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The Sustainable Kitchen in Maine

By Merrill Williams
Publisher of Maine Food & Lifestyle magazine
(First published 09 November 2008. Reproduced with permission.)

The Maine Literary Festival took place this weekend in Camden, and it was a doozy. The theme, "For This Earth: Visions in Literature" featured writers who tackled topics like Science and the Environment, Spirituality and the Environment, and Eco-Poetry. But it was the session entitled "The Sustainable Kitchen & Table" that knocked my socks off.

The presenters were top-notch: Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet magazine and former NY Times restaurant critic; Molly O'Neill, cookbook author and former food columnist at the NY Times; Ardis Cameron, professor of American and New England studies at University of Southern Maine; and Michael Ruhlman, author of landmark books about chefs and co-author of four cookbooks, who moderated a riveting disucssion about food and its role in society.

The conversation touched on issues that included:

• How can we eat sustainably in urban areas with little or no land for crops or livestock?
• Is is fair to ask low income Americans to eat organic foods that cost more than fast food or cheap foods produced by agri-business?
• How did this country move from an astonishing abundance of seafood to the point where fisheries are depleted?
• Will the local food movement, so robust in the last decade, suffer during the current economic downturn?
• What impact will the younger generation have on U.S. food policies?
• If the kitchen is the "heart of the home," why do so many Americans not cook?
• Is eating a political act?
• How have food blogs influenced restaurant chefs and restaurant critics?
• What is the influence of America's multi-culturalism on our eating and shopping habits, and when and where did it begin?

Two of Maine's best known chefs, Melissa Kelly, chef/owner of Primo in Rockland, and Sam Hayward, chef/owner of Fore Street in Portland, then joined a Q&A session on "Kitchen Wisdom." The audience wanted to know: What can chefs teach consumers about sustainability in the kitchen? Can local farms feed the world, or will agri-business assume that role? How is sustainable eating related to the environment?

The discussion would have gone on for hours, but time ran out. A bunch of us kept the conversation going over lunch around a communal table at Paolina's Way in Camden. And there we were—5 women from different backgrounds gathered in a small neighborhood restaurant owned by an Italian woman and her Columbian mother, sampling the food that kept coming and coming out of the kitchen, sharing our experiences with food from our childhoods, and promising to swap recipes with each other.

As the conference had just taught us, navigating today's food world is a difficult challenge and is fraught with complexities, but sitting around that table afterwards, it all seemed so simple. Speaker Molly O'Neill said it best: "Food opens other worlds... and every meal is a new beginning."

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Maine Literary Festival ends on hungry note

By Holly S. Anderson
Village Soup
(Reproduced with permission.)

CAMDEN (Nov 12): This year's Maine Literary Festival in Camden came to a conclusion early Sunday afternoon, leaving many attendees hungry. Hungry for literature, hungry for knowledge, and hungry for a fresh salad or sandwich in which to sink their teeth.

Sunday's final session, titled "The Sustainable Kitchen and Table: From Soup to Nuts," paired Gourmet magazine Editor in Chief Ruth Reichl, University of Southern Maine professor Ardis Cameron, and author and former New York Times reporter and food columnist Molly O'Neill in a discussion about the past, present and future of food writing.

It was followed by a panel discussion that added chefs and restaurateurs Melissa Kelly of Primo in Rockland and Sam Hayward of Fore Street in Portland to the group already seated on stage, alongside moderator Michael Ruhlman, a freelance journalist, writer and author of eight books.

In addition to talking about what has and is currently being written about food, panel members discussed the sustainability of the world's food supply. And as is true in most circles when food is the topic, the audience wanted practical ideas -- what the nation, and ultimately individuals, can do to make a difference in improving what is eaten and how it is produced, and how food can be used to improve societal and familial relationships.

If Americans wince each time a recall for E. coli or salmonella bacteria is announced and wonder how they can possibly be safe eating anything fresh -- meat or vegetable -- or lament that their family mealtimes have been reduced to fast-food window pickups, Reichl and O'Neil both point to the economics of food as sources of the problem.

"Our food has changed more in the past 10 years than during the entire century before," said Reichl. "Today, you have to be very cautious about where your fish comes from. And no matter whether you are a vegetarian or not, it's rare that you have never had to cook for one, or served a Thanksgiving meal without vegetarians at the table."

Reichl called it "wonderful" that people cling to their ethnic food ways, which have brought many people to experience more flavors than ever before. But she called the food supply "precarious," adding that it can be downright dangerous to eat if people aren't careful about what they put in their mouths.

Cameron said political and societal pressures have had an impact on what people eat in America, including the Temperance Movement, which in the 19th and early 20th centuries was an organized effort to push moderation in the consumption of alcohol.

Cameron said the move quashed spices and spicy food in early New England. Those spices originated in ethnic foods and dishes, ultimately putting a damper on mainstream consumption of that food, and social interaction among ethnic groups too.

The 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass., captured the imagination of Cameron, who located 27 of the original women who walked off the job after woolen mill owners cut the work week from 56 to 54 hours, reducing already meager earnings for jobs held mostly by women and children.

Cameron is the author of "Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1880-1912," as well as numerous articles about women, cultural politics and working class history.

"As I told their stories, I always found myself talking about the food that dominated their lives," said Cameron. "Food kept them busy, they overcame shyness through sharing food, cooking, teaching and eating together. And secret friendships grew between ethnic groups."

Cameron said food is deeply rooted in life experience.

"It's the expectation that comes with the cook opening the lid of a pot on the stove, and the thrill of hearing someone rattling around the kitchen," said Cameron.

For O'Neil, food has allowed Americans to gain individuality and control of a part of their lives.

"Food was the one way we could control -- what we made and what we ate," said O'Neil, adding that she saw that direct connection while talking to people about food and watching them look at their hands as they described dishes, meals and experiences.

For all three panelists, as well as Kelly and Hayward, there was a clear message that Americans need to get back to basics in the kitchen.

From composting and home gardens to using mealtime as a social hub, both at home and in the neighborhood, food has the innate ability to bring people together and nurture awareness of and compassion for other people and cultures.

But there are problems, said Reichl, and it will take more than a few shared meals to solve some of the most complex. She and the others agreed that it will require more than fighting at the grassroots level, that the message needs to ultimately be brought to policy makers.

"Part of the problem is money," said Reichl. "It's twice as expensive to feed kids farm raised food."

As long as calories are cheaper to produce than nutrients, fast food and calorie-laden food will be cheaper than the ingredients to make vegetable soup from scratch.

Having spent a lot of time looking inside the walls of major food companies like General Mills and ConAgra, O'Neil said big business is "scared to death" of what the future holds as they scramble and spend money working to produce foods to suit the new tastes.

"The food companies know they need to diversify and that they need to get into this local movement, but now Joe the farmer is now working for ConAgra," said O'Neil.

"But I also think consumers have a great deal of power," said O'Neil. "Look at tobacco."

As long as fast food is cheaper, said Reichl, it will be hard to tell a family to spend money they don't have on fresh foods.

"They can go and buy a huge load of calorie-laden food for so little, and that's a federal policy issue we need to change," she said. "We need a major rethinking, to teach people how to cook, how to get along without meat and how to cook seasonally."

O'Neil, Cameron and Reichl lamented the loss of the family meal, and the community meal, but their hopefulness for a change through their writing was as inspirational to audience members as Kelly's and Hayward's tips for making changes at home.

Kelly noted the resurgence of small butcher shops and bakeries around the country, which is making procuring good ingredients from specialists easier to do. She also recommended buying in bulk, and planning ahead.

O'Neil said there is little thought at home about using an entire chicken, unlike restaurants that don't waste a single bone.

"We tend to think meal to meal -- once a meal is prepared, we forget about it and move on to the next, which would be unthinkable in a commercial kitchen," said O'Neil. "How stupid is it to throw something away because you don't think you'll have time to deal with it before it goes bad. Take a few minutes and freeze it, and then remember to pull it out and use it."

Hayward recommended taking small steps to get started. A single lightbulb conversion can make a difference in conserving electricity, materials and waste streams, especially if everyone begins contributing one thing.

"Spend $10 a week on locally raised produce," said Hayward. "Start with apples, then potatoes and tomatoes, things that are staples in your diet. It will vastly improve the quality of your food." It will also help a local farmer.

"If you have any love of keeping Maine the way it is, with its beautiful landscapes, then buy locally so young farmers can do what they really want to do," he said.

Reichl said consumers have a duty to ask and know what species are endangered, how the fish they eat was caught, as well as when and where. Kelly said that instead of giving food handouts that aren't so nutritious, or sustainable, the world needs to learn how to feed itself by teaching how to grow and harvest food locally.

When asked by Ruhlman how regular folks make decisions about organics, Reichl said, "It's difficult navigating the food world today, but you (we) have the responsibility to become informed. Like democracy, you have to fight for it."

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Sustainable vs. Gourmet — Or Are They the Same?
A Maine Literary Festival forum discusses some tough food questions

By Georgeanne Davis
The Free Press Online
(Reproduced with permission.)

The third Maine Literary Festival, which took place last weekend, focused on the roles of writing in how we treat the earth. The final day of the event took a look at the literature of food and sustainability. Food writers Ruth Reichl and Molly O'Neill and historian Ardis Cameron, with cookbook author Michael Ruhlman as moderator, took part in a forum entitled "The Sustainable Table: From Soup to Nuts," held before an eager audience that filled the Camden Opera House early on a very foggy Sunday morning. Continue story...

I attended the event with some reservations: was it politically incorrect, if not downright elitist, to be immersed in the words of gourmet chefs when so many people around the world and here in the U.S. are unable to put food on the table? But the forum's speakers addressed that very question, with humor and insightful ideas and suggestions on how people can deal with the plight brought about, in the view of these speakers, in large part by subsidized agribusiness.

Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine, and former chef and food critic, along with O'Neill and Cameron, began the speakers' session with separate talks. In "Looking at the World Food First," Reichl told how no editor was willing to take on her first book, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, her memoir of a life defined by a passion for food and storytelling. While food-related memoirs are today as plentiful as grains of sea salt in a well-equipped kitchen, at the time of its 1999 publication by Random House, Tender was not a bestseller. Booksellers hardly know where to place it on their shelves. Was it cookbook or biography? "It pretty much died in hardback," Reichl says of her work, but in its wake came a whole slew of food memoirs. "The literature of food didn't become mainstream until now," says Reichl. "As relationships become more problematic and the less we cook, the more we read about food."

Molly O'Neill began her talk, "American Food Writing: Our Love Affair with Food," by stating that in her writing about food, "I thought I had invented a new way of looking at the world." She went on to say that after doing research, she could see how food writing over the centuries actually mirrors change, going all the way back to the writings of Swedish ethnobotanist Peter Kalm, who visited and wrote about the American colonies in the mid-1700s. "We are part of a long cultural progression," O'Neill remarked, and says that when she reads a description by a food writer waxing poetic over "the dew on Dorr County blueberries," she recalls her own childhood food memories of growing up at a time when "there was no dew on anything but the plastic wrap."

Cameron talked about the role of food in the community and political lives of women in "The Storyteller's Table: Dishing Up Bread and Roses." She describes how, when doing research for her book Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring Women of Lawrence, 1860-1912, which tells about the Bread and Roses strike in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, she found the women, then in their eighth and ninth decades, were not forthcoming when she asked directly about their work in the mills. But when she asked, "What did you eat," they opened up, giving a detailed portrayal of a community of women who shared recipes across many cultures and exchanged ideas around food when gathering fruit or breadmaking. During the course of her interviews she was served so many ethnic dishes like kibbe and kugel that, she says, "I should write an oral history cookbook."

The discussion part of the event began with a discussion on how food and food writing has changed in the last 10 years. "Our food has changed more in the last 10 years than in all our previous history," Reichl says. She's currently putting together a new Gourmet cookbook that will deal with the different methods of cooking needed to prepare heritage pork, grassfed beef, and the many new vegetables that weren't available 10 years ago. Further, she notes, we have to look at ethnic foods differently. In previous generations, when immigrants arrived in the U.S., they gave up their native foods because they expected to stay here and become Americans. But now they may arrive with plans to return home or move elsewhere, so their food enters our culture. In addition, says Reichl, our food supply has become dangerous and unsustainable. We now need to ask fish purveyors where a fish came from, how was it caught or raised, is it endangered?

Looking at the changes over the past 10 years, O'Neill says that during her research for her upcoming book One Big Table: Portrait of a Nation, she observed that "Americans really want to take control of their lives. As culture becomes more mass, individuals are grasping for ways to be seen as people, not consumers or medical units." Reichl agreed, saying that people also saw the farmers' markets and organic movement as ways to become politically empowered. Cameron quipped that a lot of people joined Weight Watchers when Bush was elected, thinking, "We can control this."

Ruhlman asked for ideas on how to change agribusiness. Reichl said that even Alice Waters, famed California chef and founder of the Edible Schoolyard movement, says that real food is twice as expensive as fast food, because the government subsidizes the fast food industry with tax breaks for corn growers. "We can't just fight on a grassroots level," Reichl says. "It has to be political." When Ruhlman asked if fuel costs were making a big difference in the economics of the food supply, O'Neill said that big farmers got tax breaks, not the local fishermen or five-acre farmers, and noted that at the Saturday night "Church Supper Redux," a dinner of local Maine foods made and served by local chefs, lobster was served because it was cheaper than chicken.

O'Neill talked about the time she spent visiting large food companies such as General Mills and Con Agra. At Con Agra, she says, the company is worried about the burgeoning organic movement and has spent $40 million buying gold stone mills to grind grains to suit new taste. But water, she said, is the real problem: agribusinesses are looking at grains that need less water to grow. Of these efforts O'Neill says, "I don't think it's all jaded, but it's all about money." Consumers have a great deal of power, however, she says: look at the tobacco industry.

Food writers really get hammered, Ruhlman noted, when they urge people to buy quality food, and Reichl concurred, saying that we really have to understand the social costs of obesity and diabetes, and need to change federal policy. There's also a need to teach people how to cook rice and beans, to eat seasonally, to buy food together. Since the financial meltdown, Reichl noted, Google has reported that restaurant searches are down and recipe searches up. She also talked about her 19-year-old son and his college friends, who are part of a community-supported agriculture group and are very concerned with the ethics of food. The younger generation, she believes, "is going to have a profound impact on the way we eat."

The effect of food blogs on food thought was another topic the group addressed. O'Neill says that blogs and news media are two separate things. "Blogs are really horrible," she opined. "Having a keyboard and preferences doesn't make you an expert. . . . An opinion is not knowledge." Reichl believes that blogging about restaurants has made restaurant critics irrelevant. "Suddenly everybody matters," she says. She applauds this democratization, but says of the blogging, "There's so much of it!" Further, she says blogging has raised an entire generation to think that news is free and therefore "newspapers are dying." O'Neill observed that as food editors are being canned, newspapers are all using wire services, saying, "Getting news from wire services is like getting all our news from McDonald's." Cameron agreed, saying her students are so used to instant information they have little capacity for critical analysis.

For a final question-and-answer session chef Melissa Kelly, owner of Rockland's Primo, and Sam Hayward, of Portland's Fore Street, joined Reichl and O'Neill for "Kitchen Wisdom," some tips for consumers from chefs. Kelly said she runs her kitchen like a home kitchen. "For me, food starts with culture and traditions — you're cooking from your heart, your soul, with love." She says she and her staff build relationships with farmers and growers and urged consumers to also procure food from specialists, to use seasonal foods and to be smart and not waste.

"How important is it for cooks to have sustainability on their minds?" an audience member asked. "How far should we go?" Kelly said home cooks should think about who they buy from and make the time to go to farmers' markets. When food is shipped from across the country a lot is thrown away, and it has no shelf life. Hayward urged audience members to take small steps first, quoting Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners head Russell Libby, who says that if everyone spent just $10 on local produce it would be a huge boost for Maine's economy. Hayward, who lives in Bowdoinham, says, "Buy local food if you want Maine to continue looking beautiful."

"How do you feed the world without agribusiness," one audience member asked. Reichl told of a Gourmet editor's visit to a Monsanto facility, where the company is working hard to hold the patents on all kinds of seeds, moving towards a future where no seeds can ever be saved. "If we believe that's the only way we can feed the world, we're in trouble," Reichl says. Kelly believes the U.S. should concentrate on teaching people how to grow their own food instead of sending them junk food. Hayward and O'Neill were concerned about the state of fisheries. Twenty years ago, O'Neill says we devastated Georges Bank and it's been closed ever since, and the fish aren't back. "As an American, I believe everything can be fixed and get better. . . . It's just not true."

All of the panelists agreed that navigating the food world today is very difficult. Hayward, acknowledging that it can be overwhelming, advised consumers to "take a few small steps." O'Neill feels there needs to be more time spent in early childhood education. Kelly said building traditions is really important, such as her brother's family has, all joining together to make ravioli at Christmas. It's not hard to do, O'Neill agreed: in her home in upper New York state, she began making cassoulet for the community on Christmas Eve, and now hunters contribute venison sausage, farmers the beans, and everyone brings desserts.

Reichl says that when her son was preparing to leave home for college he asked her to teach him how to roast a chicken and how to make chicken stock, tomato sauce, mashed potatoes and salad dressing. "Then he felt he was ready for life."

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