Nag's Head and Food Choice

There's something about standing among mountains of beautiful fresh fruit and vegetables at markets and produce stands that make me feel at home--as if I'm surrounded by family and friends. With Ryan away in Exeter for a couple days this weekend, I was feeling a little lonely this morning, and knew just the trick to lift my spirits: a trip to Nag's Head! There is a plethora of fresh produce markets in London, especially on the weekend, but as it was drizzling on and off and already 3pm, I decided to head to Nag's Head, our neighborhood hodge podge of stores and market stalls, many of which are Greek or Cypriot (from Cyprus). The stalls are hit or miss in their quality, but the prices are low and there's not a tourist in sight. My favorite produce shop, Michael's Fruiterers (at least that's what the English sign says), had an especially beautiful display today, probably due in part to the recent rain which turned the potatoes into a vibrantly warm fall-orange and the leafy greens into a tropical-green. The chard looked especially perky and voluptuous, so I grabbed two bunches. A lady next to me asked, "how do you cook that?" I described different methods of pan frying, steaming, or cooking it in a soup. She admired the color but ultimately decided to go with the pointy shaped English spinach.

I wandered through the fruits and stopped when I saw them: deep purple figs nearly the size of a tennis ball! They were huge! I cautiously extended two fingers and gently squeezed their sides, as if about to disturb a sleeping baby: perfectly ripe! With great deliberation and consideration I chose four that I deemed perfect and gingerly placed them in a paper sack. I moseyed by the olives and savoy cabbages--the colors, textures, and smells sedating me further and further into a peaceful happiness. At the check out counter, the usually talkative young woman commented, "someone's being healthy" as she bagged my bunches of chard. "Yes, and they're delicious!" I replied. She made a face of disgust and said, "yeah, I'm so hungry right now and all I can think about is which take-away (fast food) do I want." I laughed and noticed the moist dates sitting on the counter. "Should have bought some of those," I thought to myself.

As I walked back home, I thought about what the Greek produce lady had said and it reminded me of something we discussed in one of my classes this week. Our readings focused on the history of food safety and regulation and the implications for the safety of food (and the health of consumers) in an increasingly commercial food industry. Whose responsibility is it that consumers eat safe and healthy foods? Is it the farmer, the processor, the vendor, the government, or the consumer? Many of the readings highlighted that this responsibility has historically been placed on the consumer who is often uninformed about the source or processes of their food.

This then made me think, what influences my food choices? So much of it is tied into the availability of food, the information made available about the food, social perception (and advertisement) of the food, and the money and time I have available. But there's something more than that. What I perceive as easy, convenient, safe to eat, or tasty is very much culturally determined by my upbringing and surroundings. I wasn't buying the chard because I thought, "I'm going to be healthy." I bought the chard because I wanted to make one of the dishes that my mom always makes. I wanted to feel closer to home. The figs, on the other hand, were spontaneous, an indulgence in the aesthetics of the fruit and my conception of the figs as a kind of luxury. Some people dislike figs, but my taste buds say 'yummy!' Especially when paired with some equally decadent blue cheese....ooo!

So why did I buy the chard, the one lady bought spinach, and the produce lady fantasized about McDonald's? I don't know. What I do know is that it is important to understand our food decisions as complicated, layered processes that in turn have a profound impact on the shape of the food industry as well as our individual well being, happiness, and health.

Before all this thinking makes me too skeptical of everything I eat, I'm going to go enjoy some figs!

For some informative reading, check out:

Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism, Marion Nestle, 2003

Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire, Nicols Fox, 1998

Food Regulation and Trade: Toward a Safe and Open Global Food System, Tim Josling et al, 2004

Trust in Food: A Comparative and Institutional Analysis, Unni Kjaernes, Mark Harvey, and Alan Warde, 2006

Why are my Wellies in the Wheelie Bin?!

Ok. So, this isn't food related, but I feel the need to share a few of my observations and amusements with British English language.

We all love the British accent. It sounds polite and sophisticated, intelligent and erudite. But just like there are many different accents across America, there are many different British accents, in fact, probably even more than there are in the U.S.

This link to the British Library's sound archives allows you to listen to over 70 regional dialects of England! http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/index.html

Having been in London for about seven weeks now, I've been able to hear some slang and have been wonderfully delighted to realize that British slang is charmingly quaint! British slang loves the letter y! And why not? I agree it is an under-used and under-appreciated letter, straddling the worlds of consonants and vowels, but never before could I have thought it could be attached to so many words! Here are a few of the countless examples. I hope they make you equally giddy!

Baccy: tobacco

Barmy: crazy

Bendy Bus: articulated bus or accordion bus

Budgie: short for budgerigar (Australian parakeet)

Brolly: umbrella

Butty: chip sandwich

Juicy bits: pulp in orange juice

Manky: dirty, gross (but even more specific: bath towels in an English winter turn manky)

Nappy: diaper

Old Blighty: England

Parky: cold

Pinny: apron

Posty: mailman

Rumpy Pumpy: hanky panky

Sarny: sandwich

Shreddies: Chex cereal

Smarmy: smug and pretentious

Snarky: sharply derisive (supposedly North American, but I hear it here all the time)

Snog: to kiss (not a -y ending but one of my favorites!)

Squidgy: soft or mushy

Squiffy: tipsy/drunk

Techy: touchy

Telly: television

Tickety-boo: things are going well!

Toasties: toasted sandwiches

Trolley: cart, ie: shopping cart or luggage cart

Wellies: galoshes (short for Wellington Boots)

Wheelie Bin: trash can with wheels

Wonky: unstable, asymmetrical; strange

Rain, outings...and Bread Pudding

This past week has been cold...really cold! And rainy, very rainy, but only sporadically. As a southern Californian, London weather seems to me to be hyperactive. It can't decide what it wants to be, it's always changing its mind. And it is never happy with being what it is for very long. Yesterday, Ryan and I were out on a walk to the beautiful area of Stoke Newington to visit their farmer's market and the overgrown Victorian wonderland of Abney Park Cemetery (pictured right) when the cloudy sky opened up and spewed down violent rain and hail! We took shelter in a nearby doorway and two minutes later, the rain evaporated, the hail dissolved, and the sun came out with blue skies and puffy romantic clouds!!

London Lesson #7: The weather in London is neither predictable nor steadfast.

*Please note the paradox of this lesson: as a southern Californian, the slightest weather variations within a single day is a novel and exciting idea to me. I'm sure no one from New York, Chicago, or Switzerland would ever call London weather unpredictable or exciting.*

One advantage of such fickle weather--never long periods of either rain or sunshine--is that it encourages spontaneity and a balance of activity. This morning the sky was a clear, turquoise blue; Ryan and I looked at each other and knew an outdoor adventure was about to be born: "let's go to the Bloomsbury Festival!" Every October the Bloomsbury Festival comes to the parks and museums in Bloomsbury, enlivening the area with music, food, crafts, and art installations. We toured Dickens' house for free, drank mulled wine, listened to world music, perused art stalls, pinned paper doves to an arbor, watched improvising dancing troops, and explored weird and fun art installations in various squares.

Here I am in an art installation by some architecture students: a wooden chair swing in a tree in Brunswick Square (notice the swinging couch behind me!). The Festival was quirky, lively, creative, and fun! Most importantly, we had some amazing Creole Gumbo with corn fritters! Mmm! And just as we were starting to get too cold, the sky quietly opened and gently rained a beautiful shower, backlit by the setting sun. The rain was falling so softly it looked like snowflakes! We knew it was time to go home. At home we revived ourselves with tea and chunks of bread pudding and got some serious studying done.

London Lesson #8: Maximize sunny spells with explorations into the quirky offerings of London and keep enough bread pudding on hand to get you through the cloudy study hours spent inside.

Here's a typical English Bread Pudding recipe: dense, rich, filled with dried fruit, and delicious!

Bread Pudding

8 oz stale wheat or white bread

10 fl oz of milk

2 oz (4 Tbsp.)butter, melted

3 oz brown sugar

1 egg

2 tsp mixed spice (mixture of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves)

zest of one lemon

8 oz mixed dried fruit (raisins, currants, sultanas, candied dried fruit, cranberries, whatever is in the cupboard! I think dates would be delicious in here, but I didn't have any, will try next time!)

Break up stale bread into 1 inch pieces and let soak in milk for 30 minutes. (I mushed the milk and bread together with my hands, as the bread was not fully immersed in milk. I also added a bit more milk to make sure the bread was thoroughly coated.) After 30 minutes, vigorously mix the soaked bread with a fork to ensure there are no more lumps. (It will look like a gross gruel.) Add the brown sugar, egg, melted butter, spices, and lemon zest and mix with the fork until thoroughly combined. Add the dried fruit and stir to combine. Spread the batter into a buttered 6x8 pan or loaf pan. Bake at 350F for about 30 minutes or until bread pudding is firm and tester comes out clean. If you use a smaller pan (which makes a taller pudding), you may need to bake longer, up to one hour. Enjoy hot with ice cream! Also hearty enough to eat for breakfast! Yum!

Note: For that special occasion, soak the dried fruit in brandy for 30 minutes prior to adding to batter. Mmm!

Hampstead and Louis Patisserie

I woke up Sunday morning at 7:30am. Seven thirty AM. On Sunday. The day of rest. (For those who may not know, I love to sleep. I even like to think I'm pretty good at it. As co-founder of the Recreational Sleeper's Club I pride myself on my over-indulgence in sleep. Give me 60 seconds in a motionless position, slightly reclined and I will be asleep. I could easily sleep 12 hours a day every day for the rest of my life. So you can probably imagine how much I love Sundays, the designated day of rest). Back to the story...

7:30am Sunday. Ryan and I bundled up in sweatshirts and scarves, gulped down a quick cup of tea, and stepped out into the biting 45F early morning London air. With icy cheeks and growling stomachs, we walked two miles across North London, passing greengrocers setting up their stands, early dog walkers and cheery, well-dressed church goers. We were headed for Hampstead, a charming upper-upper-class village nestled next to Hampstead Heath with a rich history of literary residents (John Keats, Karl Marx, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Sigmund Freud, Robert Louis Stevenson, HG Wells, Agatha Christie, Ian Flemming). Most early risers in Hampstead are probably on their way to church or are out to hear the early morning birds on the Heath, maybe catch a glimpse of a celebrity or MP out for a morning jog, or to grab a cup of coffee from the designer Italian coffee house on the corner before taking a Sunday drive in their Maserati. But not Ryan and I. No. We were awake in the early Sunday hours in the posh village of Hampstead for one thing...Hungarian pastries. But not just any Hungarian pastries. Louis Patisserie.

Since our arrival in London, I have read online and in multiple books about Louis Patisserie, considered by many to be the best pastry shop in all of London. Last week I picked up a book, Still Open, that highlights the various shops and cafes around London representing a bygone era of traditional, small, heritage shops that are, still open. And it featured Louis Patisserie! One of the younger shops in the book, Louis Patisserie was founded in 1963 by Mr. and Mrs. Louis, immigrants from Hungary. The classy decor, fine quality service, attention to detail, and decadent, flawless pastries, have been it's hallmarks for 47 years.

As we approached the green awning on Heath Street, my grumpy, frozen morning scowl warmed into giddy excitement. I slowed my pace and quietly tiptoed to the storefront in anticipation. My crunchy eyes opened wide with wonder as I looked in delight at the window full of sugary delicacies: row after row of architectural sugar artwork in countless colors and shapes, painstakingly constructed and decorated with loving precision and skill. I recognized a few things, like slices of Dobos torte, dressed up eclairs, and rectangles of tiramisu cake. But there were many things I had never seen before: cakes covered with curls of chestnut puree, chocolate and marzipan domino cakes, intricate towers of glossy fruit, chocolate dipped crescent cakes shimmering in gold, and everything seemed to be covered with marzipan! What were all of these beautiful creations? And how was I going to eat all of them?

As we stepped inside, it was if we were stepping through time and space into an elite Old World coffee and tea house. Button-backed tan leather booths and mahogany panels lined the sides of the narrow Patisserie with glass cut tables and beautiful antique short, wooden chairs. Colorful exotic carpet covered the floor and bowls brimming with white and brown sugar cubes were the centerpiece of each table. The place was empty (I guess it's a little early for sugar highs for the folks of Hampstead) and we chose a seat in the middle of the room.

A young beautiful Hungarian girl with a white apron elegantly asked what we would like to drink and brought a tray squished full of an assortment of their pastries to choose from. Ryan's cappaccino came in a

dainty teacup with a mountain of foam two inches about the rim! My breakfast tea came as full silver tea service, with enough hot water for about five cups of tea (and stayed amazingly hot the whole time)! We chose a chocolate Boliem cake and a domed cake topped with slitted marzipan and dipped in chocolate! We slowly sliced the tiny silver forks into the cakes and peered inside: layers and layers of cake and buttercream. We chewed slowly, savoring each bite: not overly sweet, rich in flavor, the perfect crumb, and secretly hidden bits of walnuts! What heaven! I couldn't believe how deceptively light and airy the multi-layered, buttercream-filled, chocolate and marzipan cakes really were!

It's true! I even thought, "is this going to be enough? Will we need to order a third piece?" But about halfway through, my cake suddenly seem to grow in size and I said, "these tiny cakes are huge!" I was beginning to think that I would be unable to finish the rich, decadent, marzipan cake. But with a little more diluting of my stomach with more cups of tea, I was able to finish off both pieces of cake! Phew!

We sat for a whole hour watching people come and go, the regular old ladies with their coffee and paper, the European couple with a croissant wanting decaf coffee without luck, the kids with their dad getting domino cake to take home and arguing about eating it in the car. And then us, the grungy young couple with traces of sleep dirt in the corners of their eyes, pouring over each bite of cake, completely numb with satisfaction. I'll brave the cold London mornings any day, even Sunday, for slices of heaven this delicious!

Lardy, lardy!

I've known for a while now that there was a part of English baking that I'd have to address sooner or later--a four letter word I'd been dreading...LARD. In California, and in my household growing up, lard was a dirty word. California restaurants prided themselves on advertising their premises as lard-free and it was usually lumped into the same category as MSG--once delicious, now hazardous to your health and disdained.

But not in England! The English are not so prejudiced when it comes to fat. They embrace all kinds of fat for all kinds of purposes (using suet-beef fat- for making pie crusts and puddings) and even consider it a delicacy (think crackling-the crunchy fat on a pork roast). So it's no stretch of the imagination that lard is nationally loved. And like most things British, lard, and fat in general, is loved with aplomb! 'Lardy cakes' line the shelves in supermarkets, dairy products are labeled 'full fat' and no sandwich is complete without a thick slather of butter on the bread (in place of mayonnaise), just as toast is buttered and jammed, not one or the other. Growing up, we had a glass jar under the kitchen sink for the collection of leftover fat from cooking fatty meats like bacon. Once the jar was full, we would throw it out. Here, fat is just as religiously collected, but rather, is lovingly stored in the refrigerator and saved for future consumption (to sautee veggies, or no doubt improve something that was lacking in fat). And so it is that lard features in nearly a quarter of the recipes in my English baking book.

While studying at Le Cordon Bleu, I discovered the divinity of butter (I grew up on margarine and didn't taste butter until college) and learned then that somethings are worth potentially shortening your lifespan for. But lard is not one of those things, or so I thought. Apparently lard has had a resurgence in its popularity among foodies as an alternative to partially hydrogenated oils (lard has zero trans fat-it's au natural from the pig!). In early 2006, Europe experienced a "lard crisis" as demand for lard in England and Poland could not be met by heritage hog breeders who specialize in artisan lard. Passing the lardy cakes in the market and the tower of white bricks of lard in the butter aisle, the anthropologist and foodie in me paused. I grabbed two bricks of lard, 33p each, and felt my arteries constrict a little.

Michael Smith's Afternoon Tea cookbook says, "everyone has his or her favourite recipe for a version of this type of biscuit" called melting moments. A simple recipe and easy to make, he calls for the addition of a walnut or candied cherry on top. That seemed pretty dull to me so instead I ended up turning some of them into French style jam thumprints, filling a depression in the middle of the cookie with a bit of jam. I chewed the finish product slowly...not as flavorful as butter but much more flaky and crumbly...and after I had three more, I decided they were surprisingly delicious, satisfying a kind of nostalgia. As Michael Smith says, "they're certainly not slimming, not so much because of their calorific count but because they are more-ish and we don't stop at one." Now I understand two things: the Brits love of lard and the word more-ish, a good British word. I wanted to eat more cookies. Let's just blame it on the weather.

Melting Moments

5 oz lard

3 oz unsalted butter

6 oz sugar

1 egg, beaten

12 oz flour

Rub the two fats into the flour until sand-like in texture. Stir in the sugar and use a fork to mix in the egg. Using your hands, bring the mixture together until a soft dough forms. Roll one inch balls and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. Flatten balls with your fingers and top with a walnut or use your thumb to make a depression in the cookie and fill with unseeded raspberry jam. Bake 15 minutes at 375F or until kissed with color. Cool completely before storing in airtight containers.

For more revealing information about lard, check out:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/nov/16/foodanddrink

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C06E3DC1E3CF932A25753C1A9669C8B63

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C06E3DC1E3CF932A25753C1A9669C8B63

How to make your own lard: http://www.thenewhomemaker.com/makeyourownlard

Summoning the hunting-and-gathering spirit!

Having now completed two weeks of classes, I can confirm that I am immensely enjoying the academic substance and milieu of my course as well as the substance and aromas that emerge from our little flat's kitchen!

This week, in my Anthropology of Food core class, Food, Body, and Society, the readings and discussions have focused on humans' paleolithic food consumption patterns as hunter and gatherers and why human population shifted to food production in 8500BC. This transition, after all, is the birth of our relationship with food today. Amazingly, it turns out that hunting and gathering was a pretty good way to live: nutritional needs were met with little effort, want was little, sleep and leisure were plenty, and a seemingly harmonious balance of population and ecology existed. Sounds like utopia! So what would drive us to produce/cultivate our own food if farming involved long painstaking hours of hard work?

The transition to food production took place over thousands of years and occurred for many different reasons in different areas. It is guessed that a combination of climate change, an increase in domesticable wild plants, the cumulative development of technology, and an increase in population density could have all contributed to this complex transition. But to know exactly why a person or group chooses one means of subsistence over another seems beyond our grasp, especially 10,500 years later. I can barely understand my own decisions made at a grocery store two days ago: why did I buy Ben N Jerry's instead of

Haagen-Dazs? Or perhaps more appropriately, why did I leave a sunny, warm land abundant with avocados and peach pies, for a damp, cold island with marmite and fruitcake?

Like our hunting and gathering ancestors, (but on a much less significant scale) I too have shifted my life path without knowing the outcome and have done so, as I imagine they did, in the hope that it will lead to a more fruitful life. And in the meantime, I will enjoy the journey, as seen in a recent dinner we made: juicy hand-packed pork, onion, and mustard sausages, a mix of caramelized onions, bell peppers and savoy cabbage, broccoli with aged English Cheddar cheese, potato and leek soup, and a pint of Fuller's 1885 oak-aged ale. I am enjoying the bounty of England.

School is in!

Walking down the hallway, I pass groups of people speaking different languages I do not recognize. In class, the professor tells us not to take notes; he'd prefer we digest what he says, rather than focusing on scribbling it down: "6 months from now, you won't be able to make sense of your notes anyway." I spend four hours in the library looking for one week's reading for one class (there are no readers or textbooks for post-grads, you have to find all the original books and photocopy them yourself). The academic calendar is a mystery, with three terms, a month break in April, and things like "reading week" and "revision week." I still can't write the date correctly (7/10/10). And between noon and one, a line of people bisects the plaza as students wait patiently for a heaping plate full of steaming vegetables and rice, scooped out of ice chests stacked on a wagon, served up with a hunk of blueberry cake--provided free by the Hare Krishnas.

Welcome to graduate school in London.

It's been a bit of an adjustment to return to academia after being in the real world for four years, but it's been an even bigger adjustment to enter the academic world of a different country. The basic structure of lecture and tutorials (discussion sections) is the same, but the reading lists, the assessment methods, and administrative basics are foreign to me. The reading list for one of my classes has about 30 different articles and books listed for each week! The Miss Industrious in me started hyperventilating: "there is no way I can read all this for each of my three classes every week!" Luckily, it turns out you aren't expected to read everything. Phew! But you are expected to read most of it, as well as research additional pertinent sources. Should be good preparation for researching the dissertation (thesis). But with all the students competing for copies of books at the library, long queues at computers to access the electronic databases, and even longer queues for the copier, it takes a solid 4 hours just to acquire the reading material. And since the SOAS library doesn't have everything on my list, I have to trek all over London looking for sources. It takes ages just to acquire all the reading, which seems a bit archaic to me--though the British would say traditional (that's a compliment!). It's certainly more of an adventure and I like having a wallet full of library cards! Let's just hope it's still fun half way through the year.

What I'm taking this term: Food, Body, and Society (one of the core classes for my MA in Anthropology of Food), Therapy and Culture (looking at relationships of medicine, therapy, and the body with culture), Ethnographic Research Methods, and a Directed Practical Study that will consist of me doing an internship somewhere and writing a research paper. Term 2 will consist of Famine and Food Security, Food Development and the Global Economy, and the Anthropology of Urban Place and Space. Assessment seems to be based upon a combination of one or two papers/projects and a 2 hour examination at the end of term 2 for each class (including the classes from term 1). And then the big push to write a 10,000 word dissertation!

I've had two classes so far and I'm very pleased with the engagement, enthusiasm, and approachability of the professors. I think the program will be challenging, rigorous, and involve many hours in the library! The multi-cultural, liberal, ethnically and linguistically diverse student body makes SOAS feel like a smaller version of Berkeley but with a bit of the United Nations mixed in. It is exciting to be in a place not only rich in history but also rich in the diversity of cultures and peoples, especially for what I'll be studying.

At the end of my Therapy and Culture class, the professor had us introduce ourselves by saying our name and what food we dislike. "My name is Emily and I don't like tripe." Identity by name and food preference...I think I'm in the right place.