Sustainable food

Thursday, Sep 4, 2008 3:35 PM UTC

Organic farmers feel the pain

When the going gets tough, the tough... stop buying organic food

By Andrew Leonard

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Can we afford the organic lifestyle?

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently predicted that out of all the G7 elite group of rich countries, only Britain is headed for recession, this year. Britain’s housing market, reports The Guardian got even more out of whack than the U.S.’, and home prices are falling faster and further. Combine that with high energy and food prices and, well, you can guess the rest.

The Guardian also reports that economic woes are resulting in a troubling display of collateral damage. Organic food sales have gone into free fall, swiftly dropping by 20 percent from their peak earlier this year. (Thanks to the Private Sector Development blog for the tip.)

Figures collected for the Guardian by the market research company TNS show spending on organic food and drinks fell from a peak of nearly £100m a month earlier this year to £81m in the most recent four-week period recorded. The fall has been steepest in eggs, but is also reported in the most popular sectors, including dairy, fruit and vegetables and chicken.

Some farmers are reportedly returning to non-organic production.

I think the Guardian’s Juliette Jowit is pushing the provocative envelop when she asks “Was the organic food revolution just a fad?” A commitment to organic food is not like a changing hemline. But as a sign of how powerful price signals are for consumer behavior, the changing consumption patterns in the U.K. can’t be ignored.

Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard.

Wednesday, Nov 21, 2007 11:23 AM UTC

The turkey whisperer

Celebrated chef Dan Barber talks about raising and cooking turkeys, tweaking Thanksgiving traditions and supporting sustainable farming without being puritanical.

By Adam Roberts

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Most people don’t frolic with turkeys before eating them, but that’s precisely what I did this summer before dining at Blue Hill Stone Barns, Dan Barber’s idyllic farm-cum-restaurant in upstate New York. The meal, which was among the best I’ve ever had, was both playful and refined. Each course came with a lively presentation about the featured ingredients, how they were grown, when they were picked and what made them special. We left the meal delirious, drunk and, most impressive, edified: Blue Hill Stone Barns is more than a restaurant — to quote its Web site, it’s “a platform, an exhibit, a classroom, a conservatory, a laboratory, and a garden.”

What better person to ask, then, about a holiday that celebrates the harvest than a man who has devoted his life to harvesting the best food possible and cooking it to perfection, and who raises his own turkeys. Dan Barber is as philosophical about food as he is talented, he’s renowned for his public speaking (his “Carrots and Almonds” speech from the Taste 3 conference, which you can watch here — is legendary), and he’s a darling of both critics and foodies alike.

I spoke to chef Barber by phone on his drive from the city (where he runs the original Blue Hill in Manhattan) to the farm. His speech pattern is both anxious and confident, a bit like Woody Allen’s: lots of stops and starts and “ums” amid brilliant insights and witty anecdotes. Unlike Woody Allen, however, Barber straddles both city and country: His ability to cook and thrive in both environments makes him a perfect Thanksgiving guide.

What’s your Thanksgiving family tradition?

We spend Thanksgiving at Blue Hill Farms [the family farm for which Blue Hill is named] in the Berkshires. I’m a traditionalist when it comes to Thanksgiving. In some ways, Blue Hill Farms, the aesthetic, is ridiculously Thanksgiving-ish in its origins. It looks like Plymouth Rock — and I’ve always kind of liked the traditional Thanksgiving foods: the sweet potatoes and the turkey and the traditional sort of stuffing.

Do you have any flourishes that you do?

I cook a traditional turkey — I roast it, get it all glazed and beautiful. But I cook another turkey sous vide, and that’s the turkey I serve: the one that’s sous vide. I have a show turkey — like that beautiful shellacked turkey everyone “oohs” and “ahs” over that I have sitting in the kitchen all day. Nobody knows about it, but I heat up the other turkey in water and slice that and pretend to break down the glazed turkey.

People don’t notice the glaze isn’t on it?

Not really. Actually, the whole thing started when the gas ran out one Thanksgiving a while ago and I couldn’t cook the turkey in a gas stove. But I had sous vide from the restaurant, so I did the turkey in the dishwasher. I put it on the wash cycle and it came up to temperature; it heated the turkey up beautifully.

I was actually going to ask if there’d been any Thanksgiving disasters and that sounds like it might’ve been a big one.

It was a disaster that turned into a culinary masterpiece. To say it was the best Thanksgiving ever would be a little precious and predictable, but it was the best turkey I ever served.

Cue cheesy music.

[Laughs]

Are there any traditional dishes you refuse to cook because they’re beneath your standards?

What’s a traditional one — like jellied beets from a can?

Or marshmallows on sweet potatoes.

Well that’s a ’70s tradition. I don’t consider that part of our heritage.

But a lot of people do it.

A lot of people are misguided. That’s a 1975 sort of invention — or ’65.

That’s coming from someone who cooked a turkey in a dishwasher. Do you have any tips or tricks for managing Thanksgiving without going crazy?

Being organized doesn’t hurt. And to stop the obsession with everything having to be really hot when it goes out. Have a menu where everything can be at room temperature because it’s going to be anyway. I don’t mind my turkey being room temperature and I don’t mind the stuffing not being piping hot; that tends to relax me. One of the things that makes everyone so jittery is when you feel like people aren’t sitting down right on time or aren’t eating right away. But if you can get over the fact they’re not going to eat piping-hot food you can relax a bit more. And a couple of glasses of Champagne doesn’t hurt.

What kind of turkeys do you raise at Blue Hill Stone Barns?

We raise two different varieties, which is interesting in and of itself. It relates to this idea of: How do you keep the tradition but bring it into a modern context without being Wylie Dufresne? And I can relate that metaphorically to the two types of turkeys we raise: One is a Bourbon Red, which is a very old breed that’s no longer raised because 99 percent of turkeys in this country are raised in confinement, and they’re not a confinement animal; it’s an older delicate breed with terrific flavor that takes a long time to go from chick weight to market weight.

And the other bird we raise is the Broad-Breasted White; literally 99.99 percent of the turkeys that are raised for Thanksgiving are of this variety — the latest, most advanced technological breed from the industry. The industry is concerned with making money, and to make money they have created, through many, many years of breeding, an animal that can go from chick to market weight in a third the time of a Bourbon Red. It can take on a lot of Marilyn Monroe-ish characteristics: big breasts. And it tastes pretty good and it has a great efficient grain-to-weight conversion. We take the breeding technological advances — the efficiency that these animals convert to weight gain — and we put them out to pasture. We do feed them grain because they’re omnivores, but they get to pasture and run around over the land at Stone Barns; they’re fed a buffet diet of different grasses and bugs, so they tend to grow very healthy.

What’s the taste like? Which do you like better?

The Bourbon Red is probably a more preferable bird in its flavor. And if you’re not obsessed with breast, it’s got beautifully proportioned light and dark meat and really complex and deep flavor. But I’m kind of a Broad-Breasted White guy — not that I’m obsessed with the breast, but I’m obsessed with this idea that one can take in the talk about moving toward sustainable foods and stuff. The purists look at the Broad-Breasted White as the Darth Vader, as the absolute epitome of industrialization. I look at it as taking the technological advances of breeding, which have been pretty profound since World War II: feeding the bird the right kinds of things, keeping it in open pasture, letting it have a very varied diet and in that way letting it create great flavor.

How should average Americans shop for a turkey when they don’t have access to a Bourbon Red, and how should they cook it?

There are two parts to that question: The first is, where do you get a turkey like a Bourbon Red or a turkey that’s pastured? The first place to go is a farmers market. They generally have older breeds these days, and they also put them out to pasture. Any farm that’s small and independent and isn’t part of the industrialization mode raises the animals on grass.

If you don’t have a farmers market nearby or if you have a farmers market where someone’s not selling Bourbon Reds, go on the Internet: Heritage Foods is a great source, and Eatwild.com is another great site for sustainably raised turkeys. The last thing to do is to start asking your butcher or the guy in the meat section of your supermarket for some of this stuff — if enough people ask and enough people talk about it, it’s likely they’re going to make changes.

To cook it, I would do one of two things: I would blow the turkey out of the oven at 550 degrees for a really short time. You fuckin’ blow it out: high heat all the way. When the bird is really crisp, you open the oven and cover it with a little tin foil, but basically you don’t open the oven for the entire time. That’s one way to do a terrific turkey. The other way is to cook it at 260 degrees, in a really, really low oven, and that means basting constantly. At the end you can turn up the heat to crisp the skin a little bit. But the main thing is, I’d never cook a turkey at 350 or 375 degrees; it’s the in-between thing and it’s horrible because you’re drying out the turkey.

But at 550 degrees, how do you monitor when it’s done? Put a probe thermometer inside it?

You can put a thermometer in or watch the juices run — when they run clear it’s done. But you have so much leeway with a turkey you cook nice and slow because you have a lot more room for error.

Both those methods scare me a little bit — I have a 22-pound turkey I’m doing this year.

Well, yeah, I wouldn’t exactly be too excited if the health department was coming to check the way we cook our turkey; they’d probably have a heart attack. But if you have a good turkey, I like a really slow bake — let the proteins of the meat not coagulate. Actually, it’s the exact same idea as sous vide.

So with the winter approaching, do you lose heart as a farm-based chef?

I really look forward to the winter — totally. After a couple of freezes, before the real hard winter in January and February, you can eat the best food of the year because of this phenomenon that happens with root vegetables and heartier winter greens: The starches in the vegetable, whether in the root or plant, convert to sugar. So when you taste this incredible fall harvest in the Northeast, that’s part of celebrating Thanksgiving; part of the reason things tasted so good in New England and continue to taste so good is that cold weather turns this stuff into sugar.

What do you do in the real dead of winter when there’s a blizzard outside?

Look, I buy food from the big food chains, I buy food from California, a little from Mexico, from Florida. I love citrus fruit; I’m not a purist. I love that I can order a blood orange to [be delivered to] my doorstep overnight. So in the dead of winter, I don’t want to be eating cabbages and stale bread — to be puritanical about this kind of stuff year-round is kind of silly.

So in winter I’m eating citrus fruit and tropical fruit. People freak out in Blue Hill when they see pineapple on the menu; they say, “Oh, I thought you were a sustainable restaurant.” That’s ridiculous; there’s great mangos out there; I don’t want to be denying myself or the diner the experience of that.

The question is, To the extent that you can, do you know your purveyor? And to the extent you can, are you still buying locally? Even in the dead of winter, we’re buying potatoes, and onions, which you have to store because they cure, and garlic. Lamb, venison, all of that stuff still gets slaughtered in the dead of winter, and the flavors are fantastic and they’re local. So to the extent we can, we’re supporting the food chain, a small local food chain, but still recognizing the splendor of what the world has to offer. And I’m not embarrassed by it.

It’s interesting to hear you say that because it seems the culture’s caught up to this with Michael Pollan’s book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and the word of the year is “locavore.” It’s nice to hear that you’re not so militant.

I do like that locavore movement a lot because it makes people aware of food and within their own ecology. But I don’t think it’s a way of life for a restaurant unless you want to be a throwback to a restaurant in a Shaker village at the turn of the century.

How do we make people make choices with what they’re eating in terms of where it’s grown? If you get militant about it, it’s going to last as long as this conversation, because there’s enough rules and sacrifices out there. I try to put this movement toward more sustainable foods in the context of hedonism and delight. There’s delight and hedonism in enjoying food from other climates at the appropriate times.

What do you foresee being the next big food trend?

I’d say transparency is going to become a big issue. There’s a great quote from Pollan: “You are what you eat, but you are what you eat eats too.” There’s this idea that just because something has an organic label on it or a local label means it’s good for you, and that isn’t necessarily true if you’re not concentrating on what the thing you’ve been eating has been eating. But the word organic comes from organism; it’s the whole thing, the whole gestalt. It’s not just how it’s being grown, but who’s growing it — that was incredibly important back in the ’60s when this whole movement started. So there’s a complex definition for organic and sustainable, and it has a lot more to do than with just a farming method.

People are going to demand [to know] a bit more: That turkey they’re going to enjoy for Thanksgiving, what did the turkey eat? That’s probably a good trend for the future because it really wakes people up, both people eating the food and people producing the food. And for me, I have a very vested interest in this because when you can tell stories about Bourbon Red vs. Broad-Breasted White, you taste things in your turkey you wouldn’t otherwise taste. Through the story, though the narrative, you connect in a way you otherwise wouldn’t to your food. Part of enjoying food and giving thanks is knowing about this stuff. That’s an exciting future for us eaters — it will make the food taste better.

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Adam Roberts is a freelance writer in New York and runs the popular food blog, The Amateur Gourmet. More Adam Roberts.

Friday, Oct 26, 2007 11:15 AM UTC

Go ask Alice

Are Alice Waters' gastronomic principles -- shop locally, eat organically -- too hard to live by? A frank talk with the renowned guru of fresh food.

By Farhad Manjoo

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To listen to a podcast of the interview, click here.

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I had been prepared to skewer Alice Waters. Though I have eaten some of the best food I’ve ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she’s become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us — of me! — and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

Alice Waters is not content for you to simply eat organic produce. No, no. It’s got to be organic and local and seasonal, and really, for it to be any good at all, you have to get it from the farmer who pulled it out of the earth. And ideally that farmer would be a friend of yours. You and he would discuss the soil and seasons and his search for heirloom varieties, and he would give you tips for your own garden, where, of course, you’d spend many of your weekends.

Alice Waters doesn’t want you to use store-bought stock, or mayonnaise from a jar, anything frozen (even peas!), or salad that comes in a bag. She would rather you stay away from nearly every kitchen appliance, including a blender — a food mill or a Japanese mortar and pestle called a suribachi is wholly preferable.

Consider the eggs Alice Waters wants you to buy, the eggs she serves at Chez Panisse: eggs from chickens raised on a pasture, chickens who enjoy, among other humane conditions, freedom from having their beaks trimmed by their handlers. This is a practice performed at nearly every egg farm in the country, including the ones that sell the $4-a-dozen eggs you buy at so-called responsible stores like Whole Foods. Even in the San Francisco Bay Area, it is extremely difficult to find Waters-approved eggs — for long periods of the year, production is so low that farms impose rationing and stop supplying most stores; you have to wake up very early even to find them at the farmers’ market. “People don’t have enough time for this!” I would tell Alice Waters. We don’t have enough money, either. It’s just too much.

And then I opened her new book, “The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution,” and I fell into Alice Waters’ world. Waters is known for the rhapsodic manner in which she talks about food, but her writing is every bit as engaging. “Poached eggs perched on a buttered toasted slice of tender bread is the perfect breakfast,” she writes, and at that moment you’d move mountains to get those eggs to make such a breakfast.

More remarkable, though, is that she makes it seem, if not easy, at least not daunting. The book begins with a set of principles by which to live — among them to eat locally and sustainably, eat seasonally, eat together with friends and family, and most important, to remember that “food should never be taken for granted.” In the rest of it, Waters outlines straightforward ways that most of us can reach those goals. The most basic thing is this: Go to the farmers’ market. Go often, go early, spend a long time there.

I spent several weeks cooking by the book, preparing Waters’ recipes with the sort of ingredients she favors. I won’t say it was easy — especially when I couldn’t get out of work to get to the market. It wasn’t cheap, either, but it wasn’t expensive. Every meal I made cost more than $10, but none cost more than $20.

Many times, I cheated in small ways. I bought a suribachi, but I also used the blender. In a risotto, I added frozen peas. In a polenta torta, I used conventional imported Parmigiano-Reggiano ($14 a pound) rather than organic ($24 a pound). I used organic canned tomatoes instead of fresh tomatoes in a pasta sauce, but Waters says that’s OK to do out of tomato season.

The food was wonderful. If Waters’ methods can be fussy, if her objectives can sometimes seem unattainably pure, the end result is inarguably fantastic. A Caesar salad I made from romaine I bought during an epiphanic morning at the farmers’ market was as delicious as any salad I remember having at Chez Panisse. More amazing was that it came together in about 20 minutes, dressing and all. Linguine with clams in a tomato sauce spiked with fennel took three pots and an hour, but was so well worth it that I made it again the next day.

Earlier this week, I visited Waters at her office, which is set in a charming, woodsy annex building off Chez Panisse. She’s in the middle of a long book tour, and had come into town briefly. She looked harried. The office buzzed with young assistants getting her set up to fly off to her next reading locations. I found her, as expected, unyielding — this is a woman who believes food should be the No. 1 issue of the presidential campaign.

And yet, after buying and cooking and eating the sort of food she hails, you really can’t help feeling that maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to change your whole life around — or at least to try. (You can listen to the interview here.)

You definitely have a goal for this book beyond recipes and technique. What is your objective?

I want people to focus on where the ingredients come from. That’s really what’s important to me. It’s not so much what they’re cooking, it’s with what ingredients they’re cooking. It can be a hot dog — but where’s that hot dog from? What kind of ranches are producing the meat? Are the animals being fed hormones and antibiotics out there on the range? Are they in feedlots? Are they enjoying the natural resources of the region? You know, what’s in the hot dog? What’s in the bun? What’s in the mustard? What’s in the ketchup?

That’s what I’m interested in. Because every decision we make about the food that we eat has consequences. And they aren’t just about people’s personal health. There are consequences in terms of the healthcare system for all of us if people eat food that makes them sick. And there are environmental consequences. But I think the thing that people don’t understand is that there are cultural consequences.

When we’re eating fast food, we’re not just eating the food, we’re eating a set of values that comes with the food. And it’s telling us that food should be cheap. It’s telling us that food should be the same no matter where we are on the planet. It’s telling us that advertising confers value. That it’s OK to eat 24 hours a day. That there are unlimited resources. It’s telling us that the work of the people who grow or raise the food is unimportant — in fact we don’t even need to know. And all of those values are informing what’s happening in the world around us. We’re ending up with malls instead of beautiful places to live in.

I’ve been cooking from this book for about a month now.

You have? Tell me, did the recipes work?

Yeah, they were wonderful. But as you say, it’s less about the recipes than your ideas of where to get the food. And I’ve been following those ideas too. I went to the farmers’ market several times.

You know this would be any old book of recipes if it weren’t for the philosophy of food at the beginning. If you’re just going into the store and buying those ingredients, if you’re really a good cook you could probably make something. But what is beautiful is that this changes your life. It brings you into the whole community of people and hopefully brings you back to the dinner table.

I agree. But, some things I’ve noticed. First of all, it’s not easy to do this. I’m a writer so I have a lot of free time. I can take Tuesday afternoon off and go to the farmers’ market. So it was relatively easy for me to do it compared to someone who has to punch a clock. What do those people do?

I think there are lots of ways, actually. I think you have to decide you’re going to work at this a little bit. To begin with, you set aside a day that you might want to eat with your family. It doesn’t have to be a dinner or a complicated thing — it could be an afternoon tea. It could be a Saturday lunch. It could be a breakfast. But hopefully you will decide the following week you can do it twice a week. That’s the beginning.

I think you have to plan ahead. When I go to the market on a Saturday and I’m buying for family and friends I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat on the weekend but also about what I’m going to make for the following week. You know those tomatoes, I’m not getting them dead ripe unless I’m eating them for lunch — I might get them a little firm so that by Wednesday I can have them in a salad. I’ve always got something in the pantry — I talk a lot about what you can cook when you just have a closet full of pasta and grains.

So how often would you go to the farmers’ market in a week?

Twice. I mean, if I could I’d go every day, but I go on Saturday when I can buy a lot of things, and on Tuesday. And then I’ll go get other things in the regular market as a sort of backup.

You recognize, though, that it takes more time to do it this way than going to the store.

I do absolutely recognize it takes more time. But this is all part of fast food values. Let’s do it quickly. Let’s get it over with. Let’s let the machines do it for us, because kitchen work is drudgery and so is garden work. Let somebody else do that.

Get out of that mind-set and tell yourself cooking is a meditation. I like to do it. It’s relaxing for me to come home — it truly is! — and wash the salad. I love to see the salad in the sink. To spin the salad. I like to dry it. I like to pound to make a vinaigrette with my mortar and pestle. I enjoy grinding coffee and putting it in the filter and warming up the milk. It’s part of a ritual that gives my life meaning and beauty.

I feel particularly like this on my book tour, that this is a crazy kind of life. It’s over before you know it. And so you have to find ways of slowing it down. And this is an everyday delightful way to slow it down. Take time. Take a moment. The most important value of this book aside from nourishment is that there’s pleasure in the doing. It’s pleasure in work. It’s something that we don’t understand in this country. Work is over there and pleasure’s over here, and we work our whole lives so that we can go on a cruise ship. It’s just insanity, and some people don’t even make it to the cruise ship.

So we have to figure out about everyday pleasure. It’s trying to bring people back to their senses. Put the smells in the house. Make the chicken stock so it makes people hungry. Burn the rosemary, make the farro, make the bread. These are all aromatic ways to bring people back to the table.

In addition to time, it’s costlier to do it this way. One of the reasons that people eat fast food is because that’s all they can afford.

For some people that is true. But I would say that you have to decide — it’s not going to be cheap but it can be affordable. And that’s where this book comes in. When polenta costs $6 for a hundred portions, I’m pretty certain that I can make something tasty for less money than a fast food dinner for my family.

So you’re saying it’s more but it’s not prohibitive?

That’s right. You just decide, OK, well, maybe I won’t rent that DVD.

I was struck often in making the recipes by how simple they were. So the buying of the food was more time-consuming than the cooking –

That’s right. When you spend time buying tasty things you hardly have to cook them. You just slice a little piece of fig and some fresh cheese, and, voilà!

We have to demystify this whole idea — many restaurants are complicated for the sake of complication. And I think that leads people to believe that they can’t cook it. I’m trying to empower people in the kitchen. It isn’t anything but slicing a tomato. You can do this. You can do this.

What do you make of the mass-market, luxury organic food movement — people getting their organic food from places like Whole Foods?

They’re trying to use fast-food values to eat organic food. They’re trying still to do it in a minute, and they’re not thinking about what it really means. Going to the farmers’ market, being present, talking to the farmers, reporting back on how the produce was, encouraging them so they stay in business.

I’ve heard you describe yourself as an optimist about this stuff but from the way you’re discussing it, it doesn’t seem that you’re very optimistic.

I’ve been a little pessimistic today. But I am an optimist because I see the potential of feeding children in the public schools. And with good food comes the values that could change the world.

I’m focused on the next generation, because I think it’s very hard to break the habit of adults who’ve got salt and sugar addictions and just ways of being in this world. It’s very hard even for the most enlightened people at famous universities that are very wealthy to spend the money that it takes to feed the students something delicious.

We’ve been working in Berkeley with the Edible Schoolyard for 10 years, and we have a sister program in New Orleans. It’s the idea of teaching gastronomy — “eco-gastronomy” if you will, edible education. It’s changing the pedagogy of public education with an interactive school lunch program.

Way back when, the president of the United States said, We want our children to be physically fit, and he put physical education into the core curriculum of the school system. We built gymnasiums, we hired teachers, we got equipment, and every child had to take it. And they got credit for taking it. And now we want them to take eco-gastronomy and get credit for eating it.

Because when they grow it and they cook it, they all eat it — that’s the lesson of the Edible Schoolyard. They want to do it because it’s a kind of pride in the process. They have been involved in it since the seed when it was in the ground. They love to give it to their friends. It gives them a kind of pleasure.

The big discussion about kids and food usually focuses on obesity and health. That’s not something you focus on directly.

I’ve never focused on that directly. I think health is the outcome of finding a balance and some satisfaction at the table.

You think that if people eat this way, good health will be a natural outcome.

This isn’t a new philosophy. This isn’t mine — it’s been around since the beginning of time. Eat what’s locally available. Eat with your family and friends. Buy from a nearby market. Eat what’s exactly in season. These are all understood by people around the world.

You’ve been traveling around the country recently. I’m sure one of the things people who are not in our West Coast climate wonder about is –

Everybody asks that question. I was waiting for you to ask it. “It’s all fine and good in California, but how are we going to do this and other places?” Well, I’ve visited Yale University, which is a pretty difficult climate. They have 300 varieties of fruits and vegetables in their garden including artichokes, radicchio lettuces and a whole lot of things that don’t grow in California. They have to use greenhouses, and that’s very important. Everybody on this planet is going to have to do greenhousing because of global warming.

We serve root vegetables here at Chez Panisse in the wintertime. We only have fresh tomatoes here for four months. That’s it. It’s not nine months or 12 months. Likewise with eggplants and peppers and corn on the cob. These aren’t things that grow here. We can have salad outside all winter long, but it’s a different kind of salad. Escarole. My mint dies out, my lemon verbena’s gone. I have rosemary and thyme but it’s different tasting in the winter than the summer.

What do they do in the winter in the Midwest?

You have to think of a different kind of menu. You eat dried fruit and nuts. You make pasta sauces out of canned tomatoes. And you’re eating different kinds of grains — farro with root vegetables. All the root vegetables are there, and now because of all the heirloom varieties you can have a beautiful winter palette just the way the summer palette is beautiful.

There are turnips of every color and shape! Carrots that are white and red and orange and pink! You have different preparations of long-cooking meat. Beautiful eggs and cheese. There are wonderful things to eat in the winter. Cabbages! Cauliflower! We just have to learn to cook these things — there are cuisines like Italian and Indian that cook these vegetables in such extraordinary ways. We just continue to boil up Brussels sprouts and wonder why we aren’t happy.

You told the New York Times that you’re disappointed with the presidential candidates.

I am disappointed because nobody is talking about food and agriculture. They’re talking about the diets of children, but they’re talking about Band-Aids. We’re not seeing a vision.

What would you like one of them to say?

I’d like one of them to say — this is what Richardson just said — “In my first hundred days I’m going to make public education a No. 1 priority. I’m going to rebuild schools.” I know that a lot of them feel strongly about local food and helping farmers but I’m really looking for a big vision that helps us to dramatically change things.

Someone should at least put it out as an issue that’s important.

As the issue. The No. 1 issue. Not one of 10. This is No. 1. It’s what we all have in common, what we all do every day, and it has consequences that affect everybody’s lives. It’s not like this is the same thing as crime in the streets — no, this is more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security — this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.

It seems rather unlikely that any one of them would put this out as a major issue.

I know. But that’s because we have been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that food is not important.

One more thing. I saw that you have an iPhone. That seems like a departure.

I am an extremely non-tech person, and they have an e-mail on that iPhone that I can actually do. And so I use it for that purpose. And I also use it to take pictures of food and places and ideas. And I use it as a phone. And I wish I could just throw it out the window, but when I’m on book tours it’s a little hard to throw it out the window. But I intend to at some point.

I was surprised considering you say that the only appliance that you use in the kitchen is a toaster.

I don’t have any justification other than … I mean I hate it. I really find it annoying. And I find myself feeling like it’s necessary. Answering the phone, answering messages that people have left you. Worrying that they aren’t calling when they leave a message. Why didn’t they call? Or when you have 20 messages and you can’t answer all. The whole trip of it is kind of insane. The worst part of all is that people are sitting on their laps playing with their cellphones when they’re eating dinner at a table or listening to you at a lecture. Nobody’s paying attention to anybody fully. You can see this happening all over.

I sometimes get the sense that you’re kind of advocating for returning to a time long ago.

No, I’m not, not really. Because a time long ago, they were very much locked into a hard life, a narrow life in terms what was being eaten. I think we now have a way of sharing a lot of information that makes the growing of food and the cooking of food and the preparing of food much more diverse and healthy and tasty. So I’m not ready to go back to the diet of gruel.

I was just thinking about something Brillat-Savarin said. “The destiny of nations depends on how we feed ourselves.”

That’s a really important thing. I want whoever’s running for president to say that. The destiny of our nation depends on how we nourish ourselves.

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Farhad Manjoo is a Salon staff writer and the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. More Farhad Manjoo.