard Dairy. He eventually became the owner for the dairy, but even in the beginning, he bought cheese to supplement the ones made on site. The Neal’s Yard history states that “initially he did what everyone else did and went to a wholesaler. The cheeses that arrived were fairly anonymous and compared to the detailed knowledge Randolph had of his own cheese, he knew very little about their provenance or why they might taste different from one delivery to the next.”

Because Randolph did not know why some cheeses tasted different from others, rather than going through the middleman (the wholesaler), he started to go directly to the farmers. There he got to know each farmer, their herds, and how they make their cheese. This was all knowledge that he could then pass onto his customers, so when a customer came in and wanted a cheese that would go well with a certain wine, or a cheese that would be a perfect compliment to follow a roast duck meal, or a cheese that would be excellent along side a Stilton, he could point them in the right direction. After all, not all consumers of cheese are cheese experts, nor are they interested in becoming cheese experts—they just want to be guided to the right product so that they can enjoy it without doing extensive research.

So, to this day, when you go to Neal’s Yard for cheese, all the cheese mongers know about the origins of all the different cheese. Having hundreds of cheeses all in the same shop, this may seem like a daunting task. But you must also realize that with the exception of two cheeses, every single cheese they carry comes from the UK (the two not from the British Isle are a Greek Feta, and a goat cheese made in Oregon). Carrying only cheese made in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, or Wales means that they can go directly to each farmer and learn about the cheese. This would obviously be an impossible task if they were importing cheese from all around the world.



The second fromagerie I wanted to mention is The Cheese Shop in Chester. Carol, the owner and founder The Cheese Shop, originally owned her own restaurant. She became frustrated with not being able to source excellent cheeses, as wholesalers had no information about the cheeses they had available to restaurants. As a farmer’s daughter, she knew what excellent cheese was, and the way that good cheese should taste. Cheese is a living thing that is always changing, much like a good wine (this statement gets a little complicated with the politics of pasteurization, which I will get into in my next post). So Carol decided to open up the Cheese Shop.

Like Neal’s Yard Dairy, The Cheese Shop in Chester carries mainly all cheese from the British Isles, although she does have a few Scandinavian cheeses as well as some from continental Europe. However, when you go the Chester Cheese Shop, all the ladies can tell you about the farm, the farmer, the cheese maker, and the cheese recipe of each cheese. As I mentioned in a previous post, I tried a cheese made by a little old lady in the next town over that tasted like honey. It was incredible—one of the best cheeses I have ever had. The woman who makes this cheese is 85 and only makes it, “when she feels like it.” The woman helping us at the counter expressed her worry that when the little old lady dies the recipe for the cheese will die with her. Yes, it is quite a melodramatic story…but it was damn good cheese.

So, I will continue on with my cheese discussion in coming days, but I wanted to point out that the benefit of going to places like the Cheese Shop and Neal’s Yard Dairy is that the people who work there are experts. They are connected to their product and so passionate about it that they beg you to try it. They want to tell you about it, to educate you about it. Even if you are not interested in becoming a cheese expert, you will at least be assured to walk out of there with a better product. In addition, you are supporting farmers who simply cannot compete on an industrial scale. You are supporting farmers who have only 25 heads of cattle. And you get to enjoy some of the best cheese in the world.

These two shops are merely the finest examples of all the cheese purveyors we visited while in England. Every town and village we went to had a market with a cheese stand, and almost every town and village had a cheese shop. And each one of these cheese shops or stands had a cheese monger who was dying to tell us about his favorite cheese and where it came from. Yes, you could buy cheese at the supermarkets as well, and you could find some very good cheese at the supermarkets, but nothing like these small shops in each town. Like I said, when you buy from specialty purveyors (whether they be cheese mongers, butchers, or green grocers), you are buying from an expert. You end up with a better product because the people selling it to you are actually interested in what they provide, and you are supporting “the little guy” in a capitalist culture of big industry. The bottom line is that “the little guys” make tastier products because they actually can pay attention to what they are making or selling.

Ah, there is so much about cheese to be said, so I will stop for now, and pick up the discussion later.

While on the subject of supermarkets: The scale of food economies in England vs. the US

In my month abroad, I noticed some big differences between English and American supermarkets…

First off, although England has its fair share of convenience packaged items, the ingredient lists on these are significantly shorter than on most packaged items in the US. In addition, you are highly unlikely to see high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), in packaged food items in the UK. In the US, you would be hard pressed to find packaged food without HFCS. Candy, soda, sweetened yogurt, bottled dressings and marinades, etc. in England use cane sugar as the primary sweetener. Where as in the US, you have to really search to find soda or candy that does not contain high fructose corn syrup.

Second, although the packaged/pre-made food items are prevalent in England, you don’t see as much advertising for them. I actually did not notice this until I got back to the US. Once back in Chicago, everywhere I turned I saw adds for pre-packaged microwave rice, frozen entrees, canned soup, instant sauces, frozen skillet suppers, and on and on. I don’t know why, but advertising for packaged food in England does not seem to be as pervasive as in the United States.

Third, everything is so much smaller in England. This point I am sure does not come as a surprise. Everyone knows that US portion sizes are ridiculous. However, I am not just talking about portion sizes. I am talking about the actual size of vegetables. You would never find a potato the size of a small football in England. Eggplants in England are the size of our pears. Even the heads of lettuce are smaller in England. I am not sure why this is, but I suspect that it has something to do with agricultural methods. Oh, and it is quite noticeable that the smaller fruits and vegetables in England taste much better than what you get here in US supermarkets. Pretty much, the size of the fruits and vegetables you find at the farmers’ markets here in the US are the standard sizes of the fruits and vegetables that you find in the grocery stores in England.

Fourth, the produce isle in the Sainsburry’s, Tescos, Booths, Morrisons, and Waitrose I went into while in England were noticeably more diverse than what you would find at most American supermarkets. While a Safeway in the US may have a huge produce section, the variety of produce you will find is still small. You are not likely to find more than maybe three different varieties of potatoes, for example. One of the Tescos we were in must have had over fifteen different types of potatoes.

Fifth, for the most part, the supermarkets in England carried more seasonable produce. I did see some fruit that were obviously shipped in—mainly tropical fruits like bananas, mangos, and pineapples. And I did see some raspberries, although I am not sure where they were from. However, I did not see nearly as many fruits coming from the Southern Hemisphere as you would find in a US grocery store—I rarely saw asparagus, raspberries, blueberries, and so on. There were far more turnips, beets, celery root, sunchokes, rutabaga, potatoes, and winter squashes and gourds.



Sixth, the variety of cheeses and cured meats was astonishing compared to US supermarkets. Granted, many of these cheeses and cured meats were being imported from Italy, France, and Spain, and because of EU tariff agreements, there are no import taxes on these items as there would be if they were coming into the States. Also, there is the obvious issue of England being closer to continental Europe than the US. So I am not so sure this one really is a fair point. But nonetheless, it was something I noticed.

Seventh, chicken breasts in England look like they come from a normal sized chicken, and not some mutated Franken-bird with breasts so big that it can barely walk. There is a HUGE emphasis in English grocery stores on free-range chickens and eggs. This is in large part due to English celebrity chefs such as Gordon Ramsey and Jamie Oliver who publicly put enormous pressure on grocery store chains to only carry free-range birds.

I could go on, but I think that all of my observations tie into the food policy differences between Europe and the United States.

I see the matter as one that boils down to scale—the scale of the food economy in the US versus England. The United States is a FAR bigger country than England. Because we have these massive GMO monocultures of corn, potatoes, and soy, we have an enormous surplus of these crops being shoved down our throats. Because England is a smaller country, and has policies against these massive GMO monoculture crops, you see more variety in their food, and not to mention, fewer additives in the food that are made of corn and soy. In sum, I would say that all the differences I saw between US and English supermarkets can be boiled down to the scale of agriculture that exists in each nation. Smaller farms mean more variety of food, as well as fresher food. Huge industrial farms mean industrial sized and industrial tasting food. Obviously, this is quite a superficial assessment—it really is all speculative. I have not done enough research into the numbers to back up my theory here. But the issue of scale is my educated guess as to the differences I observed. You will see in coming posts, that this will be a recurring theme.

But for now, I am off to enjoy a cup of tea.

A Tale of Two Shopping Experiences

Yesterday I went to the supermarket. Supermarket—the word sums it up. A market where you purchase not only every type food you may need (meat, poultry, fish, dairy, grains, fruit, vegetables, and not to mention confections, breads, and cakes), but also any necessary cleaning supplies, toilet paper, kitchen utensils, flowers, plants, even movie rentals. You can buy your liquor wine and beer there (depending on state liquor laws), and some stores even have a dry-cleaner. It all sounds like a fabulous concept—a one-stop shop for all your domestic needs. It is the essence of the America—big, fast, efficient, cheap, easy—leaving more time for other aspects of life, whatever they may be.

However, as I wondered around the supermarket, I became increasingly disillusioned. The food all sat there in perfect shining form. Mountains of bright red perfectly shaped apples, heaps of unblemished potatoes, and bunches of perfectly straight and plump carrots all perched on the produce shelves beckoning to be in my cart. I walked by the meat department and saw rows and rows of chickens on display inside the glass case. Sitting in front of the chickens was a sign, stating, “Locally raised chickens. Ask one of us about it.” So I did. A guy came over and I said, “Hey, where do these chickens come from?”

He looked puzzled and said, “Oh, you mean, where is the farm?”

“Sure,” I said, “Where is the farm, and what type of farm is it?”
“Ummm, I think that it is an Amish farm somewhere in Indiana, or maybe Illinois. I don’t know, somewhere in that area, out there.”

Well, I took a chicken anyway. I wandered over to the dairy department to get some milk. Eventually I left the store with my groceries feeling as if I had just armed myself with a week’s worth of provisions.

Two weeks before, I was in England—Chester to be precise. We were staying with friends and went with them to do some shopping. First stop, the butcher. The shop was small, and the case displayed a small sampling of what was on offer—chops, bacon rashes, chickens, pheasants, game hens, sausages, loins, black pudding, tied roasts, and even some eggs over in the far corner. Roast beef was on our menu for the night. Our friend told him what he was cooking, and the butcher pointed to a cut of meat. “How is this piece?” he said. “It will roast up nicely.”

“Perhaps one with a little more marbling,” our friend said.

“Of course,” said the butcher, as he disappeared into the back. He returned with a huge loin of beef and cut us off a piece. He trimmed away the excess fat, and tied it all up, ready to be seasoned and put in the oven. Behind the counter, two other men worked away trimming and cutting more pieces of meat for other customers.
“Anything else?” said the butcher.

“Ten rashes of bacon, some lamb stew meat, and some eggs please.”

With all the cuts wrapped in white butcher paper, we left the shop and headed for the green grocer. A short walk across the town square, the green grocer’s shop was small, but loaded with heads of broccoli, buckets of yellow onions, sacks of all different varieties of potatoes, bunches of carrots, heads of lettuce, and all other types of produce you could want. The produce here was not all beautiful—the carrots were slightly dirty and crooked, the potatoes were caked with some mud, the broccoli was not on perfect tall straight stalks, and the apples and oranges were colorful, but had a dull matte finish (what apples and oranges actually look like before a protective coating of wax is applied to them). However, the store smelled like the earth—you could smell the dirt, and it all smelled alive. The green grocer, himself, was on the other side of the shop while we wandered and chose out the vegetables we needed. He was busy telling other customers about Jerusalem artichokes—they are in peak season in January.

With produce in tow, we walked down the street to the cheese monger (our friends first made a stop at the granary to pick up some flour). You could smell the cheese from down the block. We walked into the cozy little shop, eyes bulging at the mountains of cheese—big wheels, small wheels, wedges, squishy rounds, cheese covered in leaves, cheese covered in grass, cheese made of ewe’s milk, cheese made of goat milk, blue cheese, soft cheese, hard cheese, smelly cheese, sweet cheese, fresh cheese, aged cheese—the list goes on and on. There were hundreds of types of cheese in front of us, but every single on was from somewhere in the British Isles.

The lady behind the counter walked up to us, “Hello!” she said, in her northern English accent. “Like to try some? What do you want? Here here, start with this; it is just lovely. Mrs. Higgins in the town just down the road makes this—fresh ewe’s milk. I don’t know how she does it, and she only makes it when she feels like it, so you best feel lucky that we have it in.”

I took the sliver of cheese she shaved off. A pale butter yellow color, with small holes, it melted on my tongue—creamy and smooth leaving a lingering taste of honey, distinctly honey. It was possibly the best cheese I have had.

“That is amazing!” I said. “What else do you recommend?”

“Well, what type of cheese do you like?”

“Oh, I love cheese that has those little grainy crystals in it, like a Pecorino or a Romano.”

“Ah, well here is one from Devon, it is an Italian recipe for Pecorino. It really is quite lovely.”

We continued to try about six different cheeses, and finally decided upon three to take home with us.

On the way home, arms loaded with our bags of food, I not only had a weeks worth of provisions, but I had stories. I had experiences. The food I was going to eat for the next few days connected me to someone in the town I was visiting—the butcher, the green grocer, the cheese lady. The succulent roast beef, the sweet and wonderful leeks, and the soft creamy cheese were not only delicious because of their freshness and quality, but because they connected me to a meaningful human interaction—experts so passionate about the product they sold to their customers that they wanted to tell you about it; they wanted you to try it; and they wanted you to come back and tell them how it was. The guy in the meat department at the supermarket surely did not care whatsoever if I enjoyed my chicken, even if I should happen to see him again the next time I go to that particular store.

The difference in these two shopping experiences does a large part to sum up the differences between food in England and food in the United States. This is not to say that there are not supermarkets in England, because there are plenty. And there are plenty of butchers and cheese mongers and green grocers in the US. However, there are still major political, cultural, and social differences in how each country approaches food and drink.

In response to the comments on my previous post—my goal is not to defend English food as being better than, or even in some way equal to French, Spanish, or Italian cuisine. First, I have never been to France, Spain, or Italy, so I have no authority to speak on the subject of those cuisines. And second, as Ben stated in his comment, I think that you must appreciate English food for what it is—food as product of England’s land and the culture. When I say that England is light years ahead of the US in the food scene, I don’t necessarily mean that England is serving up tastier dishes. I mean to say that government policies regarding food, as well as cultural approaches to food in England, I deem healthier than what we currently have in the United States. If I were to name a single reason why, I would say that it is a matter of scale. England is a country that is what, barely the size of California?? The United States is massive, and because we have a fairly centralized and industrial food system, food is produced for maximum quantities and longer shelf lives. Quality is an afterthought, as are those who grow or raise our food.

So, let this be an introduction. I will start the following series of posts with the political front—talking about EU food regulations versus the United States, and then continue on with some more specific food experiences and themes from my month on the British Isle. There will also be a post or two on British ale, which is classified as a food under EU law (more on that later), and there will be a post or two just on cheese…because, honestly, who does not love cheese? So for now…