This past week was not one of my better ones behind the apron. I think it was a lack of motivation--mixed with a dearth of time--that contributed to only a couple of genuinely "homemade" meals, and even those were ones that appear often in the rotation.
On Monday I tried my hand at making marinara sauce from scratch (and by "scratch" I mean real tomatoes instead of canned ones) for the express purpose of getting Andres to eat some pasta with red sauce. Imagine my mood, then, when he proceeded to eat the pasta "with no red on it," avoiding the small tomato and onion bits like they were poison. Hooray.
In his defense, he may have felt (as I did) that the sauce lacked a good consistency and was too acidic. Had he critiqued my cooking along these lines I imagine I would have been more receptive; as it was, he was content to make a face whenever I tried to give him some sauce with his pasta.
The more I ate it, however, the more I was reminded of the pasta meals I used to eat when my family would got to Pat's Pushcart, or Dom's, or Pagliuca's in the North End. (I'm not saying mine was as good--I know it is not--I'm just establishing a basis for what I am about to say.) That's to say it tasted like real tomatoes with a few other vegetables or spices added in, and that it was awful difficult to get a clean plate, as there were always a few rogue tomato chunks that were left when all the pasta had vanished.
What I find somewhat interesting is that although I loved going to those restaurants, I remember not loving the sauces they used--and here I am now, 20 years later, trying to recreate them.
After the toddler pasta debacle I used my marinara on some basic ravioli from Trader Joe's, and then combined it with some jarred marinara (Trader Joe's also) for my world famous chicken parmigiana. This week's iteration of chicken parm was particularly good. I even made a more "health-conscious" version (using low-fat cheese and less olive oil) for Natalia; she appreciated it and devoured it pretty quick.
That was it for this week. I relied heavily on my panini maker for lunches, but dinners were quicker affairs this week on account of our schedules. I want to make Week 10 a good one; it's the last full week I have to think solely about cooking and parenting for a long while.
In other news I have started reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, another book by agronomist/food critic/fast food scourge Michael Pollan. It's a pretty quick read and hasn't really told me anything (yet) that I didn't already know about the food industry...but it is very interesting and is already forcing me to reevaluate the way I think about eating meat. This may become a larger blog post later, but I'm toying with the idea of only eating meat (fish, chicken, beef) at home now, and not when I go to restaurants--with the exception of places like Legal Sea Foods, or Mortons (because those of you who know me know that I go there all the time), etc. This would radically change how I eat though--my lunchtime sandwiches from Russo's would be history, as would the Newton-famous chicken parm sandwiches that I get from the Italian restaurant down the street from work. So maybe I'm not ready for this yet...but I am thinking about it.
The reason for this decision-that-I-might-make is that as meat has become such an important commodity in our culture, it is treated more and more like a commodity, and not like an animal. Personally, I understand why a lot of this has happened, and I can even rationalize a lot of this. Ultimately I don't have a huge issue with that trend--so I'm not going to become a vegetarian because cattle are treated poorly. Rather, it's how the meat that my family and I are consuming is being impacted by the shift towards commodity that has me worried.
In his book, Pollan speaks about visiting one of the many, giant cattle feedlots that dot the midwest--POKY Feeders to be exact. I was curious about how big one of these feedlots was, so I punched the address for the feedlot above--600 East Road 30, Scott City, Kansas 67871--into Google Maps and used the Satellite feature to check it out.
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If you zoom in, you can see the black dots get bigger...each of those is a cow, just eating and eating corn (not grazing on grass, as they do in the wild) until they reach their slaughter weight.
Now I don't want to get too far afield--I'm not thinking about changing my meat eating habits because I found out that cows are bred for slaughter; I've known this for years. However, Pollan discusses the types of things that are done to cows in order to enable them to live and grow in this type of environment: this includes large amounts of antibiotics to help them fight infections and to change their body chemistry to allow them to remain healthy on a diet of corn, and constant administration of hormones to speed up their arrival at their slaughter weight. Not to mention that these cows hardly live sanitary lives, being penned up with hundreds of their peers, along with their waste.
So I'm not sure where that leaves me now. Knowing much more about the meat industry now, I feel like my options are to (a) keep eating the way that I already do, and just ignore what I know, or (b) try to change my eating habits so that I treat meat less like an on-demand commodity and more like a treat (while being willing to pay a premium price for meat that I know is more healthy for me).
Related: it also means that I will not be choosing to eat this anytime soon.
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I have been thinking about this issue of meat as well, especially meat from more industrial sources when eating out, and I've more or less stopped eating burgers out (e.g. Doyle's etc.) unless there's some indication where it's from, and the same goes for most other meat, too. I was thinking about this again as ultimate season got started since we often eat bar food afterwards and there's a reason those sandwiches are so cheap!
ReplyDeleteI know, absolutely, that this is simply not feasible for people on a more restricted budget so it makes me feel as though these kinds of decisions are a bit elitist, but I don't have any good solution for that one just yet.
My brother - who works in food marketing for a big conglomerate - drove past some of these feed lots in Chino, CA and they are depressing. Vast, brown, and the smell is just appalling.
That should have been "My brother and I" by the way.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I would consider your decision elitist--people don't have to eat meat, and for generations and generations, people got by just fine eating far less than we do now.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the larger issue has become that I would like to have some control (in terms of knowledge, really) over the meat that I consume--where it comes from, how it is handled, and its cost. I actually don't mind paying a premium for meat/fish/chicken if I know that I am actually paying for a better product...the corollary to that behavioral change, though, is that if I decide to pay more, I will also eat less of it.
Maybe this is where I agree with your point about being elitist--I am in a position where I can pay more for food, and I'm aware that not everybody is in that situation. However, everybody can be informed about what they purchase and eat, and I don't think it is elitist to make decisions based on that information.
But it is a huge issue, isn't it? And it's hard to imagine living a life where you avoid being entangled in some aspect of the field-feedlot-slaughterhouse-market chain. It's too big at this point. But on an individual level, we haven't yet ceded our ability to make decisions about what we eat, so I think that's a good starting point.
Yes, I think that for many of us the sheer convenience of being able to pick anything up at any time outweighs thinking about the consequences of that. As you've already written, it's not just about meat, either, but about strawberries in December. It's probably something that people who consume veggie burgers and tofu need to think about as much as those who consume ground beef; I've a vegetarian friend at work who is a bit tired of her fellow vegetarians claiming to be virtuous simply because they don't eat meat!
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