Ramblings: Food With Soul

This blog wasn't really conceived to be your regular food and recipe blog. Sure, we wanted a place to share recipes but we also wanted a place to describe the ways in which joining a CSA (Community Supported Agrigulture program) influenced or changed aspects of our lives or our thinking about food. Clearly, the excitement (and novelty) of a weekly fruit/veggie delivery has us all focused on the many great dishes we are cooking! As a result there has been very little commentary on the CSA itself. I do hope the rest of our team will share their thoughts soon.

Speaking for myself, I've always enjoyed food and cooking. Joining a CSA has not brought any additional enjoyment to the act itself although I am finding that I cook a lot more often and "just because". Perhaps it is the pressure to use everything up or perhaps, more likely, I am just expanding my notion of why I like to cook in the first place? I learned my way around the kitchen as a little boy watching my mother cook for the many small, intimate dinner parties she would throw and become 'famous' for. She used to get and enjoy a lot of attention for it and, if I am to be honest, I probably picked it up for the same reasons. Nearly every dish I've made since joining the CSA, both posted and unposted, is something I've made before and yet the preparation feels different. This leads me to feel that the change taking place has been more in terms of my relationship with the food and the skills themselves. Whereas before cooking was for company and special occasions, (to get noticed?), now it is just for me. The dishes I'm cooking are intended to be eaten more "routinely" by me and mine and not saved for others.

The title of this Sunday's New York Times Op-Ed by Nicholas Kristoff was "Food for the Soul". He writes about today's farming methods that, while efficient, also tend create a food output that is, to put it blunly, unhealthy. He describes how the food producers of today have no emotional connection to what they are producing. To gain efficency in production, assembly line produced food has lost its soul (and may even contain pathogens!) Its definitly worth a read. He doesn't tackle the issue of how it is probably impossible to feed the planet using only the small organic farms her prefers but he does make the point that there is a value in the output of small farms beyond the price and health relationship. While reading his column I realized that food producers, in this regard, have set a bad example for the rest of us: they have pushed down this lack of food "connection" to the end users, those of us who are doing the eating and cooking. For the most part, we are not cooks anymore, we have become food assemblers. Putting together meals from preportioned ingredients. Even in the produce aisle! How is it possible to have any kind of connection to a bag of prewashed lettuce or fruit that has been cut and made ready to eat in a container? By extention, how do we feel connected to anything we make from them?
Read more after the jump:

Everyone seems to find value in 'home cooking' and there are many hallmarks of this 'attribute' but I doubt any of them involve opening up packages and assembling food. That's what the cafeteria ladies in high school did. The people in your life might appreciate it when you buy them lunch or otherwise provide food but when you make the exact same thing 'from scratch', using fresh ingredients, the food is always valued higher than the equal item purchased elsewhere. Quite simply, the value of the truly home cooked meal is larger than the sum of its parts. This intrinsic increase in value is probably what allows us to be more forgiving of cooking's imperfections than we would be if we were dining in a restaurant. The patched together pie crust is a marker of a good home cooked pie, made with love, and not a flaw that spoils it. It is precisely the imperfection gives the pie its soul!

I really think we have to apply this same value to the produce we are getting in our CSA. So what if the zucchini aren't all the same size or you get a tomato with a brown mark? So what if you don't get to pick what is in the box each week? Yes, I know you can go to Whole Foods and get perfectly sized organic produce and you can get exactly the items you want. But will you? Or will you, like I used to do, just swing by Ralphs and pick up another souless bag of lettuce or worse, get take-out Chinese because nothing better is waiting for you in your refrigerator at home? I find that I am now not only embracing the pressure this box is putting on my cooking skills but I am also embracing the irregularity of the food inside!

This food may not be perfect but it sure has soul!