Breaking Ground

Hello! Welcome. I know, I know. Everyone is just dying for another foodie blog, right?

Like many bloggers, I am currently in my pajamas at 4:30 in the afternoon, on a weekday. I decided to start this particular endeavor not just because I have nothing better to do, but for real reasons dear to my heart. I live in Los Angeles, one of the centers of the civilized world (if you're from NorCal you may disagree, but bite me.) And yet... Sometimes I find myself hungry for something more. Something genuine. Something more meaningful than the newest celeb-chef's over-hyped, overpriced gastropub.

I've got a hankerin' for something green.

"So go make yourself a damn salad." Right, well, that's not exactly what I mean, but thanks for the input. I'm surrounded by evidence of the green movement. It's what they call a "trend." The Marketing Department has latched on to the word so fiercely that Chevron tells us every day how much they're doing for the environment. The supermarket is rife with hyperbole. Walk down an aisle and the brightly packaged food products grab your attention like a fairground con artist.

"Twun-teee FIIIVE per cent organic, step right up folks, this is the real deal."

While accompanying a friend on her grocery shopping a few weeks ago, I was struck by her odd behavior. She spent almost ten minutes in front of the greens, weeding through the inflated bags of iceberg and romaine to find the cheapest one. She shook her head disgustedly.

"Six dollars for lettuce?!"

When we strolled down the bread, cereal, and cookie aisle, she purposefully strode over to the nearest shelf and dumped three boxes of cereal into her cart. They were $5.99 each. I pointed out that she was willing to spend that much money on a "high-value added product," like those deliciously fortified (NOW WITH WHOLE-GRAIN) Cheerios, but not on a simple raw product like fruit, or greens. I allowed her counter-argument in light of her several research jobs and noble attempt at surviving college with her sanity intact. But she hadn't convinced me that the only reason she buys cereal without a second thought was because it lasts longer.

Call me a cynic. Go ahead, do it! I adhere to my belief that most people's buying and eating habits are products of this ailing society's unnatural capitalist bent. Our decisions are no longer ours. How do we know what to eat? The sit-down family dinner is pretty much extinct, our jobs keep us too busy or don't pay us enough to nourish ourselves, and we're haunted by the specter of study after government study that fails to point us on the right road to health.

To this stranded soul in the center of a baffling cuisine vortex, there can be only one solution: I need to take this into my own hands.

When I started cooking dinner for my parents and brothers three nights a week, I saw it as an opportunity to change their eating habits. I'm a classically trained culinarian, but what I was setting out to do they never mentioned in school. My classmates mostly went on to be line cooks in high-profile restaurants, or Sous Chefs or cruise line cooks. We knew restaurant cooking, which very seldom crosses over into the real world. (Excluding chef barbecues, which are always drunken affairs involving homemade creme fraiche, a hot smoker, something insanely spicy, and more controlled substances than Hunter S. Thompson's luggage.)

But cooking real food, for real people every day? Cooking to keep someone healthy, or make them healthier? Buddy, if you don't already know how to do that, culinary school isn't going to help you. They don't really impress upon you the value of whole foods. Chefs are supposed to be fuckin' hardcore, and while it is acceptable to gush about a beautiful wine or scallop or duck breast, you don't meet many who linger in the walk-in gazing with awe at the turnips. I, for one, really didn't know a damn thing about cooking before I went to school. I grew up in a fairytale land of big blue mac n' cheese boxes, breaded chicken mash in the shape of stars, snacks that changed the color of one's tongue, and fruit that somehow had become a rolled-up sheet of sticky neon. Most chefs exhibit a weakness not only for quail eggs, truffle butter and foie gras, but for hostess cupcakes, s'mores, mac n' cheese, and dingy taquerias. Can't blame them for that. It's the stuff of our childhoods.

Now we're grown up (or trying to,) and we're in a world of products decipherable only by their nutritional labels. I love a microwaveable pizza as much as the next man, but I can't really justify eating that way anymore. Not now that I've immersed myself in an industry, indeed, a culture, of food. The more you learn about the origin of the things you put in your body, the more actively you have to deny this knowledge if you want to keep eating what you ate as a kid. When you acknowledge that everything you put in your body came from something growing in the ground, you have to ask yourself why we need, as a society, to disguise this fact. The truth is, we don't. But General Mills and Tyson and McDonald's do, if they want to sell us more food we don't need. You have to admit that you're just a pawn in the big game of Industrial Food, and the losses in this game are always yours.

Now breaking into the personal chef/catering deal, I have some small measure of control over what the food I make contains. I try to make these things as pure, whole, and clean as possible. I'm no health nut. I'm not a vegetarian (well, not really, but that's for another day.) As I've grown up in an increasingly chaotic world, I've developed a deep, real need to see something green happen. It's akin to political activism: We're tired of the same people controlling all the wealth. We're tired of being denied our rights, we're tired of warmongering and impossible interest rates and billionaire CEOs. And now, something new: We're tired of being fed by other powers, and we want to feed ourselves.

I'm a city girl. Throw me into the wilderness and I'd probably get eaten by a bear. I wouldn't know how to survive without a supermarket, a shoe store, a Barnes and Noble, a Starbucks. But lately the strangest thing has been happening. I've experienced this longing to see a farm, to collect eggs from a chicken. I want to see what compost smells like and look at a pasture of the greenest grass or freshly tilled earth. Why have I never seen these things? Yeah, I milked a cow on a field trip in Kindergarten, but that's about it.

So finally, to the point. This blog is the place I'll record my thoughts, my trials and errors, my great meals, my lousy meals, and my efforts to find a real way to live a green life in a concrete world. (On a cook's meager budget.) Changing the world, one plate at a time? Let's hope so.