A college student in Seattle, WA confronts food in its many forms - in restaurants, the quick bites in between classes and work, and, perhaps most importantly, she confronts the great puzzle of how to feed herself now that her mother doesn't make dinner...

Friday, May 30, 2008

Thank you, Mr. Pollan*

So apparently I've become hard to live with. Or at least, I've become annoying. I blame this entirely on the fact that I've recently finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.

I went grocery shopping with my mother last weekend. While I no longer live with my parents in Bremerton, I do go home about every other weekend to see my parents and my pets... and to have my parents buy me things. I'm a typically poor college student who lives on her 20-hour-per-week job as a barista... so it's nice to be able to get my parents to pay for some of my groceries. It's also really nice to go shopping in my hometown of Bremerton, because our grocery store is the Bangor Commecery - a grocery where just about everything, but especially meat, is deeply discounted for the military families that patronize it.

My mother and I were walking through the bakery - one of the first things that you see when you walk into the store. I told my mother what I had read in Pollan's book - that grocery stores are set up in a certain way in order to make people buy things. For instance, research shows that people will buy more food when they smell bread baking - so that's why most grocery stores now have a bakery that churns out French bread 'round the clock. "And do you know why the milk is at the back of the store?" I asked my mother. "Tell me," she said, now probably sensing that I was about to enter into a long shpeal about corruption in the supermarket. "Because milk is what everyone comes to the store for, so they're forcing you to walk past a bunch of other products in hope that you'll be seduced into buying more than you originally intended."

And it continued. Mom asked me to pick out three Bakers - I told her about genetically modified potatoes (like the ones in All Over Creation), and about the way that people normally chose the perfectly oblong potatoes, staying away from the ones that were misshapen because they did not conform to the mental image of the ideal Potato. As we walked past the bagged salads, I told her how baby lettuce marketing was concieved of on a smallish farm in California, and about how it's easier to grow them organically because they only stay in the ground for about 30 days before they're picked, giving them less time to be attacked by pests and choked by weeds. And I told her about the way they grow and harvest the lettuce, the overtilling of the soil, and about the lettuce's refrigerated journey from field to table.

And my Mom was a great sport about all of this. She has told me that while I'm annoying sometimes, she actually likes to listen to jabber on about what I've learned in class - both because she can learn more, and because I can then retain what I've learned by teaching her. However, when we got to the meat department and I began to explain about the slaughter of beef, she'd had enough. "If you're this concerned about all of this, why don't you stop eating meat and just plant a few seeds?"

While my mother said this in frustration and jest, I realized that she had just made quite a profound statement. There was really not that much good to be had by my berating every item in the supermarket - mostly I just ticked people off. What the situation needed was action. Instead of complaining about everything, people (including myself) need to take some action when it comes to the food they eat. Yes, it's effort - but isn't it worth it when you consider the alternatives? I'm not saying I'm becoming a vegetarian. And I'm not going to stop going to the grocery store altogether. But I am going to try to buy as much as I can locally - from the Saturday Farmer's Market, from the stands at Pike Place, from the butcher on the Ave. And hell, maybe when I move out of my current apartment in the fall, into a new one that actually has a porch or balcony, I'll plant a garden - it'll have to be a container garden, but perhaps it will help make me even more aware - and more connected -to where my food actually comes from. Which is what Pollan's book is all about, right?

Adventures in Olives

So I finally had Greek food yesterday. I say "finally" because I feel like there are tons of Greek restaurants, Greek cookbooks, and people saying, "hey, let's go get gyros" surrounding me. Yet somehow, I have never tried Greek food. The general idea of it has never appealed to me, mainly because it just makes me think of olives... and I hate olives.

But my friend Chloe and I ate dinner at the First Hill Grill, a family-owned greek-style diner on the corner of 9th and Marion, just north of downtown in Seattle. Thing was, we didn't know it was a Greek diner. We had decided to go there because it was part of our mission to visit all of the "Neighborhood-name-here Bar and Grill"s in Seattle. Generally, these places have very grill-ey food: sandwiches, steak, soup, burgers, comfort food, maybe ribs. And lots of yummy cocktails. And all of the places we had been to so far (including the Eastlake Bar and Grill and the Greenlake Bar and Grill) have included somewhat hip and modern decor to emphasize their appeal to the young residents of the neighborhood. But the First Hill Grill was none of these things. The low brick building looked shabby from the outside, and upon entering, we were confronted with full-on Greek restaurant regalia: fake columns and ivy, murals of the Greek countryside and the acropolis, and a gigantic marble clamshell with Venus bursting forth in all of her Greek glory.

I was skeptical. And intrigued. And not terribly disappointed. I had been expecting one of our normal, modern bar-and-grill joints, and was looking forward to crab cakes with chowder and fries. But I'd never tried Greek food, and I've always said I'll try anything at least once, and I was being given that opportunity. And at first glance, this place proved to be more than sufficiently Greek for my "first time." Actually, I felt as if I'd stepped right into the set of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

So what did we eat? We started with some sort of flambe. It was a soft sheep's cheese, doused with rum, lit aflame, and sprinkled with lemon juice. Served on pita, it was absolutely phenomenal... one of the most flavorful, yet light, cheeses I've had. Then came the main course... I believe what I had was called Souvlaki, skewers of oil-marinated pork with a greek salad. And here came the challenge. The pork was superb, and the feta in the salad was flavorful... but there, sitting atop my salad, was a plump purple olive. It looked different than the other olives that I'd eaten, the black, pitted, canned ones about which I had reached the conclusion that I did not like Olives. But this one was different... friendlier, plumper, and purply-er... and for heaven's sake, I was in a Greek restaurant! I was going to eat that olive.

But in the moment before I brought the olive to my lips, I was reminded of an article I read for class, entitled, "Food at Moderate Speeds" by Sidney Mintz. I had been presented with a picture of what Greek Food was by my cultural experiences - including, but not limited to, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. And the restaurant lived up to many expectations that had been set forth by these cultural dictums. However, the restaurant was also playing into these expectations. They knew that hungry diners would be looking for a completely Greek experience - thus the murals of the acropolis. The restaurant was playing into the cultural and cuisinal sterotypes in order to establish an identity and a clientele. While this could be seen as negative, it is, at the same time, bringing countless clueless olivophobes like myself to the realization that the cuisine is about more than the canned black olives with pimentos and frozen pasta-with-pesto entrees that may have given us our reservations or misconceptions. What I recieved for my dining dollars was both good and bad, from an anthropological perspective. While it compromised the overwhelming diversity of a people and a culture and a cuisine and presented it in the slightly one-dimensional format of a themed restaurant, it also was an improvement upon the faster-food-ification of Greek cuisine that I had ingrained in my mind and tastebuds.

So I ate the olive.

And you know what? It actually wasn't that bad. It tasted strongly of vinegar, and the mealy texture that I had so disliked in its canned cousins was absent. And while this particular olive was not brought to my table because of regional availability and tradition, as would a real greek olive, it was sufficient to allow me to change my mind, and my tastes, about Greek cuisine.