On Eating Well

After hearing both Toni Morrison and Mark Bittman last week, I'm noticing even more how memorable food and meals can be.

Morrison named food among her three top memories of attending Cornell in the 50s. She recalled the campus beauty and a progressive political and religious community. She also remembered savoring affordable food.

She loved Cornell bread -- a fortified loaf with a recipe landed in many cookbooks -- and 25 cent eggs from the Ag school. She said they always seemed to have two yolks.

She mentioned growing up in a time when there was little trash to take out. Food did not come in plastic containers. Fruits and vegetables came from the garden. Waste was composted.

New York Times columnist Mark Bittman was also in town. He is a generation younger than Morrison and said, "My mother saw it as her duty to put meals on the table 7 days a week, about 330 days of the year. No one feels like that today."

By the 1980s and 1990s, he said, home cooking was as bad as it would get and that the level of food in supermarkets was plummeting. His column, "The Minimalist," was born when he noticed two trends that had been ignored by the food press: the decline in home cooking and an increase in junk food.

Bittman stayed on campus for several days chiefly to press people toward becoming political about  food and press our government to put food issues on legislative agendas and make policy changes.  Of course he also encouraged everyone to cook and eat more of what's delicious and nutritious and less of what's bad for us.

In round one he talked mostly to undergraduates about his writing career pathway and how he made it in journalism.

His last talk was in a room filled with Ithacan foodies who are as crunchy and smart as it gets in our town (witness the presence of both a Moosewood restaurant founding member as well as an Ag School researcher who called Bittman to task on issues related to GMOs and countering him with his view of the advantages of biofortification for poor people around the world.) I had the impression that the week in Ithaca was rewarding but also challenging. Maybe it pushed a few of his buttons. Running into him in a hallway at week's end, I could see he was ready to get home to Manhattan.

On Friday I stopped in to see Joyce McAllister, in her 80s,  who went with me to hear Bittman. Her home is filled with several hundred cookbooks, in addition to volumes of poetry, biographies and novels. On her dining room wall is a hobbyist's oil painting of the small dairy farm where she grew up outside of Dryden, NY.  After her family sold the farm, it deteriorated. She no longer wanted to drive by. But now at least a small grant has helped its owners restore the barn.

On that farm,  she and her mother canned thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetable. When she first tasted pasteurized milk as a college student she could not believe how bad it was. She still buys organic eggs from free-range chickens and suffers no others.
She points to Julia Child and Craig Claiborne for starting to turn things around in this country. And, she said "We didn't go to the table just to eat, but to talk."

Then she sent me home with about 15 pounds in cookbooks, including Bittman's How to Cook Everything.

Bits from Bittman:

• You changed your light bulbs. You bought a Prius, How about eating a freakin' salad?
• We need more farmers.
• If I could get people to cook rice and beans once a week I would have had an amazing career.
• No one gives sweet potatoes enough credit.
• Consumerism is not inevitable.
• We have too many "unidenitifable food-like objects" in grocery stores.
• We should all try to be more vegan-ish.

Extra Minute: Bittman explains the 'cut and paste" function in the old newspaper paste-up days, before digital design.