The One Kitchen Revolution

Which came first the seed or the fruit? In any case, this circular movement of reproduction and continuance has fostered the planet we see today. Circular orbits, circular patterns of seasons, circular concepts of DNA to seed to parent to seed and so forth. This is the revolution, true revolution. It is a complete circle.

Of course, revolution itself conjurs up many images of past events: American revolution, French Revolution, the cultural revolution in China. Each of these had a similar feature: each movement cast off the previous regime, and installed a new one, from one to the next.

Our modern 'revolutionaries', like Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann, have very little in common with this type of revolution. There is nothing to follow up their dissatisfaction with 'the way things are.' There is no answer to what we ought to do once we have revolted, as like always, life must go on. People still need to eat. People must mate and have babies in safe and secure places or the revolution is devolution, and ends in death, with no reproduction or continuance.

It is, in fact, Will Allen, leading voice of the food revolution that we should be watching instead (http://www.growingpower.org/). So what is the food revolution? First off, the food revolution asks a very important question: "Where does your food come from?" Let's try that one again:

"WHERE DOES YOUR FOOD COME FROM?!?!?"

That question, in and of itself is revolutionary, though our great grandparents would be shocked to see how quickly our connection to our food roots has been severed, or at least severely sprained. Where does your food come from? It used to come from the backyard or the neighborhood farmer. In Portland, Oregon, where I am lucky to be alive, the food is often local. We are a few steps ahead in the march toward food safety and awareness here in our little corner of the NW USA, but we still have many miles to go yet.

And that is the crux of this writing. Revolution is circular. Where does your food come from denotes a single direction. At this juncture I must ask:

"Where is your food going?"

Americans throw away 40% of the food they purchase (http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/americans_waste_40_of_their_food). If this seems like a lot, it is. Think about it. We are pissed off because we pay 30% of our wages to taxes. That means you are working for the government for 1/3 of your working year. Outlandish, indeed. But throwing away 40% of our food? First of all the waste must end. But second of all, we have to stop looking at our by-products as waste at all.

In the city of Portland, residents are allowed up to three hens for egg production. Kitchen scraps make great chicken scraps, leftover vegetable bits (yes, even the melon rind) make excellent stocks. Why use water when you can use a more flavorful liquid? Not only does this process capture any remaining nutrients from otherwise wasted items, it helps to break the vegetable matter down in advance of the compost, making an easier time for the worms and mycelium.

Scraps of meat leftover, which cannot be composted, can certainly be turned into soup and canned. I used to be so intimidated by the process of canning, but it is really quite simple and can be done for any amount of food, from one quart of leftover soup to 40 quarts of marinara sauce to last two years.

"Where is your food going?" This is the One Kitchen Revolution. No matter how much green local sustainable organic, bio-dynamic, no spray, non-GMO food you buy, what you do with it matters. We have to complete the cycle of knowing to complete our revolution. Start today, start at home. It is the only logical place on which to stand our ground and start the battle of a lifetime.

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...