How to get a Child to Eat Spinach

The first time Matilda tried spinach against her will she was four years old and the neighbours probably thought they’d end up on the news that night.

She kicked up such a fuss you’d have thought she was being murdered rather than being asked to try something delicious.

And to be clear she had eaten spinach before, but never on it’s own or to her knowledge. There were these chocolate muffins which Mike, Matilda’s father made which had not just spinach but carrot and zucchini hidden in them, blended into the wet ingredients. Just about every pasta sauce and the like which got made in big batches had vegetables and herbs blended up into them, too. It was the path of least resistance. Mike would happily spend two or three times longer than absolutely necessary in the kitchen than have a full on head to head with Matilda or Archer at the dinner table.

The dinner table, which used to be such a relaxing and fun excuse to put down the tools at the end of the day or even something to look forward to when it was a special occasion had at times in recent years become a battle ground of sorts. Not that Mike dreaded it, he always looked forward to time spent with family but if was rife with compromise and consolations.

Now, spinach isn’t everyone’s favourite food to be sure but Mike did used to be a chef and if just about anything has been bathed in enough brown butter and salt it should a least be palatable. But you could tell there was going to be a struggle from the get-go - as soon as Matilda’s eyes levelled on the intended dinner there was a moment of breathlessness; a pause before the initial review that would tell you whether the next fifteen minutes or so were going to be calm or stormy.

She chose violence.

She had been doing so a lot lately. For nearly her whole third year of life that little girl had been a handful. Not bad, you wouldn’t call her bad, but not pleasant to be around a lot of the time either. Most mornings, it would take close to an hour before you could get a smile out of her, and if you pushed too hard trying to get one you were more than likely to regret it. Mike had often wondered if there was anything he could do for his daughter - gentle wake ups, cuddles in bed, sparing use of TV or phone apps. When most of those failed he started to wonder from what age can you start drinking coffee anyways?

Of course most of us would be empathetic to Matilda’s plight, oppressed as she was. Many of us are not morning people and fewer still are spinach people. Such an enthusiastically negative review might be discouraging but it’s hardly the first time a child has rejected a meal. Most parents or indeed most people who used to be children can empathize - Mike among them.

He told me once that he could recall the days when he was basically scared of bell peppers (capsicums) since he had got it into his head that they were spicy. Mike’s parents, Fred and Lou Lou, as they called her, had done well and the boys all ate well but certain foods still got pushed to the side or ignored on a regular basis.

Mike brother’s would often push pieces of tomato or the fat from meats to the side of their plate, and that’s if their mum and dad were lucky. More often than not they’d push the unwanted pieces clean off the plate, forming little piles on the edge of placemats. Still some other kids might have tried feeding them to the dog, but they didn’t have a dog in those days and what kind of a dog likes vegetables, anyways?

So it was until summer camp one year, when Mike, who had a big appetite, realized that if he was going to make it through the session he was going to need every available calorie. Two weeks is too long to reject pizza because it’s deluxe instead of margarita. Little by painful little he learned to eat what was there. By the end of the summer he even learned to like it. Ever since then and for various similar reasons he and his brothers have been on the adventurous side of eaters.

Matilda’s mother, Katie, was largely the same. So they didn’t begrudge their little princess her tantrums - pickiness and hangryness being as natural as any other part of childhood. They’d read somewhere that the picky kids, back in the neolithic era, were the ones who had survived to pass on their genes. It makes sense that all the adventurous kids, the kids with a genetic predisposition to trying new berries, mushrooms and the like, probably weren’t going to have the chance to pass on those genes.

Mike recalled that he had also read this idea that pickiness was brought on by overuse of processed foods early in life. It seemed plausible - most formulas and kid foods are designed to be as palatable as possible, and if a kid gets used to that and suddenly is being asked to eat something so much more foreign looking or smelling you can bet they’ll tell the chef where to shove it.

Plausible - maybe - but this didn’t square with Mike, Katie or anyone else’s living memory of their own childhood. It seemed more likely that parents just used to combat pickiness with more combat and back when that sort of thing was legal it was easy to see who was going to win.

Even Henry, two years older and at the time no less picky, would gladly have subsisted on beige foods had he been allowed. Beige carbs, specifically. He was a growing boy with a big appetite and there were exceptions, he happily ate raw broccoli for example, but his favourite foods by far were bread, pasta and pizza and I can say with absolute certainty that he wasn’t the first young person to worship the culinary achievements of Italy.

They did okay with that though, it was easy to justify basing a good deal of meals around carbs, especially if they were using brown breads, rices, pastas and pizza bases. Most of those meals were crowd pleasers and according to most traditional wisdom or nutrition science at the time, they probably had about the right kinds of nutrients in them to help a young family thrive.

But between the busyness and the lack of sleep of those days it had got to the point where some combination of brown carbs and tomato sauce - that’s marinara to be clear, not ketchup - became not just the norm but the only kind of dinner. Katie mentioned one day that it might be nice to change things up, maybe just a little.

They experimented and found some new favourites, sausages and burgers among them. It was a welcome change of pace to find some higher protein foods to add to the beige rotation, and after all they usually were still shades of brown. Mike began to wonder how many combinations of things would go with crushed tomatoes, anyway.

In fact Mike, who had always enjoyed baking, took it upon himself to experiment with all kinds of recipes to make their own versions of these staples. It seems crazy when I think about how he’d find time to make all these things but these are the kinds of things we do for love aren’t they?

It began with making bread. There has got to be something elemental, something satisfying to the soul in bread making - otherwise who would make the time? Sure it became popular during pandemic lockdowns, but that kind of proves the point doesn’t it? Who would do this if they didn’t have the free time? I’ll tell you who - someone who wants to find a wholesome, delicious, healthy way to feed their family.

But as most people who bake will tell you, making bread typically means that sooner or later you’ll want to buy a mixer. You can do it by hand but after a couple dozen kicks at that can, you start to dream about justifying the cost. Next you discover sourdough. The little jar of bubbling flour and water which occupies a small shrine in so many kitchens, that pet of chefs everywhere which eats better than the chef himself. And along with sourdough comes a whole new set of flours as well - rye flour to feed the starter, strong bread flour for the loaves, whole grain of course and white rice flour to dust the baskets, bannetons, with to make sure the sticky loaves come out of the basket and into the oven, cleanly. And with so many types of flour it makes you start to wonder, where do all these flours come from anyways? Well, they come from grains of course but where can you get big enough quantities of whole grains from to bake with? Online, it turns out. The same places you can buy a table-top, electric stone mill to home-grind your own grains into flour. Now once you’re making your own stone-milled flour what else can you make with it and shouldn’t you a professional oven or maybe start a micro bakery and wasn’t all this meant to be a way to make your life easier?

One night, when Clementine was less than a year old, she awoke grumpily to the sound of that stone mill grinding away and Katie pointed out that maybe this whole thing had got a bit out of hand. Well when else were you going to make flour? You weren’t.

So that was the beginning of the end of that. Of course it makes sense, talk about hitting the bull’s eye on the wrong target. Not the Mike hadn’t enjoyed it all - far from it - but it just made much more sense to learn to just manage disagreements at the dinner table after all.

So it was with empathy that Katie, Mike and Matilda’s brother Henry watched their little girl scream and pound her fists and run back and forth around the house after being shown her dinner.

It wasn’t long either before Archer realized that this was his dinner as well - a saag paneer - among some other Indian dishes, and that he was expected to try some of everything, too.

Then there were two kids getting murdered.

When they finally settled down, it was with some amazement that Mike and Katie watched, I think it was Henry first, sulk back to the table calmly, sit down and try a single molecule of the curry.

“Yummy” said Matilda.

“Not bad” said Henry.

“More, please” said they both.

And that was the beginning of the end of eating mostly beige foods.

Let’s Talk About Poo

I’m a father, cook, aspiring gardener, animal lover and environmentalist and there’s one thing all these roles have in common: poo.

I spend a lot more of my life managing what we call waste than I would ever have guessed I would as a young man. But let’s talk about poo, waste and paradigm shifts. 

Disgust of course is a useful emotion. We’re often disgusted or afraid to touch things which could do us harm. Like many things which we’re disgusted by it’s also a social taboo. I’ve known people to have a go at talking about taboo subjects openly and it always rang untrue to me. It was always as if we were daring each other not to be embarrassed. I’ve had many of these psychologically contorted chats and I’m done. We don’t need to tell each other how our poos are, it just doesn’t need to be said. Unless it’s a problem or if it’s genuinely hilarious.

That’s the brilliant thing about taboos, they present the ultimate opportunity for juxtaposition. You create tension by approaching a subject which is uncomfortable and release that discomfort all at once with a joke which gives people permission to laugh at the (often) arbitrary silliness of it all. Because it is a bit silly that we don’t want to talk about it. 

Avoid it, certainly. I repeat: I don’t want to know about your poo. Or smell it. But in my experience there’s a great many intriguing or taboo subjects which plain (or worse, academic) discussion can make drier than a British Prohibitionist in the desert. So if we can talk about sex, drugs and rock and roll without getting offended or silly why not faeces? 

Whatever the reason, I think it’s important that we started talking about our poo. And that of other animals. It’s a trapping of modern economic thinking that we get excited about food and avoid talking about what we now call waste. We’ve become so sheltered and embarrassed about a basic bodily function and so loathe to deal with the consequences of our biology that we ignore this step in a naturally cyclic system and treat it as the end of a journey of consumption. As an old roommate of mine used to say of any food: “it’ll make a poo”.

Bizarrely, even our well-founded disgust for the subject is probably a learned behaviour. While it’s true that handling faeces of any kind could transfer potentially harmful microorganisms to the handler’s micro-biome and present a risk of infection, it’s not a given that we find it disgusting. I’ve never personally had the experience (and I’m very grateful for that) of cleaning up a baby or toddler who’s played with their own poo but many parents and caregivers will tell you it’s not just monkeys who’ll throw their poop at you.

At a certain age we learn to be repulsed by poo; we’re told with good reason to avoid it. It seems to me though that we’ve become a little too avoidant. Over the past few years the most prominent poos I’ve had to clean are those of my first child. He wears washable nappies which means no sealing it up and throwing it away for someone else to manage. As an aside, apparently a full third of what we in Australia send to landfill is soiled nappies. It’s great that many of these are now supposedly biodegradable but just imagine the landfill filled at least one third full of used, biodegrading diapers. The primary reason most people use these kinds of nappies of course is convenience and cleanliness.

But like so much in an economy we pretend is linear on a planet of circular ecology, what appears convenient and clean is anything but when we look at the bigger picture. The energy, fossil fuels and generally carbon which go into making, transporting and disposing of all those nappies (not to mention other single use sanitary items like toilet paper and wipes) is difficult to calculate but certainly not clean. It’s polluting our world to have such clean bathrooms. 

And by our world I don’t just mean far off lakes, mountains and beaches. As anyone else present during the Toronto garbage worker strikes in the summer of stink can attest, it isn’t always so convenient to toss everything into bins and hope for the best, either. 

The truth is that the problem is treating our waste as waste. It isn’t. It’s a resource like any other in a circular economy. Any way you spin that wheel, ours and our animal’s ‘waste’ is just as important a step in a healthy ecological cycle as water or sunlight. 

In case it wasn’t clear; poo is where soil comes from. The excrement and decaying bodies of other organisms are rearranged into bio-available organic matter which feed and give support to plants, fungi and even some animals. Even sand, a truly clean kind of soil, is  often composed of the granulated bodies of long-dead sea creatures. 

Most industrial crops and animals are raised on laboratory fertilizer. Instead of receiving their nutrients and structure from the soil they’re fed synthetic NPK made using fossil fuel energy and fossil fuels directly. This doesn’t give plants and the animals who eat those plants everything they need. The plants are mostly water and fibre and the animals who eat those plants are large and unhealthy. It’s not hard to understand that eating an unhealthy plant or animal will make the eater unhealthy. We exist, and in large numbers, but we are starting to see the long term effects of this micronutrient-poor diet. 

Our population has bloated on bloated produce. By some calculations, if it weren’t for the Haber-Bosch process which allows atmospheric nitrogen to be fixed in a lab rather than in soil, some forty percent of humanity wouldn’t be alive today. 

This is particularly striking to me since I spend so much time thinking about our responsibility to each other. Trying to make humanity a more equitable species on the only planet we could hope to thrive on within human timescales is the great challenge of our time. Even climate change, our Great War, might be less of a burden if our population weren’t what it is. Those who were never born wouldn’t suffer and those who were might know a much more stable environment.

So many of our environmental missteps have been the result of industrializing nature and our economy. Seeing the earth as raw materials and human needs, even for comfort and amusement, as a moving target to be never quite satisfied. From what we understand of natural systems, anything sustainable is cyclical. On a human timescale, if we’re to build a society to be proud of, we need to treat our needs as part of a cycle as well. 

And in a cycle, no part is more important than another. 

Already there’s plenty of people who’ve adopted the idea that a little dirt is good for us. The role of our micro-biome plays in who we are is a hot topic and the importance of maintaining this ecosystem through diet and lifestyle is better understood every day. In a race for cleanliness, we’ve gone too far. 

In the past, there was good reason to get rid of our waste as fast and safely as technology afforded. It was shown that our disgust was well-founded. Living in close proximity to excrement made people sick and (relatively) clean water kept us clean. So we built complex systems to allow clean water in, dirty water out and because water is precious we would treat the water and re-use it forever. 

The problem with these systems is that this is an energy and resource intensive way of meeting a need for which nature already (mostly) provided. In most parts of the world, rainwater harvesting and composting toilets are nearly nonexistent despite the fact that these economically free or very affordable ways of maintaining ourselves would at least shift some of the ecological carrying capacity to a sustainable, cyclical system. 

Rain and compost might not provide for everyone. They certainly won’t help maintain the current quality of life many, myself included, now enjoy. But with a few simple tweaks to where the water in our taps comes from and the waste in our toilets goes we could live in a much fairer world. Which is something I for one want to talk about. 

Slow Love

A short recipe for building love.

Start with good ingredients. Cheap thrills can come in all shapes and sizes but taking the time to understand the full lifecycle of a product yields significantly better results. That’s why it’s so often best to do more of the work yourself. Not just because of the freshness or the labour of love, but because you can understand a product so much more fully when you see it’s transformation from plant, animal or fungi into food. 

Every so often take the time to make ingredients, not just food. Buying green coffee beans and roasting simply in a pan is one of my favourites. 

Find the connections. Building relationships between ingredients and humans requires openness. Without a willingness to share we can’t hope to receive. On this aspect of relationships the media is full of advice. Since we tend to focus on the beginning of love, there are plenty of artistic examples of putting one’s self out there and either being rewarded or learning from the experience. But there’s no love without risk.

For most people this means being honest first with yourself and second with others. For plants, animals and fungi it means having an understanding of how they came from the ground and ended up in your hands. It also means constantly tasting and smelling, since often this is the best way to learn about a product off the page. 

It’s become a cliche but my favourite technique I’ve learned is naturally leavened bread. It’s nearly magical to see flour transformed into bread, even more so if you actually see the grain being milled. Even if you can’t, it pays to know what the process would look like. It not only gives you a greater appreciation for whole grain flours, which will be more rewarding and healthy to bake with, but an understanding of why you want to be cooking with real food, as unprocessed as possible. 

Take care in preparation. Fast food, meal kits and assembly meals ask us to put things together quickly and consume just as fast. As much as possible, try not to do this. You and the people you love will thank you for it. Moving quickly can be exciting so certainly move and be decisive but truly falling in love is like turning on the heat before you’ve even prepped the ingredients. Exciting but risky for everyone involved. 

Think about what you’re doing, with all your senses. Every eating occasion, like every relationship, is both a risk and an opportunity. Once you’ve occupied someone’s life you have a responsibility to act in a way which is fair. Failing that, you need at least to minimize harm. So don’t be casual with either your diet or your friends and family.

As you cook, taste the various plants and fungi you’re adding to the whole. While it’s often less safe to do this with uncooked animal products, any opportunity you have to understand the flavours of the individual ingredients in something in something like ratatouille will lend that much more understanding and appreciation of the final product. It also highlights how much pleasure can be had along the way. 

Enjoy the process. So often we think in a goal oriented way. The sense of eating is satiety. The sense of love is procreation and pleasure. But just because we need to do something doesn’t mean it should be mechanical. I argue just the opposite. These most basic human desires should be celebrated and savoured as what makes us, us. Good food and healthy relationships demand both respect and joy. So whether in cooking or in relationships, pour yourself a drink and stay a while. Taking your time will also allow you to enjoy what you do have instead of wishing for things to be a different way. 

Give thanks. Not everyone will live like this, which is a shame in my opinion. But when you find people who reciprocate your emotions and ingredients of genuine quality remember to appreciate them. This is the stuff which makes life worth living, after all. 

And now for everything which happens after the credits. After I do and the music swells, the rest of us are all still here. Cleaning up after a meal is just as necessary as having it. We could call this Relationship Maintenance but even that phrasing admits a kind of boredom. We’re meant to tell stories about the exciting moments of our character’s lives and leave the average days unrecorded. 

This is the illusion of art. No epic poetry, literature, history, film, tv or even podcast is written for the middle years of marriage. I suspect this is often why the personal lives of artists are so dramatic. It can be heartbreaking to be so keenly aware of one’s emotions, so deeply in love and quite suddenly without love and just left to clean the dishes. After all, if our emotional response to love or food is what makes life worth living, how do we go on after the meal?

Since I’m only in the middle of my marriage I can only guess. But I suspect the answer again is biomimetic. Our socio-cultural understanding of our needs should mirror our biology. After all, if we continue to feast after we’re full we’d become sick. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. 

I believe our capacity to love isn’t limited by biology. Our often overactive empathy exemplifies how humans can love infinitely, even to a fault. But we can’t sustain infinite relationships. We have limits because of the effort required to love (and eat) equitably. 

So what’s a conscious consumer to do? As with so much in our consumer-driven, neoliberal lives the normal solution is to start over. Why repair when you can replace? Who wouldn’t want to be forever in the lustful beginning of a new relationship? But my argument is that this too is making us sick. 

I am not in lust with my wife. We have a toddler and another on the way at the time of writing and between our dogs, renovations, work and social lives we’re often too tired to be lustful. 

I am in love. Within it. In the middle of it. As with any relationship or recipe each moment is a new opportunity and (sometimes) a challenge. But this what I’m arguing for: to be in love. Call it slow love, if you like. 

Neither of us is perfect. Sometimes I think the lust part allowed us to build a bridge, allowing time to believe the other is perfect before discovering all our flaws. Or finding all new ones within and without of ourselves. As with any new experience, the infatuation comes first. But she’s the one I chose and I want to live with that, within it, and build a life without wondering how things might have been in some way more exceptional. 

I want to learn to celebrate an uneventful marriage just as a weeknight meal. A life about nothing. It probably won’t make it into the history books but that’s another place where history confuses us. Just as love isn’t a series of infatuations, humanity’s story isn’t a line of exceptional individuals surrounded by plebs. We tell stories about the exceptional because they weren’t normal, but they stood on the shoulders of an awful lot of average people. For every great chef, there are quite a few dishwashers. 

Solidarity

I’ve managed to cheat death, that I know of, twice in my life.

In January 2015 I was living in Paris but home for the holidays in Toronto. I had recently completed my culinary education and had begun my tenure as a stagière (or intern) in patisseries and restaurants for what would be an informative but relatively short life as a chef. One internship down, a little wiser but tired and back with my family, things were good.

A short note about interns; it’s common practice in the French hospitality industry to work the newcomers ragged until they give up or succumb. From what I’ve learned of other industries, this form of indoctrination into the working culture is largely accepted as an important step in a new employee’s life. It builds a sense of camaraderie with not only your peers but those who have faced the trials before you, in times which were no doubt harder. While there’s certainly something to be said for stimulating a passion around your working life, I hope in the future we’re more enlightened about creating unnecessary in-groups and universal barriers to entry, especially for what is essentially just another way to get paid. 

But as I said in my lucky case, things were good. Then I got the news of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the deaths of humans at the hands of other humans because we could’t agree. It’s always sad when violence becomes the result of the disagreement. And especially so when a more general sense of human empathy is made all the more relatable by thinking that it could have been you in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Or worse, since as I came to realize it’s much harder to fear for yourself than for others during a crisis. I heard the news, I reached for my phone, I reached out to everyone I knew to make sure they could still reach for their phone. We were all very lucky. It’s easy to assume that in this case “cheating death” is an exaggeration but we really never know, do we?

It happened again in early 2020 when all over the world people were waiting for the wave of what was then called coronavirus on our news to hit their region. Again, I watched the news and reached out to friends and family. Again, it was with a strange sense of detachment because in the previous year I had moved to Perth, Western Australia.

Perth is popularly recognized as the most isolated major city in the world. The next closest city of more than five hundred thousand people is Adelaide, over two thousand kilometres away. It is quicker to fly to Bali, Indonesia than to reach the capital city of Australia from Perth. This used to be a thing people joked about, back when we would fly for leisure. We’d describe prices in units of trips to Bali and get excited when a new international trend had finally made it to Perth. A Perth native and friend of my wife’s is credited with kicking-off the trend of Quokka selfies but that was before my time. Look it up if you want to see some exceptionally cute Australian fauna which for once won’t try to kill you.

So I found myself in the most isolated city in the world during a global pandemic. People kept asking me if I felt lucky.

The truth was, I felt guilty. Saying someone is lucky isn’t strictly speaking a compliment but I think we’re supposed to receive it like one, with humility and polite acceptance. But I couldn’t accept it and still can’t because it keeps coming up whenever we’re out (which in Perth is a fair bit more than anywhere else these days) because I have a foreign accent.

When you accept a compliment, you’re agreeing to the premise of the statement. This is true whether or not you had any role in the feature being complimented, just like luck. That’s why it’s polite to accept the compliment rather than give an explanation. “Nice eyes; oh I had nothing to do with them” is awkward while “nice eyes; thanks I grew them myself” is weird but acceptable. 

Luck is different because what we’re acknowledging is that we humbly accept we had no role to play in our fortune. If we pretend we did, that’s unusual. 

What I disagree with is the premise. I don’t feel lucky because being apart from my friends and family back home during this struggle doesn’t feel like a blessing.

Toronto had claimed the longest COVID lockdown of any large city. Then Melbourne grabbed the title. What we can definitely agree on, as a friend pointed out, is this is an odd thing to brag about. It does support my view though that there’s something to be said for solidarity, not individualism, at times of crisis. 

I suspect there’s others out there who agree because while I don’t follow hockey (by Canadian standards at least) I know that if there’s an organization which understands struggle it’s the Leafs. We have a similar team in Perth, a much-loved but rarely winning AFL team whose fans will likely already by familiar with the concept that struggle is team-building. 

This seems more than a subconscious suicidal tendency. I don’t think that I secretly (to paraphrase the Chinese proverb) “wish to live in interesting times”. Maybe it’s recognition that when faced squarely with our own extinction (rather than obliquely as with climate change) we cannot only survive but thrive. Even if we don’t, in the words of Steve Rogers, “we’ll do that together, too.”

Footprints

Does what you choose to eat really matter?

Food for me has been the gateway to learning about sustainability. Since climate change (or global warming, depending on who you think popularised that term) and sustainability as a whole is such a particularly large hyper-object there are any number of lenses through which I could have initially seen this problem. But for me, it was food.

Caring about what I eat opened the door to artisanal food which introduced me to the notion of traceable food. The cultural shift in coffee consumption (the third wave) since the 1980s follows a similar trend. If food wasn’t local, so local you could recognise the soil on the stem or the cow on the bottle than at least we could trace its origins to, ideally, a single farm. That way we could at least interact with global food in the same way as local.

For coffee, this is sometimes framed as a sustainability concern but just as often it’s in search of the highest quality. As I’ve seen in other areas of food production, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Whether quality products taste better because of a higher nutrient density, lack of questionable practices or palatable placebo the fact is they often do.

There was a time, at least for local food, where all food was like this. When it wasn’t possible or feasible to ship produce from another continent to your local supermarket, no one needed to research where the food came from since it was obvious. Even the most devout local foodies will often concede that it can be allowed to trade for items which can’t be produced locally; the high cost and potentially dubious origins of these products acting as another check and balance in their desirability.

Spending time tracing the origin of your food has a distinctly new-liberal vibe. It feels like the sort of thing an active consumer would do to ensure they are getting the best product. New liberalism (neo-liberalism, if you like modern latin) is based on these kinds of beliefs and practices. It’s the idea that we are responsible for ourselves; for our needs to be met and our goals achieved it is most important that we strive as individuals. Capital economists and conservative politics love these perspectives because it basically means if you want something it’s up to you (not the government) to provide for that need and if you fail it is also on your shoulders.

I’ve realised in writing this that I can’t delve too deeply into the political aspect of footprints without coming a bit off topic. Simply put, I don’t think this idea makes much sense right now. This is because ‘right now’ we live on a finite planet with little or no ability beyond imagination of how to source resources from elsewhere. As well, ‘right now’ is the historical moment preceded by all the other inequalities and chance which led to today. It might apply to a group of individuals who began with equal opportunities who live in a boundless universe, but it didn’t and we don’t.

Returning to food.

When we knew that food came from the farm, the front or back yard, the forest or the ocean, in summary: the earth, it was also clear that all food chains begin with sunlight. The purest and most efficient form of caloric energy available is from photons. Even organisms which don’t feed directly off radiation (fungi, animals) mostly get their energy from the bodies of the life which fed from sunlight.

Maybe this sounds familiar, that all food chains begin with plants. Broadly, the way a circular energy system on earth functions is that plants make caloric energy from sunlight and carbon, animals consume plants or other animals (who have consumed plants) for carbon and fungi consume plants and animals for carbon, on a matrix of which we call soil so plants can grow. Of course, it is much much much more complicated than this. But if that’s all you know, you can understand this argument.

The main distinction between phases of this cycle is what we call the carbon and how it’s arranged in molecules. You might also remember that plants need carbon dioxide to breathe, much like we need oxygen. This is where they consume carbon.

An argument I’ve heard against carbon dioxide sequestering is that since it’s what plants breathe maybe it’s actually a good thing there’s more carbon in the atmosphere even if there’s less in the soil. The reason this doesn’t work is twofold.

Firstly, just as an example, we breathe oxygen at 21% and it’s good for us, 50% and it’s toxic. As with any system, there is such a thing as not enough and too much.

Second, plants use carbon like we use carbon, as sugar. They create carbohydrates using carbon dioxide and solar energy. More carbon means more carbohydrates. This goes towards building their bodies the same way it does towards animals. More carbohydrates (more carbon) means a larger organism.

If you still think that’s a good thing, consider that of all the identifiable parts of food which we need to survive, carbohydrates are the most superfluous. Of the macronutrients, protein and fats are more essential in that order and increased carbohydrates likely either dilute or diminish micronutrient density. So larger, not more nutritious, organisms. And while nutrition science might be in it’s infancy less nutritious plants and resulting humans appears to mean less healthy ones. Micheal Pollan has noted repeatedly that it shouldn’t be a surprise that we’re unwell as a species when we eat so few plants and those we do eat are so nutrient poor?

Decreasing plant nutrient density has also been linked to soil degradation, a subject gaining increasing and worrying attention. Since instead of healthy organic matter we’re increasingly growing food organisms in essentially inorganic rock washed with just three macronutrients: Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (NPK).

You might argue that certain plants are grown specifically for carbohydrates. Who cares about how much healthy protein and fat is in a carrot?

Even as a boon to carbohydrate production the argument lacks merit. Think of Dan Barber’s famous zero brix carrot from the book The Third Plate. The leaves of the carrot are fat with cellulose and carbohydrates because there is so much carbon in the air. Why store any in the root? That carrot, much like the people who eat it, is mostly water. The cellulose (a plant fibre) we can’t digest. So a modern industrial carrot is basically pre-hydrated fibre supplement. You’re paying for a lot of water weight and fibre but very little flavour.

If all this makes you mad, you’re not alone. For me it’s at least a reminder of why I choose to shop the way that I do. But that’s where it comes back around to choices. My food choices vs the corporation’s. My footprint vs theirs.

There’s an unhealthy debate in our community about personal versus political responsibility. Some believe that since individual action accounts for so little a portion of global consumption, it’s best to just ignore personal choices and instead focus on changing political and corporate behaviour. Others see the world as a capitalist market system, where individual choice is, in an ideal scenario, all that matters and that if we want change we need to vote with our dollars.

It’s often pointed out that the notion of a personal carbon footprint instead of a collective carbon economy was proposed by BP (a British Petroleum company) in a marketing campaign designed to point the finger at consumers. After all, they aren’t making gas (petrol) for nobody. We all seem to want their product. But while the origin of the idea might be dubious we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

As with so many complex issues, it seems to me that an approach marrying the two is most sensible. We don’t need to be afraid of being hypocrites to speak up politically and we don’t need to be perfect politically to have some influence at home or work. But of course in the media nuance is boring and doesn’t get clicks.

Honestly I’m not pessimistic personally; I’ve just grown up around marketing and often get paid as a copywriter.

Instead of carbon or carb-o footprints perhaps we can think of consumption like a donut. As Kate Raworth points out, there is a sweet spot in terms of economic participation where you have everything you need but not more or less. I’ve personally started to phrase this notion to myself as the “enough” principle. With any system, there is such a thing as not enough and too much. Why should economics be any different? Whether micro or macro (home or global), doubly so.

Robusta

Are you what you eat most often or most happily?

For most of us, some kind of warm beverage or (even more broadly) flavoured beverage is a way to start the day. It’s also a way we end the day, mark an occasion or toast to friends and family. It is something we look forward to and get to do often, one of life’s simple pleasures of civilisation and essential in a culture that until recently had some taboos against consumption of any kind in solitude. 

Many people by extension like to define themselves by their preferences or aversions. Whole cultures have been created around consuming caffeinated, alcoholic or notably dry beverages and each carries contextual baggage which is quite extensive when one stops to consider it. Coffee, especially black, is masculine, tea is feminine, beer is social, wine is a healthy indulgence, etc. 

As an aside, ever since enjoying tobacco from time to time during my stay in Paris and various other limited occasions elsewhere, I’ve found it confusing that our culture divides people into smokers and non-smokers as if there were nothing in between. Definitely there are ends of the spectrum, one can be a habitual user just as one can be a virgin. However just as with the sexual use of virginity the whole idea of having had or not had an experience carries its own unnecessary baggage and identity. I have smoked tobacco and will likely continue to do so from time to time. So have many people I know who would almost certainly identify as non-smokers if pressed by a parent or doctor. Surely a single experience doesn’t cause one to cross a bridge and forever be considered something as ugly as ‘a smoker’? But that’s just how we think of virginity or illicit drug use for that matter. But other, more benign (even addictive) behaviour like gum-chewing or social media browsing? We can safely consider that a spectrum and not binary. I’ve never heard of someone being called a gum-chewer or saving their facebook use for the right special someone to share. My point of course is that, like the breakfast club, culture seeks to classify what in reality is never black and white.

It’s really people who choose to define themselves, publicly or privately, in these terms and all the associated baggage.

So it is with coffee. I love coffee. I am a coffee-person. But so does nearly the rest of the world, especially if one includes the other (slightly more popular) caffeinated beverage of choice, tea. So especially if I say I am a caffeine person, I’m in the majority. But that doesn’t tell you much about what specifically I like or don’t like. And I try not to dis-like but of course it is difficult to just like what you do and ignore what others do.

Let me explain a little about coffee, for context. Coffee is a beverage made by dissolving in water the ground seeds of a plant whose genus is called Coffea. Coffee plant seeds are called beans of course but in order to de-mystify the process and clarify what’s happening I think it’s important not to fall back purely on convention. 

Two of the most propagated varieties of this plant are the species Arabica (Latin for Arabian) and Robusta (Latin for Strong). They’re of course very similar plants with similar looking seeds but with a few key (mostly culturally defined and therefore subjective) differences. The most prominent difference is that coffee connoisseurs have decided that the flavour produced by arabica seeds in water is superior to that of robusta seeds. So this allows people who have read a little about coffee to show off what they know about the drinks by prizing arabica and denigrating robusta. This has led to (or is perhaps the cause of) Robusta seeds being chiefly used to make the polar opposite of ‘speciality’ coffee; instant coffee granules.

Here is what I’m proposing about cultural preferences, definitions and food: most people don’t really know what they’re talking about. The vast majority of people, myself included, have never had the chance to blindly taste test several different coffee varieties side-by-side, which is adorably called ‘cupping’. We actually have no idea if maybe we’d prefer artisanal crafted robusta or, as I’d argue is more likely the case, if we couldn’t really tell the difference and would like to base our decision on another factor; price for instance. Experts, with their own palates almost by definition different to our own, have told us they prefer arabica and so should we. We, as Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, buy our beliefs off the rack and put ourselves in one camp or another as a fashion statement. 

It recalls some of what I learned during my brief foray into fine dining. Food critics and chefs, whose palates are again very different to the majority, have developed a taste for artistically and philosophically gratifying food which in many cases succeeds to satisfy culturally just as it fails biologically. I’m referring to the often true cliché that after one eats at a multi-Michelin starred restaurant, one often needs to fill the stomach with something much more affordable as much to soak up the ten plus courses of alcohol pairings as to feel genuinely full. What we aspire to and what we actually do day-to-day or identify with might be just as mismatched in other ways.

The vast majority of coffee consumed globally is robusta, in the form of instant coffee, which (like comic sans and carbohydrates) coffee snobs will most likely assert is a crime against good taste and should probably not even be considered coffee. If you come across this opinion it’s interesting to counter with the fact that India is producing some really nice artisanal robusta varietals prized for their flavour and not (as robusta bound for instant coffee is concerned) for high yield. It will show that you know at least a bit about coffee and even more about snobs.

Robusta typically is associated with woody, earthy flavours and higher body, making a richer cup of coffee. For these reasons it has traditionally been a part of Italian coffee culture where people prefer it for taste as well as cost. As with instant coffee, people can come to prefer certain aspects of their food and drink for reasons which may not include flavour but also which can include flavours some other people dislike. These people aren’t wrong. 

I’m reminded of finding other people’s flavour descriptors puzzling, especially as a kid. Flavours are of course imprecise and subjective but can help as some information is better than none. But it can be particularly confusing when someone is so used to one experience and someone else a virgin or novice. As a child, I’d take it for granted when actors in movies and tv would describe a good hard alcohol as ‘smooth’. As you can imagine my first hands-on experience with the flavour of hard alcohols was many things, of course interesting and bold as flavours go but nothing I would ever describe as smooth. 

It is one argument to say robusta or instant isn’t coffee because the post-war industrial food complex is poorly suited to our biological and ecological health, which it is. It is quite another to equate this way of drinking coffee, or any cultural activity, with a form of uneducated baseness and ignore the context in which people do what they do. 

It’s common when meeting new people to ask what they ‘do’. By this we mean ‘how do you make your money?’ We phrase it this way because it’s impolite to ask directly, likely because that would be adjacent to asking ‘so how much money do you earn at work?’ But this phrasing suggests a whole series of more interesting questions. Assuming we roughly sleep one third of our lives and do paid work another third, wouldn’t it be much more interesting to ask ‘what’s your favourite hobby?’ Or more directly ‘what do you wish you were doing most often?’ Do you define yourself by how you earn money or would you like to talk about something else? And is how you define yourself a thing you do often or the thing which you most look forward to doing?

This question would be just as informative and probably allow for a richer description of the person, as it would for a society. People have all sorts of reasons for a potential mismatch in what they do for money and what they are excited by and wish they were doing most often. I can only assume that it’s the same for food and culture. 

As with so many human endeavours, cost is a chief concern. Many people’s reason for being a coffee person who drinks instant coffee is surely cost or utility. There are certainly other people who drink coffee but mostly in social settings and so have never been bothered by variety etc etc. There are so many contexts in which someone can both like coffee and like instant coffee, for so many reasons.

Even flavour, the food connoisseur’s last bastion. Surely, they’d argue, there are many reason’s to enjoy instant coffee, cheap beer, wonder bread and fast food but quality is of course not one of them. But of course even that is subjective. Just because you have spent your life comparing food and drinks of all sorts, identify as an expert and want to tell other people about your preferences does not make you right. In fact the most democratic approach would be to see what most people do most of the time, and that’s to drink the robusta.

So have your preferences, of course. I don’t want to offend anyone who isn’t trying to offend anyone else. Maybe people talking about what they like is in no way trying to imply a dislike for anything else. Even a description of disliking something else is possibly just meant to be a strong opinion, not a value judgement. Ultimately what I’d love to see is more people taking an interest, but again that’s a preference and some people just don’t care. Just don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that your tongue is right and someone else’s is wrong. Or even that they care. 

Fairy Bread

Why is it okay to eat sprinkles on buttered bread and call that breakfast?

Most of you will be surprised to hear that sprinkles, little pipes or beads of sugar in different colours and flavours, are considered real food in some parts of the world and not ‘candy’. Like even most other candy though these begin life as real plants, grown in the ground under the sun and harvested to be processed into human or animal then human food. It’s only once we get our hands on it that foods take on elements of culture; transform into cuisine. You’ll soon see how the same species can in different parts of the world and at different times consider some edibles food, thus acceptable at breakfast, and some candy; definitely not. 

The origin is a little unclear. Though eating bread and butter is nearly as old as western culture, additional toppings as today seem to likely be a matter of both popularity and preference. One source found that topping buttered bread with sugar or sugar coated aniseed has been done in the Netherlands at least since the Middle Ages, at least by wealthier people. Another found a modern origin, more like candy production, in the marriage of the idea to top buttered bread with candy and chocolate. It’s interesting to me that it took nearly twenty years for this marriage to be brought to market, considering chocolate, butter and bread had been present in the Netherlands at least several hundred years. There’s surely an economic, historical or cultural logic behind this. If I were making a rich candy of nearly any kind, the first flavour that would occur to my twenty-first century mind would be chocolate. 

Where I’m from, we catch a lot of flack from the international community for eating dessert for breakfast. To be clear, I’m not defending this. And to be even more clear, I’m Canadian and while that seems similar to American it is and isn’t in many important ways. But we famously, like America, have the unusual tradition of emphasising the moral virtues of breakfast while consuming foods the rest of world reserves for dessert at that meal. It’s not even thinly veiled either: our most famous Canadian breakfast is likely pancakes, literally cake with caramelised sugar syrup to imbibe it.

It’s unusual then that most of the articles I’ve read about fairy bread or hagelslag (the Dutch term for “hailstones” or topping buttered bread with sprinkles) have framed as a sort of culinary joie-de-vivré. A lesson we less cultured new-world humans can learn from our older, European sibling in the art of living. 

Never mind that the practice isn’t actually that old world or that modern western breakfasts are decidedly less nutritious in both the new world and the old than they might have been a century ago or even that the analogy breaks down when you compare the Dutch hagelslag (about 1/3 chocolate) to the Australian hundreds and thousands (nearly all sugar) and that fairy bread is not a breakfast food and pancakes are one. 

The cultural element that these practices point out is pointing in the mirror. The fact that we find some eating habits mundane and others interesting is what’s interesting, not the eating of sprinkles at a certain time of day. 

Recent studies have refuted the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It likely isn’t. So long as skipping breakfast works for you, you’re able to eat well the rest of the day for example and not over-indulge later because of skipping a meal or some other compensatory behaviour, you’ll be fine. Why then did we think breakfast is so culturally important that we want it to be just as palatable as dessert just so we can have that meal? What is so virtuous about breakfast that we’ll defend it’s cultural importance, insisting that it’s not nutritionally or morally right to have chocolate sprinkles on toast. Chocolate could potentially be had at breakfast in hot water or milks, or in hazelnut spread or in cereal but certainly not sprinkled on bread. I’m arguing that it’s this indignation which tells us something about humanity. 

It’s from my wife’s family that I learned about sprinkles on buttered toast. We even have some in the pantry though never in the same place for more than a week or so since we also have a toddler.

Maybe more familiar than hagelslag is the Australian tradition of fairy bread. Most cultures have birthday-specific foods, Australia is no different. There are certain simple, crowd pleasing recipes that are easy to whip up, transport and serve which you can bring with you to the many children’s birthdays we all attend whether or not we have children. A beloved classic of this genre is white sandwich bread, spread with butter or margarine and topped with rainbow sprinkles/nonpareils (called hundreds and thousands) which we call fairy bread. At least, in defence of fairy bread, we don’t consider it a breakfast food.

But beyond that I think there’s many similarities between fairy bread and another famously disliked Australian classic, Vegemite toast. And not just because they’re both bread based. I’d go so far as to say there’s a link between fairy bread and the famous fermented shark of Iceland. Both are acquired tastes, in a sense. The later is admittedly a more adult flavour profile (you’d likely agree even without having tried it). It would however be difficult to convince an uninitiated adult to eat something as silly and sickly sweet as fairy bread. 

As a culinary aside to butter and sugar on bread, which I promise will tie into the larger theme, the only difference nutritionally between, say a donut, danish or croissant and fairy bread is connotation. Like the difference between batch brew and espresso, cartoons and art galleries, I’d argue the medium is the same and the striking difference is cultural. Sprinkles or even sugar on bread is perhaps more obvious, less nuanced than the architectural marvel of pastry that is a croissant but really, they’re the same. I could understand a distinction between fairy bread and an artisanal pastry made with local, biodynamic, organic ingredients grown, made and eaten with care and attention but most of us just are not eating that way. So to my mind a grocery store croissant and a grocery store fairy bread are on par, with the fairy bread possibly even scoring higher culinarily since you’re assembling it yourself. 

The second and most important similarity of fairy bread to fermented shark is in the cultural context. Humans love to define their tribe as the people who recognise this food and eating it is nearly patriotic.

We humans like to define ourselves into groups. For most of human evolution this has been essential, a certain double-edged xenophobic curiosity was likely necessary to divide the world into those you could trust (your family, tribe) and those you could not. Apparently our ancestors recongized the need to overcome this prejudice in order to keep the tribe’s gene pool varied and healthy but not without considerable difficulty and (likely) intoxicants. 

Vegemite is another example of a food with very specific cultural contexts. Thinly spreading Vegemite on buttered toast is an act of patriotism comparable to sculling a pint at the pub with your mates or singing Waltzing Matilda. Eating it on its own, or combined with another bread spread like peanut butter though will get you funny looks at best and frowns of disgust at worst. We are the people who eat this food in its particular way and definitely not that way.

Food cultures tend to have condiments which eaten on their own or in specific contexts like Vegemite, fermented shark or fairy bread serve the purpose of making that food not only richer, more complexly flavoured but also more of that cuisine. 

There are more similarities between cuisines than differences. It is just that the differences stand out more. Think for example of the difference between a large onion cooked with a teaspoon of butter and thyme vs a teaspoon of soy sauce. One is unmistakably European, possibly specifically French; the other undeniably Asian though both are mostly onion. 

Besides the cultural use to differentiate it is striking how similar these foods can be even within this differentiator category. Soy and fish sauce, Parmesan, Demi-glace and even ketchup are all strongly rich, umami often fermented flavours.

Ketchup, by the way, is so underrated in the culinary sense. Not because it’s necessarily delicious on its own (though I wouldn’t consider that a prerequisite for culinary greatness) but because it is so essentially umami rich. You probably don’t but it on buttered toast, but maybe you should?

And it serves the same purpose as these other culture-defining flavours. Savoury first but salty, sweet and sour. Add the bitter char on grilled foods and fatty richness these often contain within and what we consider a culinary pleb, the comic sans of the pantry or worse a crime against good taste, the actual comic sans, really is something we take for granted. 

So fairy bread or hagelslag says more about humanity than it does about the Australians or the Dutch. It reminds us that we can learn to love anything just as we could learn to love each other. It also reminds us of an instinct to separate rather than integrate. It reminds us to think for ourselves and eat, if not live, with an open mind.