I am often overheard making the comment that I would kill for Indian food in this town.

Until October, at least, it looks like I won’t have to make good on my hyperbole, because there’s Indian food at the farmers’ market! And it’s vegan! And it’s pretty good!

I really don’t think that this day can get any better.

British authorities claim that there is no health benefit to eating organic fruits and vegetables, according to an article in the Guardian I read this morning. The crux of the article is that it is more important to eat fruits and vegetables than to worry about whether or not they are organic, with the argument being that organic food is more costly, so for people in the lower classes, it might be prohibitive. This following hard on the heels of a story about reviving the victory garden to get more Britons involved in the production of their food.

There are a couple of problems with the Guardian article. For one thing, although it briefly references the nutritional differences between organic and conventionally produced food, it didn’t delve into them, instead treating them very dismissively. In fact, there are substantial nutritional differences between organic and conventional food, with all evidence pointing towards organic food as a substantially better choice, healthwise. It contains a number of useful vitamins and minerals which are not present in conventionally produced food, thanks to the fact that organic food is produced in healthy soil. I think this shoots a pretty big hole in the claim that organic food has no benefit to health.

Furthermore, organic produce is not contaminated with pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides. Despite claims that washing conventional produce will eliminate this problem, it seems clear that at least some produce absorbs these substances, causing the people who eat the produce to ingest these substances as well. I’m pretty sure that most people agree that ingesting the -cides is not good for people.

I would also argue that organically produced food also has a tangible environmental benefit, which can translate into a health benefit, especially if the food is produced locally. By buying organic produce, consumers are voting for clean waterways, healthy field workers, and a more sustainable mode of food production. It’s not that “green” is trendy, it’s that by eating green, people are making a conscious choice to protect the environment, and that, my friends, is a good thing. And a good thing which has direct health benefits, not just for you, but for other people.

I understand the crux of the article, I really do. In a situation where the choice is conventional tomatoes or no tomatoes, I vote for conventionally produced tomatoes, because the tomatoes are the important thing in the equation. But when the choice is organic, locally produced tomatoes or potato chips, I vote for the tomatoes. One thing that the article did not address was the need to rethink food budgeting, devoting more money to food in general, and specifically more money to minimally processed ingredients. The junk food needs to go, and so does the packaged food, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is simple cost: organic tomato sauce is expensive, but making your own tomato sauce with organic produce is not, and people need to learn to think beyond the box.

This was really illustrated for me the other day when I was talking with a friend about the cost differences between the local grocery stores. As locals know, there is a long-standing claim that Harvest is more expensive. In fact, as my father discovered through several sessions of comparison shopping, Safeway is more expensive. It’s just that Harvest has expensive packaged junk, so people who buy that stuff have the perception that Harvest is pricier. If you actually make your own food, rather than following the directions on a box, Harvest is substantially cheaper. Since I ignore whole aisles in grocery stores because they are filled with packaged food, my grocery bills are pretty low, considering how much food I make, and I think I eat better, because I am able to control what goes into my food. If you make the choice for ingredients over packaged food, eating organic starts to become a lot more doable.

I also note that the claim shied away from any discussion of organic vs. conventional meat and dairy products, perhaps because they knew it would be a losing battle. Hormone laced chicken, or free range? It doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of argument there.

A great article appeared in the Guardian yesterday, talking about the ethical trap of “food miles.” I highly recommend reading the article, as I assume that most of my readers are interested in food politics and the ethical issues which surround food, and I promise that it is very interesting, and not all that long.

For those of you who didn’t read the article, the short story is that the concept of food miles is a bit more complex than people want you to think it is. At first glance, it makes sense to eat exclusively locally, right? Eating from the land, supporting your local economy, reducing your impact on the planet…but, in fact, there are a lot of factors which go into whether or not a food product is ethical, and it’s not as simple as how many miles the food has traveled.

From an environmental standpoint, one of the things the article highlighted was that food grown with chemical fertilizers and pest management materials, on a farm with petroleum powered tractors (or in a greenhouse) may not be as ethical as food which is grown naturally and air-freighted with large shipments of goods. In terms of carbon footprint, food which comes from further away might, oddly enough, be more ethical.

However, not all locally produced food is made with chemicals, and if local food is produced with the assistance of animals, rather than machines, I would argue that it would,in fact, have a far smaller carbon footprint than freighted food. I was somewhat disappointed that this was not really addressed in the article, which seemed to assume that conventional mechanized agriculture is the only way to produce food. This interesting omission reminded me of a somewhat disingenuous New York Times article on the same topic which was published not long ago, trying to discredit the food mileage idea with simplistic arguments. (Note that I do not necessarily think alternative fuels are more ethical, given the fact that biodiesel is turning out to be a huge disaster.)

I think that the article really illustrated the fallacy of the carbon footprint, which seems to be turning into the new gold standard for ethical living. In fact, the carbon footprint only scratches the surface of ethical living. Tristan and I were talking about this recently. I was arguing that the carbon footprint is too simplistic, and that by accepting it, people are missing out on the opportunity to delve more deeply into environmental issues. He was arguing that the carbon footprint is better than nothing, and that complex discussions of environmental issues alienate people, so we should be promoting the carbon footprint concept. What do you think? I’m not a fan of doing things by half measures, but I can see his logic.

And, the article argues, growing food for the North is a valuable source of money for people in the Southern hemisphere. So, by passing on those Chilean asparagus bundles and buying some local Brussels sprouts grown organically and without the use of heavy farm equipment, you are depriving some poor Chilean of the means of sustenance. Oh, but wait, if people in the Southern hemisphere weren’t dedicating their farmland to producing food for us, they could eat their produce, rather than selling it.

I was very pleased to note a plug for veganism at the end of the article, because it’s true that in most regions of the world, veganism is the most ethical and logical choice. It kind of surprises me, really, that the locavore movement isn’t more into veganism; I think they want to have their environmental self righteousness and eat meat too.

I think that the article really highlighted the fact that food politics is extremely complex, and that there are no easy solutions. It also reminded me of my personal goal in life, which is to take care of a large stretch of land somewhere, growing things on it and becoming self sufficient. As tangled in the industrial food complex as I am, it’s frustrating to feel forced to rely on a system I don’t like for the food I eat.

There’s a fascinating discussion going on over at the Guardian about doggy bags. Or to go boxes, if you will. I wasn’t aware that this was such an incendiary cultural issue, as I had assumed that the desire to take leftovers home is pretty universal, but apparently I’m wrong. It would appear that some UK citizens would rather waste food than be embarrassed by asking for leftovers? British readers, please educate me on this.

The article on the topic isn’t that interesting, except when the author expresses shock and surprise at the thought of being able to get food to go from a good restaurant, as though he’d asked for a unicorn and a brace of dodos and gotten it. What’s fascinating is the comments, where people say that all Americans are fat because of our huge portions, and that only Americans would be as gauche as to have the audacity to request leftovers to go, while others retort that it “must be an age thing” as they “go for an Indian” and get leftovers all the time.

I wouldn’t mind going for an Indian myself, but that’s a separate issue.

What I’m wondering is…why wouldn’t you ask to have your leftovers boxed up? I mean, you did pay for the food, after all, and if the restaurant served more than you could eat, why not take it home? Or why not deliberately over-order for the joy of leftovers in the morning? I don’t see how that would be awkward; I think it’s far worse to leave food behind, knowing that it will be thrown out. And I’ll about roaming into the kitchen in the depths of the night and nibbling on leftovers, personally.

The only time when I won’t ask for food to go is when I didn’t finish it because I thought it was bad. I’m loathe to complain in restaurants unless there’s a serious problem, because usually my dislike is related to a lack of full comprehension of a menu description and therefore it’s my fault, so I’ll just say I “wasn’t feeling very hungry” and leave it at that. But I still feel horribly guilty about leaving perfectly edible food behind.

One commenter in the thread raised the issue of food safety, which conjured up the image of a horrible spectre: a ban on to go boxes in our lawsuit happy culture, where restaurateurs might become mortally afraid of being sued by people who aren’t bright enough to put leftovers in the fridge and heat them thoroughly when they want to eat them. Given our penchant for banning things to protect people from lack of common sense, I fear this may not be very far in our future. Will a doggy bagging black market arise, with brave citizens smuggling tupperware into their favourite restaurants?

The comments also bring up another interesting issue, which is fear of waiters. People really do seem to be terrified of waitstaff. They don’t want to “inconvenience” their waiters, or look stupid, so they don’t ask questions, or they seethe silently about a perceived slight. (And then of course go rant about it somewhere instead of just talking to the manager about it at the time.) It’s funny, because people simultaneously look down on waiters as members of the “service class,” while also fearing their authority, as though asking what a “remoulade” is will cause the waiter to sigh heavily, take out a pistol, and shoot you.

This seems to be the crux of the doggy bag debate. Some people “don’t want to make trouble,” so they will abandon their food on their plates to be thrown out. (Or composted, depending on where you live, and in rare cases sent to a pig farmer who has a deal with the restaurant.) Others, apparently, have no difficulties at all when it comes to making trouble, and we gleefully ask for boxes and pester our waiters in every conceivable way possible, as our God-given right.

The question is…will I ever muster the balls to ask to have someone else’s abandoned food boxed up?

Meredith wins the prize. I was, in fact, “making cheese or yoghurt,” more specifically cheese. I’m not exactly sure how to unite Meredith and her brownie, since she’s not local, and my brownies don’t ship well. I’ll see if I can figure something out. Anyway, the photo above is a closeup of some freshly salted Neufchatel.

Disclaimer:

Certain purists attacked me for my post on making yoghurt at home, arguing that it wasn’t “from scratch,” because I used a commercial yoghurt as a starter. So, in the interests of full disclosure, let it be known that the milk used in the following post was harvested from Purity’s well stocked dairy section, as was the buttermilk, as I do not have access to a cow, or to raw milk to culture into buttermilk. I left the dirty work of rennet processing to the Junket company, which kindly sells rennet in blisterpacked tabs. If you know how rennet is made, you should appreciate this, since if I processed it myself, I would post lots of revolting photos. So this cheese is not, technically, “from scratch,” but I’ll bet it’s more from scratch than any cheese you’ve eaten this week (unless you live on a farm).

Moving on.

For those of you who have never made cheese before, cheesemaking is an awesome and complicated process which is also tons of fun. I decided to make a very simple soft cheese, like the French Neufchatel (which is treated like cream cheese here, but it’s so much more). Basically, cheesemaking involves a couple of steps. First you need to culture some milk to get some happy bacteria going on (this isn’t always done). Then, you need to curdle it, coagulating the milk by raising the acid level, causing curds to form. Then, the cheese needs to be drained, to get rid of the whey. If you’re eating soft cheese, it’s pretty much done at this point, but it can also be packed and handled in a variety of way for hard cheeses, from cheddar to Parmesan. (Cheddaring is really fun; I may make cheddar sometime in the next year or so.)

So I started with a half gallon of milk, which I heated to room temperature and mixed with two tablespoons of buttermilk. The goal was to add some delicious tang and to start raising the acidity. Then I dissolved 1/8 of a rennet tablet in two tablespoons of water, and mixed it into the milk. Rennet, for those of you who refused to follow the link above, is an enzyme found in the stomachs of young mammals. It helps them to break down milk so that they can digest it. (There are ways to make vegetarian and vegan cheeses, and I may work on those later this year too, but since I haven’t made cheese in a long time, I wanted to stick with what I know.)

Next, the cheese has to hang out to coagulate at room temperature. Depending on the freshness of all of the ingredients, this can take only a few hours, but I was prepared for it to take overnight, as in fact it did. In the morning I tested for a clean break (photos didn’t come out, alas), and it was ready to roll, so I cut the curds, making the cheese easier to drain:

That watery liquid is whey. Whey is what we do not want, so:

I poured the curds into a colander lined with cheesecloth to drain. They sat like this for a few hours, to get the bulk of the whey out, and I was astounded by how much whey there was. If I’d known there would be this much, I would have saved it and made ricotta. Next time.

Next, the ends of the cheesecloth get pulled together to make a little baggie, and squeezed to press the whey out. In Greece, we used to hang the baggie in the kitchen, the coolest room in the house, but in the interests of food safety* I hung it in the fridge:

More whey was generated. It fell into the glass bowl you can see at the bottom of the image. Note how plump and happy the bag looks. Over around 20 hours, it shrunk to this:

I opened it up to check out the cheese inside:

Mmm. Cheese. At this point, the cheese is perfectly edible, soft and creamy and perhaps a bit sweet. However, to enhance the flavor and help it keep, it’s a good idea to salt your soft cheeses. So I turned it into a bowl, sprinkled a teaspoon of salt on it, and worked it for a few minutes to get the salt in before packing it into a tupperware for refrigeration.

And that, my friends, is cheese. I am really pleased with how it turned out. The result is a very soft, creamy cheese which can be used in cheesecakes and frostings, or just eaten on bagels (assuming you have access to bagels that don’t taste like ass). Or plain in spoonfuls out of the dish. Whatever. I think I’ll be making this basic soft cheese a few more times, and then maybe experimenting with harder cured cheeses.

I certainly won’t be trying to make all my cheese at home, since I can’t make Parmesan and Brie and other fabulous cheeses at home. But this soft cheese is far superior to the stuff you can get in the supermarket, and a lot cheaper to make. And it’s fun. I highly enourage you to venture into the wide world of cheesemaking.
*A note on food safety. Cheese can be dangerous if it is not handled properly. I used pasteurized milk, which reduced the risk, and I also handled it carefully, using sterilized containers and so forth to avoid introducing bacteria. Cheese hangs out at room temperature a lot during the manufacturing process, and that’s a good temp for bacteria to grow. That’s why you want to get acid levels up quickly. However, there’s always a risk that your cheese will attract some visitors. If you make your own cheese and it smells/looks/feels/tastes funny, throw it away. It is always better to be safe than sorry, as you don’t want listeriosis and other unattractive diseases. You should also keep yourself/your kitchen/your cheese making tools as clean as possible. I bear no responsibility for repetitions of this recipe that go awry!

Listening to the news yesterday afternoon, I was tickled pink to hear JPR talk about a food dear to my own heart: the tater tot. (Which apparently is known as the “tot” by hip young things?) The tater tot and I have a long and conflicted history, as is often the case with people and trashy food, and it was a pleasure to hear this Idaho native discussed with gravity and seriousness on the radio.

I remember one night, a friend of mine and I were hanging out, and feeling kind of down in the dumps, and we went to go wander around Harvest.

“Let’s get some tater tots,” I said.

She looked askance at me, being a health food kind of girl.

“Come on,” I said. “I haven’t had tater tots in years. It’s nostalgia food. Let’s get the biggest package of tater tots possible, and a big thing of ketchup, and go crazy.”

She still looked a bit hesitant, but there in the frozen foods aisle, she started remembering all of her happy moments with the tater tot, and she reached into the case and grabbed a bag. Organic, of course. And we went home and heated them in my oven and piled them on a plate and it was delicious, with ketchup and salt and oily fingers.

I’ve never really eaten much packaged food, because it wasn’t around the house when I was a kid, so I never learned to be into it. I’m not sure where my tater tot fetish comes from. I mean, I do love potatoes, and that I will not deny. But the tater tots associated with school lunch were limp, sad looking things with little resemblance to the potato. Wherever I acquired my deep and abiding love of the tater tot, I doubt it’s going to go away any time soon, and really there are more harmful things to be into.

It’s funny, because I ignore whole aisles in the grocery store, since they are bedecked with packaged foods, and I really don’t eat packaged food. It’s not a holier than thou thing, I just…don’t. But I do have a few guilty pleasures, like tater tots, which I shyly confess to, only to learn that other people love them too.

These weak points include Geneva Cookies from Pepperidge Farm, which I have tried to replicate without success. I like the thin, crispy, almost spicy cookie, the rich chocolate, and the pecans. I dip them in my oolong tea. I just can’t get the cookie right at home, try as I might.

I also really like jalapeno poppers. I can’t explain it. It’s that gush of hot oily cream cheese, the light fluffy outer layer, the barely recognizable pepper. Is it my deep fried food fetish coming out? I’m not sure. Speaking of which, I also adore doughnuts. Which one can make at home, but it’s such a pain. Only I may be forced to make my own doughnuts if I want them, since no one up here makes decent ones. And Tings. Yes! Crunchy corn sticks!

It’s a comfort thing, I think. At some point something linked these foods with happiness in my mind, and when I’m feeling nostalgic, somehow they find their way to my plate, almost by magic. I also, of course, enjoy the upscale interpretations, like sweet potato tater tots I had once, and I really ought to experiment more to create my own versions.

Every now and then, I indulge my trashy fetishes, andI’m curious, gentle readers…what trashy/packaged foods do you secretly adore?

My big project over the last few days has been making yoghurt, thanks in part to some heated yoghurt related discussions on CUSS and Other Rants. I was going to make cheese this weekend too, but I don’t really need cheese just yet, so maybe next weekend. Unless I can come up with some amazing uses for cheese. Anyway, prepare for cheese, is the point I am trying to make.

Anyway, people seem to think that yoghurt is hard to make, filled with mystique and difficulty. It’s not, and I made it even more easy by borrowing my father’s yoghurt maker, because while I like being a bad-ass and making stuff at home, I am also lazy. And it’s cold, making it hard to maintain proper temperatures for incubating yoghurt.

So, here’s how you make yoghurt:

Step one: heat a quart of milk to around 180 degrees Fahrenheit (82 Celsius), to sterilize it. I used pasteurized but not homogenized milk, which is what I would recommend if you cannot obtain raw milk. You can use any kind of milk; I of course advocate for organic full-fat cow, sheep, or goat, but you can use camel, mare, human, whatever you can get your hands on, at any fat percentage. Heat it in a stainless steel pot, if you can, and use a metal spoon to stir it as it heats. If you don’t have a thermometer, you can heat the milk until it starts to foam.

Step two: allow the milk to cool to between 105-110 degrees (41-43 degrees Celsius). If you lack a thermometer, splash a little on your wrist to check the temperature like you do when heating milk in a bottle for infants or checking the temperature of bath water, if you lack children as a frame of reference.

Step three: add two tablespoons of a plain yoghurt with live cultures. I use Nancy’s, but you don’t have to. The important thing is the “live cultures” on the label. You can also buy plain old yoghurt cultures in some health food stores. Whisk well. Some people like to make a slurry of a little bit milk and yoghurt in a separate bowl and then pour the slurry into the big pot. I don’t.

Step four: incubate! If you have a yoghurt maker, pour the mixture into the cups, close the yoghurt maker, turn it on, and forget about it. If you don’t, you can incubate the yoghurt in the oven, using the pilot light for warmth or periodically turning the oven on (with the yoghurt out!), allowing it to warm. Try not to jostle the yoghurt.  You’re going for105-122 degrees (41-49 Celsius, incidentally).

Incubation can take 8-14 hours. As the yoghurt incubates, it will thicken. The longer you allow it to incubate, the thicker and more tangy it will get. I like me some tangy yoghurt. After it’s incubated, the yoghurt is ready to eat, and it should be refrigerated.

Here’s where the optional step comes in: straining. I really like Greek-style yoghurt, which is traditionally strained. To strain yoghurt, you need to place a colander over a bowl or pot or something, and then line the colander with cheesecloth which has been folded over. Or a clean lightweight cotton rag. Whatever. Pour the yoghurt into the colander and allow it to hang out for a few hours. An amazing amount of liquid will collect below while your yoghurt gets thick, creamy, and fucking delicious.

See, making yoghurt isn’t so hard! You can re-use yoghurt from this batch a couple of times for starter, although you should periodically buy new yoghurt for fresh, happy cultures. As always when making cultured dairy products, if your yoghurt looks funny, smells weird, or just doesn’t feel right, toss it. Better safe than sorry.

What does this somewhat revolting photograph have to do with a pasta maker, you ask?

Still confused?

This, my friends, is pasta dough. Which is one of the easiest things in the world to make. Try it sometime. You’ll like it. That brilliant yellow color is from the egg, a farm-fresh specimen form Rancho Navarro. Which reminds me, where does the term “farm-fresh” come from? I mean in theory all things are fresh from a farm at some point in their lives.

But I digress.

This, my friends, is a pasta machine, my latest acquisition. It is, as you can see, bright, shiny, and immensely fun to use. Fairly easy, too, although when the strands of dough get long, it’s a little hard to handle things one handed.

It came with one attachment, for making linguine and capellini.  I realize that this picture looks incredibly cluttered, but that’s kind of what happens when you have a small house. There’s not a lot of white space. Except for in the bedroom. And I don’t make pasta in the bedroom, for reasons which I hope are obvious.

Here’s some pasta all rolled and cut. If you’ve never used a pasta machine before, it’s hard to explain how awesome it is. It fills me with a childish sense of glee to slowly crank the pasta through, dialing the settings down one by one to the desired thickness.

My father also has a pasta machine. His has a ravioli attachment, although it doesn’t work very well, as we discovered the one time we tried to make ravioli with it. I suspect that ravioli may require thicker dough. F and I may be experimenting with manufacture of ravioli in the future, but I don’t think we will be using a ravioli attachment, not least because borrowing kitchen equipment from my father is like trying to rope an invisible greased pig. I’m thinking half moon ravioli. Simple. And delicious.

Here’s what the pasta turned into, by the way. I do love me some pasta.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the intersection of animal and human rights, and when I logged on yesterday morning, I noted that the folks at the Ethicurean had already beaten me to the punch about a series in the Charlotte Observer called The Cruelest Cuts, talking about the treatment of workers in the poultry industry. If you read (or watched) Fast Food Nation, you’ve probably thought about this issue at some point, especially if you followed up with a rollicking weekend reading Nobodies, a book about slave labour in the United States.

The Ethicurean is a natural site to draw attention to an article series like this, since the site is dedicated to talking about sustainable, organic, local, and ethical food, and the treatment of workers is very much bound up in the cost of our food, both literally and metaphorically speaking. I really recommend checking out The Cruelest Cuts, because it is very good, and very extensive. There’s a lot of information in there and it will be growing all week, and if you’re up for a laugh, you can read the response from a profiled manufacturer, which made me chuckle in that dark, sardonic way that I’ve been doing a lot lately.

I’ve been thinking a lot about meat consumption in general lately, because I don’t think that eating meat is ethical or environmentally sustainable, and yet I eat meat and animal products. It’s an awkward place for me, because I think it’s wrong and I do it anyway, and it makes me feel like a hypocrite when I try to think about environmental issues and ways in which I could play a role in making the world a better place to be, for both humans and animals. I at least try to source my meats locally, which is some compensation, but not compensation enough.

Reading this series reminded me that meat consumption isn’t just wrong from an environmental* and ethical** standpoint, it’s also questionable from the standpoint of human rights. Now, obviously, this isn’t the case with all meat, but meatpackers have been notoriously abused since the era of industrial meat began, as anyone who has read The Jungle knows.  Working in a meat processing plant is dirty, harsh, grinding work, and most processors are focused on the bottom line, not on the health of their workers.

The fact is that illegal labour keeps our food supply cheap. And that really, really sucks. As anyone who buys at a farmers’ market knows, the cost of real food raised by humanely treated workers is high, and some people find that cost unacceptable, because they aren’t thinking about the hidden cost of that $.99 avocado, or the $1.50 eggs at Safeway.

The article series talks about the issue of immigrant labor in a way which I think is extremely intelligent and well thought out. One of the things discussed is the simple fact that plants hire illegal workers because they are less likely to complain and to report violations. Even if you don’t give a fig for workers who are being exploited (and if you’re reading this site, I doubt that), you should care about what this means for your food. When workers cut themselves on the production line and the production line doesn’t stop, guess where the blood ends up? When workers are told to think about the bottom line and the bottom line only, how many downer cows enter the food supply? It’s not just illegal to slaughter downer cows because we feel bad for the cows, people, it’s because downer cows are a potential vector of a number of diseases, including Creutzfeld-Jakobs.

Exploiting workers isn’t just wrong from an ethical standpoint, it’s also wrong from a food safety standpoint. And expect to see a lot more exposes like this in the coming months; I think the American meat industry is cracking wide open, and we’re going to be seeing some ugly truths this year. Maybe enough ugly truths to encourage people to think about going vegan, or to lobby for serious changes in our food supply. I’m really glad to see the Ethicurean talking about this issue, because I think it’s a dirty little truth in this country. We all know our food comes from exploited workers, and we don’t do anything about it. Here’s hoping that’s about to change.

*Why is meat wrong from an environmental standpoint? Well, the generation of meat is extremely inefficient. If protein is your main concern, protein containing legumes, grains, and nuts could be grown in a fraction of the space used to raise animals. Meat production has led to mass deforestation in places like Brazil, and as the developing world is learning to seek out the Western lifestyle, the demand for meat is skyrocketing, leading to even more pressure on the world’s already limited wild space. Raising herd animals like cattle is also hard on the land, as cattle contribute to erosion and a host of other environmental problems. Not only that, but animal products need to be shipped somewhere for sale, thanks to our increasingly centralized methods of meat production, so meat comes with a pretty hefty carbon footprint. And that’s not counting the, ahem, greenhouse gases that are, er, emitted by meat as it is raised. There are lots more reasons, of course, this is just a brief overview.

**I understand that this is somewhat debatable, as not everyone thinks that eating animals is wrong. (I obviously don’t, because I do it and I’m not a total psychopath.) However, I think most people could agree that abusing animals is wrong, and if you buy commercial meat, there’s a good chance it was abused during its short and miserable life. Same goes for eggs and dairy. This is one reason I try to buy locally sourced meat from farms I know, to be assured that the animals I eat at least enjoyed their lives before my appetite truncated them.

There are two major supermarkets in Fort Bragg: Harvest and Safeway. Most people shop at one or the other, and it can at times be a divisive issue. Some people think of Safeway as the hick grocery store, for example, while Harvest is the yuppie grocery store.

But this dichotomy leaves out two lesser players, Purity and Down Home Foods. Purity is technically a supermarket, using any definition you like, but it’s more of a market in the style of Mendosas (before Harvest bought it), with a limited selection of basic items and a really good meat and seafood counter which often stocks local food. Down Home is the health food store, a great place for bulk tea and spices and weird hippy food. And wilted produce. Why the produce at a health food store is so bad, I don’t know.

At any rate, I typically shop at Harvest, because I have a Purity prejudice. I can’t really explain it. There’s no reason to not like Purity. The people there are perfectly nice, I’m sure. It’s a bit creepy, as I’ve noticed when picking up the occasional Cappuccino It’s-It there,  but it’s not like Purity has heads on stakes in the produce section or anything. I get a few things from Down Home, like the bulk tea I like, and I get my meat from Roundman’s as a general rule, because they have good, local meat and they’re only a few blocks away. Everything else I get at Harvest.

My Purity prejudice is kind of famous among my group of friends. I remember at one point we needed sugar for something and I insisted on going all the way to Harvest instead of Purity. I can’t rationalize my Purity prejudice, and as I recall my father and I used to shop there when I was a kid. There was just a shift, at some point, where Purity went from being a market to being a void space that I don’t even think of as a source for food.

This week, I decided that it was time to get over my Purity prejudice. It’s stupid to order groceries from Harvest constantly when I can get most of the things I need at Purity. Purity tends to be cheaper, according to those who actually shop there, and I really miss being able to wander around a grocery store and make selections. And I’m all about living within walking distance. Well I could technically walk to Harvest, but it wouldn’t be very enjoyable.

So I actually went to Purity to shop, grocery list in hand. And I have to say, it’s a decent grocery store. They definitely have some shortcomings; I couldn’t find the brand of yogurt I like, for example, and the selection isn’t that broad. But given that I ignore half of the aisles in Harvest anyway, I don’t think it’s fair to pick on Purity for having a limited selection. They have a fair amount of ethnic ingredients, for example, and the produce is of reasonably good quality. Although the tomatoes were greasy. How do tomatoes get greasy?

I don’t think I can satisfy all of my shopping needs at Purity, but I think that I will be shopping there a lot more often. I really like being able to go to the store every few days to pick up things as I am inspired to cook them, rather than forcing myself to think of anything I might possibly want to eat in a week and then making a big grocery order. I’m also looking into local CSAs for produce, and looking forward to the opening of the farmers’ market.

For Lent, I have also decided to try and purchase only base ingredients. For example, rather than buying yogurt or pasta sauce when I have a hankering, I am going to make my own. I’m even going to get experimenting with my own soft cheeses this weekend, although since I can’t get raw milk* up here it’s going to be interesting. Rather than buying boxed pasta or prepared pizza crust for a recipe, I’m going to make my own. I think that I rely on packaged convenience a lot, and while my definitions of convenience foods are different from those of a lot of Americans (I don’t buy tv dinners, boxed macaroni and cheese, and the like, for example), I think that I can make my own damn chicken soup, not buy it in a box. If I want bagels, I can find a recipe and use it rather than settling for the spongy crap everyone here has the audacity to call a bagel (seriously…you cannot get good bagels anywhere in this town).

I’m hoping that this will be a permanent shift, and that when I want things like cream cheese, applesauce, and rye bread in the future, I’ll make them myself. It’s cheaper to buy the base ingredients for these things than it is to buy them in the store, and it also allows me greater control over what I put in my body.

We’ll see how it works out.

*By the way, if anyone has a line on local raw milk and wants to hook me up, please let me know. I promise I won’t compromise your source. I just want real milk. Damnit.