Eating from Coast to Coast

 Today's entry comes from Skyler and is a beautiful combination of food insight, nostalgia and history. For the record, Skyler owns neither a microwave or dishwasher.         

       We are experiencing a January thaw in Ohio today.  I actually when outside and pulled some weeds in my flower beds and garden just to say that I did that once in January.  As I was working outside I felt the urge that every Mid-Westerner feels on a day like this:  spring will be here soon and I will be able to plant my garden and wait for the annual bounty.  It made me think of summer cook-outs, camp fires with s’mores and pudgie pies and having a nightcap on my front porch all of which are more fun to share with a group of family or friends.   The reality is that the weather forecast says that by the middle of the week the temperature won’t get out of the twenties and there is a chance of snow.  So I made out my grocery list and trekked to the supermarket where I had my pick of fresh produce and aisle after aisle (yes, I am an aisle shopper) of products to cook virtually whatever my winter heart desired. 

Getting together with friends to eat is probably my favorite pastime. There is an ease when we get around the table.  Conversation flows (as does wine) and there is a level of appreciation for not only the food, but also the person who prepared it and the ingredients involved.  How a group of people in their early 30s became such want-to-be foodies is interesting to me when you consider that when we met our freshman year of college we were happy with microwave Raman Noodles, dorm food and the cheapest beer on the shelves.  The only consistent behavior is the joy of sharing the experience of food together. 

            This appreciation then could come from a few places.  Many of us came from homes where meals were part of the daily routine.  Food was prepared.  Tables were set (although only two of us used cloth napkins, but that is another post for another day).  Conversation was expected and then we helped clean up.  The whole processes might take twenty minutes, but in that time we shared the events of our day and laid plans for the day ahead.  If this were the only ingredient in our love of food and friends it might be enough.  However, it does not allow for the fact that we have such an appreciation of the food that we eat and the craft of putting it together.

            Enter the “culture of foodie-ism”.  While we were in college the Foodnetwork came into its own, and we could simply go online for any recipe we desired to try.  I learned how to cook making the casseroles and comfort foods of my Midwest childhood.  Butter?  Gravy?  Table salt?  Check. Check. And double check.  We aged into the foodie lifestyle after seventy years of other people preaching that there was more to life than canned or frozen vegetables and basic cuts of meat where your cooking choices could be boiled, baked or grilled.  Suddenly there was a desire to braise, deglaze and rest. We could make the food of America because it was in our supermarkets and we had traveled and tasted it or had seen it made on TV so we knew what to expect.  The history of regional food to any American table is one that occasionally makes me pause and appreciate how far we’ve come and a little of what we’ve lost on the way.      

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Roosevelt Administration put people to work in a variety of ways.  From the conservation efforts of the CCC and the controversial programs to fight profit losses for farmers with the AAA, the New Deal impacted almost all parts of society.  In my home town, the WPA built a swimming pool for the community; quarried from a limestone quarry by local labor.  However, what I find most unique about these governmental programs is their emphasis on the arts as well. Dorthea Lang was employed to photograph the plight of the migrant Americans displaced by the Dust Bowl and dozens of writers were given the task of recording the regional cuisines of America. 

That same WPA that built the swimming pool in my town also headed up the effort to chronicle America’s food.  The reports were collected, but never published until 2009 when Mark Kurlansky compiled them in his book The Food of a Younger Land.  He takes pains to point out how we ate in a country before the interstate highway system and its endless exit ramps full of chain restaurants.  (Charles Kuralt said, “Thanks to the interstate highway system it is now possible to travel from coast to coast in America and not see anything.”)  It was an age before frozen foods when all food was “seasonal” because that’s what was available and there was no chain restaurant for constancy.  Of course even by the 1930s food was not as regional as it had been fifty years before.  Railroads and refrigerated cars had been used for decades to take the produce of New England, corn form the Midwest and beef from the Chicago packing plants and ship them coast to coast. 

The book itself is full of sketches of drug store lunches, automats, clambakes, Mississippi fish fries, “Georgia Possum and Taters,” “Indiana Persimmon Pudding,” “An Oregon Protest Against Mashed Potatoes,” the Texas Chuck Wagon and “Oklahoma Prairie Oysters”.  Reading it, you get the feeling that these meals were special for two reasons.  The first was that they were social.  Some were special occasions while others were simply lunch stops or weeknight dinners, but they were communal: not eaten alone.  The second was that they were seasonal.  In an age before overnight shipping, refrigeration and mass production, some of these meals were prepared once a year and that alone was cause for a celebration. 

In the years after the Great Depression, through the Second World War and into the conformity of the 1950s, America’s food became as bland as the plot lines of most TV sitcoms of the era.  Vegetables were frozen or canned and many meals were more assembled than cooked.  America became a foodie wasteland.  There was The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and he ate the same dinner as his neighbors, just as he wore the same uniform.

Enter, Julia Child.  The food culture that my friends and I inherited owes almost everything to the great prophetess.  Volumes have been written on what she did for America’s diet and its food appreciation.  She turned the establishment on its head in an age of television for every “servant-less American cook”.   Her revolution was total. 

Forty years later, we tune in to watch Rachel Ray shout at us for 30 minutes to show us how easy it was to get a meal on the table any night of the week.  (Seriously, Rachel, if it takes 45 minutes that’s fine.  Just stop shouting.)  We could make a meal with five ingredients or less from some cooks and even do it “Semi-homemade”  (don’t even get me started on that show…)  But in the mix of all of this, something is missing that the WPA files of the 1930s and Julia Child encompassed, and that was the fact that food is an occasion.  It should be enjoyed and shared.  (The only one I consistently hear stating this fact on TV is Ina Garten.)  

Due to the conveniences of the 21^st century, food is much less regional.  We have family friends who do lobster boils and clambakes in Cleveland. (Trust me; they aren’t getting any of it from Lake Erie).  In my opinion, this is the aspect of the foodie-revolution that is the most exciting and the most disconcerting.  It is wonderful to recreate Kansas City barbeque at home or to pour Vermont maple syrup over pancakes on any given Sunday morning in San Fransisco, but when we do that, I can’t help thinking that the food loses a bit of its special quality.  Reading those WPA papers, the reader senses the excitement of a meal prepared only once or twice a year.  It was a time to pause and be appreciative of what you were about to eat. 

Today my food is not seasonal.  I know where my bell peppers were grown and the farm where the cow was milked for the cheese I just bought.  However, the tomatoes that I get out of my garden from July through September make me a snob for hot house varieties that I see at the market and I do admit to changing by diet in the summer when the bounty is coming from my vegetable beds.  So as I write this on a January thaw day that gives every Midwesterner the false hope that spring and planting season are right around the corner, this foodie is going to plan some menus for my own dinners this week that combine the best of modern conveniences and regional eating.  Roasted potato and leek soup (Thanks, Ina!) for Sunday, chicken and noodles with celery and carrots for Tuesday, and a bolognese for Thursday.  Come and get it!  Dinner’s served.