Category: Food and Gardening

Corn ripened early. Not big but looks tasty.

After months of trying not to think about my wine, which was easy, really, because I have been so busy, I just couldn’t wait any longer. I took a bottle over to Sarah’s house (Of Eat Grow Think) and we drank it over a great home cooked meal.

It was really good, though, as Sarah pointed out, it did have some yeast flavors to it. Take it or leave it, the yeast wasn’t too strong, nor detracted from the rest of the wine. As I understand it, letting the wine sit on the lees early on is a stylistic choice often pursued outside of France. Overall the wine really reminded me of a rough Burgundy style wine. Some of the choices I made early on paid off. For example I knew I wasn’t going to age it in oak (at a couple of gallons, it just wasn’t possible) so I crushed the grapes with some of the stems to add in some acid that the wine would need. Also, since I was making such a small amount, I knew the wine wasn’t going to mature in “bulk”, so I only racked it once, kept it nice and sealed up, and then let it sit on the lees. All in hopes of flushing out the flavors quickly and protecting it from oxygen.

The results was a very buttery complete wine. Luckily, all the malic acid I picked up from the stems went to lactic acid thorough malolactic fermentation. It was lucky because I didn’t induce it, occurring naturally. The tannic acid also held up along with some good berry notes and lots of floral aroma.

I got totally lucky, you might say, but that is how it happens at home. If I were to try this again exactly the same way, it would turn out totally different. All-in-all, I am absolutely stoked to enjoy a few bottles of Little House Viozinho, knowing I made it from scratch, and because it is so drinkbale. Cheers!

I know its pretentious to name the first and only five bottles of my ultra-micro-batch wine, particularly when I’m not releasing it to anyone, nor is it likely to be good, but I am doing it anyway. “Vintage” also assumes some sort of tradition or wine knowledge where I have control of the process beyond smashing grapes, adding yeast and putting it in bottles. I’m naming the experiment, though, because wine is basically about pretention these days, no?

During all these long months with my wine sitting on lees, and my laziness to rack it, I read The Judgment of Paris, by George M. Taber. It is a good book that describes the wine industry, with all the players invovled in the 1976 Paris wine tasting, where California wines, for the first time, were heald up to French wines and met there match. The event was controversial then, and now. There is even a movie about it to, but it tells the story quite differently. Taber was the only journalist there, and the book he has written is filled with all the back stories and consequences of the Paris tasting, as only a “Time Magazine” journalist could tell it.

I started reading the book while enroute over the Atlantic. It was my first time traveling to Europe, a trip that included time in Spain, France, and Germany, and included three nights in Paris. My good freind Sarah Chavis, my partner in crime with the Eat Grow Think podcast suggested the book (we will be talking about in a future podcast.) There was a lot in the book I hadn’t known, and there were tons of moments where I would tell myself, “Oh, that’s where that name comes from,” or “Oh, I’ve seen wine from that winery on the top shelf way out of my reach. Now, I know the back story.” My trip had me driving through Bordeaux, and visiting wine Caves (only a few), so it was super cool to be getting the full experience from multiple sides of the historic wine tasting of 1976.

I grew up in California, and still live near many of the wineries in the book, and from the tasting. Our local markets, the ones with good wine selections, actually have products from many of the famous California wineries that came into prominence back in the seventies. A couple of names even rang some bells, because I’ve met their children/grandchildren, or seen buildings named after them at UC Davis, or various other northern California institutions.

So much of what was in that book, not only lined up with my experiences on my very recent trip to Europe, but also growing up near Napa Valley and the Santa Cruz mountains. It touched on the history I have been reading about of my city and neighborhood, and it kindled my passions and hobbies of growing, eating and fermenting foods and drink.

I was inspired to go down and check on my wine from last fall, and finally put it into bottles. I checked it first, thinking it would be vinigar. It was dark and tawny, and I was convinced it was spoiled. To my surprise, it still tasted like wine, though it was a little rough. In fact it was pretty much exactly how I made it, strong and acidy, and I would consider it very drinkable. It is still very young, for any sort of wine, and even more so for I wine with so much acid in it (I crushed it down to seads and stems, including a lot of the juice that would be thrown out in a winery, since I had so few grapes to work with.) Even so, It smelled wonderful; my wife agreed, which says a lot considering she smells a million times better than I do. It also had good mouth feel. Some of that acid was buttery, and coated the mouth. It had strong fruit notes with a hint of suger left, but lasted long and finished sharp. All that gives me hope that it might age well for the next year or two.

Now, I am excited about growing grapes and making wine in addition to drinking and exploring the amazing wineries nearby. My wine was an experiment at first, but now it means something else. It means that adding some knowledge and hands on experience could lead me to some fun new food and drink vistas. The fun of connecting to history, experiencing new tastes and smells, and learning about my place is also rewarding. I am eager to keep delving deeper into this world. Now, I just gotta figure out where to get more grapes, and plan out some trips to the local wineries.

My family and I almost always go to the De Anza flea market each month. We usually don’t buy anything, but there is always lots of great stuff to look at, and occasionally we do find things (My son always finds a carito, though.)

Over the summer, I happened to stumble upon this pair of hand shears for the garden. They felt really good in my hand and were nice and solid. Other pairs I have had were not expensive, had plastic parts, and eventually broke after lots of frustration. This pair had a dull edge, and a little rust, but I figured they would be an improvement; probably just ending up as a set of placeholders until I went out and bought a “real” pair of shears. Each part of the shears was steel, and they fit my big hands, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong spending, maybe, ten bucks on them.

I asked the guy “how much?” He looked at the rusty shears and gave me back, “three dolars,” as if he was asking too much. I gladly agreed to the price.

If you have pruned trees before, you know that anything but the highest quality shears will make your hand sore, and mangle any branch you try to cut. Even if you can keep them sharp, they usually are just adequate. Good shears that hold an edge, and stay nice and tight are both hard to come by, and quite expensive. I have never invested time and money in a good pair, but they are something I wanted and needed.

Fast forward six months: After another day of pruning in a long pruning season, for some reason, I brought in my shears and laid them on my desk, instead of wiping them and sticking them in the basement. Having a pair of sharp shears in front of you, is enough distraction for anyone. I looked them over carefully. I played with them. And eventually, I Googled the name stamped on the side to see what I could find. Nothing.

I thought, “Weird. Usually every make has some sort of history.” So I looked a little harder and finally found a reference in a digitized orchard book called “Pruning the Apple Orchard.”

Here are a couple excerpts:

It was printed in 1905!

So after a long season of pruning, I have discovered that my go-to shears, and best pair I have ever owned, are actually 108 years old, and were at one time the highest quality shears made. After a good cleaning and sharpening in the Fall, they have stayed sharp, and served me well. They pinched me a few times, but, now, they function as an extension of my hand; a great tool.

It may sound odd to non-gardeners, but these shears make me really happy. I love them. They are my little treasure, and knowing their history only adds to their value for me. They may be worth some money, or maybe not, but they have become a cherished tool I wouldn’t sell. What a great find.

For starters I don’t rule out any food because of its nutrient makeup. It’s like saying I won’t look at a painting, because it has pink in it, and pink is not a good color. It’s absurd. “Non fat,” “No sugar,” “low cholesterol,” and other such “No” foods are just as absurd. (Like I said, though, I should be nuanced and relaxed in my choices. There are exceptions to the “no’s”, but I’ll get into that in a bit.) Our bodies are designed to function best on a whole range of foods that contain all those “no” things. In fact, we need all those things, and in large amounts for a normal active body. There is good reason why we enjoy fat, sugar, and salt after all.

There are differences between foods, though, don’t get me wrong. When food is “designed” to hit pleasure centers, instead of being grown, prepared and cooked, it is probably overloaded with fat, sugar, or salt, and probably all three. When that happens, we then have to start thinking about where those nutrients are coming from, and how they ended up in our food. Unfortunately, the gift of food science that saved so many people a hundred years ago has now become the basis for a historically new food manufacturing industry.

When “fast” food (my name for anything that comes from a food scientist instead of a farmer then chef,) is developed, it is pieced together from individual nutrients. The manufacturers have broken all the bonds between compounds that make them food, so they can manipulate them into some product that satisfies a person’s emotional state, and not act as food. Fast food is about triggering satiation and pleasure, not about the whole experience of eating food.

The “no’s” that I avoid are actually the nutrient ingredients of manufactured products; things like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, sodium benzoate, etc. Those ingredients tell me that the item in hand is not, in fact, food in the natural sense. It may satisfy my desire for food, but it won’t provide my body with all the effects and benefits of food.

When all the “no’s” come in the form of actual food, they will always carry with them a rich variety of compounds, both in the form of vitamins and minerals, and a whole host of other compounds we don’t know much about. First, all that food interacts with our saliva, releasing aromas and flavors that can’t be reproduced by nutritional substance manufacturers. Then food provides a sensation of substance we relate to texture and fullness, and we feel it all the way down to the stomach. During digestion, all those compounds set off a chain of events that are so complex that it is impossible to know the whole process. What we do know ( through the good science that comes out of medical centers, not the “food” industry,) is that everything down to the shape of those compounds can have an effect on what our body does in response.

For example, sugar comes in a few different varieties, but in many shapes and combinations. Some of those combinations that come to us in natural fruits can pass straight into the blood, giving us a boost of energy and brain power. Other forms are incredibly tough to digests, and require special enzymes to digest like lactose. Others still, like the artificially products coming from high-fructose corn syrup, can’t be metabolized at all until it gets well into our digestive system, and then it trigers a chemical switch that causes us to store it as raw fat calories regardless of whether we need the sugar boost or not.

Sugar is one of the best know compounds and simplest to understand, so now imagine all those other more complex things we eat like amino acids (the building blocks of protein) carotenoids, and alkaloids (think caffeine, and the thousands of compounds that are very similar, affecting the nervous system in a range of ways.) Never mind all the other celluloids, lipids and complex organic molecules out there. The list is endless, and the combinations even longer. Our bodies are designed for them as much they are for us, and no nutrient break down will compensate or explain much of it.

So the next time you catch yourself talking about, or considering the nutrients of your food or nutritional products, tell yourself that in reality, even the most informed “you” has no real idea what you are talking about. Even the highly trained college educated nutritionists, and food scientists out there don’t have a clue about the complex nature of most “good” foods either. (Obviously if you have a medical condition, there may be specific things you need to avoid to make sure your drugs work, but in general this holds.)

When we have problems with the things we eat, they can usually be traced to the non-food things we eat like junk food, supplements and industrialized products, not the actual food we eat. More likely, these problems are just a result of eating too much, period. Real foods like fruit, whole non-industrialized grains, vegetables, and properly raised meats and dairy affect us in more profound ways than simple nutrient reactions. They buffer the bad things, and let our metabolisms do their good work. They drive our biologies and let us feel it working. The complex nature of real food is what makes eating so rewarding for us.

As Pollen described so famously in Omnivore’s Dilema, we need some basis for what is good to eat, or we will eat anything that is food-like. It is our omnivore’s dilema to figure out what is good to eat. We fill in that need with nutrient info, and “expert scientific” advice, but traditionally we as people have had other ways to learn those lessons. From history, we’ve learned that when we eat and drink whole, or fermented foods in small amounts together in groups of loved ones we become healthier. When we are active in mind and body, and know how much food we need for that lifestyle, our lives become healthier. Well grown, well prepared, and well cooked food, generates well people.

As the holiday season fades in a few weeks, and a new year faces us, many will set out, either through resolution, or just looks in the mirror, to cut back on calories, do more exercise, lose some weight, or more generally just get healthy. But what does “healthy” really mean when it comes to food and our behaviors?

For most of us, health is a rather elusive state that seems to shift out from under us every few months. This is because we don’t know what it is. As a result, media, marketers and our own psyches play tricks on us to make us feel we are lacking that missing ingredient in our health.

For people with chronic illness, lack of pain might be the ideal “healthy.” For the terminal patient, another few months of just being alive could be all the health he or she wants. In my twenties health was all about being able to play a full game of soccer, or climb up a rock gym. There is also a whole other way of thinking that describes health as a mental state of well being. In the end, health is a fairly relative term that varies from person to person, and moment to moment. I think we can all get a handle on it, though, if we do some philosophizing.

When it comes to food, I have built a philosophy around the idea that foods are neither good, nor bad, but nutritionalism and “fast” food are.

When is food healthy? When it has high nutritional numbers? Low in fat? Sugar? Salt? Low calories? Or some discovered health benefit? Is it healthy when it has a label of “natural,” “organic,” or even “healthy?”

For countless generations people ate food to survive, and enjoyed it whenever they could. Enjoyment usually meant the addition of fat, salt, or sugar, and often all three. People didn’t use to live very long, yet were very active physically and mentally. Food was an active part of their health, but only because they were eating it.

It is a misconception that contemporary people have a leg up on our great grandparent, pesant ancestors because of our “health knowledge.” The reality is that our ancestors did actually know every sign of health very well. Their lives depended on it. Strong bodies and sharp reasoning were needed every day to keep food on the table. Whether it was on the farm, at the shop, or in a factory, people knew their bodies well, how much they could do, and how much food they needed to do it. They saw health, with all its nuanced glory in their animals, themselves, and in each other.

True, they didn’t have the scientific knowledge to back it up, and superstitions were often wrong, but then again there wasn’t a need for more “knowledge,” because people were healthy as a matter of course; or at least didn’t live long enough to know the difference. Actual contagious diseases were the enemy then, not our self inflicted stress illnesses. Our ancestors had medical problems, not health problems. Those things are too very different, yet related things that often become conflated in our over-informed society.

When scientists began to understand the nature of nutrients in the mid-twentieth century, they were able to find ways to rid society of mal-nutrition, but it didn’t actually make the rest of us normally-nourished people any “healthier.” Mal-nutrition was a medical problem then, and not the health indicator it is now. In Western society, there is really no such thing as mal-nutrition anymore, even amongst the poorest of us. When compared to the dire conditions that true famine and starvation caused in the past, and still do in areas of the world like Sub-Saharan Africa, minor boughts of “not-in-perfect-health” are a mere shadow.

Taking all that into consideration, why are we so concerned with “nutrients” in our food? Unless a doctor has tested you and found that there is a medical problem, few are actually in danger of nutrient problems. I hear people talk about protein and vitamins all the time, I do it to, instead of food. We should be talking about the body’s reaction to that food, as in taste, vitalization, and satisfaction. Nutrients, and the corresponding nutritionalism, are small parts of the wrong puzzle for most of us.

Our bodies don’t react, or function on nutrients. In fact, they require, and function on food. So what is food, then? For one, it is not simply the carier of nutrients. Food is a conglomeration of emotions, sustenance, and a giant mix of compounds. On any given day or given meal, no one can be totally sure what food does nutritionally in the body. It is a short term stimulus, and a long term metabolic stabilizer. Food is the sum of everything beyond the air we breath that keeps us alive.

Food is so wondrous and complex, we need to relax about it, and with it, then build a nuanced approach to eating. A big part of my choices now revolve around being a vegetarian (with some fish once in a while), but there are a whole bunch of other considerations to eating healthy, too.