(originally posted September 29, 2010)
Healdsburg made a joyful noise on Saturday night ~ especially on our part of Center Street where 200 elegantly dressed people of all ages came together and kissed, wept, drank, ate, laughed, told stories, then lost their shoes and danced their hearts out. Our weddings are always very special, but something else was in the air as well. As if the brief return of a warm night coupled with the sense that only a few weeks are left of summer heightened the mood so it swelled beyond the happiness felt by this particular couple and their families and friends. It reminded me how important it is going to be in the coming year to express delight whenever we can. We will continue to face seemingly insurmountable problems ~ a faltering economy, an ailing ecology, a paucity of leadership ~ that history has placed at our door. Most solutions will come in tiny packages. All but a few will seem to take too much time. Many of us reading this will not be around to see how it all plays out for our children and grandchildren. But we are in the game right now, and each of us with a powerful role to play. With the stakes so high, we need to keep from feeling overwhelmed. It’s essential we stop when we can to acknowledge that good things are still happening, though sometimes they need a jump start.
The first thought we came up with to keep the parties going ~ stay tuned for lots more ~ was to open the Gallery for musical evenings, films, talks and fun cocktail parties of any size. We will waive all facility rental fees to make use of the space more affordable. Our menus will be keenly priced, but will continue to be sourced locally and sustainably. Our farmers need to feed their bottom line, as do we, but we want Studio Barndiva to feed something else as well ~ a sense that as a community we have a great deal to be thankful for.
We like the French word soirée, even though it sounds a bit poncy, because it really does capture what we’d like to see happen in the Studio. To wit: “An evening party or social gathering esp. one held for a particular purpose” yes, that hits the nail on the head! Besides, it rhymes with archway, which is nice. Sometimes friendship alone pulls us through to the next courtyard in life, sometimes it’s music, or the spoken word. The point is to keep moving in an interesting direction. Yet real social contact is precisely what our all-consuming electronic media is robbing us of. What’s most important when we come together in groups, after the work of the day is done, is often simply that we are together. And while it’s great when you know people at a party, often it’s more exciting when you don’t. In a community our size ~ with so many interests and passions and so much talent to express them ~ it almost doesn’t matter what draws you away from the campfire of your hi-def screens and out to the town square. Your presence alone has the power to redefine the space, and claim it. Not knowing the outcome is part of the magic.
Of course it helps when there is great food and drink ~ which we will happily provide. When Ryan first came to us we weren’t sure how he would feel about all our weddings and special events. Lots of chefs look down on events, understandably. It’s not just the amount of work that goes into coordinating them. From a chef’s point of view, because of the timing and the sheer number of plates, most often they don’t showcase a chef’s talent in the way fine dining does.
Taking his cues from Lukka, whose joie de vivre is legendary, Ryan has fun with the menus, be they family style or comprised of many wine paired courses. He approaches a glitzy Oscar Night or a serious dinner where each course is paired with the dirt it was grown in with the same intensity, and as his talent blossoms it reflects on each and every farmer partner. Even for those working the events the sheer exuberance and style of our parties is contagious. By summer’s end we will have sent thousands of people back to their own cities and towns across the country talking about what’s going on in Healdsburg. Not just Barndiva ~ but the connection they made here with the surrounding community. Hopefully it sent them looking to recreate parts of that experience closer to home.
By making the story of local sourcing the point of our food, we haven’t relegated Ryan’s talent anymore than Bonnie Z’s, whose gift for arranging flowers is sometimes subsumed by the sheer extravagance of her locally grown blooms. Talent and product become indispensable to each other, and for the end user, indistinguishable. We all live in cultivated landscapes, in self-curated spaces. What we choose to seed and grow and prune is up to us. If only a fraction of our wedding guests go back to their hometowns and seek out a Farmer’s Market, that’s a fraction more than had the desire to do so when they sat down and unfurled their napkins on a warm summer night beneath the fairy lit arches in our gardens.
But make no mistake: Joy is the carrier of that message. And Joy, while clearly not in abundance these days, does not need a wedding to thrive.
So listen up: If you own a business and want to say thanks for a year of hard work (with another yet to come) or are a group of friends wanting to meet up to raise high the roof beams, we want to make Studio Barndiva ~ and the food and drink we serve ~ available to you. While we hope you will join us for some of our upcoming scheduled events (first up: the opening party for the much anticipated Susan Preston Exhibit: One Button Off) consider this an invitation to think up your own reason for a soirée in the coming months ~ rhyme it as you will.
(originally posted September 22, 2010)
(originally posted September 8, 2010)
A few weeks back a journalist called looking for a quote for an article she was writing on the salmonella debacle, whose horrifying revelations were then just beginning to unfold. The first quotable words that came out of my mouth when she asked what I thought (lots of expletives having preceded them) were “It’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Which, sadly, it is. It’s a travesty that the simple egg, which even comes out of the animal that produces it in its own sanitary container, can be made into a lethal weapon. But that is by no means the only potentially dangerous food heading your way courtesy of a hydra-headed corporate food industry that has been built to put its own profitability before the health and safety of its customers. Up next: more meat recalls. Still, even for someone as skeptical as I am about the business practices of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), it was shocking to read that one single company alone (family owned no less) was capable of producing 2.3 million eggs a week in its Clarion, Ohio facility. We’re talking 60 million chickens folks, housed in hanger-sized industrial roosts where they lived, laid their eggs, and died inhabiting spaces the size of a shoebox. It’s not like you can take a broom and clean out a henhouse that size with the help of the neighbors.
Not these neighbors at any rate. From all available reports most of them either worked for the DeCoster family or had businesses dependent to some extent upon them. After I hung up I began to wonder at the mindset of someone living in Clarion, traveling to work every day, passing “millions of gallons of manure and putrid animal carcasses” heaped, in plain sight, beside facilities where rat excrement in the chicken feed was eventually found to be the cause of the outbreak. What were they thinking? At what point does self-interest begin to take a back seat to a greater concern for the health and safety of the community at large?
It’s easy to judge the community of Clarion in hindsight, but the truth is they are not alone in turning a blind eye to the perils of modern food production. Most Americans have come to accept, even expect, cheap animal proteins in their daily diet. Instead of questioning how a plate of food that includes meat can be sourced, prepared, and served in a fast food restaurant for only $1.99, we complain when we come up against the real cost of food which has been properly farmed. A farmer I know that has a stand at the Farmers Market in Marin, an upscale town if ever there was one, told me a well dressed woman looking at her heirloom tomato prices last week ($1.50 above what we pay for them wholesale at Barndiva) told her “That’s a bit high, don’t you think? I can get six of those at Safeway for the same price.” No, actually, she can’t, not six of ‘those,’ but where is the change in having that conversation, at a Farmers Market no less?
By failing to understanding the real cost of producing food which respects the land and the animals that live on it in a manner which puts health first (their and ours, which in fact is one and the same thing) we have come to validate a false economy. One that, with the shrinking availability of the oil it's wholly dependent upon, is about to crash. The irony here is that when it does it will affect the cost of those "cheap" tomatoes a lot more profoundly than the local, seemingly more expensive ones.
And don’t be fooled by the recent headlines that until the spigot closes, oil based agriculture will be able to help the economy in general in any meaningful way either. The lead article in the New York Times business section on September 1 may have read “strong exports lift agriculture, a bright spot in the U.S. economy,” but the key word in that seemingly optimistic headline wasn't ‘Bright’ ‘Strong’ or ‘Lift.’ It was ‘Exports.’ While the natural catastrophes in Russia, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine which decimated their wheat crops this summer, along with the increasing desperation in China to feed its exploding population have indeed lead to higher prices for wheat and grain produced by American food conglomerates, who really benefits? Read a bit further in the same article and you find out: 75% of the farm production the headline touts as being ‘on the rise’ in this otherwise dreadful economic year occurs in just 12% of the total farms in the country. If the ethically challenged DeCoster’s aren’t representative of that 12%, I’ll eat my hemp hat.
If we can just agree it’s time to understand the real costs involved in producing good safe food and adjust to the fact that it’s going to be a bit higher than we have gotten used to, where do we go from there? We can start by eating less and eating more intelligently, but obviously that alone won’t do it. We need systemic changes in the system ~ food production needs to reflect a sustainable set of values. If food producers are not held to legal standards to accomplish those, we’re doomed. Yet at precisely the moment in our history when we should be pulling together as a nation and demanding oversight and change in a unified voice that will truly serve 'the will of the people' ~ that hallowed historical tenet ~ built into the constitution to save us from ourselves when faced with precisely this kind of scenario ~ has been co-opted.
What do you really know about the Tea Party Movement? Not what you've been led to think ~ a genuine grass roots (neo-conservative) movement ~ but what do you really know about how it’s being funded and what its real agenda is?
Frank Rich wrote an eye-opening editorial two weeks ago in the New York Times in which he noted “There’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental oversight safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety, and the subsistence of the elderly.” A lot of what Rich refers to in “The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party,” which we provide a link for below and urge you to read, was based on a remarkable article published last month in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer. Both articles point to overwhelming evidence that the self-serving interests driving the Tea Party Movement will subvert the very notion of grass roots that has always been relied upon to seek change from the bottom up. Instead, and possibly without the knowledge of most of its members, the TP Movement advances a singular big business agenda that cares about as much for the little guy as the DeCosters cared for their 4.6 million disease riddled chickens. Don’t get me wrong: Americans need to demand change within virtually every Federal Regulatory Agency we’ve entrusted to have our backs when it comes to labor, the environment and food safety. More and more, with every Katrina and BP disaster showing fault lines in federally funded protection agencies we should be able to depend upon, Washington begins to resemble a lawless frontier town where justice is random and graft reigns. But having a lawless town doesn’t mean you don’t need a sheriff, it means you need one whose gun fires more than blanks.
With respect to food, which this newsletter is primarily about each week, if you’re reading this within eating distance of the Sonoma County Foodshed and are tempted to think outbreaks like the Salmonella egg fiasco can’t touch you because you know where your eggs come from, think again. No matter what your individual diet is comprised of right now no matter where you source it, the dismantling of controls over food production will eventually affect all of us.
It’s one thing to be fed up with the quality of "elected representation" masquerading as leadership in Washington ~ I know I am ~ but quite another to think the center will hold in America by dismantling all our flawed but essential public programs simply because they don't serve the vested interests of powerful lobby's and the corporate entities they represent. The very way we define the words “an America of and by the people” is up for grabs, that is the real war being fought right now. As in all wars, the first thing to arm yourselves with is knowledge.
CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories
With respect to The Tea Party we urge you to read Frank Rich’s editorial: The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party, and the Jane Mayer article: Covert Operations, in the New Yorker.
(originally posted August 18, 2010)
(originally posted August 18, 2010)
(originally posted August 4, 2010)
I was happily surprised we only received one complaint after last week’s admittedly bloody newsletter in which Chef Fancher dismembered a 90 lb Fritschen Vineyard’s lamb. ‘ugh, gross” the unsigned email read. Everyone around here figured a vegetarian or a vegan wrote it.
But I’m not so sure. I know from personal experience it could just have easily been written by a passionate carnivore who loves to eat lamb. It is one of my favorites too, but if memory serves me, ‘ugh, gross’ was exactly the thought running through my head many years ago when I found myself face to face with a plate of Stuffed Lamb Heart. I was living in London at the time and it was my first outing to Fergus Henderson’s Mecca of Nose to Tail dining, St John. I fancied myself quite the food adventurer, but while I had devoured a plate of roasted bone marrow and parsley salad, bravely tasted deep fried lamb’s brains on toast and a spoonful of Gratin of Tripe, something about the sight of that heart made me realize what I was playing at wasn't a game. The non-stop plates coming out of this kitchen represented a whole new way of thinking about food, and that scared me. I can’t eat this I told my friends. In reply they didn’t argue or tease. One of them just leaned over the table and quietly asked, What do you have to lose?
Nothing, as it turned out, and an enormous amount to gain. I no longer even remember what that dish tasted like, but the question has stayed with me. It proved especially providential six years ago when I began to start thinking about the kind of food we wanted to serve at Barndiva.
So I’m sympathetic to the awkward part of any food journey, especially nose to tail, which certainly takes some getting used to. Anthony Bourdain was an inspired choice to write the introduction to Henderson’s cookbook, The Whole Beast, when it was finally published in America ~ we all know Bourdain is a guy who will eat anything. But while he was right to call the tome “a proclamation of the true glories of all the neglected bits of animals we love to eat,” for the rest of us he really should have written “neglected bits we should eat, but don’t.” Why we don’t is worth taking a look at.
The reason I was able to persevere after that first dinner at St John was down to the fact that I was living in a country that still valued that kind of cooking, and I had a very patient guide. My husband Geoffrey grew up in a post WW2 England when even getting meat, no matter the cut, was a treat. The recipes his mum relied upon flowed directly from a farmhouse kitchen history that 20 years later Henderson would resurrect and refine at St John. As Bourdain correctly points out, this kind of cooking is the foundation of haute cuisine, but even more to the point, “nearly every part of nearly everything we eat, in the hands of a patient and talented cook, can be delicious ~ something most good cooks and most French and Italian mothers have known for centuries.”
I grew up in the same era as my husband, but our exposure to food was vastly different. For a treat on Sunday he was more likely to be taken to the seaside for mussels, winkles and welks than a Baskin-Robbins for 31 Flavors of ice cream, which was invariably my family’s choice. Before I left home I never saw a cut of meat that didn’t come from the supermarket case. If it didn’t arrive in the house frozen, it quickly found it’s way there. I’m not dissing my mother, she loved the supermarket like every woman she knew at the time because its one-stop shopping experience meant a liberation of her time. Everywhere you looked in America during those years, if you bothered to look, you could have seen the effects of a ‘bigger is better, and cheaper is best’ mindset that was sweeping the country, ultimately having a profound effect on the survival of anything smaller and hand-made. I do remember thinking, when my favorite bookstore closed shortly after a discount book barn opened across the street, that the end result would be larger and larger venues with less and less choice when it came to books, but I never thought about how the same dumbing down process was profoundly affecting food. Never would have occurred to me.
In the case of animal proteins the move towards corporate food production resulted in a cheaper unskilled work force hired to “butcher” animals for the money cuts, those parts of the animal that took the least amount of skill to extract. Anything that took time to cut or process was thrown away. While we value cuts like filet mignon and rack of lamb for a variety of tasty reasons, we only started to think of them as ‘the best’ parts of an animal because that’s what the industry producing them wanted us to think. Offal was ‘awful’ and ‘cheap’ to boot, the implication being that if you ate tripe or had the wherewithal to make head cheese you were either a foreigner, lower class, or both. What nonsense. And it’s actually a misnomer to call the neck or the belly ‘cheaper’ cuts at all, when you factor the labor involved in properly butchering and prepping those parts of the animal. Real nose to tail cooking takes consummate skills that only start with the knife. Yet for a burgeoning middle class hanging over the freezer case in the supermarket during the second half of the 20th century, if the industry didn’t deem it salable it wasn’t to be easily found. As the butchers disappeared from the street, sub-primal cuts disappeared from the table, resulting in recipes which had been passed down for centuries becoming lost forever.
Last week I made the point that there are profound environmental gains in shortening the distance between animal and plate, especially when it involves smaller, feedlot-free abattoirs that could service local farms and ranches. A return to this kind of food production would contribute to a more diverse marketplace, so much so it’s not a stretch to say that with accessibility to animals of this quality we could re-establish a system of food production that is infinitely healthier for us, and more humane to the animals we depend upon.
All true, but we should fess up that here at Barndiva our main reasons for wanting to do more of this kind of cooking isn’t just politically or even morally driven. At the end of the day, the beauty of sustainability in this context derives from the fact that it’s also insanely delicious. On Saturday night lucky diners in the barn were offered a $35 tasting menu with five different cuts of lamb from a single animal ~ belly, neck, leg, rack, and tongue. Each preparation drew from flavor profiles you just don’t get a chance to enjoy very often. Following this process over the past two weeks, from the day I met John Fritschen and photographed the lamb frolicking in his vineyards to the moment I lifted my fork to taste an incandescent morsel of Ryan’s rillette of lamb neck, I’ve thought a lot about how far we still have to go before we have anything approaching a true locavore economy. It’s quite a distance.
On a personal level, however, I’m anything but disheartened. Every now and then I can see glimmers of it happening. I’ll tell you this, if the future could taste anything like the lamb my English husband and I ate on Saturday night, it’s worth working and fighting for. He and I had traveled vastly different roads to get to that moment together, which made the fact that we had exactly the same reaction to what we put in our mouths all the more remarkable: it was quite simply the best lamb either of us had ever tasted.
Here then are Chef Fancher’s notes on three of the five lamb dishes he prepared this week. I’ve included a fourth, Lamb’s Heart, in part because it brings me full circle to that night in St John when I shared an exciting meal with great friends in noisy room at the edge of the Smithfield meat market. Though very few people got to taste Ryan’s Lamb’s heart, when all is said and done, it epitomizes what cooking nose to tail is all about. Cooking from the heart doesn’t get any better then this.
Lamb Belly:
Chef simmered the belly in a white wine stock with aromatic vegetables, then cooled and carefully cut out the bones and any remaining cartilage from the meat. He then seasoned the belly with salt and pepper and molded and pressed the meat overnight. This allowed the meat flavors to meld and gave him a piece he could cut multiples of any shape out of. He chose diamonds. The product before the final cuts looks like a flatted chicken breast ~ Chef often calls this cut lamb’s breast. To cook he placed the fat side down in a very hot pan and did not flip the piece over at any time. If there is a secret to perfect belly it’s this: score the fat and let it crisp; the heat from searing the bottom will gently cook the meat on the top.
Chef’s words: “I prefer a nicely seared piece of lamb belly over pork belly any day. With pork it’s very easy for a less skilled chef to end up with too much fat to meat ratio. The beauty of this preparation is that you get a crispy top layer of fat followed by a melty meat layer of the same thickness.”
Lamb Neck: Chef cooked the confit of neck in duck fat for 3 hours in a 250 degree oven. Then he peeled the sides down and carefully pulled out any remaining gristle and veins, taking care to leave the meat intact. The trick here is to carefully flip one side of the neck so the thinner end (towards the top) aligns with the thicker end (towards the bottom). If you don’t do this you end up with a cone shape, which will not cook evenly. Next he rolled the whole, re-formed neck meat into cellophane, and chilled it overnight. Before cooking he cut the roll into ¼” rounds ~ though one could cut it to any size thickness. The rillette was rolled in Panko, brushed with a little Dijon, and pan seared to perfection. Chef’s words: “When you see a neck preparation that is comprised of shredded bits you are looking at meat that has been processed clumsily. I treat this cut simply, all you need is that initial crunch, followed by a great, soft, satisfying meaty taste.”
Lamb Steaks (from the whole Leg) This preparation was a revelation for me. Who knew that the single leg I’ve just been roasting, bone in, all these years for Sunday lunch was actually five distinct primal cuts: sirloin, top round, bottom round, shank, and knuckle. Before working with them individually, he first marinated the whole leg in virgin olive oil, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper overnight, then pan roasted the leg until the meat began to relax from the bone. He was then able to separate it into the sub-primal segments, from which he cut the steaks.
Chef’s words: “The beauty of breaking down the leg is that then you can just treat it as you would a great steak: salt, pepper, char the fat and keep basting. We use a seasoned grill butter with lots of garlic and fresh herbs from our garden.”
Lamb’s Heart A traditional preparation for heart is to mix it with giblets and serve it diced in the lamb jus, which is delicious. Ryan went another direction. He thinly sliced then gently grilled the muscle. When it was almost room temperature he tossed it with a tangy panzanella salad comprised of bread, feta, tomatoes and lashings of sherry vinegar.
Chef’s words: “I like this preparation because with heart you are up against a predominate taste of iron…stands to reason…which is nicely cut by the sherry vinegar. There is no need for any oil in the salad, which is also a classic presentation for tongue.
LINKS:
Our Friend Marissa Guggiana, whom we met in the early days of Fork & Shovel, is about to publish Primal Cuts, Cooking with America’s Best Butchers. A brilliant food activist and fourth generation meat purveyor, Primal Cuts, which will go on sale in October, promises to be sublime on all things meaty and wonderful. Check out her wonderful website.
If you are a professional cook interested in where to source whole local animals that have been sustainably raised, contact her dad Ritz who now runs Sonoma Direct with her.
If you are interested in a meat CSA, you might try The Sonoma Meat Buying Club.
(originally posted July 28, 2010)
Squeamish, are we? Then you may want to forgo this week’s journal entry in which we butcher the fine animal to your right. Before you stop reading however, consider this: if you enjoyed perusing the Dish of the Week just seconds ago, what makes you think you won’t also find it interesting to make a real connection between that delectable plate of food and the honest labor it took on the part of a farmer and a chef to get it to table? Dish of the Week was all about this animal’s liver, which came out of its body. In the run up to the Taste of Place Dinner we’re going to cook our way through the animal from nose to tail, a delicious endeavor, but ~ as with most everything we serve at Barndiva ~ it’s germane to remember the delicious part didn’t start at the plate.
Of course I want you to continue reading. For most people knowing where their food comes from blithely stops with an image of an animal grazing in a bucolic pasture. What happens after that is often thought to be unpleasant or disgusting or mysterious, sometimes all three. Yet it’s possible to embrace the icky bits of life when they are integral to the process. I always smile when new parents describe natural childbirth as ‘so incredibly beautiful,’ because it is, icky bits and all. I know, I know, that’s about life, where slaughter and butchery is about death, and yet, unless you forgo eating animals on ethical grounds, isn’t your appreciation of meat a celebration of life? The animals… and yours?
There can be no true locavore economy without making it possible for farmers and ranchers who raise the animals we eat to get those animals processed locally. While clean and humane mobile slaughterhouses have made it possible for a few dogged consumers (with big freezers) to purchase animals that are slaughtered humanely where they lived their lives, it’s going to take more than a few diehard foodies before the word local can be applied to animal proteins as easily as we now apply it to fruits and vegetables.
There were understandable reasons over the past thirty years that resulted in America consolidating localized slaughter into larger and less humane facilities farther and farther away from where we live and eat our food, but those reasons are no longer viable. It is an incontestable fact that their size has given rise to unsafe, inhumane feedlots ~ massive holding pens ~ which do not and should not be part of the abattoir. Four large corporations now process 85 percent of the nation's cattle, which they can only control (barely) with dangerous cocktails of antibiotics and chemicals. Make no mistake: it isn’t only the animals who suffer as a result of corporate agriculture’s take over of this essential part of our food chain.
But while I’ve yet to meet a person who disagrees with me when I launch into a rant about the dangers of corporate control of the food chain, or bemoan the energy squandered shipping animals that are raised and will be consumed in one area away to be slaughtered, or even how inhumane it is to make an animal take such an unnecessary journey, something always happens when the conversation drifts toward the slaughterhouse door. A strange NIMBY response occurs when the words local (which we revere) and slaughterhouse (which is frightening) are put together. When a town like Ukiah, whose roots in ranching go all the way back and is now struggling economically, can reject a proposal for a small, progressive slaughterhouse that could serve the entire county of Mendocino, as they did last year, you know something is wrong. Change is possible ~ in two decades New Zealand has gone from American-sized centralized slaughter and meatpacking to smaller locally owned slaughterhouses dispersed across the country ~ but it’s not going to happen until we get over a modern repugnance against all things connected with death and begin to see it again for what it truly is: the final part of the life cycle.
So here’s what I propose. We do it lamb by lamb. All the talk in the world about the bigger issues of sustainability and safety won’t get us to change the way things are now if we aren’t able to bridge the disconnect between the meat on your plate and the whys and wherefores of how it got there.
A good place to start is one single step back from the sexy part of cooking and consuming. Butchery is a lost art in American kitchens thanks to the role supermarkets played in making it easy to look away from slaughter. But something is lost every time you break the seal on the plastic and lift an animal part out of its Styrofoam package. Even the way you handle it communicates an “ugh, let’s get this part over with.” The smell, more a result of flesh being trapped beneath plastic, is not appealing, while the touch, instead of firm and resilient, is usually slimy. Dozens of hands, often in different states, handle one mass produced lamb as it makes its way to your table. Compare that to the short journey our animal took. John Fritschen, who raised the animal in his beautiful vineyard overlooking the Russian River Valley, guided it into a cage and took it over the hill on Monday where a USDA agent inspected it for 24 hours before the proprietor of the facility quickly dispatched the animal on Tuesday. John delivered the carcass, its organs in a separate bag, to Barndiva on Wednesday. Ryan was the fourth person to handle the meat before Pancho and Andrew began to see cuts of it coming down the hot line in the restaurant Thursday night.
The 90 lb, eight-month old lamb Ryan butchered had virtually no odor. Watching Chef break it down ~ hack sawing the neck from the body, deftly detaching the shoulders, precisely separating the belly, rack and saddle, breaking the vertebrae to make cutting the legs away from the trunk easier ~ it struck me that the techniques inherent in really great cooking, as well as the vegetables, herbs, spices and condiments, everything we use that constitutes a recipe, don’t start in a cookbook they really start here, ruled by which part of the animal the cut came from. Chef worked swiftly and cleanly ~ there was no hanging about ~ but it was the animal that provided the road map. Every now and then he closed his eyes and felt along a contour of a joint, trusting his fingers more than his eyes to tell him where to direct his knife. It was beautiful to watch ~ and it went a long way in explaining why he always cooks his proteins to perfection. This kind of understanding starts long before the meat hits the pan.
Years ago I knew a great Irish butcher in London, name of Mack, who used to make up stories about the animals as he carved them up. Nice and lean he’d say about a shapely lamb’s leg, this lassie must ‘a been a runner, or, oh look at the beautiful fat on this boy, as he sliced through the perfectly marbled ribeye, he liked the shade by the tree, he did. At the time I assumed he only nattered on to keep himself from being bored or having to talk to the endless stream of Hampstead housewives, but now I’m not so sure. I thought of Mack as Ryan ran his hand down the entire length of our lamb’s body. Beautiful animal Chef said before he made the first cut. Mack used to say the same thing as he wrapped a cut of meat in paper and tied the bundle with string, nodding as he handed it across the counter and I headed out into the night to feed it to my family. For both men, whose livelihoods are intrinsically reliant upon the animals we raise to eat, the words offered a kind of benediction. We often forget that a benediction is both blessing and guidance. We need both now.
LINKS:
Heather Smith wrote a good article in in San Francisco Magazine worth reading.
Michael Pollan's PBS interview Modern Meat.
There are usually no butchery classes offered this time of year, but you can go to an incredible fair this weekend where butchery will be only one of the food related skills you can learn about ~ with lots of opportunity for hands on experience. As Sophia Bates is one the organizers, we highly recommend a drive up to Anderson Valley this weekend. Where Sophia goes great food, music, and life changing good times are not far behind.
(originally posted July 21, 2010)
We take our cocktails pretty seriously around here. Up to a point. We may take weeks parsing spirits to feature and sourcing arcane ingredients, but when it's time to put the new list to bed we schedule an 'anything can happen’ throw-down that never fails to separate the men from the boys. As reward for a life spent in unabashed cocktail adoration, I get to play the part of the kid in the candy store during these sessions, sipping through concoctions to chose those worthy of inclusion on the Barndiva List. Not counting seasonal updates which take place weekly, we replace the entire list about five times a year.
These days you can find a well made drink almost anywhere ~ restaurant, roadhouse, tavern, pub, jukejoint, club, or saloon ~ but for a perfect cocktail you still need to frequent a bar that has a proper cocktail program. This isn’t something an establishment can pull out of a hat on paycheck Fridays, it takes long term commitment, a deep knowledge of spirits and the way they work, and a liver worthy of Tolstoy. For which I thank my Russian grandma. Every day.
In recent years an interest in the field of Mixology has raised the game considerably, which has contributed to an ever expanding ingredient repertoire and exciting new technologies. But I sometimes worry that the context of why we love cocktails is being forgotten in the race to get clever in the glass. When I go in search of a great cocktail I want the experience of being cosseted in a handsome room with warm lighting and cool music, I want to be surrounded by a good-looking crowd. The word cocktail goes with the word lounge in my world, always has, always will. My answer to the man who asked us to turn down the Serge Gainsbourg the first week we opened because “we are dining over here” was polite but succinct: “yes, but we are drinking over here.” He’s lucky I didn’t stick him with a tinkling piano.
I’ve made no secret that Barndiva was my chance to bring a classic bar scene a la Visconti by way of Nick and Nora Charles into Healdsburg. And if Barndiva was to celebrate the foodshed without losing an urbane subtext, the bar was a golden opportunity to extend that vision to the art and science of libations. Life is one long ridiculous mystery in any case. To get through it with any grace, every now and then you need to heed the urge to put on a good set of heels and head off into the night to find a well appointed bar that has great style and a professional, insouciant bartender. (a plague on the overly friendly kind).
As we move into our seventh year, we’re going to up the ante with our bar program. Because we can, and because we think the interesting conversations we’re having with our customers about food can be broadened to include cocktails. Up to this point we’ve been very lucky to have clever young men like Dan Fitzgerald, Brandon Manning, and Spencer Simmons share their passion for mixology with us. But I am especially thrilled with the new summer list, which was entirely generated from the crazy-talented mind of a guest mixologist, Stefan Ravalli, who will be behind the bar with Sam and Adam throughout the summer. Come in some night for a cocktail from the new list. Or play Dealer's Choice. As in all things, we welcome your feedback.
Hot off the press, here is a preview of the new cocktail list, which Stefan and Adam will launch this coming Wednesday. About our drink names: yes, there is a story to each one but it's usually not one which makes sense in the traditional manner. Think of them as metaphoric breadcrumbs. They may not lead you directly home, but we throw them with equanimity and the promise that if you follow them with an optimistic heart they will definitely take you somewhere worth visiting. Cheers everyone.
The Lover Gin infused Peaches and Fresh Ginger; Dry Sake; Navarro Gewürztraminer Juice; Lemon Verbena. Finished with Local Peaches dabbed with Orange Blossom Water and a Flame of Chartreuse.
The initial trigger for this drink was a cache of Navarro Grape Juice Stefan found in the wine cellar and mistakenly thought was unloved rather than hidden. To partner the juice he infused gin with Preston Farms peaches from the Healdsburg Farmers Market and fresh ginger. Lemon Verbena adds a clean citrus note while the filtered sake subtly contributes dimension to the body of the drink. I suspect Stefan was a precocious youngster, which may explain his jones for crushing, macerating and setting things on fire. Whatever. The idea of using a chartreuse burn as a transitory garnish here is brilliant, and it works to open the senses to everything that will follow.
This is a dead sexy drink, which I why I have named it after one of the most sensual novellas in history, written by Marguerite Duras in 1984 when she was nearly seventy years old. The Lover is set against the backdrop of French colonial Vietnam, and tells the autobiographical story of a clandestine romance between a pubescent girl (Duras) from a financially strapped French family and a much older and enormously wealthy and cultured Chinese man. Surprisingly, a Jean-Jacques Arnnaud’s 2002 movie with Jane March and Tony Leung did it justice.. but read the book.
Strange Land Rum Infused with Earl Grey Tea; Cynar; Velvet Falernum; Fresh Lime
Velvet Falernum is a sweet syrup redolent of almond, ginger, lime and sometimes vanilla or allspice. It was made popular in the 1930’s and the best source for it is still the purveyor John Taylor. Falernum also has distinct clove notes, which Stefan plays off here with the lime and herbaceous flavors of the Cynar an Italian bitters made from 13 herbs and plants, the most recognizable of which is artichoke. Strange Land is garnished with a fresh Pineapple Sage from our gardens; it is this scent which rolls over the nose first, like the smell of a meadow. The rum, tea and spices in this drink made me think of the line “close your eyes and think of England,” from a poem entitled Strange Land written by an English ex-pat living in New Zealand at the turn of the century. The saying only gained popularity however in the 1920’s, when an entry to the diary of Lady Hillingdon was made public upon her death. Apparently, upon hearing her husband approach her bedroom door on a night in 1902, she plucked a line from the original poem and used it in quite a different, but exceedingly more memorable context: “When I hear his steps outside my door I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England.”
Ernest in Love Tequila; Aperol; Compressed Local Watermelon; Lime Juice; Lemongrass-infused Agave Nectar. Finished with a misting of Rosewater.
I’ve dedicated drinks to Ernest Hemingway over the years, but not because this prodigious drinker is a favorite writer of mine. There was a great capacity for joy in Hemingway, tragically undone by a suicide gene that he knew lay sleeping in his DNA and could do nothing about. He was perhaps never happier than the year he married Hadley, his beautiful first wife, in 1921, and they headed off to Europe where he could write. Hemingway is famous for using simple sentence structures to great affect, but he also had a master’s comprehension when to use a series of coordinators to create compound sentences. In much the same way, the simple one key fruity notes of Aperol and watermelon allow the agave to deliver a one two three punch in this cocktail. The mist of rosewater is an unabashedly romantic gesture that also serves to heighten the grassy essence inherent in all blanco tequilas. Stefan likes the way the Aperol also gives a long finish to the cocktail, which he considers crisp and fleshy. Ernest in Love is also, obviously, a play on words.
Strawberry Life Hennessey Cognac, Local Strawberries compressed with Thai Basil, Nigori Sake, Maraschino, Lemon Juice, with a Float of Crème de Violette
I am in love with this drink. It is an utterly delightful concoction, summer in a glass. Makes me happy the way early Beatles songs do, hence the name. The Croatian cherries in the maraschino impart a burnt almond flavor that rounds out the predominant appeal of the fresh strawberries. Stefan’s addition of the unfiltered sake brings an earthy flavor you can’t quite identify, coming from the yeast particles in the unfiltered sake and the smell they impart. Like an indelible fingerprint of the dirt the strawberries grew in. Cognac used in this way is a revelation.
Cosmo Killer Vodka infused with local Cucumbers; Green Chartreuse; Verjus; Elderflower Cordial and a Perfuming of Kaffir Lime.
I was an unabashed fan of Sex and the City until the movie came out. What I could never figure out was how a girl like Carrie, with such exquisite taste in footwear, could have settled year after year with a Cosmo as her drink of choice. Come on already. Few spirits have the mutable charm of vodka when played to its strengths. A vodka cocktail should not to be loaded with too many flavor profiles, but it can certainly handle more than a zuz of cranberry juice.
Stefan has gone green and floral with the vodka he infused with local cucumbers. The Verjus ~ juice of green grapes ~ plays chaperone to the Elderflower so it does not get into sickly sweet trouble. The cucumbers also bring it back from the edge of coy, but it is the perfume of Kaffir Lime that lends an incredible grace note to this cocktail.
Weapon of Choice Bay Leaf-and-Chili-Infused Gin; Pimm's no.1; Compressed Local Watermelon; Ginger Beer
I have no idea why the words ‘weapon of choice’ came into my head while I was tasting this drink for the first time. The Pimm’s part must have brought me to Sherlock Holmes and from there the heat of the chilies, used to balance the sweetness of the fresh watermelon muddle, brought me to Professor Moriarty. The Cucumber garnish and the medicinals of the gin infused with bay leaf are herbalicious. FYI, Moriarty’s weapon of choice was the silent but deadly Air Rifle, invented by mysterious blind German mechanic von Herder.
Poodle Springs Pisco; St. Germain; Maraschino; Lemon Juice and a scoop of House-Made Apricot-and-Bitters Jam
An unmade bed of a drink, sexy after the fact, which I’ve named after an unfinished story by Raymond Chandler. Keep in mind that even unfinished stories by Chandler are wonderful and that Pisco is one of the hardest spirits to hang anything on; it throws flavors off like a bucking (in this case Peruvian) bronco. The St Germain and Maraschino work well with the Pisco, and while the apricot stone fruit sugars add a smooth finish, Stefan will be changing the jammy notes as our jamming season continues. Olleberries up next, then figs. There’s worst things than being his guinea pig on this one.
Bangkok Cowboy
Buffalo Trace Bourbon infused with local peaches; Black Tea; Thai Basil; Lemon; Honey; a dash of Allspice Dram. Finished with a misting of Fernet.
Don’t be fooled by the green mist of Fernet which envelops the nose of this cocktails with a eucalyptus-spruce-pine forest intensity. The first mouthful is deep and rich with bourbon leather, while the honey infused peaches play grown up games on the front porch with the Allspice Dram. Most of the bourbon drinkers I know are men, and they will love this, but a certain kind of woman will too. If Charlotte Rampling ever does me the great honor of coming for a drink, this is one I will serve her. On the house, of course.
(originally posted July 14, 2010)
Seven years ago, the day before we opened Barndiva for the very first time, we hosted an unforgettable interactive art exhibit celebrating the work of ten renowned local food producers. Each food artist was paired with two other artists: one to document their work, the other to interpret it. The interactive part was that we invited guests to “eat the art” while they experienced it. 300 old friends, new neighbors, journalists, vintners, and tout Healdsburg descended upon the barn on a warm and sunny Saturday in July expecting to be wowed. We wowed them. Who could resist the heady perfume of art, food, wine and music, all served up in a beautiful new building on a perfect evening at the height of summer?
The entire day was our business plan writ large, with the central proposition that diva’s don’t just live in opera houses. When it comes to food there are people who hit the high notes every day of their lives in vegetables fields, olive orchards, dairies, bakeries... even restaurants shaped like barns. There was a sense that day, articulated by almost everyone who was here, that something exciting was gaining momentum in Healdsburg; that Barndiva was only part of a zeitgeist that was happening in our town, and towns like ours (which admittedly is not many) across the country. The term ‘farm to table’ didn’t mean what it does today; the concept of ‘artisan’ had only recently begun being applied to something you’d find on a plate in a restaurant. The adoration we lavished on our food savants felt new and exciting, an homage to hand made and home grown that felt wholly warranted and fully our own.
It was the greatest opening party Barndiva could have imagined. Of course we needed the good will, inexperienced as we were, to get through that first tumultuous year. And we were thrilled to have pulled off an exhibit of such great complexity to launch our business. But what we were most proud of was the $16,000 we helped raise with Slow Food Sonoma County, our partners for the event, to be spent on a program that would bring sustainable farmers to the kitchen doors of Healdsburg Public Schools to provide for their lunch programs.
Paul Bertolli, already contemplating Fra Mani, the next great act in his remarkable culinary career, arrived first with homemade salumi he’d cured in his basement in Berkeley. He had been paired with the artist Ismael Sanchez, who fashioned a life size homage to the dead pig out of rusted wire, and with Evan Bertoli, his nephew, a classmate of our daughter Isabel and a budding photographer. The group vetting the artists with me had concerns that a boy as young as Evan could pull off work that would raise significant money at auction, but one look at the image he took of Paul’s beautiful hand slicing through a sheaf of snowy white pork fat put that fear to rest: it was haunting, fully capturing the skill Paul brings to the art of charcuterie.
And so it went, with virtually every collaborative exhibit: Lou Preston’s wine was exhibited alongside Susan Preston’s installation piece of a single worn blue kitchen chair sitting, as if floating, on a mound of flour with a jug of their Guadagni on the floor. Ig Vella brought huge rounds of cheese and a lifetime’s worth of craft in his worn and irascible smile. Elissa Rubin Mahon stacked a dozen of her jams in an old wood box by the front door where they sparkled like jewels in a Bulgari window. John Scharffenberger sent slabs of different grades of chocolate and huge bags of chocolate nibs which we poured on a wine barrel below Michael Recchiuti’s accompanying ‘canvas’ of hand poured chocolate upon which he had painted a shimmering, incandescent barn. The smells of Olive Oil and Honey and Bread and Peaches ~ all other exhibits ~ filled the air, mingling with the laughter and music and talktalktalk.One of the artisan producers I’d personally invited to participate was Karen Bates of the Philo Apple Farm. Though the focus of the exhibit was the artisan bounty from Sonoma County, Slow Food understood that as a family we intended to draw from a sustainable food shed that started in Mendocino County where we own a farm on the Greenwood Ridge. Our place is directly above Karen’s; her family and ours have been nearest neighbors and friends, raising our kids together, for going on 30 years. Karen’s artisan product, her ‘art,’ as it were, was the ‘mother’ starter she used for the farm’s infamous apple cider vinegar, made from organic heirloom apples that grow on their 40 acres along the Navarro River. I had only ever seen yogurt or bread starters before so Karen’s massive disc of fulminating bacteria blew me away.
Karen has chosen the artist Laura Parker to document her work and towards that end Laura has spent many hours at the farm that spring photographing apple trees in full blossom. She then transferred 55 images onto fabric panels that on the morning of the exhibit she slung across the entire rear of the barn. It was a gorgeous body of work. Remarkably, she’d taken an inherently flat, captured image and given it back the life it once had out in the fields. Karen and Laura are good friends, which you could tell from the way their pieces played together. There was also something wonderfully incongruous between the mothership starter floating in a huge glass bowl of rust colored cider, and these ethereal blossoms, splashing sunlit patterns through the air, moving like a curious school of butterflies, hovering, but with no intention of landing.
Laura and I connected that day, talked briefly, then lost touch, except for infrequent emails about our respective openings. From hers I gleaned that she was mixing up her time between fine art, highly sought after pastel images of fruit and vegetables (presently on exhibit in Studio Barndiva), and interactive work which sounded more experiential than performance. It wasn’t until she sent something about a new project called Taste of Place that I started playing closer attention.
Taking the current interest in terroir out of the vineyard and bringing it to the farm, Laura was making the case that everything we eat, not just wine we drink, has a indelible fingerprint connecting it with the soil it is grown in. She visited farms and tramped around, meticulously labeling soil samples, which she then put into wine glasses for folks to smell and discuss. She only used dirt from sustainable farms (fyi: soil becomes dirt when you take it away from where you find it). She didn’t ask anyone to taste the dirt (though some did) but she made the case that by smelling deeply we are in fact tasting: scientifically that’s what happens on the sides of our tongues when we salivate, the result when something piquant ~ in this case dirt with a little water added ~ hits our olfactory senses. What she found from the first few interactive shows was that often just the smell of dirt played a strange alchemy on memory. It can bring back a moment in time when we were very young, before dirt was just something to wash off. Sound implausible? Maybe, but this is exactly what happened to Geoffrey at the Taste of Place lunch Laura put on at the Boonville Hotel in 2008.
I have a long history with the Boonville Hotel: I was among the second round of investors when the restaurant was in its glory, and it provided my first real connection to Anderson Valley. Ironically, given what I do now, it also exposed me to a style of country dining I’d only ever seen in Europe, where it’s not unusual to see some of the food you are eating growing or frolicking in the fields beyond the dining room windows. The hotel is now owned by Johnny Schmitt, Karen’s brother, a wonderful cook who had worked with Laura and her farmers to create a soil-paired meal I had no intention of missing. My husband thought otherwise. On the day of the lunch, with temperatures already climbing over 80, it was all I could do to get him in the car.
The first thing that strikes you when you experience Laura’s Taste of Place is how different the soils look when you are able to study and compare them, side-by-side. Some soils are deep and rich, while others look almost too thin to support growth of any kind. Some are rocky, with bits of granite, some smooth as silt, several so light and airy they seem to be crawling up the sides of the glass.
There are two ways of describing what happens after that. The first is to take a page out of wine Terroir vernacular (albeit tongue and cheek) as indicated from crib notes Laura and Karen wrote about the Philo Apple Farm.
Philo Apple Farm – Flood Plain, Navarro River District. Unlike the Indian Camp Ground variety, flood plain has a yellow mustard color. It's texture is hard and clod like. A bit less exotic in aroma, but more varietal, with olive and mineral notes, and a bit weightier finish. The nose here is clay and smoky with huge extract and extraordinary elegance.
Then there is the way Geoffrey experienced Taste. First he stuck his long aquiline nose into a glass of “Indian Campground: Arrowhead Reserve” and inhaled deeply. Then he furrowed his brow, closed his eyes, sighed. “This brings me right back to our coal cellar in London when I was 5." He looked up at Laura and smiled. “It’s the smell of anthracite and moisture. God, I spent hours playing down there, with this smell in the air.” Later, in the car on the way up to the farm he remarked that he hadn’t thought about those years for a long, long time.
It is amazing to me, and quite wonderful indeed, that after seven years we are still talking about the sanctity of the soil here at Barndiva. Since Ryan arrived the idea behind “eat the view” has taken on even greater meaning. It’s not just a nifty tag line for our patrons anymore, but embedded deep within their enjoyment of everything we surround them with here at the Barn. With inspired cooking, as with bio-dynamic farming, it's hard to know where the passion ends and the science begins. A growing part of me feels we may be seeing the beginning of a thoughtful re-consideration of why food tastes the way it does, which could even lead us to a reappraisal of the very concept of nourishment. There is now talk about Secondary Metabolites in plants which, while they have probably been around since the beginning of time, are only now being studied for the possible secrets they hold in protecting the plants that produce them. If we are ever able to unlock that connection, they may someday be able protect us as well.
These are exciting times to be considering taste and how it applies to farming practices and food. What’s most incredible is the fact that this new frontier has been here all along, where it’s always been, right beneath our feet.
If you missed our opening party seven years ago, now is your chance to share an historical evening at Barndiva. If you were here for The Taste of Art, thank you for your continued patronage. We hope to share A Taste of Place with you in August.
(originally posted July 3, 2010)
Once upon a time Lukka, Jesse, and Jil called LA home so we were especially pleased to read such wonderful coverage of Healdsburg and Barndiva on the front cover of Saturday's Travel Section.
Great pictures in the articles, be sure to click on them!
Healdsburg: For foodies, a new northern star
(originally posted July 7, 2010)
I went to a party last week in Santa Rosa. First warm summer night, great music, lots to eat and drink. As the evening began to wind down I found myself happily ensconced in a deck chair by the pool with people I had never met before. One minute we were having an innocent chat about BP’s CEO, wondering aloud how he could sleep at night when talk seamlessly morphed into a conversation focused on things in our personal lives that we were ashamed to admit we did. Anonymity and alcohol easily carried us to a casually intimate place that somehow felt comfortable, like a collective sigh. It was dark and the band had taken a break and there was a lovely waterfall sound emanating from the stone walls that surrounded us. Not far from where we were sitting a dwindling group was still playing bocce, so every now and then the solid thrack of one ball hitting another ricocheted in the air.
One fellow said he cheated on his taxes. Sometimes. Not big things, mind you, little things the government had no right sticking their nose into. A woman, mid-thirties and more drunk than the rest of us, giggled and said she fantasized about cheating on her live-in boyfriend. She loved him but sometimes she felt time whizzing by, while she watched, standing perfectly still. A heavy set woman sitting at the far end said she went through a phase where she would steal magazines from Whole Foods, and justified it to herself because they were such a big company. Cheating seemed to be the theme of our confessions, but when the conversation came around I heard myself admitting that sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I crept up to my office and watched The Housewives Series on Bravo for hours. Didn’t matter which city ~ New York, Orange County, New Jersey ~ the women were all interchangeable and uniformly dreadful, a fact which they happily compounded by allowing their obtuse lives to be played out on national TV.
A silence enveloped the group. Finally the tipsy girl piped up and said I know what you mean. I can watch a whole season of The Tori Spelling Show in one sitting. The tax evader asked if DIY shows counted. No way all three women shouted. At least you can learn something from them, the girl said. The woman at the end sighed. We all watch crap TV, she said, it's just harmless fun, what’s so bad about that?
I had no idea, but for me, I didn’t think it was just about fun. And I wasn’t quite sure about the harmless part either.
I am not a snob when it comes to TV, or film for that matter ~ if it moves I will pretty much watch it, or at least give it a chance. I’m as stumped by the guy who can ‘only’ listen to classical music as by the guy who brags he’s never listened to it before. Of course it’s true that quantifiable genius separates Ibsen’s A Doll’s House from Russ Meyer’s Valley in the Dolls, but they basically have the same plot and come to the same conclusions about the human (female) condition. And truth be told a hell of a lot more people watched and read and wept over Jacqueline Suzanne’s overwrought story of female subjugation then ever sat through an Ibsen play. Great themes and their denouements come in a variety of disguises; it's up to us to decide which ones we will rely upon to get us through the night.
So my nocturnal relationship with the surgically enhanced ladies of Reality TV was not repugnant because I looked down on the form it was coming to me in. And while one would be hard-pressed to find uglier examples of women in the 21st century, there’s also not much change left in spending time with characters simply because you feel superior to them. For a while I ran with the assumption that the Housewives Series was a cautionary moral tale ~ with apologies to Goya ~ a 21st Century Los Caprichos about how tragically our venal desire to acquire things has lead us astray. For the past fifty years we have been force fed an American standard which exalts an unbridled obsession with wealth. The girls had simply taken a step further and ordered their Kool-aid to go. But that still did not explain why I was watching it. If bling with a dubious moral attached was all I needed, I’ll take my Jay-Z straight up, thank you very much.
Television is the most democratic and popular medium ever created, even now as it is being subsumed by youtubitis. But from its beginnings the programs which held sway over the airwaves, while they used a variety of voices to keep us entertained, always aimed at a common dominator. (read: lowest). Classic TV programs like The Honeymooners, All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Seinfeld, Friends, all tackled big issues ~ marriage, dysfunction in the family, racism, friendship as a sustaining force ~ but played them out in a common vernacular that consistently and perhaps naturally veered toward the stupid. Name any great sitcom in the last thirty years and on some level stupid reigns supreme.
Still, the paucity of good programs I found in 1996 when I returned from a decade living in the UK shocked me. It seemed to parallel what had happened to food in America while I was gone: the plates had grown bigger while the nutritious value had exponentially diminished. My family went from four stations (two government sponsored!) to over 400, but with the exception of sports, choice felt remarkably more limited. There are still great scripted programs like The Soprano’s on TV ~ the Nurse Jackies, the Mad Men, the Friday Night Lights ~ but they grow ever more infrequent. Reality TV, meanwhile, continues to gobble up more and more air time. Dead cheap to produce, with no writers to pay, no sets to frame reference, no studio time to keep the industry alive, Reality TV proliferates because we are allowing a cost driven marketplace to buckle under massive competition from the internet. The irony is, because all you need to produce a ‘reality program’ is a cameraman, people who will do anything to have their five minutes of fame, and an editor with an eye toward cutting for commercial breaks, with reality programming the television industry has set in motion its own demise.
Some competitive programs like So You Think You Can Dance elevate struggling cultural forms by exposing them to huge new audiences. But generally Reality TV grows in stupidity instead of getting better. Take cooking shows ~ have you wondered why the initial progenitors like Mario Batali, chefs who really know how to cook and talk about food, have been forced out and replaced with ‘user friendly’ schlocky cooks like Paula Deen? Even Gordon Ramsey, an extraordinary talent who shaped one of the best food programs ever (The F Word) made while he was still in the UK, instantly dumbed down his act when he hit our shores, producing unwatchable crap like Hell’s Kitchen.
Then there is the Housewives Series, my bête noire of the moment. Like Survivor, and MTV’s Real World (the progenitor of reality shows) it would seem to focus on social interactions in their crudest forms ~ basically how we manipulate one another ~ which admittedly has some practical application in the workplace and relationships. But there are no resolutions, no winners, no achievements, just an endless stream of greedy people with narrow worldviews living meaningless lives. At what point does ignorance become culpable? Something happens when you spend time with people whose only notable ‘talent’ is that they have managed to invade the privacy of your home, bringing all the meaningless stupidity of their lives with them. I fear you don’t just watch stupid, you become stupid.
There will be no innocent bystanders in the war currently being waged on TV and the internet for a collective attention span that is shrinking in content, even as it gains in numbers. What we switch on when we drop our tired vulnerable bodies down on the couch and focus our eyes for a few hours each night ~ even when we do it for harmless fun ~ will ultimately make as profound a difference to the quality of our lives, and the culture we have to draw from, as what we put into our bodies when we eat.
It is our right and our mandate to demand more from the people making money off us. In the words of Thoreau “The world before me is of too much consequence to be merely observed.” There’s cheating on a spouse, cheating the government, cheating big business ~ none of them good to be sure ~ but all of them preferable, to my mind, to cheating on yourself, because that’s where identity and honesty starts in each and every one of us. Which is why, at the end of the day, my ‘confession’ in the dark actually was the worse one of all.
