Organicity

For many years, I rarely ate apples. They simply didn't taste good to me. It was only in the last couple of years that I began eating apples more frequently, and I no longer have an aversion to them. What changed? I never really thought about that question, and definitely didn't have an answer, until Brian's mother lent me the Organic Cook's Bible, by Jeff Cox.

In the opening lines of the book, Cox describes the best apple he ever tasted. It was a blackish red, somewhat rare variety of apple that he bought at a small market. Cox goes on to discuss the only apple variety most of us are familiar with:

The proliferation of the inferior Red Delicious is due to two primary marketing factors. First, the apples have deep red skins and consumer preference tests show that people associate a deep red apple with quality, even if, as with Red Delicious, there's precious little quality to the flavor. Second, they are called "delicious" even though they aren't.

As I read those lines, it dawned on me that for all these years, I had been avoiding not apples, but a single variety of apple, the variety which is usually the only one you can get. Then two years ago I moved next door to a Whole Foods, which has much more to offer than Red Delicious, and organic too. Thus my re-acquaintance with apples.

Here's a photo, by the way, of the type of apple that Cox had. Alas for "consumer preferences".

This story is not limited to apples. The food industry, like some Plato scared of variety, has long been on a quest to reduce food to these limited ideals. Red Delicious is "the" apple (or maybe Granny Smith). Black Beauty is "the" eggplant. White Button is "the" mushroom. And on throughout the food supply:

Scientists have recorded over 15,000 plants that have been used by human beings as food over the millennia, but there are only about 150 commercially important food crops worldwide these days. And in the large corporate food systems that provide foods to our supermarkets and big commercial stores, only a few of these 150 commodities are typically available to the consumer.

And as is the case with apples, the chosen variety is frequently the inferior one. Cox, former editor of Organic Gardening, introduces us to the other varieties of vegetables, fruits, nuts and grains throughout the book, and while perusing his in-depth descriptions, I was struck by how little I know about the food I eat.

For instance, there is a variety of eggplant that actually looks like a white egg. Avocado flowers are the only flowers which change their sex. Black canned olives are actually green unripe olives soaked in lye. Pineapple juice can eat your skin. These are some of the more odd and intriguing facts among all the information about varieties, seasons, growing tips, and best regions to grow what—knowledge that has been lost in our age of standardized food available year round. Quick: what type of food grows best in the area you live in?

I don't know either, but this book makes me want to find out.

Over centuries and sometimes millennia, local people had learned which crops and types of livestock thrived in their climate and on their soils. ...Cooking techniques and recipes were for centuries very region-specific, and over time cooks in those areas learned how to make the most palatable dishes from unique local products. ...The French call these site-specific flavors terroir, or soil, which is a succinct way to describe the phenomenon that each specific place on the earth will express itself in the taste of the food that grows there.

The food industry has been steadily trying to destroy terroir with inferior-tasting food, an arsenal of chemicals, and genetic-engineering. Terroir is the opposite of what most corporations are all about: standardization and monotony, also known as branding. That you can go from Beijing to Bangalore to Paris to New York, and in each place get Big Macs and Frappuccinos, is the corporate, anti-terroir wet dream.

Although the major food corporations have tried and will continue trying to water down organic food rules, it looks like the tide is turning somewhat with the growth of of the organic food movement in recent years. Cox has been involved in this movement since the beginning (in America), and the book is interspersed with 250 wonderful recipes that he's collected over the years, and with stories of the unique, delicious, and local food he's encountered in his travels across the country. Reading this book makes you hungry, but with a different sort of hunger. You want to stop at a rural fruit stand, you want to pick something in the wild, to find food at the right time and the right place—and savor those lucky moments which you can't get with conventional food. If you care about the environment and the food you eat, this book is definitely worth buying.

I must end with one last fact, this one about rabbits:

Buck rabbits are either screamers or fainters. That is, after they mate with a doe, they either scream or faint. Just a point of interest.

Some relevant links:

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/
http://www.oldwayspt.org/
http://www.treesofantiquity.com/
http://www.localharvest.org/
http://www.gourmetsleuths.com/