Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Another traveler on the locavore path is Barbara Kingsolver, probably best known for her novels – particularly The Bean Trees and  The Poisonwood Bible which won the National Book Prize of South Africa and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

I recently read her newest novel, Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer Prize. But the book I’m thinking of today is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. I was looking at her booklist and saw this non-fiction book about her family’s experiment to eat only locally grown food for a year. Along with her husband and daughters, she moves to a farm in Virginia. They grow and can tomatoes, learn about roosters, make cheese, and learn to do what it takes to eat what is in season.

Kingsolver’s background is interesting. Born in Maryland with some of her childhood spent in Africa where her father was a medical doctor and some in Kentucky. She attended DePauw University on a music scholarship for classical piano but ended up switching to biology. In the late 1970s, she lived in Greece, France, and Tucson, Arizona, working variously as an archaeological digger, copy editor, housecleaner, biological researcher and translator. She earned a Master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

That doesn’t sound like the typical resume for a novelist or someone writing about being a locavore. “If we can’t, as artists, improve on real life, we should put down our pencils and go bake bread,” says Barbara Kingsolver.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was published in 2007 and is described as a blend of memoir and journalistic investigation. The revised edition is updated with stories of how the family’s original project has been carried forward through the years. The family was concerned about the environmental, social, and physical costs of American food culture. Barbara wants you to consider our nation’s lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production.

Mastering the Art of Blogging

Back in the early days of this website, I saw the movie Julie and Julia about the chef Julia Childs. Watching it did not inspire me to go home and start cooking Boeuf Bourguignon a La Julia Child (though I did feel like eating it). It made me go home and blog.

Half the movie is the story of a blogger, Julie Powell. She described herself as a “government drone by day, renegade foodie by night” when she started her blog and challenged herself to cooking in 365 days the 536 recipes in Mastering The Art of French Cooking published in 1961 and written by Louisette Berthole, Simone Beck, and Julia Child.

She called her blog The Julie/Julia Project and and her first post was in August 2002. I was able to find her original posts back then (they seem to be all taken offline now) and I bought her book as a gift. But since I am not interested in being a chef at all, why did I do this digging? It’s because she is someone who started blogging about something she enjoyed, and ended up with celebrity, a book and a movie deal. It one of the Horatio Alger story about blogging.

The book Julie & Julia and the movie of the same name is more than a cooking story. It’s as much about Powell’s marriage and about finding some purpose in your life.  One reviewer said it is like “Bridget Jones’ Diary meets Like Water for Chocolate.”  It is a fast and funny memoir (I read the gift copy over a weekend before I gifted it) that just might be inspiring.

The movie seemed more like two movies to me. I liked both. I like both actresses. Meryl Streep is the “Julia” and Stanley Tucci is her husband. The “Julie” half felt quite different (almost like a “TV movie”) but I do love Amy Adams.

Find your passion and blog about it. Maybe an audience will find you and a publisher and producer will follow them. Of course, a story in The New York Times about your efforts wouldn’t hurt.

Her What Could Happen blog ran from 2005-2010 and her main website’s blog seems to have ended in 2014. I discovered while updating the information in an earlier post of mine about her that she died of cardiac arrest, after battling COVID-19, at her home in Olivebridge, New York, on October 26, 2022, at age 49.

The Way of Tea

Yes, I love tea and I really find the tea plant itself to be rather incredible. There are so many kinds of tea. So, how many species of tea plants are there? That’s what I find so appealing. There is really only one tea plant.*

The Chinese Camellia sinensis is a species of plant whose leaves and leaf buds are used to produce Chinese tea.  White tea, green tea, oolong, pu-erh tea, and black tea are all harvested from this one species. There is also a kukicha (twig tea) that is harvested from that plant which uses twigs and stems rather than leaves.

So why all the different flavors?

Where the plant grows and the way the leaves and buds are processed changes the tea. (The plant is also referred to as the tea tree and tea shrub.) Maybe you have heard the term terroir which comes from the French word terre meaning “land”. Usually, the term is associated with wine, but it is also used with coffee and tea to denote the special characteristics that the geography, geology, and climate of a certain place bestow upon a plant.

Cha Wu LongJing Green Tea that sells for about $40 an ounce

I wrote here about the philosophy of wabi-sabi and how its practitioners were connected to the Japanese tea ceremony. When that simple ritual went from China to Japan, it became an ornate Japanese ritual and a way to show off wealth in the 15th century.

There was also a movement to the other extreme of simplicity. If understanding emptiness and imperfection is the first step to enlightenment, then the tea ceremony might be a way to understand that. Those who see tea as more than a drink and the tea ceremony as a way to foster harmony in humanity and with nature, and as a way to discipline the mind and quiet the heart, then see the art of tea as teaism.

Teaism is our Western term for chadao which comes from two words – the word for tea and the Chinese tao/dao.  I like this word and the related “teamind”, which is that sense of focus and concentration one has while under the influence of good tea.  I’d like to think that I am a Teaist.

I once attended an authentic tea ceremony, but my practice is largely solitary. A tea ceremony is a very ritualized form of making tea with particular tools, gestures, etc.  It seemed to me to be much too artificial, abstract, and formal to fit in with what I saw as most attractive in Teaism. The Victorian-era “high tea” also seems that way too with its proper equipment, manners, and social snobbery.

The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo was first published in 1906 and has since been republished many times and is the text that often starts people to learn something about Teaism. He covers how tea has affected Japanese culture, thought, and life. The book is meant as an introduction to Westerners. (It was written in English.)  He emphasizes that  Teaism teaches simplicity. I do not claim enough philosophical knowledge of  Teaism to explain it to you. It is a synthesis of Taoism, Zen, and tea.  Kakuzo says that the ceremony has “a subtle philosophy” behind it and that “Teaism was Taoism in disguise.”

In Tea Life, Tea Mind by Soshitsu Sen, he relates this story:
“Once a tea grower invited Rikyu to have tea. Overwhelmed with joy at Rikyu’s acceptance, the tea grower led him to his tearoom and served tea to Rikyu himself. However, in his excitement his hand trembled and he performed badly, drowning the tea scoop and knocking the tea whisk over. The other guests, disciples of Rikyu, snickered at the tea grower’s manner of making tea, but Rikyu was moved to say, “It is the finest.” On the way home, one of the disciples asked Rikyu, “Why were you so impressed by such a shameful performance?” Rikyu answered, “This man did not invite me with the idea of showing off his skill. He simply wanted to serve me tea with his whole heart. He devoted himself completely to making a bowl of tea for me, not worrying about errors. I was struck by that sincerity.”

So, tea may be much more than a drink. This is the way of tea.

* Okay, to get really technical, there are two major varieties of tea plants and variants that characterize this species and recently someone has come up with some hybrid, but still… On Amazon, a search for tea brings up 30,000 tea entries.

Locavore

I listened to a radio program back in 2007 that introduced to me the term “locavore.” It was the 2007 “Word of the Year” for the Oxford American Dictionary. A locavore is someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within a certain radius. (I have seen 50, 100, and 150 miles mentioned).

Unlike being a vegan, vegetarian, or some other limited food consumer for health or ethical reasons, the locavore movement’s main aim is to support local food producers. It encourages consumers to buy from local farmers’ markets or even to produce their own food. Most locavores would say that fresh, local products are more nutritious and taste better. Also, locally grown food is an environmentally-friendly means of obtaining food, as compared to supermarkets that import their food and use more fossil fuels and non-renewable resources to obtain it.

It does mean that I won’t have strawberries and tomatoes in Paradelle in December unless they are grown in a greenhouse. And citrus fruits won’t be locally grown here ever. So, there are sacrifices, especially since most of us have become used to a global supermarket experience.

“Locavore” is a fairly new word coined by Jessica Prentice on the occasion of World Environment Day 2005 to describe and promote the practice and is in the pattern of carnivore, herbivore, and omnivore.

More
www.locavores.com
wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_food
10 Steps to Becoming a Locavore

Cheesemaking workshop, Maker Faire 2011 – Note the “Eat Your Zipcode” sign
CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

McGovern’s Tavern

McGovern’s is a real old-fashioned tavern. I’m sure there are those who think of it as an Irish pub and Esquire magazine called it one of the country’s best bars.  But it is a tavern.

I started going there in the early 1970s when I had a summer job in Newark during college.

It had Guinness on tap, murals of Irish scenes in a back room, old photos on the wall, patches from police organizations, and the clientele was made up of city workers, cops, and firemen, prosecutors and attorneys, students from nearby Rutgers-Newark and a lunchtime crowd from the downtown offices.

And all of that is still there. Few changes in half a century. Maybe not much different since 1936. They have a half-hearted website. I guess you don’t have a choice these days – you have to have something online – but it seems appropriate that they don’t seem to really care. They are on Facebook and it looks like they are getting some bands in there.

I’m not sure if the write-up in Esquire works for or against the place.  I don’t really see McGovern’s crowd as big Esquire readers.

The menu is still good but basic. I usually get some Chili Con Kearny (as in Kearny, NJ),  a McGoo burger or maybe a Scully burger with some Jersey Taylor ham. There’s no other place I go to where I would order a liverwurst sandwich and lava fries.

I’m not around New Street in Newark much these days, but it only takes a few minutes in here for me to feel comfortable. No one yells, “Ken!” when I enter, like on Cheers, but it feels as much like home as I want from a tavern.

Yeah, it’s a tavern – from the Latin taberna and the Greek ταβέρνα/taverna. In Renaissance England, a tavern was distinguished from a public ale house because it was run as a private enterprise. So, drinkers were “guests” rather than members of the public.

I like being a guest at McGovern’s.

Eat 80 Percent

New Jersey diner dessert case

It’s not that I eat bad foods. It’s that I eat too much. I have a Jersey diner mentality. Big portions. There is a Japanese cultural habit of healthy eating called hara hachi bu, which means eat only until you are 80% full (literally, “stomach 80%”).

That is possibly easier to follow in Japan where portions are generally much smaller than in the U.S. and the pace of eating is also slower. One thing it does not mean in Japan is leaving a fifth of your meal on the plate. It is bad form to leave food on your plate. That is a rule my mother seemed to follow. “Clean your plate” was a rule in my house and it has stuck with me – which has not helped my waistline.

Stopping at 80% might be a good way to avoid obesity without going hungry. The stomach’s stretch receptors take about 20 minutes to tell the brain that it is full. That’s why you probably feel really full about 20 minutes after you stop eating.

Pastrami Reuben with disco fries at an NJ diner – not part of the Okinawa diet.

Hara hachi bu is discussed in a diet book called The Okinawa Diet Plan: Get Leaner, Live Longer, and Never Feel Hungry. It’s based on a traditional Okinawa, Japan diet that emphasizes vegetables, whole grains, fruits, legumes, fish, and limited meats.

Keeping that 80% in mind, I looked at some health statistics for Okinawa that I found: heart disease rates are 80% lower than in the U.S; the rate of stroke is also lower and cholesterol levels are typically under 180. Their rates of cancer are 50-80% lower – especially for breast, colon, ovarian, and prostate cancers.

When I started searching online for more information on this 80% rule, I came across a blog post that wondered if this principle could relate to other aspects of life. The blogger (who writes about business presentations) related it to the length of a good speech, presentation, or meeting.

He says, “No matter how much time you are given, never ever go over time, and in fact finish a bit before your allotted time is up. How long you go will depend on your own unique situation at the time but try to shoot for 80-90% of your allotted time. No one will complain if you finish with a few minutes to spare. The problem with most presentations is that they are too long, not too short. Performers, for example, know that the trick is to leave the stage while the audience still loves you and doesn’t want you to go, and not after they have had enough and are full of you.”

Does hara hachi bu relate to anything in your life?

I can certainly see situations where I would NOT want it to be a guiding philosophy. For example, I wouldn’t want my students to give 80% of their effort. Then again, in this current economic downturn, perhaps it makes sense for all of us to use the principle in situations like our spending. Maybe, as with food, you only need to buy 80% of what you think you need in clothing, dining out, travel and non-essentials. Spend only 80%, save 20% or donate the 20% to charity.

The 80% food rule is good as long as you can tell you’re at that point. I’m not a fast eater, so you’d think that I could sense I was full and just stop. My wife rarely finishes a meal when we go out. Eat half and take half home for lunch tomorrow. I have to break the habits of my childhood. And maybe go to fewer diners.