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Ecw Press - Lenore Newman

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174 pages

English

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When we humans love foods, we love them a lot. In fact, we have often eaten them into extinction, whether it is the megafauna of the Paleolithic world or the passenger pigeon of the last century. In Lost Feast, food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future. Whether it's chasing down the luscious butter of local Icelandic cattle or looking at the impacts of modern industrialised agriculture on the range of food varieties we can put in our shopping carts, Newman's bright, intelligent gaze finds insight and humour at every turn. Bracketing the chapters that look at the history of our relationship to specific foods, Lenore enlists her ecologist friend and fellow cook, Dan, in a series of 'extinction dinners' designed to recreate meals of the past or to illustrate how we might be eating in the future. Part culinary romp, part environmental wake-up call, Lost Feast makes a cri

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Sciences et techniques

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	17 octobre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773054063
Langue	English

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Extrait

Lost Feast Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food
LENORE NEWMAN

Contents
Acknowledgments
Section One: The Beginning of Endings
Chapter One: Silphium
Chapter Two: Gods and Monsters
Chapter Three: Across the Seas of Grass
Section Two: Beef or Chicken?
Chapter Four: The Beast in the Jaktorów Forest
Chapter Five: Burger 2.0
Chapter Six: The Living Wind
Chapter Seven: Engastration
Section Three: The Burning Library
Chapter Eight: The Pear King
Chapter Nine: Life Is Short, We Must Hurry
Chapter Ten: The Scrambled Paradise
Section Four: The Twilight Garden
Chapter Eleven: Honey and Roses
Chapter Twelve: The Sex Life of Plants
Chapter Thirteen: Wabi-Sabi
Suggested Readings
Index
About the Author
Copyright

For Kitty. Your support and encouragement made this book possible.

Acknowledgments
A number of people helped bring this book to life. I would like to give special thanks to my editor Susan Renouf and the entire team at ECW Press for making this book a reality. I would also like to thank Trena White and the team at Page Two Strategies for the long brainstorming sessions needed to turn a handful of ideas into a book. I also want to thank Shannon Blatt and Kitty Newman for the hours of copyediting, and to Dr. Adrienne Chan for her patience and guidance. The research for this book was supported in part by the University of the Fraser Valley and the Canada Research Chair Program. Special thanks go to “Dan” (you know who you are). Lastly I want to thank William Newman for providing slices of pear pie whenever my motivation flagged. I owe all of you a dinner.

Section One
The Beginning of Endings

Chapter One Silphium
It began with butter, a surreal amount of butter, glistening with tiny pinpricks of fat. It was studded with fragments of fresh herbs and whipped nearly to a foam. There was bread as well, but it was a supporting character. It too was excellent, a dark rye loosely stacked in rough slices on the right-hand side of a plate-sized slab of black lava rock. The butter was mounded up on the left side, a lump the size of a Christmas orange, melting gently where it lounged against the warm stone slab. The stone itself was of the same sort found in the walls of the restaurant and rimming the pool of steaming azure water outside the window. This stone played hide and seek among the drifting snow from here to Reykjavík. I took a moment to gaze out on the falling flakes and on the tall blond bathers reveling in the shimmering water. Some perched on the rocks, and others floated in the pool’s volcanic embrace. I’d spent the morning there, and after the meal, and perhaps a short period of digestion, I would return. But for now, there was butter.
I plucked another slice of bread from the slab and spread it liberally with butter. The fresh herbs, tiny leaves and twigs I couldn’t recognize, gave off the smell of a summer mountaintop. My grandmother liked butter, I thought to myself, my mind rambling in the manner of the solitary diner. My grandmother would have approved of this excess. I settled into my chair and took a slow bite, savoring the flavor and texture. I had a long lunch ahead of me and yet I was probably going to eat the whole lump of glorious butter. Slowly, the stress of the last few days, the snow, the cold, all melted away.
I was in Iceland to study the food of hard places. I had copious notes from my fieldwork in Newfoundland as a comparison, full of tales of cod tongues, salt pork for Sunday dinner and seal flipper pie. Now here was another island on the ragged northern edge of the world, full of friendly people, tidy settlements and interesting cuisine. Iceland is conveniently located between the December gloom of London, where I had just been, and the December gloom of Vancouver, where I needed to be. On the plane from Heathrow, I’d perched on the edge of my seat, excited to expand my horizons, meet new people and see new things. And, of course, excited to eat. My optimism had dwindled once I’d landed. Twilight gave way to driving snow, and the bus from the airport began to fishtail in the darkness. Out in the night, impossibly neat cottages were barely visible. None of this seemed to concern the jolly older man sitting beside me. He was happy to engage me in a one-sided conversation about the joys and struggles of being an aurora scientist in northern Scotland. He talked the way older men talk, alive with the joy of having an interested audience. At home, he had plenty of the darkness needed for his craft, but it was far too overcast. Instead, he spent time in Siberia and Iceland, supplementing his scientific work by giving aurora tours to wealthy tourists. I looked out the window, skeptical of his chances for success. I couldn’t even tell where the sky ended and the forest began. The wind began violently rocking the bus. I could see the driver tense his arms; his knuckles were white under the occasional streetlight. The aurora scientist frowned at the snow. He shrugged.
“Don’t worry, it will clear. Behind this storm, it will be clear and still.”
“Don’t you get cold, watching the aurora all night?”
“Oh, it’s a dry cold. You hardly notice it.” 1
“I’m here to study food.”
“Oh, that’s grand. Such fish and dairy. Be wary of the shark, though.”
He shuttered a little and turned to the window, lost in contemplation of the darkness. The bus slid merrily across the road, the driver cursing in a melodic tongue. I burrowed into my coat and hoped that the hotel would have room service and maybe a sauna.
Iceland is awash in interesting food. I talked to restauranteurs in the snow and dark. I visited thermal greenhouses in the snow and dark. I chatted with ice-eyed fisherman in the snow and dark next to an ocean of such a forbidding temperament I couldn’t turn my back on it.
I loved it. The noonday sun barely graced the horizon long enough to cast a glow on the mountains across the ice-choked harbor. I enjoyed tasting everything I could get my hands on, prowling the streets like a hungry wraith of midwinter. I ate fish as fresh and delicate as snowflakes. I did end up nibbling the fermented shark meat I’d been warned about and regretted it for several hours as the smell and taste hung on me like a pungent ghost. I munched on lichen. I tossed back salads grown with the heat of volcanos and ate bread cooked in the ground. I ate a great quantity of skyr, the yogurt that is really a cheese made from the milk of the Icelandic cattle descended from cows brought from Norway in the tenth century. They are now a distinct product of their harsh home, small in stature and few in number, with only thirty thousand lactating cows working to fill the breakfast bowls of Iceland. They are unusual cows, their coats pied or brindled in six colors, as plush as cats. They are tended on 700 farms that tuck into fertile valleys along the coast, where they eat the local vegetation in small plots of pasture, isolated for a millennium from the rest of cattle kind. The Icelandic cow is different, and its milk — extremely high in protein and low in fat — passes that difference along to the sort of butter one can eat by the spoonful. As my aurora watcher noted, the dairy was sublime. This place and its people have existed for centuries by the graces of fish, cows and sheep.
The world has found Iceland. Tourists flood the streets of Reykjavík. Skyr, so rich and wonderful, is an increasingly prized export in a food-obsessed world. So prized, in fact, that the cows of Iceland cannot possibly keep up with demand. A possible solution would be to crossbreed Icelandic and Norwegian cows to increase production per acre, but in the process the purebred Icelandic cow would likely go extinct from introduced disease and genetic mixing. There is no real way to make the magical cloud of butter brooding on a slab of volcanic rock available to a wider audience without making it into a pale copy of itself. That butter emerged from centuries of harsh landscape and slow cattle-breeding combined with skilled preparation. To lose the butter of Iceland, and the foods like it, would be a great loss.
Many of the unique foods that help to make the world a diverse and interesting place are in danger. The forces of globalization, industrialization and ecological collapse threaten the wealth of culinary products that make our cultures distinct. Some of these foods are becoming rare, some are becoming much more expensive and some face outright extinction. Some have already become extinct.
To understand these threats, imagine a feast. It can be any feast: a Las Vegas buffet, a family holiday dinner, a South Pacific pit BBQ, or an Indonesian rijsttafel, the classic meal of many small dishes, served for special occasions. Imagine a meal with many dishes and more food than can possibly be eaten at once. There are two things in that feast, aside from a great deal of hidden labor. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of species of plants and animals, a sort of culinary menagerie. There is also a huge body of culinary knowledge, the accumulated knowledge of growing, harvesting, processing and preparing foods handed down and improved upon over generations. A feast is a bit like a book, but a tasty book we read through eating. Now imagine that the dishes start to disappear one by one. The raspberries for the waffles, the sage on the Thanksgiving turkey, the poi or the pisang goreng. Gone. Slowly the table becomes less interesting, less captivating, and as each species disappears, the accompanying cultural knowledge vanishes with it.
This is the paradox of the lost feast. Even as we enjoy a time in which food is cheaper, more diverse and more available than ever before, the specter of extinction threatens t