Recipe For America
by tristero
Who knew that “activism” could be so delicious!
Jill Richardson
Jill Richardson, founder of La Vida Locavore, has written a wonderful book entitled Recipe For America: Why Our Food System Is Broken And What We Can Do To Fix It. (A click takes you to her website where you can order an autographed copy). It describes how she became involved in food issues, succinctly lays out what the problems are, and, most importantly, provides a detailed “recipe” for how we can go about fixing it.
In addition to telling us about the horrors of the industrial food system, the book gives us insight into an alternate, far better, food universe. One of the amazing stories Jill tells is about her favorite restaurant in San Diego, Spread, which doesn’t embody as much as transcend the locavore aesthetic. In her description of the extraordinary food they prepare for their customers on a typical day, Jill gives us a sense of the truly awesome potential of local food to provide a deliciously unforgettable experience:
Unless you are looking for it, you probably wouldn’t even notice Spread, as the restaurant’s muted lighting and unremarkable appearance pale in comparison to the flashy theatre located on the same block. Yet Spread attracts a steady stream of business, and does so without advertising-that is how loudly its food appeals to diners, inspiring them to come back over and over again to “spread” the word.
A food delivery truck has never pulled up to the front entrance of Spread. Instead, each morning, owners Andrew and Robin Schiff wake up at 5:30 to begin gathering the ingredients for that evening’s menu. The belief that “the moment you pull [a food] from the vine, that’s the moment it’s supposed to be eaten” drives Andrew to search for ingredients from farms and farmers’ markets as distant as Temecula, about 75 miles away. He and Robin personally select each day’s ingredients, sometimes picking the vegetables themselves. “A lot of times,” Robin told me, “We’re out there fighting off ducks for beets.” By 4:00 in the afternoon, it’s time for Robin and Andrew to head home for a quick shower in order to make it to the restaurant by 5:00, where they will design that evening’s menu from their chosen ingredients, write it out on a large chalkboard (they avoid using disposable products like paper menus), and then open the doors at 6:00 p.m.
On the day I was talking with Andrew about the restaurant, Robin burst in the door carrying a bundle that included kaffir lime leaves. I had a notepad and pencil, ready to ask about the more mundane details of the business, but Robin’s focus was only on the food; she had a little under an hour to turn the ingredients she was carrying into a menu, which that evening would feature a Thai vegetable pizza topped with heirloom vegetables and a black sesame reduction, two salads, rosemary and citron-scented edamame, olive oil and shallot crusted purple potato tacos, a lavender tart, and a kaffir lime and kumquat glazed vegetable mix. As she put it, “it’s so much more interesting to not fall back on fat for flavor.”
While Robin and Andrew view their cooking as a nightly “free form art extravaganza,” in fact, their impact on San Diego reaches beyond merely tantalizing diners’ palates with a new, local menu each night. They’ve formed relationships with local farmers, thus helping to economically enrich the city’s organic agricultural community. In return for Spread’s business, farmers work with Andrew and Robin when planning their planting, growing varieties of their heirloom vegetables specifically for use in the restaurant. Andrew sees this as supporting mom ‘n pop businesses [and] bringing identity back to the American landscape.”
As nutritious as this food surely is, to call cooking at this level “health food” is like describing Jimi Hendrix as an interesting warmup act for The Monkees. This is dining for sheer unadulterated pleasure. I, for one, can’t wait to get to San Diego to try their food (and to see Jill again; we met briefly in Massachusetts during her book tour).
While the movement to reform our food system has produced exceptional restaurants like Spread all over the country, the real focus of the movement, and Jill’s book, is on the effort to make what all Americans eat tastier, more diversified, and (yes) more nutritious than it has ever been. Jill Richardson and others in the movement seek to change – radically – the political and economic factors that have forced more and more of us to eat garbage and nothing but. Yes, “forced,” as Jill makes clear; the economics of our food does indeed provide few, and for many of us, no decent choices about what we eat. But the present production and distribution system not only disgorges more and more disgustingly bleak junk that passes for food; it also sickens those who eat it. Rates of illnesses related to bad diets have skyrocketed while, at the same time, the price of lousy food remains as artificially low as its heavily advertised nutritional content is empty of real worth.
One of our most important founding documents calls the pursuit of happiness a self-evident, inalienable right. Jill Richardson’s book provides us both the ingredients and the techniques to wrest food and eating back from those who have succeeded in denying us that right by turning one of the great sensual experiences of life into a brief, bleak, joyless, and sickening chore.
It’s interesting: the people who have ruined our food are more often than not avid supporters of the folks who preach abstinence, advocate torture, foment unending war, and think the present healtcare system is basically just hunky dory. Unlike other issues, when it comes to food, we have the opportunity to vote three times a day for a far better country. But we also need to do more. And Recipe For America shows us how.