Say the word fat

I'm in a weight-loss program again, six months long. They gave me a charming little pedometer with their logo, plus a copy of this valuable reference work by "the Calorie King." I had made up my mind to use my hour-long bus ride to Burlington every morning to do my food journaling for the program, recording everything I eat and looking up each item's calories and fat gram content. But the first time I fished the book out of my bag to start, I put it right back in. The dominant graphic element of the cover is the word FAT in 144-point letters, yellow on a field of blue. It's bad enough that my co-commuters already look at me and think "FAT!" No point encouraging them. Our assignment for next week, beside learning to keep our journals, is to find the highest calorie food item in the entire book. As far as I've read, the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cheesecake is winning, at over 2,000 calories per slice. Tonight I searched my bookshelves to find a suitable cover-up for the offending book cover. After reviewing many volumes which were willing to sacrifice their covers to the cause, I chose Dante's Purgatorio, in the John Ciardi translation. For the sin of gluttony, six months in purgatory should be just about long enough, don't you think?

Passing Peak Lemon

These things sneak up on you, like global warming and the credit crunch. On Saturday, the shelf-stocker at Greg's Meat Market told me he hadn't been able to order bottled lemon juice for a month, and that the other stores in town didn't have any either. This sounded fishy to me, so I investigated. There's definitely something going on. Shaw's did not have either Realemon or their house brand in the big green bottles, only a tiny plastic jug. I bought two. Hannaford's did have regular-size bottles, but a brand I hadn't seen before--"Lemon Time." I bought two of those too. And why am I hoarding lemon juice? Why am I acting like a Baghdad taxi driver who can't find an open gasoline station? It's because recently lemonade has become a big item at our house, both the cold and hot varieties: bottled juice, water, and Splenda. I'm sort of an improvisatory cook, using whatever's around, so my shopping isn't systematic either. The problem with lemon juice is that there's no substitute for it--hence the panic. Googling around revealed that there is indeed a worldwide shortage of the sour stuff, caused by weather and crop failures. I won't trouble you with the details. I'm just here to remind you that food comes from farms, not grocery stores. If you see a a farmer today, give him a nice cold lemonade.

Food is messy

Even if you are a neat, precise cook (and I am not), even if you wipe up spills when they happen and clean as you go (and I don't), cooking generates prodigious amounts of messiness, and eating is not far behind.

Food is inherently, intrinsically, essentially messy. Why do you think they call it a mess hall? The kitchen is a factory that would not pass an OSHA inspection. Bread flour flies through the air. Non-stick spray (hi, Pam!) drifts like a toxic chemical cloud. Thick tomato lava spatters the stove with fiery globs. Peanut butter clings to the knife so tenaciously that even boiling dishwasher water cannot loosen its grip.

My Kitchen of Shame is notorious, but I am putting up a good fight lately to conquer food mess and my inherent distractability. The trick, I have finally learned, is to treat the cleaning task as finite and strictly ordered, from left to right. Left to right is an arbitrary approach. I rebel against all that is arbitrary, but most order is arbitrary, and without order there is only disorder, and disorder is mess. QED. Now I clean the counters from left to right and in an hour I can get the place looking respectable.

I know that this entry is not profound. Sometimes I have to stop being profound and just clean the kitchen. It is humbling. I need some of that.

The perils of brand extension

You can see the corner the One-Pie company has painted itself into. Their canned pumpkin puree was such a hit, the public demanded more. But how could the One-Pie company sell a two-pie can? Imagine the angst in the creative department. Finally, somebody came up with that yellow circle with a message. In the biz we call it a splash.

The splash says "NEW! 2 PIE SIZE."

I had to show you. I saved the can to use for a pencil holder and I carry it around with me everywhere I go.

I am the eggman

I grew up surrounded by egg farms and thought this was perfectly normal. You may be surprised, but I thought it unremarkable that all the egg farmers I knew were Jewish. Why shouldn't they be? Nearly everyone we knew in our South Jersey town was a Jewish egg farmer, or had been before they got into something else. My grandfather had a poultry farm, my father and his three partners ran a chicken feed mill, our next-door neighbors the Gingolds had a poultry farm, and so did the Auerbachs, the Eisens, the Fleischers, the Kaufmans, the Mullers and Maiers and Ritters and Wolfs.

For a few decades, from the 1920s through the mid-60s, this odd enclave of Jewish poultry farmers flourished in and around Vineland. At its peak in the 1940s, there were thousands of Jews on the sandy flats, far from the slums of the Lower East Side or the suburbs of Westchester County. The earliest settlements were encouraged by a German-Jewish philanthropist, the Baron Maurice de Hirsch, who thought that the solution to "the Jewish question" was for them (i.e. us) to go back to the land. He planted Jewish agricultural colonies in Turkey, Argentina and New Jersey. One of the first was in Alliance, NJ, still the site of the Jewish cemetery where my father and his parents lie buried.

All the other Jewish kids I met in college and later life grew up in suburbs, or in cities. Nobody knew from farming.

And what odd farming it was! This was not the 4-H life, no storybook menagerie with a quack-quack here and a moo-moo there. It was monoculture: white chickens laying white eggs. There were no tractors, no fields, no growing of animal feed from the soil. Feed was purchased from local mills like my father's, which ground into powder the carloads of grain that came by rail from the Midwest. There were no cows or horses, and certainly no pigs. We did not witness the constant cycle of livestock breeding, birthing and slaughtering which was supposed to teach regular farm children the facts of life. At our farms, day-old fuzzy yellow chicks arrived in cardboard boxes from the hatchery, already peeping, roughly spherical, and ready, within a few months, to start laying eggs. At the time, a hardworking grain-fed chicken was expected to produce about 200 eggs per year.

The hatchery chicks were guaranteed to be nearly 100% female. Rooster chicks, who obviously were never going to lay eggs, were culled at the hatchery by sharp-eyed sexers and thrown into barrels to die. Chicken sexers in that era were always Japanese, a prime example of America's ethnic division of labor, which is always shifting and reshuffling but never entirely disappears. Yesterday we had Jewish lawyers and comedians, Italian singers and organ-grinders, Negro boxers and railroad porters. Today we have Pakistani emergency room doctors, Vietnamese pedicurists, Oaxacan roofers and African-American secretaries of state. But I digress.

It is often said that Americans nowadays, spoiled by supermarkets and plastic packaging, don't even know where food comes from. All sentences containing the word "nowadays" are propaganda on their face and can be safely ignored. And I do know where eggs come from. A few times I accompanied my father, who was his mill's outside man, on his rounds of the poultry farms. The farmers were always glad to see him, because he was funny, and respectful, and spoke a little Yiddish, and knew all about agriculture. They would bring out the limp carcasses of dead birds for him to autopsy. He cut them open with a hunting knife, looking for signs of disease in the flock that could be remedied by adjustments in the feed, or by antibiotics. During one of these field post-mortems he cried out in triumph and lifted something up to show me. It was the dead hen's oviduct, with an already-formed egg visible inside it, patiently waiting to be laid, still unaware of the catastrophe that had overtaken it.

The egg business was shrinking by the 1960s. Like nearly everyone we knew, my father began to make other plans, and in 1965 we moved away from Vineland. More on that in another post.