Julie and Julia

     I finally saw this film, about a year after it came out, and am undecided wether Nora Ephron is riffing on or sucked in by the vapid celebrity chef aura that surrounds so many cooking related television shows (and best sellers) that involve egos out of control, rude behavior, and poor decision making. Going gaga over celebrities does not appear related to a commitment to the art and science of cooking, to the practice, learning and teaching of it. Julie's quest was to be, not a cook, but a writer - where "writer" is defined not so much by practice, telling a good story, writing what one knows, creativity, and other typical parameters as by being known as a writer. Possibly this is an unfortunate by-product of universities being in the business of "teaching" people how to write - only to have them end up doing it for money themselves, and even teaching it after knocking off a best seller


     Anyway, once cooking was settled on as a thing to write about, the quest then narrowed to be recognized by some (any?) food expert or celebrity, and especially Julia Child. Cooking was a means to that end rather than valued intrinsically. The chorus of blog reader's support seemed to cement the popular conceptualization - and without them, Ephron seems to hint, Julie would have hung up her electronic toque. The film's comparison of the lives of Julie and Julia is a rich vein of feminist social commentary that I never seem to be able to tell how or if Ephron intends us to parse in her films. Included is a vignette of Julia's attempting to "do something" by learning hat making before settling on cooking as her true path. Julia sincerely followed a natural progression that relied heavily on her confidence in taking chances and wish to change the world for the better. Perhaps being different in terms of height fostered her openness to be different in other ways. She also had the good sense to marry someone who saw her as an equal. It was Julia's passion for food and cooking along with frustration that French cookbooks were unavailable in English translation that sensitized her to be ready for the opportunity to share what she had found out about French food that eventually came about through Madames Beck and Bertoilles. 


     By contrast, Julie's choice of following in one year all the recipes of volume one of Mastering the Art of French Cooking and writing about it seemed to have sprung from oddly mixed motivations such as proving untrue her mom's critique that Julie never finished anything, comparing herself to someone she knew who was published, therapeutically buffering herself from the trauma of her call center job, and doing something that would obtain attention. It had the mark of a stunt, like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Interestingly, although Julie claims inheritance of Mastering from her mom and cites a memory of her mom cooking something great from it (beef burgundy), 2001 was the year that the 40th anniversary edition of the book hit the streets - a fact that cannot have been lost on real life New Yorker Julie Powell as she cast about for something to write about that might have financial traction.


    One of the many details linking writing and cooking as a contrivance came when Julie asked her husband to guess who was coming to dinner. My guess was that it would be her mom, to whom Julie (supposedly) owed part of her success acquiring blog readers by her example of cooking that very beef dish and by putting Mastering into her hands. Instead, it was a famous person she never met who happened to be Julia Child's editor. Having a good name and valuing ones career, wether humble or very elevated, is all fine and good of course, nothing against famous people here. But how embarrassing to fawn over someone just because she is Julia Child's editor! As a friend once colorfully described the silliness of a celebrity: "Does she think she shits ice cream?". I was not surprised that the invitation was declined; rather, it seemed just. 


     Of the many reviews and comments I have come across for Julie & Julia, the one that most closely agrees with my analysis but is exponentially smoother and more incisive than anything I can write is found here:http://www.troubleandstrife.org/?page_id=263 .  I shall offer no more critique and defer to this as I believe it best captures the complexities of the film.


   Yet there is an air of recursiveness about Nora Ephron's work that prompts me to look again, to find referential details and wonder about their genesis. Most interesting for me are the comments* (see below) offered by Meryl Streep and Nora Ephron on the Charlie Rose show that indicate that the character of Julia Child in the film was a patchy, significantly skewed construct of Julie's based on her limited understanding of who Julia Child was and what she did. So is this a reflection of Ephron's accurate understanding that her audience will see what they are prepared to see, like Julie, and yet a subversive and artful tactic to draw them to learn more about the real Julia, since of course the film generated widespread interest for people to read Julia's work and view her old shows? The renewed interest in cooking and in Julia Child is at least one unambiguous benefit of the film - another being, I hope, that people who ought not to may stop writing about food and cooking hoping for a similar "success" - or will this just encourage more blogging for bucks? In another facet of this recursiveness Meryl Streep once had an interaction with Julia Child when a younger Streep asked for Child's support for an organic food organization. Julia declined, but it was a mistake she would later work to correct when she realized that organic food was crucial to cooking and health. 


   As for how the film yin yang's (forgive the use as a verb) with my own life, I had to laugh out loud at the part where Julie fell asleep on the couch because once, when as a teenager I made croissants from Julia's recipe, I had a similar experience. I had begun after lunch the mixing, raising, folding, and resting to get all the laminations needed for a good baked croissant. Of course I had done other things that day but the time I expended to get it right was extensive and it was close to midnight by the time I put the fully proofed and eggwashed crescents - some plain, some with a bit of chocolate or raspberry in the center - in the oven. Just for a few minutes, or so I thought, I lay down on the couch, When I awoke, the fire alarm was blaring and my sisters, mom, and dad were rushing down the stairs in terror at the noisette smoke filling the house. I leapt to my feet, rushed the pans of charcoal croissants out to the back door, and tossed them into the rather deep snow we had at the time. A singular sound emitted from the snow on receiving the overdone, charred laminations - a sound I expect I never again will experience. Later, after being thoroughly and rightfully given what for by my family, as I was cleaning up, I snuck out and broke open some of the croissants - scientific curiosity added to maternal feelings of loss of what I had come to feel were my little children. I ate the centers, which consisted of about a jumbo cashew shaped portion, looked up into the wintery stars, and felt some sort of perverse completion
at the unique and wonderful taste. My mom reminded me recently that this was also the occasion for a bird to enter into the basement due to the back door being propped open. 
    
    Also, I work in a kitchen in which Ms. Child once taught, in roughly 1962, as she was working on The French Chef. My informant was a man, an MIT student in the early sixties, who was in a cooking class I was leading back in 2005 . He had been a student in some of these classes, and commented that the pegboard ....

had come about due to the influence of Paul Child. At the time I was astounded by the information, though it makes perfect sense given the Harvard Square location, but I am not a good researcher, else I would have got his full name and address. My excuse is that at the time I was preoccupied with fighting the special education system's bungling of my son's education. If anyone knows more, please tell me.


   Finally, I also worked at a call center as a senior agent for Federal Express whose speciality was taking calls from irate customers and those with impossible problems, the solving of whose issues earned me scores of management commendations and appreciative customer letters. Other agents would pass these off to me when faced with a demand to speak to a manager. I did not know a call center would be part of the film and it gave me flashbacks.


*
MERYL STREEP:  So it was already kind of caricatured in your head.  
And I didn’t want to -- I wanted to look at her in the idealized way that 
Julie did.  I wanted, because this is Julie’s imagined Julia, in her head 
she imagines this gal in Paris with her -- with her husband.  And I think 
because it’s in this rosy (ph) hue, I just wanted to make it as real as it 
could possibly be but I didn’t feel that I really had to adhere to every 
piece of research I’d done on Julia.  I just wanted to make a human being 
that lived.


NORA EPHRON:  Well, we don’t know.  But in -- you know, there’s no 
question that the Julia we show in the movie was Julie Powell’s idea, you 
know.  And I certainly in reading about her thought oh, I’m not like that.  
I’m just not like that.  She’s a much better human being than I will ever 
be.  And I think -- I think you share that --that feeling.


MERYL STREEP:  Yes.


CHARLIE ROSE:  You have said this before, that Nora gave you kind of 
direction that -- when she told you she needed you to embody, you said this 
earlier, Julia Powell’s idea of Julia Child.


NORA EPHRON:  Yeah.  That wasn’t me.  That was Meryl’s idea, that was 
-- that was one of the ways Meryl .


CHARLIE ROSE:  To get on to it.


MERYL STREEP:  Yeah, that’s one of the ways that I could climb on and 
not feel too guilty about it.


My favorite image of Julia

The taste of yesterday

   Topsoil - the priceless foundation sustaining humanity - has been of interest and concern since the Mayan and Egyptian empires and earlier. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver, Helen Caldicott, and Mark Kurlansky are a few of the more well known who have voiced alarm at what any wise farmer could tell us: topsoil, good clean dirt, is - by far too many people - not accorded the respect it deserves.

   Many generations of humanity pass by while topsoil acquires its magical, microbial, womblike ability to nurture the lives of plants and house its myriad tiny residents - fungi, bacteria, enzymes, nematodes, copepods, diatoms. Topsoil is grander than the Grand Canyon, older than giant sequoias, and more valuable than any gold or diamond mine. It's amazing features are hidden in plain sight, looking so ordinary to most people as to be relatively invisible, "just" dirt.

    Wether we have a tiny piece of turf by the front steps in the city or larger pieces of land under our care, it is amazing how much can be done to help. Even more amazing is that it helps itself -witness the weeds in the tiny cracks of sidewalks, coming about due to topsoil constituting itself from windblown materials in the crack that had been tiny and relatively sterile at first. To save coffee grounds, egg shells, vegetable scraps, and other non-animal based tidbits for a compost bin or pile (at the community garden in the city if you have no room yourself) is one of many small acts helpful to topsoil.

    A practice as simple as keeping a kitchen compost container stimulates awareness of connection to earth's topsoil, growing things deepens this, and in the act of eating is an opportunity to appreciate the incredible behind-the-scene processes that have gone into, say, a tomato, a golden beet, or a blueberry. It may be so that some people have been genetically bequeathed impaired smell and taste, some end up with superior abilities, and most are about average. I believe that we all tend to do less with this facility than we could, and to fall prey to the urgings of evolutionarily imbalanced perceptions which prompt us to go for the salt, the fat, and the sweet. Profit motives of corporations play up this affinity for certain flavors. And cultural influences shift people towards or away from bitter, umami, sweet, sour, and salty.

     But there is much more to taste than these five common designations, that much is clear. More than any of us will likely ever know. Certain individuals have what seems to be super powers - able to pinpoint a wine's vintage, determine the exact location to harvest truffles, hunt, guide the production of cheese, beer, tofu, or agricultural products, and detect or react to minute and varied molecules. Most of us do not have to be super powered to appreciate the difference between a home grown blueberry or tomato and one we buy - or even the difference between eating right off the vine or after storage for some period. Sadly, most of us don't get such opportunities. One of the more fascinating lines of inquiry that intersects such fields as paleobotany, human evolution, climate change, diet and allergy, anthropology, and our relationship with plants is the effort to look into the origins of agriculture. 

     It appears that in terms of human evolution, agriculture, and by extension, our messing around with/closer relationship with topsoil, it a relatively recent development. Some scientists argue persuasively that the "comfort food" of today may represent the opportunity to feed a craving for exorphins - opioid peptides found in both certain foods and produced by the body and of importance in the brain to influence stress, pain, pleasure, motivation, and attachment. The popularity of corn syrup, pizza, french fries, and so on attests to the power of this bio-feedback system - and to the fact that it is not necessarily adaptive.

     Apparently, the neolithic era during which evidence of agriculture's beginnings are found correlates with the glacial and interglacial cycle that favors annual crops - such as grains. And this correlates to the growth of larger communities centered in one place and dedicated to grain production. Technology, animal domestication (e.g. dairy farming), more radical hierarchical social structure, and most of the things we recognize as civilization (e.g. libraries, arts, law, ritual and culture) then had a foothold - in the topsoil. 

    Which brings me back to my topic: memory of taste. I began by thinking about my personal memories. Although aging probably influences not only how things taste but how much we might remember of tastes long past, I am convinced that food, water, and beverages did not taste the same 40 years ago or so, when I was a child, as they now do. Some things seem relatively unchanged, others completely different or nearly unrecognizable. I can name cantaloupe, carrots, milk, chocolate, and other things but the differences are also influenced by how the food has been grown - some carrots  do taste more like a carrot than others.  My informal surveys of other people tells me I am not alone in this general impression. Recently, one person described the phenomena as things tasting washed out nowadays. This is a case of nostalgia with bases in agriculture, neurology and pharmacology. It's a case of something conspicuous by its absence, some missing bits of nutrient, electrical charge, or biochemical complex that gave rise to a certain changes in potency of taste that people can detect. 

     It is obvious that the first generation of crops grown on vintage or untouched land creates a very different result than the tenth or thousandth. The amount of such land left today can be assumed quite tiny. Instead, soil tends to be "fertilized" (a misnomer if ever there was one, since it implies an instantaneous restoration of what took ages to develop and/or preserve) and modified. And the crops grown are ever more genetically engineered, and altered by the washed out soil itself along with whatever pesticides, herbicides, radioactive fallout, and unstable compounds have been introduced. Such an agricultural system that results in washed out food and in destruction of small farms in favor of more profitable production of more and more tasteless things like corn syrup does not seem worthy of support. And the support it does have seems to be largely based in larger segments of the population having no memories of what food was like when grown in healthy soil without the various nasty treatments it receives today - at least on non-organic farms. Organic farms and sustainable practices respect topsoil and, therefore, taste. 

     But there may be taste memory built in, genetically transmitted, that helps people who are introduced to good, honest, organic and/or sustainably produced food to recognize that what they are tasting is genuinely good. A promising thing to remember. 

  

Poisoning lawns

At Home Depots, garden supply, and hardware stores across the country alarmingly large piles of things like "Grubex", fertilizers, herbicides, and other poisonous materials in 40 pound bags are displayed. Homeowners are causing untold amounts of pollution, spread of toxic wastes, groundwater contamination, and harm to pets, children, pregnant women, and fireflies - to name a few. 

I see little flags everywhere on lawns - flags meaning "poison is here!". It absolutely infuriates me to see these not only on people's private property - since poison and fertilizer will clearly leach out beyond puny property lines and affect fish, birds, insects, mammals, et al - but audaciously applied to the little strips of grass on sidewalks, which is public property! 

The facts on lawn chemicals are easy to find, but civic authorities, homeowners, so called lawn care companies, and certainly retailers of poisons are for the most part uninterested. The firefly is a sort of canary in the coal mine, and a pretty good rallying point on which to raise issues of other collateral damage in the world of lawn warfare. You can sign up with Boston's Museum of Science to get involved in the welfare of fireflies; this site also makes a good classroom project.

Lawns are a hot topic due to the commercial brainwashing that has taken place since about the end of WWII. Products used in warfare have tended to find a way to be used on lawns - so wars are never really over: the field of battle has merely shifted. Lawns are big business to several classes of manufactures of course, not just companies like Scotts. Real estate markets promote toxic practices by the now commonplace term,"Curb Appeal".  Those who make and use leaf blower machines are only a small, though extremely annoying, sub group of the social obsession hell bent upon achieving the perfect lawn. I imagine a world in which we all grew blueberries instead of supporting this vast and harmful complex of industries.

There are also subtle ways that, though not a direct effect of "lawn care", have almost certainly caused death and/or devastation to some through the simple fact that most of these "lawn care" contractors, with their dump trucks and trailers festooned with the tools of the trade, park right in the roadway! They even put up little red emergency cones, as if what they are doing takes precedence over the safety or right of way of passersby and neighbors. How many bicyclists, pedestrians, and motorists have been injured or killed through this type of rude behavior is perhaps unknown. But I often see close calls as people are distracted from where they are going by the roadside commotion or swerve to avoid riding mowers or plumes of blown debris that intrude into the road. 

Why the police are not called upon to order these folks off the road is simply one more piece of the twisted urban mores that surround "lawn care" and legitimize that done by some that causes harm to the many. The irony is that many of the heaviest consumers of these destructive products and practices never actually sit on their grass to enjoy a picnic, roll in it
with their kids, or see the blades for the lawn.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus ( MRSA )

Listening in the car to Terri Gross, NPR's amazing interviewer of interesting people, the other day with Science journalist Maryn McKenna on the show, I knew I had to write something here. Ms. McKenna led me to ponder once again in amazement at the sheer idiocy demonstrated by governments that fail to connect the dots when it comes to food and poisoning the earth(and much more). The basic point is: antibiotics in food production systems are a humongous threat to everyone. Think: chunks of your flesh pussing out and falling off, amputations, nightmarish inversions to what was before health and happiness.

You see, minute doses of antibiotics are given to livestock (other things like the hormone rBHT are used to dose-for-profit) as it has been found that doing so increases the rate and limits of growth. That means more money for the unscrupulous corporations that employ these tactics to beef up profits at the expense of your health and that of the planet. Antibiotics in a treatment size dosage are typically administered to an entire herd/flock even if one or just a few individuals are ill- and perhaps without any testing to actually see if the illness is bacterial. Doctors often do this with people - they recommend megadoses of antibiotics and while their hand hovers over the prescription form I ask for a test to see if the problem is bacterial and get that look. You know which look I mean: "Who is the doctor here?"

Anyway, the end result is logical. Bacteria find a way to adapt and overcome all of this antibacterial weaponry and become immune to it. That means if you or those you love come in contact with MRSA - and it is not the only superbug out there - and it takes hold, you are basically doomed since no antibiotics will be effective against it (MRSA already mutated beyond all the antibiotics it was exposed to). Although, some essential oils like tea tree oil are effective against it! Cool.

So what can be done? Idiocy in policy and law cannot be cured, alas. However, you can buy only meat that is organic and/or raised completely without antibiotics. Becoming a vegan is an attractive option as well. But not a sure thing - MRSA can be picked up in a lot of places (especially hospitals). Be careful handling meat. Wash your hands and have your kids wash hands - a lot. But not with antibacterial soap - these just add to the problem so don't buy antibacterial anything. In particular be careful of raw meats. The path of transmission is likely from them to your skin. Touching public doorknobs and other common objects (e.g. subway straps) is risky. Ms. McKenna advises a personal size sanitizing method (purell or cloths etc). Check out the interview.