Reclaiming the Kitchen

February is the time of year when an eager band of Northland College students take the snowy trails down from Ashland to join us for three Sundays of our “Sustainable Foodie:  Making a Meal, Making a Life” wellness class, which features preparing and sharing a meal together each week based on the theme of building healthy food skills.

For the first class, we experienced “a meal in comparisons,” where after a lengthy farm tour and discussions about the value of local foods systems, we made a side-by-side trial for the accoutrements to a roast turkey dinner (featuring a pastured turkey from our farm).  The students split into two teams, each preparing the same dish using from-the-farm ingredients vs. processed supermarket ingredients.

An aquaponics lettuce salad with fresh radishes, beet greens, broccoli, and organic carrots sat across the counter from iceberg lettuce with limp cucumber, pale hydroponic tomato, and bleached baby carrots.  From-our-soil potatoes, riced and mashed by hand, were pitted against “Idaho Spuds” from flakes out of a box.  From-scratch apple cranberry sauce from our apples and local cranberries stared down Musselman pale applesauce (which we dressed up with a little cinnamon to make it even remotely tasty), and still-a-little-warm homemade chocolate chip cookies met pre-packaged “chocolate-flavored chip” cookies from the store.

As we sat together and thoughtfully enjoyed the meal in courses, everyone had to take at least some of each team’s potatoes or applesauce or salad or cookies and compare their taste, texture, smell, mouth-feel, and overall appeal side-by-side. So often the pre-processed foods are chemically enhanced with “natural and artificial flavors,” MSG (mono sodium glutamate), and emulsifiers of all sorts to trick our brains into thinking that the food is good or that we like eating it…and that we want more!

But when you place the pretender next to the real, whole food straight from earth to table, the mask falls away and the metallic aftertaste in the flaked potatoes, the grainy, gritty bitterness of the canned applesauce, the lifeless chlorine smell of the white salad, and the gummy rubberiness of the cookie are both starkly apparent and rather revolting.  How sad, we reflected, that some people consider these things to be good food and never have the chance to taste the succulent pastured turkey, the vibrantly green aquaponics salad, the spicy tang of the applesauce, the creamy fluff of the potatoes, or the soft but crispy ecstasy of the cookie when made from scratch fresh off the farm.

So, there arises the question of how do we break away from these addictive but false processed foods that are so ubiquitous to modern life?  This is not only a dilemma for contemporary college students with busy class schedules and limited cooking equipment and skills but also for families with demanding work schedules and afterschool activity lists that keep everyone on the go.  These are the challenges we tackle in class two.

First, we have to start by reclaiming our kitchens.  Pre-processed foods are advertised to make life easier, take the work out of cooking.  But that also means that we lose control—especially over what we’re eating.  Processed foods are chuck full of preservatives, emulsifiers, additives, colorants (plus even more unpronounceable ingredients to preserve the colorants), fillers, flavorants, texture conditioners, and more.  And while all of these additives have been approved for human consumption “at safe levels,” many are still quite harmful, including triggering cancer development.

One of the exercises we have the students complete in the second class is to bring in a food wrapper from something they ate that week—a wrapper that contains an ingredient list.  As each student reads their granola bar, peanut butter, Hostess Cake, or bag of chips ingredients, I’m whirring away on my laptop Googling any item that stumps us.  What’s soy lecithin, tocopherol, or sodium acid pyrophospate?  Some turn out not so bad (like acacia gum, which comes from the sap of a tree) but others are downright terrifying.

Here’s an example from one student’s wrapper.  TBHQ (Tertiary Butylhydroquinone), a preservative made from butane, is widely used in the food and cosmetic industry.  According to www.naturalnews.com:

“The FDA allows amounts of up to 0.02% of the total oils in food to be TBHQ. This may not sound like a lot, but it does tend to make one wonder why there needs to be a limit on the amount if it is apparently a ‘harmless additive.’ Mind you, anything which derives its origins from butane could hardly be classified as safe, no matter how small the dose.

“Consuming high doses (between 1 and 4 grams) of TBHQ can cause nausea, delirium, collapse, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), and vomiting. There are also suggestions that it may lead to hyperactivity in children as well as asthma, rhinitis and dermatitis. It may also further aggravate ADHD symptoms and cause restlessness. Long term, high doses of TBHQ in laboratory animals have shown a tendency for them to develop cancerous precursors in their stomachs, as well as cause DNA damage to them. It is also suggested that it may be responsible for affecting estrogen levels in women.”

Ok, takeaway message?  Let’s reclaim our kitchens.  And that’s exactly what we did with our six Northland students this last Sunday.  After crock-potting last week’s turkey, we picked the meat clean and used the delicious broth to make Gypsy soup, chopping and peeling carrots, sweet potatoes, peppers, and onions, as well as including a jar of our own home-canned tomatoes from the garden.  Mixed with cancer-fighting spices like tumeric, the fragrant smell filled the class space.

We dived into making our own bread, churning our own butter, and canning our own jam.  We dried fresh herbs from the greenhouse, cinnamon-sugar dipped apple slices, and turned some of the left-over homemade applesauce into fruit leather, sprinkled with coconut shavings.  We froze extra chopped onion and detopped tomatoes for next week’s lasagna, and we baked and Foley food-milled fresh pumpkins for next week’s pie.  We even made our own miniature batch of gelato from scratch to serve on our from-scratch apple-cranberry fruit crumble!

It was enough food for an army (or at least a very hungry troop of college students), and not only were our labors full of sensory delights—the zesty cinnamon and nutmeg, the sizzling onions and garlic, the tangy kale salad, and the succulent lightly golden butter, but it made everything taste all the more special because of our care and attention to every detail.  And if any of this sounds pretty delectable right now, here’s one of the recipes we used to get you started in the kitchen this week.

English Fruit Crumble

1 1/2 pounds fruit (whatever is in season, apples, cranberries, blueberries, peaches, rhubarb etc.)

Sugar to taste, depending on fruit

1 cup flour (alternative flours are delicious here too!)

1 tsp. mixed spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, etc., depending on what you think sounds tasty with the fruit)

1 stick (4 oz.) butter

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 oz. chopped walnuts or almonds

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Layer fruit in pie dish and sprinkle with desired amount of sugar.  Cut the butter into the flour and spices, then mix in brown sugar and nuts.  Sprinkle in thick layer over fruit.  Bake 30-40 minutes, until the top if browning and the fruit is bubbly and cooked through.  Serve hot with ice cream or yogurt (especially if it ends up tasting like it could have used a bit more sugar) or cold over oatmeal is fabulous as well.

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But how to crack the nut of the busy life issue?  Yes, we all have our days when there just isn’t much time to prepare and enjoy a meal, but there are also many traditional food skills—canning, freezing, drying, etc.—where we can bank food time on slow days to make life as a sustainable foodie easier on the hectic days.  It’s also a great time to gather together for those large “putting up the harvest” tasks.  No TBHQ for me please, I’m heading to the kitchen.  See you down on the farm sometime.