Purify Me

After a long hiatus – for which I have a long but uninteresting list of reasons – from active work on my thesis, I am pleased to say that I am working and making progress once again. Recently I’ve been listening to my field research interviews from the time I spent in India. It is such a blast from the past (all the way back to 2007 and 2008), and reliving some of this time has been fascinating. Aside from critiquing my naïve interviewing style and wishing that India was a quieter place (or at least that I had the foresight to use a noise-cancelling microphone), it has been great to revisit some of these experiences from the perspective that time and distance allows. I am feeling a lot of gratitude for the opportunity to see the places and meet the people that I did during my PhD field work. I’m also pining a bit for India, especially as the cold dark damp days of Vancouver shorten in anticipation of the solstice.

One thing that has come up in a few recent conversations I have revisited is the idea of purifying the body to prepare for receiving food. One very wise elder told me that, as children, everyone would wash their feet before sitting down to a meal. I don’t know if that had anything to do with the fact that your feet are a lot closer to your food when you sit cross-legged on the floor, or to the general messiness of children, or to the incomprehensible dustiness of Indian streets, but the basic message was that the body should clean and pure in order to receive food. Another (not so) elder told me that in her youth, the women would wash their hair in the morning before entering the kitchen to begin preparing food. This was a about purifying the head before beginning the sacred work for preparing food to eat.

I love this idea, particularly because these traditions are from a time and a place where people did not distance themselves from nature with attempts at sterile living, as many of us do now. They would have lived in buildings made of either mud or a combination of cow dung and straw. They would have used dry cow dung as cooking fuel and cow urine as a disinfectant. These purification rituals were not about killing “germs” or getting rid of “dirt”. They were about the symbolic purity and cleanliness owing to something sacred. Food was recognized as a gift from Nature – a gift necessary for human life – and it was treated as such.

Photo: articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com

By stopping to prepare one’s body to cook or receive food, one cannot easily avoid thinking about the significance of the act. Cooking and eating are acts that deserve our full care and attention. Without them, we would not last long. There is real value in showing such respect and gratitude toward something so essential to our very being. It may not be a value that can be measured in economic terms, but in human terms it is immense.

I suppose there are purification rituals of sorts in many Western kitchens today. We wash our hands with antibacterial soap, we boil our dishrags (or simply use disposables), and we wipe our surfaces with bleach to ensure obliteration of any invisible organisms. This may be useful to an extent, although many people go way overboard with this, but we forget the symbolic purification to ready our bodies and our minds to receive, really receive, with gratitude this life-giving gift. (I can’t help but add that it must be far easier to feel this respect and gratitude when we are eating real, fresh foods that are recognizable gifts from Nature rather than the output of a far-off factory. I know that I feel a great deal more respect for the bean I have coaxed from seed to sustenance in my garden or the hand-picked lettuce from the farmers’ market than I could for a microwaved mystery patty I removed from a box.)

Something to think about the next time I feel compelled to eat a meal in front of my computer without taking time to stop, think about it, feel something, and eat mindfully.

Travelling to India

Travelling to India - first as a fresh, naïve 20-year-old volunteer in an orphanage, and later as a graduate student researcher - changed the course of my life inextricably. A colleague recently asked me what it is about India that raises such strong reactions in travellers. I’ve thought about this a lot in the past, and I knew it had something to do with the intensity of the place, but could never quite put my finger on it. At that moment it struck me that India strips away all of our preconceptions and forces us to face the things we may not wish to face – both out in the world and within ourselves. We are struck by suffering, injustice, poverty, and all manner of sensory assaults superimposed on the indescribable beauty of the place and its people. We love it, we hate it, and we love it again. Every time the chaos threatens to send us home, never to return, an angel appears and all is redeemed. A flash of colour, a smile, the smell of food, or the impossible generosity of a stranger remind us why we are there. The endless contradictions force us to question our own world view and our place in that world. Nothing is as we once thought it was, and nothing will be seen in the same way again.

Cooking with Julia

Tonight I went to see the film Julie and Julia and my head hasn't stopping spinning since. I laughed, a lot. I cried a lot too. I relived the past 6 years of my PhD in 123 short minutes. And I thought I was just going out for a nice light evening at the movies.

Where to start? I had of course been planning to see the film: Julia Child, writing, and food all in one place! Yesterday I was having lunch with a very insightful friend who recommended – no, insisted – that I see it, so I thought I better get right on that and made plans to go with another friend who has witnessed most of my major thesis-related events over the past few years. I was thoroughly enjoying the first hour and half of the movie, all the time wondering why my friend so insisted that I see it. I don't want to give anything away for those of you who may yet see the film, so I'll just say there is a point near the end of the movie when Julie (the intrepid blogger working her way through all the recipes in Julia Child's book in 365 days) has to face the fact that Julia may not like her, and more importantly, that she may not like Julia, the woman to whom she has devoted a year of her life, who she considers her saviour, who she obsesses over to the point of nearly destroying her marriage. The light bulb went on in my head. Suddenly the thoughts came flooding in, and everything in this film seemed a metaphor of my recent past. Everything down to the fact that I am sitting at my computer, late at night, drink in hand, blogging the inner workings of my mind to an unknown audience.

A lot of things have happened to me during this existential journey sometimes referred to as a thesis. One of the big ones is the loss of a certain amount of idealism and complete disillusionment with many of the food heroes I once idealized. That disillusionment almost caused me to drop the whole thing on more than one occasion. It created a strange tension, because my ideological nature is what led me to what I am doing now, and it was a meeting with someone who I once idolized that created the space for me to do the project I'm now trying to complete. Realizing that this person is not perfect and does not represent all my values really made me question what I was doing and why. I began to question the validity of my research and almost decided not to continue. In time, I've realized that the fact that although this person may not live out certain values in the way I would like to see done, she has done an immense amount of work in a very difficult context. It's not perfect, but it is important. I've also realized that no matter what I learn about someone else, it doesn't change what I've done or what I've learned about myself. Which, incidentally, is a lot. I may be disillusioned, but I'm all the better for it. My insightful friend asked me yesterday why I used to be so blindly idealistic and regimented. I couldn't come up with an answer at the time but it came to me later: I used to live and work in a world where my ideas and values were really quite radical. I didn't have the confidence to back them up, so I clung to them and the people who publicly expressed them so that my ideas – and I – wouldn't get lost. As I created a world around me that is more supportive I no longer feel the need to cling so fervently to these ideals. I won't say I've become cynical, just that I'm comfortable questioning my own opinions. In some ways, my "idols" probably did more for me by "letting me down" than they could have done by meeting every one of my unrealistic expectations. I've become more principled than idealistic, and as a result far more relaxed, happy, and comfortable in my own skin. I also have way more fun eating, not only turning into a raging omnivore, but not worrying if something is full of cream, fat, or – god forbid – a non-organic, non-local ingredient that may not have been created exactly the way I would do it. So many great meals I missed! (There's a scene at the beginning of the movie in which Julia Child gets quite veclemt over a grilled fish. I completely understand, and was reminded of a time when I felt ready to die after eating what is quite probably the best panna cotta in all of the world at Osteria del Boccondivino in Bra, Italy.)

Once I started down this line of thinking, the parallels and metaphors just kept coming. Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking as way to teach American women how to cook real food in an age when mixes and cans were being pushed as the way to women's liberation. This isn't far off from the original thinking that led to my current dissertation. I was horribly distressed by the fact that cookbooks for people who know how to cook were disappearing and being replaced by instruction books telling people how to combine various packaged products and calling it cooking. I saw a great loss of knowledge and skill and it frightened me, so off I went on a study of deskilling which ultimately led to my thesis on distancing. And I don't even own a copy of Julia's book. Yet.

The two stories in this film deal with so many other themes that are all too real for me. Diving headlong into something as way out of something else (as opposed to a way into where you want to be) or simply as something to do can lead to amazing new joys and insights. It can also lead to obsession and dashed hopes. Or to unexpected success. It can both strengthen and strain relationships. It can lead you into things that are easy to start but hard to finish. It can result in many, many meltdowns. My dissertation process has been all of these.

Julie, Julia, and I have all used food and cooking as a celebration of love, an escape from reality, and as a source of great joy.

And maybe most importantly, to rediscover The Joy of Butter.

Back [to] Bacon

Much of the summer, I've either been escaping the city for beautiful places or hiding out trying to make a visible dent in my long dissertation "to do" list, and I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the things that normally inspire posts. In lieu of that, I think it's time I tell The Bacon Story.

I've been thinking a lot about the progression of my dissertation over the past few years.... I started out thinking about models for assessing food security and sustainability on an international scale (clearly a ridiculous venture for a mere 6-year doctoral project). Then I streamlined my thinking and moved on to what may be my best idea EVER: a fascinating and dramatic tale, and one that I still hope to investigate in the future. When that fell through for practical reasons, thoughts about cooking skills and globalization eventually led me to what I am doing now: an inquiry into what motivates people to engage in food system change in two very different but strangely similar places, India and Canada.

How I got here is one story. Thinking about how "here" has affected me has taken me on a journey of self-reflection about the interplay between my dissertation and my life and value systems. Each has had a huge effect on the other in many ways, but the thread that weaves it all together is made of connection, community, and spirit. One of the most visible effects this has had on me is my recent disregard of a lifetime of avid vegetarianism. Since deciding around age 3 that I didn't think it was a good idea to eat animals, I consumed absolutely no meat or poultry (with the exception of an unfortunate phase of processed and deli meats, which one can't really call "meat", during my youth) for another 32 years. I had experiments with seafood throughout my 20s and 30s, but that's as close as I came. I was deep into my field work in the summer of 2007 when I suddenly realized I was an omnivore. My lifetime sense of identity as a vegetarian was out the window and I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all.

At the risk of inspiring hatred, or at least extreme jealously, I have to say that my field work consisted largely of traveling to farms in southern BC and visiting people in all sorts of exotic places to look at, talk about, pick, shop for, cook, and eat a lot of really, really good food with all sorts of interesting people like Bollywood stars, elderly seed savers, university professors, and young activists. I also had meetings with bureaucrats and days of combing through policy documents, but that part wasn't nearly as much fun.

So back to the summer of '07 and my Conversion. I was spending the day in the Fraser Valley visiting farms with a bunch of city folk who had signed up for a tour to go and learn where their food comes from. We had arranged to have lunch at the home of an apple orchardist who also raised chickens, a few animals, and vegetables for a kitchen garden. He had asked in advance about dietary restrictions and I, along with about half the group, said that I was vegetarian. We had just finished touring the farm when we sat down for a fabulous outdoor lunch of fresh salad, homemade apple cider, and - for the vegetarians - egg salad sandwiches. The happy looking chickens (yes, I do think chickens can look happy) who kindly produced our eggs were running around in the field right next to our table. The sandwich was garnished with a few slices of very fragrant crispy bacon. Without even thinking, I reached out set the bacon quietly aside and enjoy my sandwich. I had the bacon in my hand when our farmer host started to tell its story. He and a neighbour had raised a pig from birth. Their kids had played with the young piglet. He spoke very fondly of that pig. And when the time came, he and the neighbour respectfully slaughtered and cleaned the animal right there on the farm (I'll spare you the details here). They cut and cured all manner of pork parts for their freezers, and they chose a choice piece from the back to make into bacon. For what seemed like 20 minutes, he described in great detail how they cured and brined and salted this bacon, how they aged it for months in the cool cellar below his house. This was the introduction to our lunch, and I still had that bacon between my fingers when he finished the story. He told it with such passion and respect and love that it would have felt fundamentally wrong to let any piece of that pig go to waste. My sense of responsibility toward the pig's life seemed so much more important than my own ideas of what was right or wrong to eat. That seemed self-centred and insular and no longer relevant to my own reality. Instead of putting it to the side of my plate, I silently thanked the pig and that piece of back bacon went straight into my mouth. It was heavenly.

For days after, I found myself telling my friends: "I ate bacon!", excited and giddy as if I had just won the lottery. I wasn't sure I could do it again, but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. In the following weeks and months, my field work took me to more farms and more meals at which I was offered more meat from animals that had been raised, and prepared with the utmost of respect for the animals, for nature, and for the people who would share the food.

Now that my field work is complete, I miss sharing those meals with people who were living out their passion for food in every aspect of their lives, but the effect of those meals has stayed with me. I'm hardly a raging carnivore, but I continue to eat meat from time to time when I know the animals were treated with respect or when it is offered as a gift from someone I care about.

Bring on the bacon.
.