The Thinkingest Thoughts on Food With Rhea Kennedy

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I'm a little disappointed with myself that I didn't go with the obvious title for this latest episode of The Thinkingest Podcast: "Food for Thought."

Alas, you'll have to live without corny titles. The good news: The Thinkingest is back with a new episode featuring Rhea Yablon Kennedy. Rhea is a Washington D.C.-based writer and teacher whose work often addresses food and foodways (though she explains it better herself on the Podcast).

"Food is a great thing to think about or overthink, because you're rewarded with it," Rhea said during our chat.

I overthink food quite often. Food is, of course, one of our most primary needs, so it's no surprise how much we mull over the ways we eat. The decisions we make about what kind of food to buy, about how much of it to eat, about how to grow and distribute and sell food are all topics worth, well, chewing upon. But it still fascinates me how much energy we expend making sure we eat well, how much strain the realities of our modern life places on our ability to do so consistently, and how much imbalance there remains in the way food is distributed, marketed and subsidized. Many thinkers have digested these discussions far better than I, but they're still worth having. Chatting about food with Rhea was great fun. We were friends in college and she was one of the first people who got me thinking about food from a more philosophical perspective, from a perspective that I find very similar to the way we view art and writing and interpersonal interaction.

This episode of The Thinkingest touches on this and other topics, such as community agriculture, Michelle Obama's "Let's Move," program, real food, the intersection of Judaism and food, managing the logistics of food preparation, and even a little about car-free commuting.

You'll notice I lagged a bit in getting this episode up. I mention Mark Bittman having been here "last week," when his visit was actually September 20, and, of course, Rhea mentions how we were chatting some time between the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur. I hope you'll forgive the delays (but it was for a good reason: I was pouring nearly all of my energy for the last month into finalizing a formal proposal for literary agents about my book about Melville Jacoby. It's a fun, dramatic story. Learn more about it here).

Thanks again to Rhea for helping me out. Don't forget to check out Rhea's web page, read some of her writing, and find some inspiration in her recipes at rheakennedy.com.

No one wants to read what I had for lunch

Wake to the parched taste of a dry mouth. Rise to the scent of a half-cleaned kitchen. Continue with instant maple nut oatmeal, a pat of butter, some almonds, a banana and a glass of milk. Two percent. Jerry's Farm, Mulino, OR. Coffee once. New Seasons Concordia Blend. French press.

Toothpaste. Peppermint with baking soda.

Coffee again, thicker and coarser, dripped from a DeLonghi machine in the kitchen of a temporary workplace.

Tap water.

Sub-par street cart seafood ramen served in a plastic container. Wet noodles, orange broth and a gritty mussel. Tortilla chaser. More water.

A third cup of coffee.

A third cup of water.

Finish work, play some pinball, drink a happy hour beer. A Ninkasi. IPA.

Taste the beer fading from your breath as you bus home. Start savoring the thought of the leftover chicken you roasted the night before.

Decompress.

A wing, a thigh and a few other scraps. Roasted root vegetables. Turnips and parsnips and carrots and beets reheated in the microwave. Dave's Killer Blues Bread and melted butter. More water.

Start writing.

Ducking the Elephant in the Room

The day takes shape slowly. Getting out the door just happens. Once you do the bus is ten minutes late. Then, so is the MAX, but you don't mind. You've been quietly extricating yourself from time. You wait in the chill beneath an interstate, listening to teenagers gossip. Staring at the spikes lining the steel beams beneath the roadway you think perhaps a bit too long about pigeon deterrence.

Boarding the wide slick new cars of the Green Line, you laugh occasionally at a Wait Wait Don't Tell Me podcast and take another stab at the crossword you started two days prior. Disembarking in Lents, you pass a crop of green, swirling, solar panel-topped sculptures, walk beyond cold, new planters toward Foster Road and gaze on Lincoln's giant face on the side of the New Copper Penny.

This landscape is neither foreign nor familiar, a domestic banlieue swept to the edge of the green movement's model city.

The mission is murky at best. You walk west under another freeway, looking for a well-reviewed video game merchant you found online. It's not clear why you went this far. You don't play games often enough to make them a destination, though you suspect the entire point was to ask just such questions. Wedged next to a 7-11, the store is smaller than you imagined, as cluttered and cramped inside as the clamoring chaos of the intersection between which it's squeezed. A man lingers at the counter, trying to squeeze pennies from the business as he sells old games. There are too many people in the store. Despite nostalgia stirred by the pile of old NES games all you want to do is leave. Asking a quick question of the clerk, he assumes you're there to make a trade and for some reason won't look in your eyes when he talks with you. Nothing in the store interests you enough to make a purchase.

Not quite ready for lunch, you head the other way beneath the freeway to see if you can find some sort of treasure to justify the journey. Past a barber shop and tiny antique shop and a handful of businesses closed for the weekend, all you can see in the distance is a long road.

You turn back toward the MAX line, but can't ignore a taqueria down a side street. Inside, fake pepper and onion and garlic plants line the ceiling. Elephant statues raise their trunks from every surface behind the counter. They're outnumbered only by ducks. Rubber ducks. Ceramic mallards. Wooden drakes and plastic hens. Ducks. Everywhere.

Everything else is as traditional as taquerias seem anywhere. Staticy TV stations play spanish-language music videos. Hand-written specials fill a dry-erase board. A dozen bottles of hot sauces and salsas sit on the edge of every table. The red, white and green of the Mexican flag on the wall mirrors the facade's paint job.

You make your order quickly, and simply. Tacos. One pollo, one pastor, and one cabeza.

You sit down at a middle booth, ponder discoveries and road trips and that burning itch to travel. When you pull from your bag the latest issue of Harper's, it opens to an excerpt from a writer who spent five weeks in residency at London's Heathrow Airport. He describes arrivals. Expectancy. The cultural filters thousands of us pass through each and every day. Crunching tortilla chips and hot salsa you sink into the words, wishing you wrote that way, or that you could be there, documenting the everyday, spinning it into lush, rich language.

A family comes through the door, led by a girl of no more than seven hobbling on a cane. She's dwarfed by the boisterous entry of her oversized relatives. They settle into the larger table in the middle of the room. You find yourself inching away as one sits near you, the slightly unpleasant odor of her exhaustion hitting your nostrils just as your meal arrives.

Embarrassed by your quick judgment, you let the discomfort pass and eavesdrop on their cheerful Saturday afternoon conversation. They plan errands. The mother recalls a long-passed uncle's favorite foods. The boys and girls chirp. A man, a boyfriend or brother or son, sits at the head of the table and doesn't utter a word. Not one. The women talk about an 18-year-old niece's thwarted hopes to hire a male stripper. The $150 cost of the house-call is too high and she's too young to go to the 21-and-over club in town with male exotic dancers. Mother and daughter and aunt discuss the situation as the younger kids laugh and joke, oblivious. It doesn't seem anything is resolved, except the family's decision to include tacos with breaded fried beef in their order.

You sprinkle a little too much habenero sauce on top of your second taco, the chicken. A middle-class couple walks in. The woman is cute, blonde, maybe mid-30's and wearing a long, knit sweater-jacket. Her partner is about the same age, with a meticulously cropped red beard around his chin and a tight, pastel green t-shirt from another Northwestern metropolis. They ponder the menu and make their orders. They're loud, somehow more so than the sum cacophony of the family, which somehow seems to have gained even more members in the fifteen minutes or so they've been in the restaurant.

You turn your attention away and sip your lime Jarritos. A waiter offers more tortilla chips. Though you decline, on each of your remaining five or six you carefully dab a few drops of a different sauce to find just the right one for your last taco. The name of the favorite escapes you now, but you sprinkle it carefully on the taco, only a touch so as not to overpower the pork.

Taking a bite, you sit back in the booth and notice another herd of elephant figurines in the corner.

More and More

Settling into a life of self-employed writerdom has taken a bit of getting used to. Roadblock number one: discipline. Thus, despite grand plans and great lists and now-fleeting moments of inspiration, I've been adoring my French press, discovering there are few breakfasts not bettered by adding a few blackberries (please technophiles, I'm talking about the kind that grow on shrubs, and, specifically, the ones purchased from the Friday farmer's markets at the Wilshire/Vermont Subway station in Koreatown – See Photo) and semi-limbering myself up with a few rounds of Wii Fit Yoga. It's only taken since I first drafted this post in early June to get around to finishing it. There's slow food, a burgeoning slow journalism movement, and, now, slow blogging. Being the bearer of a new master's degree from a large, somewhat unduly-pompous university in Los Angeles and an education from a small liberal arts college in flyover country, I begrudgingly acknowledge I might fit into a class-based stereotype or two, especially now that I've mentioned farmer's markets, yoga (and Wii Fit at that) and fresh coffee in one sentence. At the least I've done my part to prove I like Stuff White People Like. So I'm not doing myself any favors when I mention that one of my other recent joys is the chance to listen to NPR's Morning Edition as I putter around coming up with distractions for the day.

Even better than Morning Edition, though, is the ten minutes KCRW devotes at the end of its broadcasts to the Marketplace Morning Report. Marketplace does a tremendous job of putting business news into plain English without dumbing it down, and I generally find its stories more compelling and educational than the business news from NPR (Planet Money excluded), so I'm glad Santa Monica's gem of a radio station offers this alternative.

One morning, though, I was struck by a promo for one of the Morning Report's underwriters: agribusiness giant Monsanto, which, audiences were told, is “Committed to sustainable agriculture.”

How would Monsanto maintain this commitment? Apparently, in their view, their recipe for sustainability is “Produce more, conserve more.”

The thing is, that's the problem. The entire point of conserving more is to counter the need to produce more.

Monsanto's take is that it's helping farmers produce more food. The company insists it's just meeting the needs of the earth's growing population. But is that the right course of action, or should we be focusing on better distribution of food?

On its Web site, Monsanto continues the claim, adding “improve farmers' lives.”

Contacted for his comment on the seeming contradiction between conservation and production, Monsanto spokesperson Darren Wallis explained that hunger is such a complex problem that neither better distribution nor increased production are solutions alone. Dramatic population increases expected over the next half-century necessitates accelerated production, but it will do so at the cost of existing resources, including land, water and nitrogen.

"From our view,” Wallis said, “The great challenge is to produce more AND conserve more [emphasis his]. Monsanto has committed to that challenge.”

Monsanto, Wallis said, committed to a “sustainable” yield to address that challenge. Their goals include doubling crop yields on core crops, using 1/3 fewer inputs to do so and “helping improve the lives of farmers.”

For the moment, I'm not going to explore the controversial history of Monsanto's relationship with the environment. My extant concern is this attitude that we can somehow continue to produce and produce and produce, just more efficiently, smartly and more “sustainably.” But it's telling that few people, whether corporate agriculture giants, activists or green-leaning politicians define what sustainable means. What are we sustaining? How do we define “improved” lives? All that increased conservation does, if not coupled with decreased production (and decreased demand), is postpone the inevitable.

What I'm writing here is not new. But it's telling that the message that perhaps enough is, indeed, enough is not getting through to the society as a whole. Why do we continue to believe that we can live, — even that we should live — as we have for the past century? Do we even want to? Why do we resist sacrifice, change and evolution so readily on one hand, but continue to demand new technology, cleaner cars, more honest politicians, healthier cities and faster communication? We need none of these things. We need different ideas. Different models. We need not to improve what we have.  If we want to live differently then we have to live differently. We need to tear down what we have, not just repaint it.

I say that, yet at the same time I also believe we need to stop trying to improve and just live more honestly, more truly. We need to stop expecting that by traveling just a few more feet we will be home. I guess I think the problem is we can't decide what home is. We can't determine whether home is a place we must return to, if home is some destination in the distance, or if home is where we are, always.

When we discuss conservation we constantly discuss new technology and better habits. We shame each other into improvement. Yet we're still too embarrassed to discuss one topic: overpopulation. Why can we talk carbon credits, carbon sequestration, recycling, compost, energy conservation and smart growth, but not smart people and limited population? Overpopulation shouldn't be discussed without doing so in terms of the consumptive potential of populations (i.e. the environmental strain of an American far outstrips that of an Indian or even a Chinese person, despite the fact those two countries share a third of the world's population — and, when considering the environmental impacts of a developing economy, we must consider the role our domestic demand plays in stirring such foreign economies). True, procreation is our deepest human instinct. What right do we have to suggest to others to deny that instinct? Yet, at the same time, if survival of the species is our ultimate goal, we are dooming it with every moment of silence we maintain on this topic.

We need to share the message that the culture of more is not the answer. More wealth is not the solution. Economists lament that Americans are saving too much money, they're not spending enough to support our economy. Is anyone willing to suggest that might be a good thing, that, for once, some Americans are living within their means? Consumerism's weaknesses are so visible. Why are we so eager to return to where we were, and why are we so eager to bring the rest of the world into our mess?

I hope to write more about this cult of "more." I've never quite understood why accumulation is often considered synonymous to satisfaction, security, and even basic survival. While taking care to prepare for the future and buttress oneself and one's community against unforeseen dangers is a rational action, no argument can be made that this is what is sought through worshiping growth at any cost.  There are, sadly, too many examples of society jeopardizing its future and current happiness and strength in the pursuit of consumption's façades.

From New York to Jollibee and Back Again

Jollibee on Beverly in Los Angeles's Koreatown Neighborhood

For about a year I've had an inadvertent subscription to New York Magazine. Somehow it just started appearing in my mailbox. I kinda thought perhaps I had tried to subscribe to The New Yorker, made some ridiculous mistake, then forgotten about the episode. Strangely, none of my credit card or bank statements said anything about either magazine, but it was clearly addressed to me at what was then my address. It kept coming. As far as I knew, it wasn't a gift subscription, and I'd probably peer quizzically toward anyone who gave me such a gift (quizzically, but appreciatively, because a gift is a gift, right?). Every week, another copy of New York. I'd thumb through here and there, each time thinking "this is impressively irrelevant to me." (Note to self: learn how to spell the word "relevant" and its variants at some point. That and "tomorrow" and "gray".) I don't have any specific qualm with the magazine, nor the city for which it is named. Every now and then, particularly last summer, when I was transitioning between incarnations of my life, I'd actually read an article or two in the magazine (don't ask me which — my apologies to the authors, but they just didn't leave very lasting impressions). Usually, the magazine would just get filed away, stacked toward the middle of my pile of magazines and books to read.

Thankfully, my subscription is finally nearing its end and I can give away my last copies on Freecycle. If there's nothing else I've learned in life recently it's that there are people in this life who want and can make use of just about anything in this world.

Today, I got yet another copy, oddly enough, since I received the previous issue on Tuesday (There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to New York's circulation). As I climbed the stairs to my apartment I found my thumbs skipping across the pages, but I didn't really glance at what they said.

Then, this evening, my not quite as old as it sometimes acts laptop overheated right as I was in the middle of watching an episode of Lost. While I waited for the computer to reboot I went about my apartment, shuffling papers and washing a few dishes and generally pretending to be busy. I got to the front door adjacent bookshelf upon which mail gets stacked for innumerable weeks and grabbed the New York i received this week. Flipping through, I landed on a page listing a few restaurant openings and closings.

Then I saw it. What would appear to my wondering eyes but none other than the home of "Crispy Chickenjoy" and "Juicy Yumburgers." Jollibee. 

Oh the joys of coincidence. Since the day I moved to L.A. and passed the giant, gleeful bee sculpture outside a drive through fast food joint, Jollibee has pervaded my consciousness. In the following months, friends and family have all discussed the joint, yet I haven't had any crispy poultry or tasty beef patties. Just last night I mentioned to a friend how curious I am about Jollibee and was reminded, as I learned a few months ago, that the restaurant is actually a popular Filipino fast food chain.

Somehow I feel cheated that it made it to New York's openings list before it even got a mention in L@L. It's not so much that I'm protective of my L.A. gems, but that it seems a latent instance of the somewhat annoying irony fad that so infected late 90's and early 00's Western culture, often fueled by inaccurate understanding of the term's definition. Perhaps, perhaps not. Whatever the case, I still keep picturing New York's food editors thinking how recession-chic it might be to list a new fast food outlet among the openings.

Yes, my computer is fine. And yes Lost was great. I'm a sucker.

In other news. Did anyone hear about the Octopus at the Santa Monica Aquarium? Crazy.