Life in a Dumpster

Image, still from: The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnes Varda, dir.

Who knew food history research would involve dumpster diving? As a subject, that is, not an activity. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. For some people, dumpster diving is cultural commentary.

Dumpster diving came to my attention as a part of my foraging research. When interviewing DC-area foragers, a few wanted to clarify they didn’t dumpster dive, and that they found it disgusting, but wanted me to know that rummaging around in dumpsters was also form of foraging.

A few recent viewings drove home this point. The best of these is French and recommended if you like the French and aren‘t a stickler for linear narrative style. Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I, 2000 (the French title directly translates as “the gleaners and the (female) gleaner or gleaneress.” The film is partially autobiographical and not exclusively focused on gleaning or foraging food, but includes artists who make art of found objects.

I watched the film because it ties together the historic practice of gleaning with contemporary urban issues and food economics. (Technically, gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops and has served as a form of welfare in some places. It's also a handy metaphor.)

This food film contrasts sharply with fairly contemporary hard-hitting American documentary features like Food, Inc, The Future of Food and Modern Meat. The Gleaners is very personal and anecdotal. There are no bad guys -- even the large-scale farmers who won’t let gleaners collect leftovers on their property have feelings. One is an exceptional artist whose drawings appear in a special feature on the DVD. I really don’t see “The Softer Side of Monsanto*” coming to DVD anytime soon.

One of the primary subjects in the French film dumpster dives. He also runs marathons and teaches French to immigrants at night. Selling homeless journals is his only source of income. But although urban gleaning is a necessity for this guy, his pure pragmatism and lack of materialism (or guile) make him a hero in this film.

The film makes a strong connection between those living on the fringes of society and their ability to identify things other people don’t value. This diverse group includes: alcoholics; immigrants; gypsies; self-supporting, non-commercially successful artists; and societal purists.

I like the relationship between still-good food and still-good and meaningful stuff that might have a new use, new life and new meaning in someone else’s possession. Although I don’t think anyone would categorize historic preservation as a fringe concern anymore, I do think preservationists are kin to Varda’s motley group of outsiders if only in our ability to see value and meaning in discards. Negotiating expiration dates is preservation's raison d’etre.

*For those who don’t watch food films or read about the subject, Monsanto is an evil empire of engineered foods. If you type Monsanto into Google, “Monsanto evil” is the first key word pairing.

Wal-mart vs. Whole Foods in The Atlantic

Image: still from Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Waldemart, October 2008, on YouTube.

Preservationists love to hate Wal-mart. I typed "Walmart preservation fight" into Google and found a slew of entries, as expected. Wal-mart threatens Civil War battlefield outside of Charlottesville. State of Vermont Battles Wal-mart in the Wilderness. Lancaster County, PA advocates have been fighting a Wal-mart planned for Amish/Mennonite country. Etc. Etc.

The National Trust has advocacy materials dedicated to fighting "big box stores" generally -- but Wal-mart has been the focus of most big box fights.

http://www.wakeupwalmart.com/community/hist-preservation.html

Conversely, Whole Foods is generally perceived as a good guy. The mission-based grocery store anchored historic and infill redevelopment at P Street and 14th here in DC years ago. Shopping there makes buying local and/or organic easy. But WF (aka Whole Pay Check) is notoriously expensive, which significantly edits its local customer base. Wal-mart is popular because it's cheap. These two businesses don't overlap in my ethical universe.

So I was predictably intrigued by the latest Atlantic Monthly's article "The Great Grocery Smackdown: Will Walmart, not Whole Foods, save the small farm and make America healthy?" by Corby Kummer.

What? Wal-mart now carries local produce that generally competes with (and sometimes exceeds the quality of) Whole Foods.' Kummer gathered together food snobs for a blind taste test. He prepared two separate meals with ingredients from the two retailers. "The tasters were surprised when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal. And they weren't entirely happy."

http://podcasts.theatlantic.com/2010/02/walmart-produce.php

"I'm not sure I'm convinced that the world's largest retailer is set on rebuilding local economies it had a hand in destroying, if not literally, then in effect. But I'm convinced that if it wants to, a ruthlessly well-run mechanism can bring fruits and vegetables back to the land where they once flourished, and deliver them ot the people who need them most."

This seemed to be the salient point, from the perspective of a preservation advocate. If they support the local food movement, why can't they do a better job supporting local preservation?

http://walmartwatch.com/

Property Rights and Breakfast

Our peanut butter and jelly platter -- a breakfast staple -- includes representatives from many countries.

Since my last post, I have heard that a certain local newspaper won't publish substantive articles on foraging due to property rights issues. They apparently get pitches all the time for articles about foraging. I'm undeterred. I'm now figuring out where to pitch an article about foraging and property rights.

In the meantime, we have a stack of books to read about foraging. Although newspapers are apparently shy of the topic, publishing houses seem keen on the subject. I bought Henry Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter (Penguin: New York, 2009) for Christmas and have Langdon Cook's Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager in my bedside bookpile. Urban forager Emily Burrows, author of the blog Sweet Huckleberry, has loaned us about a linear foot of reference books.

So while I'm looking for the right market for the right foraging story, I've also been reading about the history of breakfast and the huge variety of things people around the world eat first thing in the morning. Thus far, I've found that Wikipedia has the most comprehensive explanation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast

Given the huge scope of the topic, I'm assuming I'll find something related to politics and urban design in my preliminary research. And add a little bit of variety to the morning routine.

"Dowager Queen of Local Food Movement" Challenged in The Atlantic

For myself and many of my friends, early gardening experiences shaped our long-term connection to food and its ethics. In my case, my mom dropped me off at Mrs. Frieda's place, a bona fide German kindergarten, on her way to work at General Electric where she was employed for 30 years. I was one of five or so kinder, and the garden was about an acre of land beside the house on a road ending in tobacco fields (I'm from Wilmington, NC). Mrs. Frieda had a hen house where some of we kinder collected eggs.

Acres of soybeans spread out behind the chickens toward someone else's small property. We ate what was grown on that property, plus a few imports from the candy section of the gas station at the other end of the street. Mrs. Frieda confiscated cans of Chef Boyardee dropped off by parents with their kids assuming that's all they would eat because that's what they ate at home. She kept these "banned materials" in a section of the cupboard sequestered from legitimate items, like baking soda.

I attribute my interest in food, history, and German culture and language to this experience. I was never particularly good with the German language, though I studied it for eight years and am still proficient enough to have polite conversation with German waiters.

When thinking about what I want for my kids, I can't help but hold up Mrs. Frieda's method as an ideal. I want my kids to grow vegetables as an integral part of their comprehensive education. I can't imagine not doing this.

So I was compelled by an essay in the latest Atlantic Monthly by Caitlin Flanagan, "Cultivating Failure: How School Gardens Are Cheating Our Most Vulnerable Students."

Flanagan takes issue with a California school program spearheaded by Alice Waters, one of America's most famous restauranteurs, and certainly one of its most political. A vacant lot in Berkeley next to the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School inspired the "Edible Schoolyard" program that provides "experience-based learning that illustrates the pleasure of meaningful work, personal responsibility, the need for nutritious, sustainably raised, and sensually stimulating food, and the important socializing effect of the ritual of the table." Waters worked with the school's principle to create a curriculum around this.

Michelle Obama has lead the White House's healthy food's initiative and kids have been the Administration's primary target. Gardens are popping up in schools everywhere with support from all directions.

Flanagan's primary issue is the problem of priorities in schools with disastrous test scores, particularly those with first-generation Latino American students. Here's a sampling:

"Imagine that as a young and desperately poor Mexican man, you had made the dangerous and illegal journey to California to work in the fields with other migrants. There, you performed stoop labor, picking lettuce and bell peppers and table grapes; what made such an existence bearable was the dream of a better life. You met a woman and had a child with her, and because that child was born in the U. S., he was made a citizen of this great country. He will lead a life entirely different from yours; he will be educated. Now that child is about to begin middle school in the American city whose name is synonymous with higher learning, as it is the home of one of the greatest universities in the world: Berkeley. On the first day of sixth grade, the boy walks though the imposing double doors of his new school, stows his backpack, and then heads out to the field, where he stoops under a hot sun and begins to pick lettuce."

The problem with the program, Flanagan argues, is that it takes away from core educational objectives like reading comprehension and math in schools with high numbers of immigrants. To get into college, these kids have to meet minimum requirements that many aren't meeting. When gardening programs branch out into other coursework -- like English where recipes rather than essays are written, and math where plots are measured rather than more algebraically heavy exercises -- kids are cheated. The program may work for kids who have their bases covered, but it isn't "one size fits all."

Here's a quote from the state's standards regarding gardens:

"Some families, particularly those from other countries, may feel uncomfortable when asked to help out at school because their English skills or educational background do not give them a solid classroom footing. For these families, the living classroom of a garden can be a much more inviting environment in which to engage their children's education."

Flanagan notes, "if this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education."

Here's the link to Flanagan's piece:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/school-yard-garden

For myself, I think the Edible Schoolyard and similar programs are a good idea, but could be started much, much earlier like a "head start" program or as a complement to kindergarten. By sixth grade, eating patterns and tastes are already formed. Early agri-learning work wouldn't compete with later core learning kids need to get into college and succeed generally. I don't think my "Mrs. Frieda experience" could be replicated without a league of Black Forest transplants, but I do think U.S. daycare could improve significantly by teaching food values and fill a critical public need (and market niche).

Better than Omnivore's Dilemma? Susan Allport's Food, Sex, Foraging and Love

Leading up to the New Year, I was (and still am) working on two distinctly different kinds of projects. One makes the connection between food and history somewhat indirectly, the other involves research on food and the history of foraging as described in earlier blog entries.

The indirectly-food-related project involves polishing an idea for an illustrated story about displaced polar bears developed in early 2008 (the image included here is a detail of a draft of one frame). Bears go elsewhere when regular food supplies disappear. This seemed like a good starting point for a "road story" involving animals and food (that is, other animals).

Right now, I'm drawing most days. I've learned a lot in the process. Birds are extremely hard to draw. Polar bears can run up to 25 miles an hour. That sort of thing.

But, I've also been thinking about one of the best books on food I've read thus far. I learned about it in the end material for Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma related to his foraging research. I'd argue that Susan Allport's The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love is better than Pollan's book-- at least for those interested in history and food (and animals in my case).

I prefer The Primal Feast because Allport explains the science of food choices, as well as politics, anthropology and the history. And Allport entertains. For example, "migrating birds have been seen gorging themselves on fermented berries, then -- drunk, disoriented, and overweight -- the unlucky ones among them smash into buildings and cars. p. 121)." I feel so validated.

She also gets into the power of meat in the animal world. I was reminded of the Simpsons' episode in which Lisa decides she's a vegetarian in spite of her father's insight, "you don't win friends with salad." Allport provides the science behind this. Winning friends with meat is nature's way.

Here's the info: Susan Allport, The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging and Love, (originally published by Harmony Books 2000, reprinted by iUniverse: Lincoln, Nebraska 2003),

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.

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.