2010

I recently was able to view the What's Hot for Food Service in 2010
( http://www.restaurant.org/pdfs/research/whats_hot_2010.pdf). This .pdf document is the culmination of a large abd broad based survey among culinary professionals, speculating and creating the trends for this our new year. No surprisingly, the top of almost every list is sustainable, local foods. Local vegetables have been a hot for some time, and granted, here in Portland, where Chef resides, we are quite spoiled when it comes to the freshness of our ingredients.

But local meats? Is there enough production locally to supply the growing demand of artisan, local meats and animal products? Again, I am aware of my own spoiled nature. I grew up getting milk from our local Dari-mart, family run now for over 45 years (http://www.darimart.com/), and surrounded by farmland. Much of that land now, outside of Eugene, is being quickly developed as the allure of the Willamette valley grows, but what of the new demand for locally produced proteins. It doesn't take a genius to recognize the absolute fallacy presented in the mass slaughterhouses (killfloors) or the 100,000 head of cattle bumping and pushing up against one another in a frenzied attempt to find some kind of nutrition is the corn they are being fed (cows eat grass, by the way).

I could talk ad nauseum with reagrd to the proper handling of all of your food. The energy given to something along every part of its path is transferred, in some small way into your sells as you integrate the food and energy. Fear, antibiotics, adreniline, poison, E. coli and other bacteria, ammonia, chemicals, cow manure, etc. are all common in these feed lots. Personally, I don't have any recipes for how to make E. coli more pallatable, nor can I find an amuse bouche to make rBGH cute and attractive. The food movement is more than a movement, this is a call to return to the self-sufficiency of our great-grandparents (if you are in you 30s-ish, that is).

My partner's mother and I were discussing what we call the "great forgetting." She remembers fondly getting the bag of margarine home and how it was the kid's job to squeeze and squish the annatto coloring into the white Crisco to make the new-fangled spreadable fat look more like butter. The concept was so hi-tech, so new, that it was preferred simply due to its novelty! I grew up eating I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Butter, I can't believe its not food! Actually, I have no problem believing that it is not food. We have been duped into buying our energy from a system so sick that it requires more energy to grow corn (our mainstay crop in America) than the energy gotten out of it (see Michale Pollen: The Omnivores Dilemma). This is absurd. The whole point of food is to convert the hard to access energy of the sun into Carbohydrates that we animals can harvest and use to build our bodies and keep our hearts ticking. Is is really so difficult to envision a wolrd in which this is actaully what we are doing?

I imagine often a time-trveler from the America past coming to the future and seeing what we have made of a dream that, while perhaps misguided, was at the very least noble in it cause for growth of the humans spirit. They arrive, see the corn belt, read the financial aspects of the modern farm industry, and go home to their time, and call off the whole American revolution and go home, deflated and depressed that we could flounder in such a cesspool of ignorance and stupidity.

Of course Local is the answer: and this is no trend. Any person posed the question "Where does your food come from?" Will probably give the same disconcerted answer....slight pause, and then: "...I don't know...."

Lets change this. What the chefs see as trends for the New Year, Chef Zack sees as the inevitable movement back toward self-sustainability...