Jonathan Safran Foer

I’ve been thinking recently about Jonathan Safran Foer, specifically this interview from The  Atlantic Monthly. In it he takes some puzzling logistic leaps and says some things that I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with while simultaneously endorsing a simplistic notion of vegetarianism – and meat eating – that I am adamantly opposed to.

I’ll preface this by saying that I haven’t read Eating Animals – Foer’s pro-vegetarian book – and he may well go into depth about some of these things in that book. I have read several reviews of it and found them hard to learn much from because the reviewers let their own beliefs color their reviews so much.  So it’s hard to glean how much emphasis he put s on sustainability issues, as opposed to the morality of eating meat.

Foer starts out the interview with a hearty endorsement of sustainable farms – he praises them for treating their animals well and, as he puts it, “the goodness of good farmers might have surprised me more than the badness of bad farmers.” So far so good – I think we can all agree that factory farming is terrible.  And that, perhaps, not all meat consumption has to fit the bad models in his book.

Then the interview gets, well, cloudy. Here’s an excerpt:

So are you a vegetarian because, at this point in the history of farming, it’s safer, morally, to be a vegetarian? In other words, if you absolutely knew that all the meat or eggs and milk that were produced by X farm were produced according to your standards, would you go back to eating meat?

JF: You mean assuming that that farm existed in the context of this world?

Now Foer is putting on the interviewer, right? He knows that farm exists, because he just talked about it, one paragraph earlier.  And if he’s been doing his homework, he knows there are hundreds of good farmers out there doing the right things.

I’ll let you finish the interview yourself. I can’t get into all the logic leaps he takes here. What the interview comes down to, at the end, is that vegetarianism is virtuous because factory farming of animals is bad.  Foer winds up by pointing out how many college students are vegetarian and how, simply put, vegetarianism – without any kind of context, mind you (you could be vegetarian and eat pizza and taco bell every meal ) – is the virtuous choice.

It’s a lazy argument, and it’s disingenuous.

I’m not going to argue about the virtue of a dietary choice. It’s a moral or even religious question and one which I find myself ill-equipped to deal with. I will say that we are lucky to be able to live in an affluent culture in which we can make decisions about what we eat; most of the world doesn’t get that choice. They eat what they have or they starve.

The problem with his argument is that it equates all meat production with factory farming, while giving short shrift to the factory farming of vegetables and fruits. In other words, it’s not meat that’s the problem. It’s industrial agriculture, period.  When I have this discussion with vegetarians their argument so often comes down to factory farming. It’s as if the option is vegetarianism vs. factory farming, while if you’ve been paying any attention to sustainable food culture over the last decade you know that choice is bunk.

Kate and I are lucky to live in a place where we can eat locally and sustainably almost year round. We have made a conscious decision to avoid factory-farmed anything, especially meat. We’re lucky to have great farmers around Bloomington who raise cows and chickens and pork and rabbits in ways that we can fully support. I recognize that not all people can do that, and that we’re in the minority, but I think we’ve made a virtuous choice although meat is still part of our diet. The argument that I can’t stand is the lowest common denominator argument – “factory farming of meat is bad, therefore all meat production is bad.” It’s jingoistic and doesn’t take anything else into account.

I’m sure if you’ve paid attention to food politics at all that you know about the Coalition of Immokalee workers. These are migrant, mostly Latino farm workers in Florida that pick tomatoes for a few cents on the pound in fields in Florida, picking mostly for Taco Bell and McDonalds and Burger King. Throughout the 2000s the group has staged boycotts of those and other big-time fast-food outlets because they have tried to increase the wage the companies pay the pickers. By a penny. A single penny per pound. For most workers the amount would be less than 2 dollars a day. And the fast-food giants have fought it tooth and nail. It took years for the workers to claim victory – for these three behemoth corporations to accede to the penny-a-pound wage increase.

Notice what’s not produced or harvested by these farms? Meat. It’s all vegetables. Now, would Foer –or anyone –argue that food produced in this way is a virtuous or moral choice?

If you drive through the arid parts of southern California and Arizona, you’ll find these miraculous fields of iceberg lettuce, grown with the help of millions of gallons a day of water sucked in from thousands of miles away and coated in pesticides and insecticides. The workers, many undocumented and working for slave wages , have cancer rates 2-3 times higher than their population should, even accounting for the statistical noise around cancer clusters and poverty. That is industrial agriculture, my friends. Growing non-native produce that requires enormous amounts of scarce water and energy while giving its workers cancer and polluting what little groundwater there is left with poison. And, again, this is vegetable farming. This is the stuff that allows us to eat flavorless tomatoes in December in Indiana. Is this a virtuous operation?

I’ve gone to the farm where the chicken we eat are raised. I feel completely comfortable with the way they are treated. I know how they’re fed and processed. And yet my choice to eat them is less virtuous, according to Foer, than eating a Taco Bell bean burrito? How can that be? Does the virtue of vegetarianism excuse the terrible conditions of big agriculture? Or, to put it another way, can you condemn all vegetable eating because so many vegetables are raised so horrendously, with so much waste and a complete disrespect of the human beings who grow and harvest our vegetables?

Of course, I don’t buy that argument either – I think using the worst of an institution to impugn that very institution is lazy. It’s what Rush Limbaugh does. It’s something the film Food, Inc. fell perilously close to doing before salvaging the film with the appearance of Joel Salatin and his “beyond organic” approach to farming. But what we should be talking about is sustainability and how much we’ve removed it from our vocabulary around food.

Do we eat too much meat in this country? Of course. A McDonald’s hamburger used to be one ounce of meat. Now it’s four times that. But we also eat too many tomatoes in December, we grow so much corn that most of it is fed to animals or used as fuel, we obliterate our topsoil by planting too much and refusing to leave fields fallow. We eat billions of pounds of Dole bananas every year, simply because they have a monopoly on the product and they treat their workers worse than you or I would treat a dog.  In that context what is virtuous? What choice is moral?

When it comes to food and its production and consumption, it’s not the product; it’s the process. We have to get Industrial Agriculture out of the picture.  Then we can talk a bit more honestly about eating virtuously or morally. At least then we’d have some concept of what those words even mean.

How I got here, Part 2



I think one of the hardest things to do as a cook is balance between your ethics and what “tastes good.” Fast food is designed to taste good.  In the basic sense of “tasting good,” it succeeds – it’s full of fat and salt and sugar, and those things tend to agree with people’s palates. I mean, truly – it’s designed in a lab to have favorable flavor compounds that people desire. That doesn’t necessarily make fast food evil, although the people who market and sell it are probably evil people. But fast food is easy – it’s easy to load up food with crap and sell it to addicts. What’s harder is to take really good stuff – seasonal vegetables and sustainably-raised meat –and make it appeal to a general public raised on fast food and chain restaurants.

When I began cooking none of this was that important to me. I was a vegetarian for vaguely moral reasons, mostly dating back to my early teenage punk rock years, when many of the bands I listened to espoused vegetarianism because of animal mistreatment and suffering.  At age 14 it’s almost impossible to think critically about anything, let alone about something as esoteric as food production and sustainability, especially when those ideas about food were so far off.  I turned 14 in 1988 and I can assure you, if there had been any such thing as “slow foods” or sustainability or heirloom produce I would have been about the last to know about it. Especially because it didn’t exist.

After being a vegetarian for about 14 years, I eventually realized that not all meat production was as bad as Crass* had made it out to be. There were farmers who cared about their animals, farmers who raised their animals the right way, and as long as I could put aside any lingering objections I had to the notion of any animal dying so I could eat, eating meat was okay.  It was a big leap for me, and it took me several more years before I became really comfortable with the idea of eating meat in a restaurant.  I still had morals about it; they had just shifted.

If you read even the slightest bit about food, you probably know that the politics of farming, processing, sale and production has undergone a sea change over the last decade. The battle lines are no longer drawn over “vegan vs. vegetarian” or “organic vs. conventional” but rather framed in more specific terms:  local, sustainable, heritage, heirloom, biodynamic, humane, free-range, grass-fed. We actually talk about these things with some semblance of knowledge; we actually know our farmers. We know where our food comes from in ways we never could have imagined even ten years ago. It’s an exciting time to be a cook; it’s an exciting time to be an eater. We have access to so much good stuff now that it’s almost embarrassing.

As for me, this wave of information has coincided almost exactly with my own personal education about food. Many years ago I moved beyond the notion that food was simply a means to an end, and started thinking more concretely about its production and distribution and about my place in the food chain. My self-awareness overlapped with some of the most important moments in food thought:  Carlo Petrini’s “Slow Food,” a manifesto of the movement and, of course, Michael Pollan’s “the Omnivore’s Dilemma,” still the go-to book for a comprehensive philosophy of how we should eat and why. I’m grateful to have come of age as a cook in these times. It’s exciting and gratifying. Making a great stewed chicken is one thing; making it from a chicken that I bought from the farmer and knew its upbringing is an entirely different kind of satisfaction.

As much as I want to teach people to cook and give hints and make this blog a fun, food-oriented space, I also want to share the discoveries I’ve learned over the last few years and how my eyes have been opened to the important role that food plays in our lives, and how best to respect the incredible bounty we’ve got to work with. It’s a cook’s world now. Time to roll up our sleeves and get to cooking.

(*Crass was an extremely political punk-rock band that concerned itself with vegetarianism, sexism, anti-war, class issues, etc. Their politics and lyrics were pretty much right-on, although a bit mawkish, but their music, viewed in hindsight, is just outright terrible. They’re the kind of band that means a lot more when you’re 14.)

Recipe: Mongolian Beef

Mongolian Beef. I have no idea if Mongolians really eat anything like this, or where I even got the name. This is more of a stir-fry with a handful of vegetables and sliced steak. If anything, it’s probably closer to Korean cuisine than anything else.

It starts with a marinade: ¼ cup soy sauce, 3 T black vinegar, 2 T rice vinegar, 3 T sesame oil, 3 T hoisin sauce, 2 T grated ginger, 2 T minced garlic, 1 T chili paste, 1 T cracked black pepper.

For the steak I use about a pound of flank steak – a local farm (Rice’s) sells it for about 2 dollars a pound. They sell to the public every day from 8-3, and until noon on Saturdays. They’re out in Spencer, and I’m sure you can look them up on the web.

Flank Steak is a great cut of meat – flavorful and easy to cook; the only caveat is that you have to cut it correctly: across the grain always. If you cut it with the grain it gets unpalatably tough.  It’s always really inexpensive, which means you have no excuse to not buy it from a farmer of exceptional quality.

If flank steak is too hard to come by, skirt steak works, as does strip – anything with a nice grain that runs in a single direction (the “grain” refers to the lines in the meat.)

Marinate the steak for 30 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Put a stainless steel sheet pan on the top rack. Heat a skillet to red-hot on the stovetop. When hot, add the steak and cook 3 minutes each side.  Then slide the steak onto the sheet pan in the oven to cook, about another 10 minutes.

Use a thermometer, and pull the steak when it reaches 135 degrees.

I serve this stir-fry with rice, carrots and broccoli. The broccoli and carrots are sautéed until tender. The rice is simply steamed or boiled.

Once the steak is cooked, let it rest about five minutes, to redistribute the juices. Then slice it across the grain into thin slices. It should be pretty pink in the middle, since you’re going to cook it more.

Using the same pan you fried the steak in, add the carrots and broccoli. Add the steak. Cook until warmed through. Serve over jasmine or basmati rice. Garnish with scallions. Thank your local farmer for raising an animal with respect.

How I got here, Part 1

I never had any ambition about food. I came of age in the mid-1990s, when the notion of sustainability and slow foods weren’t even on the radar. I started working with food because it was a means to an end; I was a college student and restaurant work was something I was – and still am – good at. I can walk into any professional kitchen and hold my own. That’s not bragging; it’s simply the truth. Kitchen work requires a certain work ethic ; a certain stubbornness; and, most importantly, a willingness to learn. I have always had these things.

When it comes to food – the real stuff, farm-to-table and sustainability and eating well – my education is in its infancy. As I said, my kitchen experience was borne of necessity: I was a good kitchen worker, and kitchens always need help. It wasn’t until I had been in kitchens for a dozen years that I started to really think about food and where it came from; where the animals and vegetables I was throwing in a sauté pan were from and, more importantly, how they were raised.

You see, even when you work in food you tend to disregard the real tough questions. Where was this pork loin from? How was it raised? Is this something I feel comfortable with eating or cooking? No, you never think about things like that – it’s all about the taste, the preparation, the final result. That stuff’s important, sure, but in the end it’s all about the animal. If you’re asking for an animal to be killed (which is what you’re doing when you buy meat), then you better make sure that animal had the best life possible; you should insure that, as Joel Salatin says, “That animal only has one bad day in its whole life.”

So that’s where I come from. I run a big kitchen and I attempt to imprint my thoughts about food as much as I can. I’m not always successful, which is why I have this blog.

More in Part 2….

Starters: Parmesan Crisps

Sorry for the wait between posts. Starting this blog during the Thanksgiving holiday was a terrible idea; I’ve just been beaten up by work. after this week the posts will be much more regular. But here’s an interlude:

Parmesan crisps are something I really like to do; they’re easy, they taste good, they look really cool and they complement everything. Plus, you can physically manipulate them in all kinds of ways.

So the first thing you need is a silpat. That’s a silicone pan liner. It’s basically a sheet of re-usable parchment paper that’s virtually non-stick. If you bake or often cook things that stick to your pans you should invest in one. They’re about 20 bucks. Beware of the imitations – I bought one that was a few bucks cheaper and it doesn’t work nearly as well

You need shredded parmesan.  Not grated – that kind of just turns into a blob. The shredded gives some texture, and it melts together better.

That’s all the ingredients:  Parmesan. I told you this is super easy

Heat the oven to 325 degrees.

So, first off, sprinkle the parmesan into rounds on the silpat. I’d say maybe two tablespoons per round. Get them as round as you need but don’t get too fussy about it; when they melt they’ll get a little unround anyway.  The big thing is just to not make them too thick or uneven  – the cheese should be pretty even before entering the oven – otherwise the outside edges will brown too much while the inside will still be soft.

Set them in the oven for 10-12 minutes. Check them at 10 – they should be slightly brown but still pliable. Pull them out. If you wanna get crazy, at this point you can put them over a cup or spoon or whatever – they’ll bend to the shape of the thing. It’s like that old DIY craft thing where people would make vinyl records into bowls. Except these are edible.

If you’ve resisted the urge to shape the parmesan crisps into a bowl or a canoe or whatever, set them aside to cool. When they’re cool, you can lift them off the pan with a spatula, and you have a little parmesan crisp.

Also, if you’re wondering how I started off with six crisps and ended up with five…well, you can ask my wife about that. I’m pretty sure the cats didn’t steal it.

It’s basically a cracker, except it’s made ENTIRELY OF CHEESE! There is no way this can’t be good, right?

The cool thing now is that you can do tons of stuff with it. You can serve it as is, or put some kind of topping on it, or – my favorite thing – float it on top of a bowl of tomato soup.  The soup will melt the cheese a little and add some richness.

Mis En Place

Mis en place is the foundation for making a good dish. Roughly translated, it means something like “everything in its place.”  Even more basic, it’s making sure that you have everything together for whatever you’re about to make. It’s a fundamental approach to cooking, one which can stretch back in many ways and layers, but in its purest formal expression, at least in a kitchen, it’s about being  in a position to make a successful dish.  Being a successful cook is mostly about being well-prepared.

Watching people cook, professionally, without a good setup can be frustrating. Let’s say you’re making a soup. You’re starting with a classic mirepoix of onions, carrots and celery.  You heat up your pan, add your oil – and you haven’t peeled the carrots yet. Or minced your onion. Or washed and chopped your celery. Or peeled the garlic. Or…well, you’re a mess. You’re either going to end up with a bunch of inartfully chopped and peeled vegetables, or you’ll burn your oil, or…or…well, there’s a whole bunch of things that are bound to go wrong. I watch it every day, from people who get paid to cook.

To illustrate mis en place here’s a photo from the sausage cassoulet I made last night. This is my mis en place:

So from left to right, I’ve got some sliced pancetta (like an unsmoked bacon; you could use real bacon, or turkey bacon, or just omit it altogether), minced parsley, crushed peeled garlic cloves, diced carrots and onions. That bundle of herbs behind the parsley is thyme, rosemary and sorrel from my garden. Sorrel’s not really a standard ingredient of cassoulet, but I like it, I have a lot of it, and the great thing about cooking at home is that there’s no right way to do it. The herbs are tied together because they’re going to flavor the cassoulet, but I’m going to remove them before I serve it.  Behind the herbs is some wine.  I know a lot of people say don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink, but I think that’s kind of silly; most of us can’t afford to cook with the wine we drink. I’d rather drink it instead. So I think the caveat should really be “don’t drink with wine that’s not DRINKABLE.” That would include wine in a jug with a little handle, or that nasty stuff grocery stores sell labeled “cooking wine.” Avoid that – it’s just wine with a bunch of salt added to it so they can sell it on Sundays.  I use the 3 dollar wine from the grocery store – Sutter Home. It’s fine. Don’t sweat it.

The sausage is chicken and red wine sausage from Loveland Farms. Traditional cassoulet uses pork sausage, but this is what I have. And it’s really good and I know where it comes from, which is pretty important. Behind that sausage are some white beans, cooked and drained and rinsed. Yes, you can use canned. That’s what those are. Next to that is chicken stock. Making your own is really easy, especially if you eat chicken on the bone a lot, but the store-bought is fine too. Just get the low-sodium variety. It allows you to control the amount of salt in your finished product better.

This took me maybe 30 minutes to pull together. At that point I’m ready to cook.

First, I brown off the sausages, whole. I’ll finish them in the oven, but I want that flavor from searing the skin in my finished dish. And since they’re raw sausages, I don’t want to cut into them until they’re fully cooked, to keep them moist.

Once those are browned all over, remove them and place on a sheet pan. Then add pancetta and cook until crispy. When it’s all crispy remove with a slotted spoon and place on a paper towel. If there seems to be a lot of fat in the pan you should probably pour some of it off. Not that fat is necessarily bad for flavor, but too much of it can make your mouth feel greasy.

Add your onions, carrots and garlic and bundle of herbs.
Scrape all the seared bits into the vegetables. Using a spoon with a flat edge will help.  Add salt. That will help the onions release their liquid, which will evaporate and then the onions will brown.

Deglaze is a fancy word that basically means to pour in a liquid and scrape up all the caramelized bits in the bottom of the pan that are loosened from the liquid. Here you will deglaze with the white wine . When? When the onions and garlic seem to be getting a little soft – remember, this dish is going to cook for awhile .

Once all those tasty browned bits are scraped into the vegetables, add the beans and stock and lower the heat to a simmer. Cook it as long as you can.

The point of this isn’t just to share this recipe. It’s about the idea that a meal starts long before you get it on the stove or on the oven or on the plate. Preparation is more than just mincing onions or dicing carrots. It starts when you get to the market, when you choose not only what you’re going to cook, but you start to think about every step in the process of how that food got to that market. Where did those sausages come from? How far did those carrots travel to get here? How was the pork raised for that pancetta? What about the chicken? Were the animals raised in squalor, or were they treated with respect? Were their lives miserable? Can you talk to the person who raised this animal from a baby and sent it off to the slaughterhouse. Can you look them in the eye and feel comfortable with eating this food?

Preparation. It doesn’t just happen in the kitchen and it doesn’t just happen when you buy something from a market with some idea of how you’re going to cook it. Preparation starts with the notion that somewhere, somebody decided to raise something, be it a vegetable or a fruit tree or a cow or a pig, with the eventual goal of someday processing that thing and selling it to you in order to make a living. Preparing food is one of the most personal choices we can make in our lives. It’s one of the few things we have near complete-control over.  Shouldn’t we arm ourselves with all the information we can about what we’re buying? Would you buy a house or a car or medicine without knowing how it was taken care of, how it was treated, if it was safe? Shouldn’t the same standard – or even a more exacting one –  be applied to something we do every single day?

Isn’t it imperative that we prepare ourselves to buy food as much as we prepare ourselves to cook – or eat  –  food?

It’s not just about the way we cook – or even consume –  food. It’s also the way we think about food, from the ground up. That’s what I hope to do here.  Because by the time your food gets to your kitchen, most of the deep prep has been completed. It’s time to open that process;  time to get our mis-en-place set up long before we put knife in hand and get to chopping.

I think about food every day, from its provenance to purchase to preparation. I hope to make this blog some reflection of that.