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Sometimes a quest becomes damned depressing. This is the time of year when the lovely people at Ben and Jerry's come out with a pumpkinny ice cream---this time it's Pumpkin Cheesecake. Now I had spotted this at a local market but was not heading right home and didn't want either to slurp it all down, or to have it melt before I could even try it.
So later I stopped in at Smith's supermarket, having failed to find any at Trader Joe's, where the dim bulb manager seemed amazed that I even knew of this seasonal flavor, and wondered why the store didn't have it--the same store that was shoving Halloween down our throats in August, and pushing Thanksgiving and Christmas simultaneously as of November 1st.
Walgreen's was next--I knew they carried a few B&J items but no, said the manager, that's all decided at corporate and in truth all 7000 stores do not really have room to carry more than a few basic popular flavors. "You have a huge aisle always overflowing with seasonal, um, items," I said, but that does not extend to ice cream? "
"No--you see if they don't sell, then we have to pay for them and throw them out."
"What? What about donating them to the local food bank?" I asked.
"That's not possible. Management thinks the employees will steal the food, you see--or that they will deliberately damage things so as to make them unsaleable."
Temporarily silenced, I stood there while he pointed to a couple of security cameras. "See those?"
"70 percent of the cameras in the store are intended to watch the employees. And that's true in all the big supermarkets as well."
Lord. Makes you want to pour hot fudge over the pumpkin ice cream, if you ever find it, that is.
I read with interest an excerpt from Lyanda Lynn Haupt's book, Crow Planet, in Utne Reader recently, and then swiftly, as so often occurs to me these days, saw the book in the library. Now that I've meandered through it, I can say I was delighted with the crow bits, less enchanted by the philosophical riffs on the urban wilderness, the author's angsty moments, etc., etc. I really had hoped the book would be all about crows. ( Maybe I am bring picky here--the author writes well and there is much corvus-ian info.)
Crows, like the pigs in many parts of Asia, among their many activities, eat roadkill/foodwastes, spilled big Macs, and Cousin Leta's tossed-out 2008 fruitcake, that would otherwise leave urban and suburban areas icky. Crows and pigs both have been deemed off the charts re their smarts, too.
( It was humans, you recall, who misguidedly killed off the pigs of Cairo recently, and thus became awash in garbagey-areas now presumably patrolled by staggeringly fat crows.)
So crows, though lovers of corn, are omnivores, not reliant on any particular food source. Writes the author, "A crow does not know what the day's food will be. A meal must be sought out, wrung from its place, and perhaps defended."
Am I more like a crow than I thought? As I peer into pantry and fridge at the start of the day, or stroll the market, I am certain I will eat, but usually not until actual feeding time do I decide what I will toss together and how.
This handsome mega-book weighs far more than most of us will eat today, and, alas, it fell open to an entry titled "French Fries in Ghent." ( No!) Those of you who know me and this blog well understand that we speak of Belgian Fries, particularly if zeroing in on a Belgian city.
Anyway--It's Food Journeys of a Lifetime--500 Extraordinary Places to Eat Around the World, created by National Geographic. Over 300 pages, it's filled with the rich photography the National Geographic is known for. It's also one giant cliche---paella in Spain, baguettes in France, feijoada in Rio. Anyone who has traveled has eaten these things. Sake in Japan, wine in Sonoma.........you get the picture.
Even though it lists websites, recipes, and suggests places and concepts of interest to the alert traveler, it is decidedly a book for those who have not yet begun to travel, or those who want to contemplate travels completed. But, to give it credit, it has taken on the entire world of eating, an absurdly gargantuan task.
The most interesting sections are the book's top 10's--and in one of them, our own country's top edible, apparently, is the hamburger.
(Crayfish are big in Finland, as this photo attests. )
The self-described "food politics" website Civil Eats has posted this by Naomi Starkman:
"Consumer Reports’ latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice, tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand foods tested contain measurable levels of Bisphenol A (BPA). The results are reported in the December 2009 issue and also available online. BPA, which has been used for years in clear plastic bottles and food-can liners, has been restricted in Canada and some U.S. states and municipalities because it has been linked to a wide array of health effects including reproductive abnormalities, heightened risk of breast and prostate cancers, diabetes, and heart disease. I’ve reported on BPA here, here, and here."
My pantry, which I just checked, contains a few cans--tomatoes, white beans, black beans, and pumpkin. I stared hard at them just now. A can of green beans never has entered my larder but, yes, tuna has, sardines have, along with the odd cans of beans. As a spontaneous, non recipe-based cook, those beans are vital and always ready to go. Soaking dry beans overnight-- of course I have done that, but usually when I know that I am preparing a massive portion of black bean soup the next day.
I am sure many of you soak and cook beans ahead, and then freeze them in handy sized amounts, right? But in what? Plastic bins! Baggies? Chemical-laden somethings?
Help!
( Tks to http://www.thehungrymouse.com/home/2008/10/24/white-beans-two-ways-garlicky-dip-creamy-soup/ for can pix. It's a site that looks lively and informative, BTW.)
If you delight in letters--remember them?-- as well as food, American history, and familial fondness, read this book. It's called Slick as a Mitten, by Dennis M. Larsen, it's published by Washington State University Press , and it's about a character named Ezra Meeker.
The book, rich with old photos, is based on Meeker's letters, mostly to his wife, Eliza Jane. She and Ezra came west on
Unimaginable in this era of Bank of America et al? The mid to late 1890's were a time of bank closings and financial downturn in the US.
Once gold was discovered in the Klondike area in 1897, the race was on. But, unsurprisingly, so many masses of people arriving in an inhospitable area did not find enough to eat. People suggested that there was more money to be made in supplying miners than in engaging in mining itself. "There are no fresh vegetables of any kind here," said one.
Meeker took note of this and decided to supply both fresh and dried veg, as well as reconstitutable eggs to the populations springing up in Yukon tent cities. He specialized in granulated and sliced potatoes, dried cabbage, squash, sweet potatoes, turnips, pop corn, and fresh oysters from the east, hauling everything first by steamer, then along icy trails with "teamsters," and floating produce down the Yukon River.
Even lemons.
He was 67 when he started. In three years he had made possible the movement of almost 100 tons of food. And throughout those years, he wrote regularly to Wife, back home in Washington, signing himself Husband. It was Eliza Jane who supervised the dehydration of the eggs, and the preparation and packing of the veggies.
As for the phrase slick as a mitten, Ezra lost his assets that way, he said, swiftly. I picture a thick leather mitten, coated with ice.
ps Meeker planned the town of Puyallup, and named it. The name honored the native people there, known as the "generous people," but whether their generosity extended to the deeding of their lands to white settlers for hop growing I do not know. ..
