In your face about food: reading (2)

Do read Jason Epstein's memoir 'Eating' after you read Jeffrey Moussaief Masson's 'The Face on Your Plate'. While the former may serve as easeful antidote, the latter aims at viscerally letting the reader feel how painful it is for animals to be forced into our food chain.

Unlike the hapless animals he describes, Masson has had a few lives, notably as a golden academic unearthing ancient texts, and digging up material in the Freud archives. The conclusions he drew about Freud's work were met with such controversy by dour members of the human species, that Masson turned to animal rights and a vegan lifestyle in a remote green corner of the world.

Masson knows a thing or two about doggedness himself. 'The Face on Your Plate,' as the title indicates, is no picknick. What ends up on our plate is a sentient being, capable of a great range of instinctual reactions and emotions, and poignantly so, of bonding with the human species. Within chickens for instance are "giant characters inhabiting small bodies."

Using scientific evidence to back up, Masson relentlessly demonstrates that animals suffer in the service of our sustenance. Domesticated animals and farm animals do not live in conditions that allow them their natural behavior.

Animals in different industries are held captive, often in conditions so unsavory, that they present a direct health hazard to the environment and to human beings even without being eaten. The Chinook salmon is able to travel more than 10,000 miles in the Pacific before it returns to spawn - imagine this creature in a fish farm.

Animals are tortured, maimed, and killed, and in this process do feel pain, contrary to what is thought. All of this is done without much consideration by humans who are weaving a rich web of denial.

Masson hopes that his reader will feel aversion, and even without a real factory experience in situ of how animals are killed and handled to end up as food, one does shudder and whince. He's realistic enough to realize that his book won't change human habits, but perhaps some people will at least make choices based on consciousness.

In the last chapter Masson states that a vegetarian and/or vegan lifestyle actually has great health benefits. But you can be just as unhealthy as a vegan or vegetarian if you don't eat well.

Here are a few practical tips for good eating:

1. Eat fruit and vegetables;
2. Eat produce as fresh as possible;
3. Eat local food (be a "locavore")

And I would add, with The Swiss Guy (see posts with that label): 4. Right preparation.

Photo credits: thanks to cousin T. and her photographer brood who daily capture wild fowl and other animals in their garden - on pixels only, mind you.

The Swiss Guy Does It

Name your favorite cookbook, Ilva from Lucullian Delights said, and she went antiquarian. So instead of Claudia Roden or Harry's Bar or some chef, here's R.Müller, Gesund und leistungsfähig durch richtige Ernährung - Part I & II. Bern, Verlag "Sonnseitig leben", 1975. In the 1970s in Bern they didn't do catchy titles in alternative publishing houses yet.

After lecturing ominously about our need of vitamins and minerals and the suspicious lack thereof in refined foods, R.Müller serves complete meals in his opus Healthy and fit for activity through eating the right food, that take as a standard the foods and food preparation of a black-clad farmer family on a Swiss Alp, who live off their own vegetable and fruit garden. Meaning: benign cooking methods, unrefined foods, simplicity, wholesomeness. George Ohsawa would summarize as follows: "vivere parvo. And don't forget to chew!"

It's feasible, but it also requires us to be completely re-educated. It may require us to yield our own produce, if only on a patio. It's the kind of book that teaches one to think long and hard before filling the supermarket cart with the fine and shiny products of the food industry, to read labels, to become choosy over time, and to rethink cooking methods. And in these fast times that's quite a tour de force.

Signature or Upgrade? Green Swiss Chard Vegetable Tart

This week an artist friend refused to help me to hang art works because my house was too messy (books and paper, not enough storage), too studentlike on account of a bric à brac of furniture, in short, not up to par with the beautiful and luminous home it is. So the art plan is deferred until Spring, and I have to do basic storage homework.

His passage made me more conscious about the fact that I have been living as if I had to pack my bags anytime soon. I also don't have a complete set of tableware to dine in style. Honestly, I haven't truly been bothered.

It also questioned for me what I'm doing in these pages.

If there's one dish I had triumphantly wanted to declare my signature dish, it's the vegetable tart, which I easily roll our from scratch. But isn't my cooking a bit too simple and crude...? Isn't it time to move up a notch...? More importantly, can I spend the time to become a true amateur cook?

The answer is: no, and definitely not right now. This is a blog mostly about simple and healthy food. Becoming an amateur cordon bleu would have to be a very very slow process, which would begin with mastering the basics. But this artist's critical passage has sent ripple waves through my existence. A great gift to close a year.

Green Swiss Chard Vegetable Tart

Courtesy of my friends at Yggdrasil - a didactic place devoted to permaculture and green living, who shared their pie and veggie tart recipes with me.

Yggdrasil's Basic Pie Recipe

200 g sieved wheat flour
100 g cold butter
pinch of salt
1 dl cold water
oat flakes

Combine the ingredients and form a ball, let this ball rest 30' in the fridge, better still, an entire night.

Preheat the oven at 200 °C.

Cover the dough roller with flour, roll out the dough to 2 cm thickness (a bit less than 1'').

Oil the tart form, put the dough in place, and and sprinkle oat flakes on the bottom. This insulates the dough.

Pour in your filling, then fold the ends of the dough over the filling.

Bake for 30' in a 200°C oven (I baked at 180 °C)

My filling:
Braised green Swiss chard leaves combined with 150 g soft goat cheese, 1 egg, and 1 teaspoon of Hungarian paprika powder.