Me to Michael Pollan; "You're an Elitist Gas-Bag"

Yep, that's right. The ethical-eating authority, best-selling author, and Food, Inc. star muffed one. And I'm calling him on it. I'm no authority on anything (except maybe Italian Beef sandwiches), but there it is.

I'm actually a big fan of Pollan and his writing. I loved The Omnivore's Dilemma, recently saw Food, Inc., and have kept current by following articles he publishes every now and then. The guy's really well-informed and has a lot of worthwhile stuff to say about how we eat and how we should change our approach to food.

But in his most recent article, published last week in the New York Times, Pollan screws the pooch. Big time. Not only is he just flat-out factually wrong in about six different places, but in his attempt to find a scapegoat for the current sad state of affairs in how Americans eat, he targets feminism. Specifically, Betty Friedan.

(Not that feminism, broadly, or Friedan, specifically, is above criticism. They're not. But neither are they guilty of what Pollan tries to pin on them. More to follow.)

That's not all, though. In his (mostly justified) rants about The Food Network (Lord knows I've made my feelings about the network known), he gets enough details about the shows wrong to allow careful readers to realize he doesn't actually know what the fuck he's talking about. It seems like he had a research assistant watch a few episodes and report back or something, so he wouldn't have to lower himself to actually watching "low culture" like Iron Chef or Triple D. Who knows... maybe he switched the network on and left it running in the background while he flipped through the recent issue of The New Yorker.

And, really, that's where Pollan's article rubbed me the wrong way. The whole thing has this condescending, scolding, elitist tone that really muddies the message. The article is hung on the framework of discussing the recent film Julie and Julia, but he uses the film's subject matter as a jumping-off point to continue the national discussion of our broken, dysfunctional relationship with food and eating that he's been prodding us to have for years. Most of what Pollan's got to say is right on the mark. All his major points are true and, yes, need to be written about, discussed, and changed.

But having a Long Island born-and-bred, Northern California-dwelling Berkeley-tenured ivy tower male like Pollan lecture middle America about why they're morons for watching The Food Network isn't a great way to move that discussion forward or get people to listen. And blaming Friedan's Feminine Mystique for re-framing our approach to cooking causing generations of women to view it as "drudgery" isn't a great way to get feminists, stay-at-home-moms, or working women to take what you're saying to heart.

I'm going to quote liberally from the article and simply respond, since this is what I found myself doing as I sat in front of my computer screen reading it. Overall, it's a thought-provoking piece containing lots of valid points and valuable insights. But in the name of a good rant, I'm going to focus just on the parts that really got the hairs on the back of my neck standing up, starting with the one that's drawing so much ire all around the net:

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.

This is the quote that's gotten Pollan into trouble with the feminists and has bloggers and twitterers of all stripes buzzing. I don't take issue with the sentiment behind it--neither Friedan nor feminism is anything approaching a sacred cow with me--but it's just flat-out factually incorrect. Dead wrong. Bzzzzt! Thanks for playing, Mike, you can pick up your parting gifts on the way out.

Saying that Friedan's book "taught millions of women to regard housework...as drudgery" is just drastically, laughably, misleading. The post-war years prior to 1963 saw women emerging as a huge sector of the workforce and factories that had been geared up for the war effort re-tooling as production facilities for all manner of convenience food products. The booming advertising industry was quick to jump in and assist in the food industry's effort to convince women that food preparation was drudgery to be avoided at all costs, and did so with incredible effectiveness. All of this was well-underway by the time The FM was released in 1963. There are entire books dedicated to documenting this phenomenon and what gets me is that I'm confident Pollan is not only aware of them, but has read them.

Which means that his scapegoating of Friedan and feminism is lazy at best. Perhaps he didn't want to stretch an already-very-long article to more fully flesh out the various parties who really were responsible for this negative re-frame of cooking. A less charitable read, though, could view Pollan's choice as a cynical attempt to co-opt negative sentiment towards feminism to bolster his cause, or maybe just as a way to drum up some controversy and get people talking.

Regardless of which explanation is accurate, it's some weak-ass shit from a guy I expect far better from. Incredibly enough, a few short paragraphs later, he says:

Many of these convenience foods have been sold to women as tools of liberation; the rhetoric of kitchen oppression has been cleverly hijacked by food marketers and the cooking shows they sponsor to sell more stuff.

So Pollan acknowledges here that other forces were working to portray food prep as "drudgery", not very long after trying to blame the whole thing on Friedan. But who had more influence in the early 60's? A feminist writer or "food marketers"? Which enjoyed more circulation--The Feminine Mystique or magazines like Women's Day and Family Circle?

I spent an enlightening if somewhat depressing hour on the phone with a veteran food-marketing researcher, Harry Balzer, who explained that “people call things ‘cooking’ today that would roll their grandmother in her grave — heating up a can of soup or microwaving a frozen pizza.”

Another cheap shot in an attempt to make a valid larger point. I admit to having more limited knowledge than this Balzer guy, but I've never heard anyone refer to microwaving a frozen pizza as 'cooking'. It just seems like Pollan is taking the easy way out to make his point.

...you do have to wonder how easily so specialized a set of skills might translate to the home kitchen — or anywhere else for that matter. For when in real life are even professional chefs required to conceive and execute dishes in 20 minutes from ingredients selected by a third party exhibiting obvious sadistic tendencies? (String cheese?) Never, is when. The skills celebrated on the Food Network in prime time are precisely the skills necessary to succeed on the Food Network in prime time. They will come in handy nowhere else on God’s green earth.

This comment misses the mark for me on two levels. First, the shows he's discussing--Iron Chef America, Chopped, and Top Chef--do not claim to be instructional cooking shows. They're billed as entertainment. Although the recipes are often made available online after the show airs.

And second, the ability to improvise and construct a dish or meal from random ingredients *constantly* comes in handy in real life. I do it ALL THE TIME. It's a great skill to have and shows that give contestants a basket of unlikely ingredients and challenge them to compose a tasty dish with them can, yes, be instructional, but--and this is even more important--they can be inspirational, especially to home cooks who find themselves fishing around the bottom of the freezer with a hungry family due to arrive home any minute.

I guess a guy like Pollan, who probably only shops at organic-humane-eco-friendly-localvore farmer's markets hasn't ever found himself in that situation. Must be nice.

We learn things watching these cooking competitions, but they’re not things about how to cook. There are no recipes to follow;

Arrgh! HUGE pet peeve! Learning how to cook isn't about following recipes! Are you KIDDING me, Michael? This statement actually makes me wonder if *you* really know how to cook.

Or as a chef friend put it when I asked him if he thought I could learn anything about cooking by watching the Food Network, “How much do you learn about playing basketball by watching the N.B.A.?”

Um....tons? But besides all that's learned by watching, the more important point is that watching often inspires people to get out there and PLAY. What a dumb, dumb comment.

What we mainly learn about on the Food Network in prime time is culinary fashion, which is no small thing: if Julia took the fear out of cooking, these shows take the fear — the social anxiety — out of ordering in restaurants. (Hey, now I know what a shiso leaf is and what “crudo” means!) Then, at the judges’ table, we learn how to taste and how to talk about food. For viewers, these shows have become less about the production of high-end food than about its consumption — including its conspicuous consumption. (I think I’ll start with the sawfish crudo wrapped in shiso leaves. . . .)

And the hits keep on comin'. It was at about this point in the article that I became really aware of Pollan's insulated bi-coastal sensibility. I'm not saying that he comes off as a totally out-of-touch, holier-than-thou elitist, but...um...yeah...actually, that IS what I'm saying.

Listen, I've barely ever even seen crudo or shiso leaves on menus and I've been a chef for 15 years. I had to go look up sawfish to find out what the hell it is and the first thing I find out is that it's critically endangered and is completely banned from international trade. Where the hell is this Pollan guy eating? What's next? Is he going to drop a reference to the last ortolan feast he went to?

His point here his valid, but it gets completely lost in the underlying messages he's cluelessly broadcasting about himself and the perspective from which he approaches his work.

Sure, Guy Fieri, the tattooed and spiky-coiffed chowhound who hosts “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” ducks into the kitchen whenever he visits one of these roadside joints to do a little speed-bonding with the startled short-order cooks in back, but most of the time he’s wrapping his mouth around their supersize creations

Again, Pollan doesn't allow reality to stand in the way of his scapegoating. I happen to watch D,D&D almost religiously and I can attest to the fact that Fieri almost always speaks with the owner or chef, that he's sincerely respectful of their success and their "creations" and that he possesses a solid enough kitchen background to know exactly what the folks he's interviewing are talking about--something that probably couldn't be said of Pollan. Fieri doesn't usually interview "short order cooks" and his characterization of the restaurant staff as "startled" reveals Pollan's ignorance of how the show is filmed (restaurants featured on the show close down on the day they do the "kitchen shoot" so no one is being caught unaware).

“I love that after a day where nothing is sure — and when I say nothing, I mean nothing — you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” How many of us still do work that engages us in a dialogue with the material world and ends — assuming the soufflé doesn’t collapse — with such a gratifying and tasty sense of closure? Come to think of it, even the collapse of the soufflé is at least definitive, which is more than you can say about most of what you will do at work tomorrow.

Ok, I haven't seen the movie and I assume Pollan has, but I'm not sure how he gets souffle from egg yolks, chocolate, sugar and milk. Maybe that's what Julie Powell was talking about, but soufflés, which do usually contain some egg yolks, are more characterized by the presence of egg whites, which are whipped stiff and then folded into the mixture to give the soufflé its essential poofy rise. I've also never seen a soufflé recipe containing milk. When I hear a recipe described as "yolks, chocolate, sugar, and milk getting thick", I think chocolate mousse, not chocolate soufflé.

I'm telling you, I think this Pollan guy DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO COOK!

Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized nation — an extra two weeks or more a year. Not surprisingly, in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.

Oh, but it's all Betty Friedan's fault that women view cooking as drudgery and reach for Rice-a-Roni or canned soup. Gimme a freakin' break!

Shapiro shows that the shift toward industrial cookery began not in response to a demand from women entering the work force but as a supply-driven phenomenon. In fact, for many years American women, whether they worked or not, resisted processed foods, regarding them as a dereliction of their “moral obligation to cook,” something they believed to be a parental responsibility on par with child care.

Gosh, I just can't imagine why feminists like Friedan would portray this sort of mindset as a form of oppression. Uh....maybe because it IS one? Sheesh, Pollan, can you contradict yourself MORE?

Chunks of animal flesh seared over an open fire: grilling is cooking at its most fundamental and explicit, the transformation of the raw into the cooked right before our eyes. It makes a certain sense that the grill would be gaining adherents at the very moment when cooking meals and eating them together is fading from the culture. (While men have hardly become equal partners in the kitchen, they are cooking more today than ever before: about 13 percent of all meals, many of them on the grill.)

Yet we don’t crank up the barbecue every day; grilling for most people is more ceremony than routine.

Ugh. The dreaded use of "barbecue" as a synonym for "grill". A bigger pet peeve doesn't exist in my world. More evidence the guy's not a cook. Attention, fancy, multi-degreed writer guy; "grilling" is cooking food quickly directly over live flames. "Barbecuing" is cooking food slowly with low, indirect heat. They aren't the same. You grill a burger. You barbecue a pork shoulder. Look it up.


Rant over. I'm done here. Read the article and lemme know what you think. My take on it is that Pollan didn't do his normal standard of due dilligence. Maybe the grad students that usually do his research for him are all on summer break.

Either that, or he's trolling.

Food, Inc. Screening (FREE)

I haven't seen Food, Inc. yet. It's currently the biggest thing since sliced uh, whatever in the food world and it's high on my list of to-do's, but I'm not generally a movie-goer and what with the two kids, we generally pass out shortly after 9:30 most nights anyway.

But, Chipotle Grill is sponsoring free screenings of the film next week, July 15th and 16th at the Landmark Century theater at 7:15. Free is just enough of an excuse to get me to motivate and get out of the house to check it out. It's a first come-first served deal, so expect lines.

The film, directed by Robert Kenner, features Eric Schlosser and Bay Area uber-food authority, Michael Pollan, so if you've read some stuff by those two guys, you already know at least some of what this movie is going to be about. My impression is that it will be a much glossier, better-produced presentation of the high points of Fast Food Nation, Omnivore's Dilemma, and Debra Koons Garcia's wonderful 2004, The Future of Food.

Some reviews I've read have said it's quite disturbing, and that you'll "never want to eat again" after seeing it. But Alice Waters is quoted on the film's ads as saying it's "the film I have always been waiting for". It'll certainly be thought-provoking, and should generate plenty of fodder for discussion.

Along those lines, I was hoping to get a post-film meet-up* going. For those who are interested in this, head over to the Duke of Perth, just up Clark, after the Thursday night screening. Around 9 or so, I'm thinking, and we can break it down. I'll be there having a beer or two, at any rate, for those interested in stopping by.

After learning about fun stuff like extra-virulent strains of E. Coli and Salmonella, I'll probably just limit my post-film intake to beer. And/or whiskey.




*Ok, I know the term "tweetup" but am I obliged to use it? Please don't make me. Though, I am going to "tweet" this event. Argh. I hate that term. I only use Twitter because people tell me I'm supposed to. I swear. Anyway, hope to see lots of you there.

Healthy Kids Cook-Off

There's a great event this weekend that I was invited to attend and unfortunately won't be able to get to (Henry and I are going camping!) but it's not too late for you to plan on attending and bringing your kids.

It's an Iron-Chef style cook-off where kids will team up with Kendall College students as well as local well-known chefs like Michael Kornick, to see who can whip together a tasty and nutritious snack using "secret ingredients".

The finalists will compete in what the press release calls a "fast paced" cook off in front of a live studio audience "just like on TV". Snacks and prizes are provided, and the whole thing is also done in conjunction with something called the Healthy Living Fair which features demos, free samples, and lots of other cool stuff. You'll also get the opportunity to check out Kendall College's amazing new facility on Goose Island.

The whole thing promises to be plenty of fun, but it's also pretty important; when school lets out, 8 out of 10 kids who receive free school lunches during the year don't get any assistance over the summer. This event is geared towards raising awareness about child hunger and also teaching adults and kids alike how to prepare simple and nutritious meals and snacks.

It takes place this Sunday, June 7th from 12:00 noon to 5pm at Kendall College--900 North Branch Street (on Goose Island near Chicago Avenue and Halsted) in Chicago.

So, go! Bring your kids. Cook, watch, feast, and have a good time.

Peoria Packing Butcher Shop

I referred briefly to my recent visit to Peoria Packing in my review of the bacon I bought there, but didn't really get into the whole experience of the place itself, which is a real trip and very thought provoking.

Most Americans are pretty squeamish about meat, despite the fact that we eat more of it than any other country in the world. At this point, we are really insulated from the process. Meat is fully broken down into only the most desirable parts, fully trimmed, and ready to go from the shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray right into the pan. Or fully cooked on the plate, if consumed in a restaurant. It's been like that forever, for most of us, and we really don't think about it too much.

Until we're confronted with something different, like a European market where piles of offal or whole animals are just out in the open, for all to see. Even for someone like me, a chef who's been dealing with larger primal cuts of meat for years, these cruder, more "real" displays represent an off-putting paradox, because I find myself curiously attracted and also, at the same time, repulsed.

I think this is true for most Americans, with varying degrees of attraction/revulsion, of course, and most simply avoid the revulsion side of the equation, which results in a sad state of affairs. We've managed, as a society, to hide and sanitize the reality of meat. Perhaps that's why we eat so much of it.

A visit to Peoria Packing will cause one to ponder these things, because once you enter the butcher shop wing of this small grocery store across the street from their commercial packing house, you will be confronted with MEAT in a way that not too many Americans are accustomed to.

PP's meat section is a large refrigerated room with big long tables running the length of it. The various cuts of meat are just piled onto the tables and customers (wearing the required latex gloves) just kind of rummage through the piles until they find what they're looking for. The meat is very fresh, very inexpensive, and they carry cuts that are difficult to find elsewhere. I went specifically to get "packer cut" brisket for smoking. I also picked up some pork bellies (to make homemade bacon) and a few other things.

A lot of people have trouble handling this set-up. The online reviews of PP are mixed, with quite a few folks stating they'll never go back due to the way the meat is just right out in the open for anyone to sneeze or cough on. This is true, of course, but I didn't see this happening and I like to believe that people have enough sense not to do that. Most people do a pretty decent job of covering their mouths and not coughing or sneezing directly on me, so I'm not sure why expecting them to do the same in a roomful of meat is any more of a leap.

I think this sort of revulsion is how people deal with the fact that they are just not used to seeing meat displayed this way. It is jarring, I will admit, and seeing whole cow's feet, pig's heads, and other less common animal parts is definitely a bit of a shock as well. I think a lot of people are simply put off by the sheer real-ness of it, and so they use the "unsanitary" claim as a rationale for their revulsion, and as a justifiable reason to avoid that experience in the future.

Revulsion, however, is natural when confronted with meat. Revulsion is normal. Meat is a dead, decaying animal. It's bloody, gruesome, and serves as a reminder of our own mortality. Yet most people eat it every day. I'll go out on a limb and say that NOT feeling revulsion at the sight or thought of meat is what's, in fact, abnormal.

We're so unaccustomed, though, to this feeling, because the meat industry has done it's level best to eliminate any and all reminders of death, blood, and the idea that these are animals we're eating. And they've been very successful, with the full compliance of a willing populace, who values avoiding the cognitive dissonance of feeling both hunger and revulsion far more than it values coming to terms with our carnivorous impulses.

Up until recently, the luxury of not getting to know one's meat up close and personal just wasn't a real possibility for most people. It's only in the last hundred years or so that we've acquired this new found squeamishness, which has gotten to the ridiculous point where some people act all grossed out even by chicken served on-the-bone, or with skin. Grow up, folks.

The conflict intrinsic to eating meat has long attracted deeper thinkers. Cultural anthropologists and sociologists like Mary Douglass and Claude Levi-Strauss have written reams on this fascinating subject. It's human nature to be both repulsed and attracted by meat, and people have been dealing with it since back in the hunter-gatherer days. It's just that here in modern-day America, we've made a new art form out of figuring out ways to avoid dealing with it.

The flip side of this is the head-to-tail movement that's been steadily gaining momentum among chefs. In Chicago, chefs like Paul Kahan, Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds, and Paul Virant have been sourcing whole animals direct from the farmers who raise them and utilizing all of the various cuts, including the organs. There is no better way to pay tribute to an animal that has been slaughtered for food, these chefs say, than to ensure that nothing goes to waste.

These chefs feel it's their responsibility to close the awareness gap created by the commercial meat industry, and they're bypassing it entirely by going direct to farmers, buying whole animals, and doing the butchering themselves in their subterranean restaurant prep kitchens.

So the head is used to make pâté, the cheeks to make guanciale or braised for ravioli filling, the neck for coppa, the bellies are cured for bacon, and the feet used for cotecchino or for their natural gelatin. Blood sausage, tripe, and kidneys are making a comeback among foodies.

Before you wince and get all squeamish, stop and think for a moment that the bacon you enjoy is also attached to lungs, a heart, a head, and feet, and ask yourself what happens to all that stuff once you've eaten your ribs and bacon. If you're not a vegetarian, animals are being killed to support your meat habit, and if you're not eating anything but the prime cuts, you're wasting big chunks of the animals that were killed to feed you.

The Reader's Mike Sula did an extensive piece called The Whole Hog Project (scroll to the bottom and check out the reader comments to get a taste of how strongly people feel about the subject) which documents the paper's purchase of a rare mulefoot pig, and follows Dee Dee's (yes, they named it) life over the course of a year and a half, culminating in its slaughter. It was a fascinating and courageous exercise in journalism which cut right to the heart of America's schizophrenic relationship with meat, and it was recently nominated (along with Mike Gebert's Sky Full of Bacon video podcast that accompanied the Sula piece) for a prestigious James Beard Award.

It's extremely thought-provoking stuff, and it's a subject that most people would prefer to avoid thinking about. But it's also perhaps a subject that we must consider more often, considering our love/hate relationship with food, the growing national obesity issue, the extent to which we consume highly processed foods and fast foods, and the myriad other ways in which we're all dysfunctional in our relationships to what we eat. Myself included--I'm certainly no exception.

I'm not claiming, mind you, that I have the answers here, or that a visit to Peoria Packing will solve all your problems. But I do think that burying our collective heads in the sand and continuing to buy grocery store trays with shrink-wrapped beef tenderloin and BSCB is the exact wrong thing to do.

So, instead of mindlessly purchasing your animal proteins from the grocery store, take a trip over to PP and check the place out. Bring your kids and do your part to kind of de-mythologize the process for them, and start closing, if only by small increments, the awareness gap that the meat industry has spent decades building in their attempt to try and insulate us from the inner conflicts that are inherent in being carnivorous.

I was actually somewhat concerned that it might bother Henry, my four year old son, who made the trip with me, given that, in many of the books we read him, piggies and cows are cute barnyard animals that talk, sing, or drive the school bus. But it didn't. After we got back, my wife asked him what he liked best about the place and he said, enthusiastically, "the pig heads!"

Henry, 4, surveys the carnage

So there you go. This little field trip can be an opportunity to start grappling with these deeper issues of morality, mortality, and animal rights, or you could just look at it as a good, cheap option for bulk burgers, hot links, and ribs. Either way, Peoria Packing is worth a visit. Don't forget to bring a cooler.

The Bacon List--Niman Ranch Applewood Smoked

When I spotted a pack of Niman Ranch Dry Cured, Applewood Smoked Bacon on the shelf at my local Trader Joe's, I knew that I'd have to buy it and do a review for my ongoing sweeping epic series, The Bacon List. Niman is an interesting company that's gone through some recent shakeups, so it makes sense to dig a bit deeper into the back story before reviewing the bacon.

Niman Ranch was the first "boutique" farm name to garner national recognition by appearing on high-end restaurant menus as a descriptor for the center-of-the-plate item. When chefs such as Zuni Cafe's Judi Rogers and the iconic Alice Waters started name-checking Niman on their menus back in the late '80's, a trend was born. A foodstuff's provenance suddenly became important. Chefs and savvy diners around the country took notice.

Back then, Niman-Schell Ranch (as they were known at the time) was doing something quite extraordinary; raising beef and pork naturally, without hormones or antibiotics, and with all natural vegetarian feed. Further, these animals weren't being sent to finishing lots, as the overwhelming majority of commercially-raised animals are. They were finished and slaughtered within Niman's system, which valued humane treatment, sustainability, and sought to ensure that the products were good for those who ate them and for the planet as a whole.

This sort of thing was appealing to some chefs, who, like Waters, took a dim view of the commercial meat industry for a number of very valid environmental and political reasons, but most chefs using Niman's products were interested almost exclusively in the end result product itself; bottom line, the meat just tasted better.

As more and more foodservice operators and chefs jumped on to the farm-to-table bandwagon, Niman's growth was exponential, and by the late '90's, as McDonald's corporation's Chipotle Grill contracted to purchase all their pork from Niman, the operation grew so big so quickly that the folks at Niman Ranch had little choice but to purchase much of its pork from a network of like-minded farmers rather than raising it all on their own.

They were, however, still committed to finishing and slaughtering their animals in their own facilities, and so were forced to truck thousands of hogs across the country, from the farms in the midwest where they were raised, to the Niman finishing/slaughter facilities in Northern California. They refused to outsource beef, however, and were simply unable to keep pace with demand for their naturally-raised, pastured, grass-fed product. The beef cattle--fed on the less calorie-dense grass, and without the growth hormones that sped up the process--took twice as long to reach market weight and cost about twice as much to get to market. Chefs raved about the superior marbling and flavor and demand was very high, so prices could be set accordingly.

(Yes, this post is about bacon. Be patient. This is important stuff.)

Despite the fact that the methods employed by this company influenced a major movement in the world of gourmet food, and built an incredibly strong brand identity, the company was never profitable. Bill Niman, the company's founder and ideological leader, explained that he was "consciously deferring profitability to expand the brand." In other words, he was less interested in building a profitable company than he was in changing the way that people look at meat, and food in general. The money was less important to him than the message.

But, as commendable an ideology as that might be, it's not a formula for running a successful business. Despite the fact that Bill Niman had built his modest cattle ranching hobby into a business with $65 million in annual sales, the company was losing an average of $3 million per year and began veering dangerously close to bankruptcy.

Enter Chicago-based Natural Food Holdings, LLC, a division of massive equity company Hilco. The company owned Sioux-Preme Packing, which processed all of Niman's pork, and in 2006, purchased a 56% stake and took over four of the seven spots on Niman Ranch's board of directors. The company immediately began to make changes in an effort to "streamline the operation" and become profitable.

But "profitable" in food production almost always means cutting back in ways that impact the quality of what's on the plate. Niman fought the new owners' plans for shutting down their finishing lot and slaughterhouse and outsourcing these tasks to larger, more efficient companies (that might not continue the humane and environmentally-friendly practices so integral to Niman's vision). The Niman feedlot was sold in 2008.

The new owners began using "antimicrobials", which technically aren't antibiotics, but yield the same end result while still allowing the company to proudly proclaim their products to be free of antibiotics. Niman only gave the animals medicine when they were sick, but the new owners were using it as a matter of course, the same way commercially-raised animals are treated.

The new owners also locked horns with Niman over the distance that animals were being transported, the conditions of their transport, and the changes in the cattle operations. In 2007, Bill Niman left the company and in January of this year, the changeover became complete. Natural Food Holdings and Niman Ranch merged, giving Natural complete ownership of the company, all its holdings, and exclusive rights to the brand name. Bill Niman is no longer legally permitted to use his own last name in any commercial endeavor.

Niman has moved on. He's into heritage turkeys now, and is raising them commercially on the 1,000 acre Northern California ranch that he managed to keep separate from the company that he now has no share in. He made news recently by announcing that he is boycotting his namesake company, due to questionable practices that he claims compromise their natural, environmentally-friendly, humane ideals, and that he can no longer consume their products in good conscience.

The whole thing's really a sad story. It leads one to wonder whether quality-driven, humane, ethical food production can ever possibly be economically viable.

Anyway, that's the back story. Let's get to the bacon. Since I've already gone on so long about the company's history, let's go straight to the rundown:

Designation--Fancy or Grocery Store? Fancy. But take everything you read above, and the sheer size of this supposedly artisanal company into account and judge for yourself. The package says 'dry cured', and, to be honest, it tastes like it's made the old fashioned way.

Price--How much did I pay per pound for the bacon? $8.65/lb. I purchased a 12 oz. package at Trader Joe's for $6.49.

Uncooked appearance--Color, texture, wet- or dry-ness, mushy or firm, etc... Great looking. Nice bright red on the lean meat, perfect fat-to-lean ratio with nice streaking, all slices are center-cut and thick. Texture is very firm and dry, indicative of a true dry cure.

How it cooks--Tendency to curl, how much it shrinks, tendency to spatter... Very little shrinkage. Typical of artisanally-produced bacon that is dry-cured and smoked over a longer period of time, it hardly shrank at all. This is due to the fact that the meat isn't injected with any saline, sugar, or phosphate solutions like the factory-produced stuff, and the long hot smoking pulls all the moisture out during the production process. The end result is more meat on the plate after it's cooked.

Cooked appearance--Color, shape, texture. Wonderful, deep red-brown color, almost no curling, a bit of darkness on the outer edge indicating a true hardwood smoke. Texture is perfect--nice crispness when cooked well, but strips cooked a bit short of totally crisp are nicely yielding with awesome melting fat.

How does it taste--Sweetness, saltiness, smokiness, texture (melting, chewy, flabby, spongy), "porkiness". Among the best I've tasted. Great real smoke flavor, which you can smell strongly while it's cooking. Great balance of flavors. This is a perfectly balanced bacon, with equal parts smoke, salt, sweetness from sugar, and pork flavor. The fat is wonderful, giving that great melting quality you get from bacon of this caliber, and the texture is very good; crispy yet with a nice chew. This is a really well thought-out, well put-together product. You can really tell that this product has evolved over time. Many, many tweaks have been done to the curing/smoking process that have brought this product to where it is today. Really excellent.

Overall rating--All bacons reviewed will be given an overall rating from 1-10, with 1 being practically inedible (I say "practically" since, you know, it's bacon--how bad can it be?), 5 being a perfectly serviceable bacon for use in cooking or on a sandwich, and 10 being....well, let's be honest; there won't be a 10. 8.5. This bacon lacks the character of a Broadbent, but it's really not far off. I have to wonder whether knowing what I do about the company has influenced my opinion, and if it might have scored higher if it came from some small farm in Virginia wrapped in brown paper and burlap with the name hand-stenciled on. What can I say? I do my best to remain objective and to taste purely on the basis of taste, but I am only human.

Bottom line, this is a very, very good bacon. Right up there in the upper echelon of real small-batch, old school producers. It's worth purchasing, especially since it's widely available at Trader Joe's, but the price makes it fairly cost prohibitive, so it's more of a special occaision/splurge bacon. Certainly worth the money every now and then, though.

sMACked Down

As a well-seasoned mac-n-cheese maker, I snapped at the opportunity to compete against several well-known Chicago chefs in a benefit cook-off for the Organic School Project. When I spotted this event listed on Gaper's Block Drive Thru a few weeks ago, I immediately shot off a quick email making a case for why I thought my mac and cheese recipe would be the winner.

The event was called sMACkdown, and I learned a few days later that I'd be competing for culinary bragging rights against chefs from Kuma's Corner, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, The Publican, and Boka, as well as 15 other regular cooks like myself.

But it wasn't those hacks that I was concerned with. Nope. The big game I was hunting was none other than the Top Chef herself, Stephanie Izard.

I watch very little television, but I'm a big fan of the Bravo reality show, and Stephanie was the winner of Season Four (Chicago). So not only did she win the title of Top Chef, beat a number of other very impressive chefs, and turn out some fairly innovative dishes (braised pistachios, anyone?), but she did it on her home turf and represented Chicago.

Well, last night she was going to be on *my* turf, and I was gunning for her. I had designs on writing a great blog entry about how I trounced the Top Chef. In fact, I've even been considering applying for season six of the show, and doing some trash-talking after my triumph was going to be a key feature of my audition tape.

Unfortunately, I lost. But....so did Stephanie. So, technically, I tied the Top Chef. Ah hah! Not too shabby after all.

Attendees got three tickets each to vote for their favorite mac and cheese entries, and the top five vote-getters advanced to the judging round, which resulted in three trophy-winners. The win went to James Gottwald of Rockit Bar and Grill (clickers beware--very loud website), and second place went to Amalia Obermeier-Smith of Kuma's Corner. Third place--and the only non-pro chef to bring home a trophy--went to LTH'er KennyZ.

Stephanie (Top Chef) Izard was gracious despite suffering a humilating defeat.

All in all, a good time was had by all. Ubiquitous uber-mixologist Adam Seger was there mixing up some sort of godforsaken cheddar-cube garnished MAC-tini (I stuck with the Goose Island 312 Urban Wheat--the event was held at the local brewery's Wrigleyville outpost), and the room was literally jammed with charitable comfort food aficionados crowding three-deep around the ring of chafing dishes from whence came the goods.

I applied my signature method of moving through crowded venues (big guy, move with a sense of purpose, people tend to get outta my way) and sampled most of the competition. Some were very good, some were fairly bland, and some were just strange; peanut butter and jelly mac and cheese with a grape breadcrumb topping? Asian-flavored mac and cheese with edamame?

My entry was the exact same thing I make for my family here at home; the classic, straight up mac and cheese. (My mac and cheese recipe and technique will be detailed in a future post). No bacon, no truffle oil, no weird cheeses. I figured, why mess with a good thing?

Well....the winner featured braised oxtail. And both runners up featured truffle oil, one with morel mushrooms, the other, Gorgonzola. So much for that strategy. Strangely, though, the winning recipe is supposed to be going onto a school lunch program menu as a result of this event. Should be interesting to see how the kids take to oxtail.

It'll have to be locally-raised, organic, hormone-free oxtail, of course, because that's what this organization is all about--bringing these type of important food values to schoolkids. It's a really cool project which aims to re-vamp school lunch programs in a way that teaches kids valuable lessons about horticulture, nutrition, and cooking while also preparing made-from-scratch organic lunches on a daily basis. It's similar to the kind of thing that's been going on in France for years, and to what Alice Waters is doing in the Bay Area with her Edible Schoolyard Program.

At the end of the night, I may not have earned any bragging rights, but I met some pretty cool and interesting people, I watched a grown man proudly hoist a macaroni-festooned plastic trophy over his head, learned about a very cool organization trying to teach kids to reject the agro-pharma-industrial food establishment, and--bonus!-- I loaded a pretty good-sized to-go container full up with leftover mac and cheese to bring home.

Not a total loss, I guess. Ms. hot-shot Top Chef, however, fresh off her humiliating tie with yours truly, will be jetting off to the Bahamas for a Club Med food and wine festival. Grrrr. No wonder she was so gracious about losing.

Classic Cookbook Review--French Country Cooking

Elizabeth David emerged as a writer of articles about cooking in post-war England in the late 1940's. Her first full-length book, Mediterranean Food was released in 1950, and followed up almost immediately with French Country Cooking in 1951.

It's hard to imagine in today's 3G-fiber-optic-paced world, but if you really think about what life was like in early 1950's post-war England, David's books must have seemed like a welcome breath of warm, sunny, Mediterranean air. Food was still being rationed then, and a huge number of what we now consider to be staples (eggplant and olive oil, for instance) were either unobtainable or unfamiliar to the average British cook. English cooking was largely very drab and bland, with a lot of roasts, flour-thickened sauces, and overcooked mushy vegetables.

David's food writing was borne out of her travels, both before and during the war. She studied at the Sorbonne in Paris as a young woman and left England in 1939 to become an actress. When WWII started in Europe, she ended up fleeing from one exotic locale to the next, spending time in Antibes, Corsica, Italy, the Greek island of Syros, Egypt, and India.

By the time the war ended and she returned to England, she had seen (and eaten) all over the world. She had cultivated a strong appreciation for the food of the Mediterranean, and this is what she chose to write about. In a time where staples like milk, butter, and beef were in short supply, David was writing about exotics like saffron, eel, capers, and fennel; ingredients that most Brits had never even heard of. For many, cooped up for years due to the war, these books must've read like escapist fantasy.

The books, of course, were hugely successful, and David went on to write ten or so, mostly focused on the food of provincial France and Italy (although her book English Bread and Yeast Cookery is also a classic).

I found this book for three bucks at a used bookstore when I was a budding young cook attending culinary school, thrilled at the prospect of steeping myself in classics like daube de boeuf and truite meunière. It appealed to me as a nice introduction to French country cooking, and I had heard of David and knew that she was considered a legendary cookbook author. This was an ambitious time for me and I had visions of attempting to cook my way through this book in my spare time.

I don't think I quite managed it. When I took the book down off of my bookshelf, a blue fingertip band-aid fell out from where it had been serving as a page-marker for the last 15 years or so. That should tell you something about my knife-skills at the time, and, since it was wedged in only about a third of the way through the fish chapter, you can also figure out about how successful I was at cooking my way through the book.

The recipes here are solid, and do manage to give a pretty comprehensive assortment of "country" or "peasant-style" dishes from the varied regions of France. But what makes this book really wonderful is what it represents, and that's a cultural shift that was, at the time, on the horizon in post-war England. I'm going to quote extensively here from David's introduction, because I really think it manages to capture and convey the ideas that are at the very heart of this classic.

Although there is not such a profusion of raw materials in England, we still have much greater gastronomic resources than the national cookery would lead one to suppose.

Rationing, the disappearance of servants, and the bad and expensive meals served at restaurants, have led Englishwomen to take a far greater interest in food than was formerly considered polite; and large numbers of people with small farms in the country produce their own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages; personal supervision of the kitchen garden induces a less indifferent attitude to the fate of spring vegetables; those who have churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares, are in no mood to see their effort wasted. Town dwellers, who take trouble over their marketing, chose their meat and fish carefully and keep a good store cupboard, are equally interested in seeing that their care is repaid in good and interesting meals.

It is for such people that I have collected the recipes in this book, most of which derive from French regional and peasant cookery, which, at its best, is the most delicious in the world; cookery which uses raw materials to the greatest advantage without going to the absurd lengths of the complicated and so-called Haute Cuisine.... Good cooking is honest, sincere and simple, and by this I do not mean to imply that you will find in this, or indeed any other book, the secret of turning out first-class food in a few minutes with no trouble. Good food is always a trouble and its preparation should be regarded as a labour of love, and this book is intended for those who actually and positively enjoy the labour involved in entertaining their friends and providing their families with first-class food.

There's so much here to take in. David touches on almost every one of today's major food trends, fads, and cultural shifts--organics, local eating, head-to-tail eating, the emergence of 'foodie' culture, garden-to-table eating, the increase in popularity of urban farmer's markets, seasonality. Somehow I'm surprised there's not a chapter on savory cupcakes or any mention of espuma.

David somehow had the prescience to begin constructing a school of thought that was rejecting the concepts of processed, factory-produced, value-added, canned, frozen, and artificially-preserved food just as this nascent industry was emerging. The post WWII era was typified by a massive industrial change-over. Factories that had geared up to produce goods for the war effort were forced to reconfigure, and began to make cans and canned goods, frozen and processed foods, and nitrogen fertilizers for agriculture. Simultaneously, the exploding advertising industry was employed to create newer and ever-increasing markets for these new products.

This, in large part, is how we got where we are today, with a huge portion of our society not knowing how to cook or even take apart raw ingredients--think about it, how many people do you know that are comfortable cutting up a chicken? Ads convinced cooks that canned or frozen vegetables were superior to fresh ones, that eating any fruit at any time of year is a God-given right, and that cooking was a "chore" or "drudgery"--something to be avoided at all costs, or, at least, something to try and spend as little time and energy as possible doing.

Subsequent food industry "innovations" along with PR and ad campaigns have brought about the boneless/skinless phenomenon, the hormoneing and antibiotic-ization of all meat-providing animals, the de-fatting of industrially-raised pork and eggs, the ubiquitous use of high-fructose corn syrup, and scores of other Really Bad Ideas that were driven by the food and agriculture industries' desire to make more and more money without any concern for the quality of the products, the effects their actions would have on the health of the people eating the products or the environment in which they were produced, or for the implicit and explicit messages being sent to our society about the value and importance we place on feeding our stomachs and our souls day in and day out, throughout the lives of multiple generations of people.

We're learning now, of course. Many of the ideas David espoused back in the early 50's are now becoming fashionable among foodies and then beginning to wind their way into the popular culture. But we still have a ways to go, and it's an uphill climb because these concepts are working against food-industry ideals that have been firmly entrenched for the last 40+ years and that have huge money and lobbying power with which to push back.

All this could've been avoided if we'd have all read our Elizabeth David, and tried to emulate her and her wonderful celebratory attitude towards food and cooking. David, of course, was mostly unaware of all the political stuff, and was just concerned with eating and living well. Which is, if you think about it, the very heart of the matter, from a personal, political, and societal standpoint. Cooking and eating (along with writing about it) is a political act--regardless of whether one is aware of it.