Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Looking Down: Urban Foraging and Historic Preservation


I’m a preservationist, an architectural historian by education and training and a lover of good buildings. By good, I mean interesting. By interesting, I mean provocative, generating curiosity and further research. For an architectural historian, “further research” may involve breaking and entering, that is, snooping around superficially abandoned buildings. Those of us who like to do this tell ourselves it’s fine. It can be like forensic vigilante history, and feels a little dangerous, even when investigation is a part of paid work.

Recent fire damage. Unheated, unventilated attics with unknown historic treasures and structural system insights. Large creepy historic industrial sites with great reuse potential. Natural disaster-damaged heartbreaks. Part of historic preservation is seeing through scary and envisioning amazing. We like challenges. We’re curious.

The impulse to find edible wild things in the city fits into this line of thinking. Or at least for me, at least in the beginning. I tend to look ahead, around, and up. I size up a building (nice cornice, good brickwork, lots of integrity, etc) and make judgments. Until recently, I’ve considered wild things weeds, something someone needs to take care of. Wild plants = neglect.

While this is often true, it isn’t the entire story. And stories are the life blood of the field, after all. I’ve found many stories about these wild things. Encyclopedias, field guides, web sites and blogs are dedicated to the topic, and many of this include the history of wild plant uses.

Chickweed is a good example. I’d never eaten it until I started research urban foraging. I am fairly picky about greens and found these above average. I later read that chickweed got its name because poultry like it. The English used to call it ‘hen’s inheritance.’ It resists the cold, so its been a winter green as far back as classical Greek and Roman times. It was also popular in ancient Japan. It grows wild in temperate regions all over the world. Now I look around for it everywhere, especially where my preservationist eyes tend to wander.

Interest in urban foraging tracks with urbanists’ reevaluation of solutions for good living in our cities. Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus was first published in 1962 and sparked interest in looking for natural food everywhere, even in vacant lots. Gibbons was a late night talk show regular. In the 1960s, vacant lots in most American cities were a lot scarier than they are today for a lot of reasons. While today, urban foraging seems a little contrary, within the context of American urban history in the 1960s and early 70s, recommending people eat wild plants in urban vacant lots seems downright revolutionary.

Both foragers and the historic preservation vanguard reasserted the value of what existed, the value of variety, and the importance of seeing through conventions.


I’ve spoken to a number of people who forage. We fall into a handful of potentially-overlapping categories. We forage because: we’re short on cash or enjoy the economy of free found food; we like diversity in our diet (In The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging and Love, “Susan Allport notes that of the approximately 50,000 edible species of plants in the world … the average American eats only 30.”); we believe in gleaning what is available and not wasting food opportunities; our cultural tradition or “foodways” include wild edible plants; we learned from our parents; we are into making statements about the food we eat and/or our urban environments; we are connected to nature everywhere; we are creative cooks; and/or we are simply curious.

I fall into the last category more than any of the others. I take great pleasure in seeing the outline of an oak leaf on the sidewalk and knowing what acorns from that particular variety of oak taste like, or what acorns roasting smell like, or all the different ways acorns have been processed into iconic dishes. It’s similar to the satisfaction I take in correctly dating a building based on visual cues. But unlike visual history work, this natural education taps smell and taste to make sense of things.

Combining foraging with historic preservation has also deepened my connection to other foragers who bring unique perspective to the experience. Walking with others, new friends who know more than me, or equally curious loved ones makes looking down that much more rewarding.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

How Not to Cook Acorns


Image: upper bowl, acorn meal; lower plate, partially eaten acorn muffin with apricot raspberry jam.

I’m working on an article about urban foraging in Washington, DC, that is, finding and preparing edible wild plants downtown. Other cities, like Portland, Oregon have extensive urban foraging communities. I have been in contact with a handful of Washington’s urban foragers, but have not yet found a cohesive community. I plan on looking harder.


I have, however, met some interesting people with extensive knowledge of local edible wild plants. Based on my initial research, I’m finding that many of the areas wild plant gatherers look for food in DC’s expansive green areas, like the city’s northeastern and northwestern neighborhoods.

My neighborhood is kind of brown by comparison. Although many wild edible plants grow within a block of my house (including dandelion, chicory, horse mint, wild mint, wood sorrel, and nasturtium), green spaces in my neighborhood are either private landscapes or the grown-over remains of demolished old buildings where many dogs pee often.

I’m also researching whether or not the city sprays its vacant lots with pesticide before I make a ghetto grass salad.

Acorns seemed safe by comparison. They now litter the sidewalk and, it turns out, are not just for squirrels (or pigeons, pigs, deer, mice, rats, and lots of other animals). Humans have been eating acorns for millennia, though today they are not especially popular except in North American Indian and Korean cultures. Acorns are nuts and contain high levels of protein, carbohydrates and fats, and essential minerals. But they are often too bitter to eat without processing. My dog hoovers most everything he finds on the sidewalk including napkins, cigarette butts, diapers, and mysterious lumps but consistently spits out acorns.

Tannins cause the bitterness (the word comes from the Old German “tanna,” which meant oak). Tannin levels vary depending on the species. Most DC oaks are high-tannin red oaks. White oaks’ acorns are reportedly low enough in tannins to eat without leaching away the bitterness. Acorns in my neighborhood are bitter and require a lot of work.

I collected a bag of acorns from a red oak in the Giant parking lot a block away from my house and experimented with various tannin leaching methods outlined on various websites. In all cases, acorns have to be shelled (of course) before eating. Hitting an acorn with a standard hammer squarely at its pointy tip generally splits the shell in two and makes harvesting the nutty innards (called ‘meat’ or ‘nut meat’) pretty easy.

Boiling was recommended by some and discouraged by others. I tried boiling some of my acorns and don’t recommend this because it takes too long and uses a lot of water and energy (both the kind you pay for and your own). According to Wikipedia, boiling unleached acorns may actually make them “unleachable.”

One website written by a Native American noted a friend who leached her acorns in a cloth sack in the back “clean” part of her toilet. He didn’t recommend this because 1) the tannins stain porcelain and 2) nobody really wants to eat anything processed in a toilet. But should you ever be caught in a drought situation or after an apocalypse or siege with little water and only acorns to eat you know what to do.

I found the following process the easiest and least resource-demanding: 1) put acorns directly into food processor after shelling; 2) pulverize into a meal; 3) leach meal by placing it in a wash cloth and rinsing it repeatedly with hot water (requires that you “milk” the wash cloth, which will be permanently stained) and 4) lightly roast on low heat. Mother Earth News recommends using the heat leftover from cooking something else as it dissipates. This is a good idea because acorn meal is pretty fragile and burns easily.

Acorn meal can be used to make bread and muffins. So I tried the following recipe from the blog GroupRecipes.com. I simplified the recipe a little. The original entry was submitted by “julesong.” They're quite tasty -- the acorns make these muffins (or bread) very hearty.

Ingredients

1 cup acorn meal
1 cup flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar (I used brown sugar)
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons butter, melted

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. Butter a loaf pan.
2. In a large bowl, combine the acorn meal, flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Stir well.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg, milk, and oil, then gradually whisk in the melted butter.
4. To the bowl containing the dry ingredients add the liquid ingredients and stir to combine all,
5. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake in 400 degree F oven for 30 minutes.


Thursday, October 22, 2009

Hybrid Markets


A neighbor in the consulting business and I had coffee last week to talk about being consultants. She's an expert "silo buster," and marketing and communications professional. Generally, she works with nonprofit organizations that want staff in different departments to work together toward a common goal.

Over the course of our hour and a half chat, we were both wondering how writing about food, history, politics/policy and design and illustrating could fit into a single business plan, executed by a single person. What do I put on a business card? This seemed like a good exercise, so I sketched a possible logo with a fenestrated pumpkin and mocked up a card in Photoshop. That evening, I drew a corn skyscraper (included here). The corn is better; I'm redrawing the pumpkin.

Hybridizing skills and experience is easier said than done. I have renewed respect for professionals who change careers, especially those who have established clear professional identities in their initial chosen field. I am meeting more and more "transitional professionals" around my age who, for one good reason or another, thought it was time to do something else. Leaving an established career for the unknown requires professionalization and routinization of new work, even at its sketchiest and most embryonic.

The alternative is professional chaos and too-frequent dog walking.

Thanks to my demanding friends for pushing the hybrid illustration/writing efforts. More to come...

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Meat Matters: Will 'Country of Origin' Labeling Support Sustainability Ethics?


Photo: Basque berets on local foie gras in St. Jean de Luz, France. No need for "country of origin" labels here.

I got my first taste of national food politics a few weeks after I began work grassroots-lobbying for historic preservation in September of 2004. The issue was mandatory labeling for meats' "country of origin."

This two-hour-long hearing considered cows that grazed along the Canadian border. Were they Canadian cows or US cows? If they were born in Canada but processed in the US, did they maintain original residency status as an all beef hot dog?

With the power of hindsight, I should have wondered why a resource committee was considering the issue at all. Typically, I got to hear about wild fires, problems with the National Park Service, or disaster relief in general committee hearings before someone (if anyone) got to historic preservation issues.

Meat matters are generally covered by the agriculture committees. I later learned that some issues overlap with many different committees' jurisdictions and get bumped around before they eventually settle into law (or not). Generally, these are exceptionally important and/or complex topics, requiring insight from varied fields and perspectives.

In 2004, I wasn't paying attention to food policy. Nor was I thinking actively about how this overlapped with policies governing historic places and cultural landscapes. I was focused on issues with a clear, direct relationship to historic preservation programs. I generally did not take extensive notes on other interesting but memorable items like prairie dog vacuums or national meat policy.

As a paid preservation lobbyist representing an organization and its grassroots interests, my attention to the enormous Farm Bill was highly focused. I followed preservation-specific programs covered by bill -- like a historic barn preservation program and conservation easements for unique land (including historic farms). The opportunities for preservation within the Farm Bill didn't go unnoticed at the time -- colleagues at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Society for Historical Archaeology and the American Cultural Resources Association all pursued preservation angles within the bill.

Now, I'm considering the inverse. How do basic food policies, like clear food labeling, support sustainable farming and historic resource management?

Location, location, location

Providing all consumers with clear choices related to place and production helps make sustainability ethics more mainstream. Debates about labeling processed meat continued throughout the second half of the Bush Administration and reflected a significant shift in consumer demand for information about food. Before September 30, 2008, meat processed in the US was considered a US product regardless of where the animal came from. Not including this level of information seems dated already.

As of now, some meats receive passport-level documentation. Because livestock production has become very specialized, animals may spend time at many different farms and countries on their way to the slaughterhouse. Some farms now specialize in breeding and raising to a certain age, then pass the animal onto another farm specializing in maturation. Other farms focus on fattening. Processing might happen somewhere else. All of this might be included on Congressionally-mandated labels if these stages take place in different countries.

At WholeFoods (aka Whole Paycheck) and other upscale grocery stores, the labels are less of an issue. Even before the legislation, origins (national, regional, and local) provided effective branding for meat, fish and produce in stores with mission statements. But what about other grocery stores? The labels may be a step toward more specific origination information for the general public, and quite possibly, help create greater demand for local products from major mainstream outlets.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Center Market, Washington, DC (Part 2): The Not-So-Glamorous Complement


(Image above, Dejeuner sur l' Herbe, Washington, DC ca. 1870. Rats were a major problem for DC city planners in downtown's early days).


Immediately after the last posting, my attorney* advised me to figure out how to combine my illustrations with this blog. Before legal counsel, I was going to write about the "pestiferous" historic conditions around the market, and how this figured into public thinking about a market downtown. Post-counsel, I tried to sum up the issue cartoon-style.

During most of the 19th century, butchers regularly dumped poultry innards, rotted fish and animal carcasses into a canal that used to run alongside B Street. The canal path is now Constitution Avenue. This was covered up in 1871 when a pipe was installed to make the canal into a real sewer.

This was a hugely significant complement to a modern, grand market on the Mall. For decades, the market was a growing eyesore, a "squatty" mess, completely inappropriate for a national capital in-the-making.

An account from 1870:

"the present old rookery embraces within its struggling circuit of sheds a sort of barn-yard where horses and vehicles are coralled on market days, and which yard is delightfully paved with manure, floating straw, dead kittens, rotten eggs, stinking fish, and rubbish of all sorts, it does not follow that a bill may be wholly objectionable that fails to perpetuate this feature of our unique market."

The Adolf Cluss-designed Center Market replaced squalor with splendor, and provided the right kind of backdrop for Washington's image-conscious social elite -- as well as a central shopping venue for millions of ordinary citizens and tourists.

* my fiance, Henry

Friday, September 18, 2009

Center Market, Washington, DC (Part 1): Chicken Punching in our Nation's Capitol


(Image: Shopping at Center Market, Theodor Horydczak, 1920s, Theodor Horydczak Collection, Library of Congress, LC-H814-T-1030 DLC).

Buying groceries downtown was part of the original plan for Washington, DC, back when the District was a swamp and George Washington still had something to do with the capital city's urban planning decisions.

Center Market's demolition in 1930 to make way for the National Archives building marked a critical tipping point in the District's quality of life, at least in its central downtown.

This entry is the first in a series looking into why DC lost Center Market, without a replacement. Unpopularity wasn't a reason.

All the President's Meats

On March 2, 1797, "Center Market" was established in a two-acre square around what is now 7th and Pennsylvania Avenue. In its early days, the federal government took keen interest in the quality and cost of food sold locally, and this Center Market was the primary source of produce and meat for DC's early urban residents. Including its Presidents.

President Grant was, according to local reports well over 50 years after his presidency, very interested in the market downtown and shopped for himself when he was in the mood, as did Chester A. Arthur, Franklin Pierce and William Henry Harrison. The latter died after only a month in office, but apparently frequented the market throughout that month.

William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, three-time Democratic presidential nominee, and inventor of the "stump tour" alledgedly took early evening walks up Pennsylvania Avenue with a market-purchased bunch of celery sticking out of his pocket. (Sunday Star, September 9, 1951 and Washington Herald, December 29, 1936).

Scenic Washington

Buying groceries downtown was, by contemporary accounts, a scene. When the building and its function were threatened with demolition, local papers painted glamorous portraits of grocery-buying there in olden days.

"... General McCawley never missed a day (at the market), his footman behind him, a huge market basket on each arm. Here, on a wintry day, he might encounter Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Leiter, each wrapped in a raccoon coat, followed by the chauffeur and the footman, likewise fur-coated, laden with baskets piled high with every good thing that the market afforded."

"In that leisurely era, there was always time for a chat and a gossip with friends between trying to decide upon the relative merits of halibut or salmon ... or knowingly punching the breastbone of a chicken to determine whether "spring" was a misnomer or not." (Washington Herald, July 30, 1928)

Fur coat wearing chicken punchers were already an entertaining anachronism in 1928 when supermarkets were starting to dominate conventions about how and where to buy food.

But what about those "golden years" when the market was more than a quickly fading memory? It attracted residents throughout the city, tourists from around the world and was, in its day, completely conventional. Public markets were ubiquitous when the details of what DC would be were being worked out.

One writer in the 1920s noted that had the building been a different color and style (it was red and Victorian, more on this later), it might have stood a chance.

The next installment of Ate Past will consider what really killed DC's Center Market.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

O Street Market, DC: Great Expectations







Conspicuously dilapidated, clearly historic, and located near a number of housing projects, O Street Market at 7th and O Street in Washington, DC is the kind of project an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student would write their thesis about. O Street Market could easily illustrate the history of DC's Shaw neighborhood, DC's race relations and housing issues, and its urban renewal goals.

But I'm supposed to be blogging about food politics. And my attorney (also my fiance) advises me to be brief, like bloggers do, not long and lecturey, like someone who was once an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student.

The New Old Market

The 1881 market's heyday was in the 1930s and 40s, according to reports from the 1970s. It fronts a major historic route to Maryland farms. According to one account in the late 1970s, produce stalls once lined 7th Street on market days from O Street Market all the way to Florida Avenue (north by several blocks). Today, that's a pretty bleak stretch.

O Street Market has been on the verge of rehabilitation for a while now. It's part of a bigger plan for the site.

http://www.roadsidedevelopment.com/admin/Editor/f1l3s/rd_oSt_marketing.pdf

This plan involves tearing down a Giant supermarket on the other side of the two-block lot, and adding a hotel, rental and senior housing, and condominiums. In the plan, the historic market is a landmark cornerstone, and the market function on the site (in the Giant, to be demolished) is incorporated into the older building.

In general, most everyone is excited about the project. Concerns include the scale of the new development relative to the context, restoring 8th Street (a part of the L'Enfant plan) which was erased in the late 1970s site plan and gentrification issues. The project's architect, Shalom Baranes Associates, has incorporated preservation officials' feedback into the design.

Community Feedback

Can O Street be compared to Capitol Hill's Eastern Market? O Street's rehab has been delayed for some time while Eastern Market was quickly rehabbed after an April 2007 fire. Given Shaw's challenges, and the history of the site, a fairer comparison -- at least when thinking about the ultimate impact of the project -- might be the larger-scale CityVista, a multiuse development in the nearby Mount Vernon Triangle neighborhood.

Though that site doesn't include a landmark building, the overall idea and neighborhood concerns and needs are much more similar to Shaw's than Capitol Hill's. Capitol Hill's public Eastern Market has been in continuous operation since 1873. O Street Market's history has been up and down, and tied into urban renewal plans for Shaw (more on this below).

CityVista's program, including a large grocery store function, (http://www.cityvistadc.com/f_index.php) shows how this scale of development might work in the Shaw neighborhood. CityVista is still very new -- it opened last year -- but a review of blogs focused on living in downtown DC suggests CityVista's Safeway is now the supermarket downtown.

Historic Politics

Forty years ago, development ideas about O Street Market attempted to balance the needs and desires of new (more affluent, white) residents with the needs of existing residents. (Note: Shaw is historically multiracial and middle class with some pockets of poor residents). The building's developer in the late 1970s, James Adkins, proposed flood lights to make new white residents feel comfortable shopping on O Street. This was no simple ribbon cutting.

O Street Market stood closed for over a decade after the April 1968 riots following Martin Luther King's assassination. The Giant was the District's first new supermarket after the riots. ("Old-Style Markets Return," Washington Post, November 29, 1970).


The historic market's reopening, along with the Giant, made many very optimistic. Reporting about the two markets in the late 1970s and 1980 was a mix of nostalgia and ideas about what Shaw needed to do well.


Unfortunately, the good late-1970s ideas for O Street's rehab (including a proposal for a neighborhood kitchen and culinary training) didn't come together exactly as planned. Sales were less than brisk. A 1994 shooting inside the market, resulting in the death of a 15 year old, and 8 wounded, left sales even scanter, and vendors packed up for other markets. The shooting dominated reporting about the historic building after that, even in more recent reports about Roadside Development's plan. The building's roof fell in after a snowstorm in 2003. It's now gutted and fenced off.

As a Shaw resident, I'm maintaining optimism about O Street Market. It's a complicated project, but certainly well worth the wait.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Ate Past: Food, History and Politics


Last month, on a Friday afternoon at 0 and 9th Streets, I thought I heard gunshots. Then I thought I heard sirens. Then I went outside, and saw neighbors looking over toward flashing police cars, and swarms of cops, so asked someone what happened.

He said, "somebody got hit."

I asked, "Hit, someone was hit?"

He said, "somebody got hit."

I wondered if someone had been hit by a car or in a fist fight. I asked another neighbor what happened.

He said, "someone was shot."

Oh.

Turned out, two people had been shot that Friday near the Giant Supermarket on 9th and O Street. I shop there nearly everday. I've been told it's actually pretty safe, and that violence there is generally targeted, gang-related and professional.

That said, I wish buying groceries nearby didn't involve calculated risks.

****

I live on O Street, between 9th and 10th Street NW, in Washington, DC's Shaw neighborhood. More precisely, I live in Naylor Court, which has its own distinct identity. I'm an architectural historian, a writer, an illustrator, and was recently a lobbyist. I think I'm still certified. I don't think it matters. Earlier this year, I made a decision to return to my roots after lobbying for nearly five years with grassroots interests for historic preservation.


I also like food. A lot. My mom was a terrible cook, so I learned how to work a kitchen at an early age. I started with grilled cheese around 1975 and moved on from there.


For six years, I was a freelance writer while working for preservation and history nonprofits in Seattle, which is an excellent, formative place for foodies. When I moved to DC in 2004, culture shock was acute, in part because I wore pantyhose on a regular basis after years of wearing jeans to work, and in part because of DC's food culture.


Seattle's Pike Place Market is iconic, historically, but it's also an inexpensive place to get fresh produce, meat, fish, and other basics in the middle of the workday. DC used to have that, and when the city lost its downtown market to its federal presence in 1930, many were peeved. But not enough.


*****


About a month ago, after the aforementioned shootings and years of consideration, I started researching the politics of food through building and neighborhood history. My first subject: the historic O Street Market, which is on the other side of Giant's parking lot. This posting serves as an introduction to a series of posts featuring what I've learned about that market and others in DC, including the history of street vendors, private markets, local farming, farm routes, and food politics generally.