Chefs Speak: Slow Food for Normal People

{Please join us in welcoming Chef JoAnna Minneci. Chef JoAnna runs a home catering and personal chef business at chefjoanna.com, and has made several appearances on tv including an episode with Bobby Flay on The Food Network.  As if that were not enough, take a bite of this:  she and her husband are currently transforming 10 acres of abandoned forest in Tennessee into an organic farm and “Bed & Bistro”, and have plans to build a gourmet restaurant featuring fresh farm raised produce and meats.  You can follow their progress and growth on the Mockingbird Acres blog.

In this very special guest post for Savory Tv, Chef JoAnna teaches us how to incorporate slow food into our fast and busy lifestyles.  Thank you JoAnna! }

Slow Food for Normal People

You may hear famous foodies and professional chefs talk about “slow food” all the time .  Many of us have grown weary of hearing about it, but if you’d like become more familiar with the term, click here to read the wikipedia article for it.

On a grand scale, Slow Food seeks to reconnect people with the food they eat.  They pay attention to the cultures, community, and production behind it.  Slow Food’s members include culinary professionals, food enthusiasts, farmers, food producers, educators, and students.  Slow Food USA aspires for a world in which all people can eat delicious food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it, and good for the planet.

On a more immediate scale, and to understand how the movement got it’s name, slow food is meant to be a direct contradiction to Fast Food.  Italian journalist Carlo Petrini in 1986 organized a protest in response to the opening of a McDonald’s, and was dubbed the father of the movement.  Since then, the Slow Food moment has developed chapters all over the world, and succeeds in making us feel guilty about whether or not what we’re eating is good enough.

Michael Pollan wants us to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”.  Julia Child would make these offhand comments on her television show, “The French Chef” of how much better life would be if people would take the extra time and make food like they did in the old days.  Don’t get me started on Alice Waters, who I find to be more of a culinary bully than her adversary Tony Bourdain.  Back in March ’09,  I posted my thoughts about that Leslie Stahl piece on “Saint Alice”. Waters has the right idea, but in my opinion her methodology is flawed.  Her premise is that eating good, nutritious food is a right, not a privilege, but her manner of spreading that philosophy reeks of elitism.   Even Julia Child talked a little smack to Alice Waters:

“You have an unduly doleful point of view about the way that most people shop for food.  Visit any supermarket and you’ll see plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables.  And if you don’t like the looks of what you see displayed at the market, complain to the produce manager.”

Slow food, they way those celebrity chefs do it, is elitist.  They’re suggesting that you’re not doing it right if you can’t achieve the magic trifecta required of a foodie:

• The Inclination to make food from scratch
• The Time not only to procure the ingredients but to make the complicated recipes
• The Skill to turn these edible treasures into something divine to eat.

I don’t see how making more of an effort to eat better food is elitism.  I hope that by the time you’re done reading this you won’t think that’s my intent.  Eating local fresh organic food is historically the staple of most of the world’s population.  It’s called farming, and rarely seen as elite.  I used to live in Los Angeles, where some of the best produce in the United States was available year round at open-air farmers’ markets several times each week.   Now I’ve moved to rural TN, where I have a nice little garden.

When I’ve dug through my rocky garden plot, when I’m on my hands and knees, putting seeds in or pulling weeds out, that’s just a choice.   Moving away from L.A. was also a choice.  You can hardly call my new lifestyle elitist…but I’d bet you’d love a dish of my fat little yellow squash and those shiny peppers roasted up with some onion.   If my chickens ever lay, I’ll serve you a fried egg with it, and you’ll think you died and went to heaven.  I can’t grow it all, so what doesn’t come from my backyard I buy from the mainstream stores as well as from the woman who sells her fruits and veggies from under a tent across from the donut shop.

I’m not trying to start a movement or become famous. I just want to make good food and share it with people, and maybe share a couple of ideas on how people can make good food for themselves. Wherever you are, for better or for worse, there’s a grocery store nearby.  They sell several beans (canned, less than $1/each, or dried, which is even cheaper) and I’ll bet you can find brown rice too.  Add in some fresh -or freshly frozen- veggies and you’ve got a wholesome meal that can taste great.  Add in some herbs and spices, maybe some olive oil or some butter, and you’re going farther than most home cooks.  You like meat?  Add some.

What I’d like to do here is strip down the idea of slow food and make it more accessible.  Let’s set aside the arguments of those in the Slow Food Movement… That we’re not paying the real cost of food at the checkout aisle.  Whether the real costs of your food choices are being paid in environmental costs and healthcare costs.  Just for the moment, let’s forget about “food miles” and “green cuisine” and “sustainability” and all the rest… Let’s just ignore Brillat-Savarin and his snide insinuations when he says, “Tell me what you eat: I will tell you who you are.”  All we’re going to think about for the moment is “can I eat something fast, easy and cheap without going through a drive-thru or buying food frozen inside a cardboard box”.

Truly, I think that it’s your choice to eat whatever you want. It’s too bad that it doesn’t work like the late Mitch Hedberg’s ideal:  “It would be cool if you could eat a good food with a bad food and the good food would cover for the bad food when it got to your stomach.  Like you could eat a carrot with an onion ring and they would travel down to your stomach, then they would get there, and the carrot would say, ‘It’s cool, he’s with me.’ ”

I think the fast-food places that offer healthy options do it for largely political reasons.  Those items won’t help them make a profit or reach an economy of scale because such a small number of people buys that food.  Fat, salt and sugar taste good.  Fast food companies are not in business to help you live longer and stay slim… they’re out to make money. and they make a lot of it because people get addicted to fat, salt & sugar.  They bring you in with the dollar menu and suddenly you’ve ordered a supersized combo meal.  Please, take a minute to read this.

What I’m saying is that, if it’s important to you, take the time to prepare good, healthy food for yourself in advance, and you’ll be giving yourself an option. Here are some ideas for easy, cheap, grab-and-go food:

• all kinds of fruits & veggies
  these are good for guiltless munching. You can even buy them cut & bagged in advance.
• whole wheat bread and spread
  YES, even a PB&J but you could go more interesting like having cucumbers & cream cheese sprinkled with black pepper)
• multigrain bread and cheese
  This actually holds up for a little while, though I wouldn’t go longer than 8 hours
• dried fruits, veggies, nuts & seeds
  make sure you do portion control in advance, it’s easy to eat these mindlessly

AVOID things like pasta & rice, they have too much water in them to make them stable and safe at room temperatures for too long.

Another thing is to have tools available to you so that you can “make do” without advance preparation. Keep these where you spend a lot of time, or somewhere that you have easy access, like your car.

• get a minimal set of flatware
  Just a fork & a spoon, maybe a table knife. Go to a Goodwill and pick up a few sets. Then you can just wipe them off, then throw them in your bag, then toss them the sink when you get home.
• sharp knife
  good for peeling veggies, slicing apples, cutting cheese… Asian markets have plastic-handled knives that come with plastic sheaths so you won’t cut yourself or anything else during travel, but you can also put one in a plastic toothbrush holder. a pocketknife will work, too, but I’d rather suggest something you’ll wash thoroughly.
• tiny can opener
  One you can find in the housewares area in the grocery store or drugstore, or at your favorite 99¢ store. Practice using it.
• salt & pepper
  I give you permission to pocket a few extra packets of salt & pepper the next time you see them.
• multigrain or table-water crackers
  They won’t go bad if you keep them closed up, and they finish up any snack you can think of.

Now you’re prepared to avoid fast food.  You can stash canned food in your car or desk drawer.  Choose things that you can eat cold such as tuna, pork & beans, canned fruit… None of these are perfect foods, but they’ll get you past the “ohmygawdineedacheeseburgerrightnow” temptations.  If you were going to get in your car & drive for food, stop by a grocery store instead.  Get some bread, cheese and some fruit, and you’ve got a great little lunch.

If you want a proper meal, you have some limitations.  Make things that don’t have to be refrigerated, won’t spoil over 5 hours, and can be eaten at room temperature.  There are HUNDREDS of cookbooks out there for these kinds of recipes, and thousands of websites available for research.  One of my favorite go-foods is a salad made with whatever lettuce greens are available, topped with garbanzo beans or black beans, a handful of cherry tomatoes, and some sliced carrots.  If you keep the dressing on the side, this will survive beautifully for several hours without refrigeration. A hard boiled egg is nice, if you can manage to peel the egg just before you eat it, so it stays fresh longer.  Yogurt has an out-of-refrigeration shelf life of 5 hours if you buy the individual containers.

Make yourself two or three grab & go lunch kits. You can use plastic containers with self-sealing lids, waxed cardboard boxes, or wide-mouth glass canning jars (my personal favorite).  You can load them up in advance and keep them in the fridge, or have them clean and ready to pack, so that when you’re running out the door, you can put in stuff you made for yourself.  One of my favorite grab & go meals is:  cooked brown rice, diced chicken (or black beans), frozen (or canned) corn, salsa and grated cheese.  Basically it’s a burrito in a jar.  I prefer the glass jars because you can put them straight in the microwave without worrying about BPE in your plastics, and they hold up a lot better in the dishwasher than those disposable plastic containers.  Also, they’re not as fragile as you think.

If you wanted to go all out, you could make a complete fried chicken dinner at home for less than it cost to buy it at KFC.  Cabbage for coleslaw and potatoes for potato salad are about the cheapest things in the grocery store! While it’s not health food, it stands to reason that cooking at home saves money.  And it could be better for you if you’re using sunflower oil and making sure that the chicken is cooked through properly.   So why would people choose fast food fare? It’s easy. it’s cheap enough.

Don’t make it hard on yourself. If you have screaming kids in the backseat, it’s even more important that you be a responsible parent and not feed them the junk that gets passed through a car window.  Keep a box of dry cereal in the car for munching on, some sugar-free hard candy if the kids are old enough, some low-salt pretzels, dried fruit, and some nuts (raw almonds are good snacking nuts).  If you don’t like my ideas, there are plenty of places to look for other ideas for healthy snacks.  If none of this is very important to you, then as I said, you can make your own choice.  Please pay at the first window.

JoAnna Minneci

http://chefjoanna.com
http://twitter.com/ChefJoAnna