Andrea
MacMichael
Food
and Travel Seminar
11/21/16
Back
to the Basics
I’m not a vegan, or a vegetarian, and I’m not the kind of
prepared person who plans breakfast for the next morning and meals for the
entirety of the next week. Meals in my life have been about fueling up before
practice or household chores. These meals have also been about family- made at
home and eaten together. My parents have always scoured the weekly circulars to
find the best prices for meat, yogurt, cereal, and especially produce. These
have been the essentials for chili, pasta dishes, steak and potatoes, salads,
and many more amazing meals I have helped cook at home with my family. Of
course, I have loved the “special treats” of fresh mozzarella for caprese
salad, the golden loaf of crunchy Italian bread from the bakery rather than the
$1 pre-sliced baggie for assembling pulled pork sliders. Everyday eating has
not been filled with the most expensive or always the freshest ingredients, but
it has always been filled with the good intentions of two hard working parents
and more than anything, the personal touch that comes from cooking at home.
When I endeavored to cook my idea of the “perfect” meal,
I was overloaded by more than just what to make, but also how to make it and
where to get the ingredients. It is true that buying most products from the
grocery store supports an industrial food system that fills us with a whole lot
of artificial garbage. It is also true that buying from this system supports poor
treatment of the animals we eat, treatment I think most people would consider
cruel. But can I stop buying from the grocery store? Do I even know where or
how to obtain grass-fed meat and local produce not treated with chemicals or
genetically modified for faster growth? The answer is that I don’t know, but I
want to do some exploration into other places to buy sustainably harvested food.
Before learning about where our food truly comes from in this industrial food
system, I would not have thought twice about simply going to the grocery store,
because the grocery store was all I knew back home in Metro Detroit.
Occasionally my family and I would make the short drive to Detroit to shop at the
Eastern Market or the Gratiot Market, but those trips were infrequent and I
think many of the products sold are still connected to the widespread
industrial food system.
Nonetheless,
I came to a point where I had to decide what I valued for this “perfect” meal I
was going to cook. Accounting for my lack of knowledge about where to buy
sustainably harvested food in general, let alone in the Kalamazoo area, I
decided to go with what I have grown up believing: a few fresh ingredients and
some careful preparation always makes for a tasty dish.
About
every two weeks my family and I load up an entire cart piled to the top with a
rainbow of various vegetables and fruits from a Market in Dearborn called Super
Greenland. While also selling packaged goods and meat, the store is mainly a
produce market. Wacky Wednesdays are the days we nudge our cart along through
the stampede of other customers with shopping carts. Eyes light up at signs
displaying: 2 heads of romaine for 50 cents, 17 lemons for $1, 2 pineapples for
$1, and 50 cents/pound of apples. Every day, but especially on Wednesdays, this
market sells out whole displays of cucumbers and tomatoes, nectarines and grapefruits
for dirt cheap prices. Produce from this market has made many colorful,
healthful, and delicious meals at my home, and I am thankful that some markets
make it affordable to load up a cart with the good stuff.
So
for my perfect meal ingredients I went to Meijer, because that is what my
parents would have done (we have Kroger in Southfield, but that is beside the
point) to find ingredients for a quick meal like the one I was going to make.
To be good, it didn’t have to be fancy, say ratatouille or a prime cut of meat.
In fact, I’ve never eaten ratatouille, and I don’t feel like I am missing out.
I
wandered down the bright isles of Meijer, zig-zagging through parked carts and loads
of people searching the shelves. I picked up the cheapest box of spaghetti
noodles I could find, a package of fresh basil and parmesan cheese, two cartons
of cherry tomatoes, and a package of break-and-bake cookies because, why not? I
realized that with homework and projects to finish, I didn’t have enough time
to make a big, time-consuming meal, so I bought what my mom would have bought,
all the while hearing my Dad’s voice in my head saying “You just can’t beat
fresh fruits and veggies.” Fresh parmesan, basil and tomato would brighten up spaghetti
noodles and make a tangy, colorful dish.
Whenever
we were low on food at home when I was growing up, I knew I could reach into
the cupboard and throw some noodles on the stove to boil and cut cucumber, red
pepper, or tomatoes, along with ranch or Italian dressing and cheese to top of
the colorful bowl. Noodles could fill me up and keep me going. Noodles are a
thick and tender complement to crunchy cucumber or gushing tomatoes, and for
the creamy, sour flavor of ranch. The perfect meal isn’t specific to me, but
more of a reminder of where I have come from and an example of what resources
and ingredients I have to work with at any given time. Right now, in the dorms in
college, with only a small bit of cooking experience, the perfect meal to me
was a simple meal that reminded me of being at home and cooking with my family.
Apparently my concoction has a recipe associated with it. Giada De Laurentiis calls
it Cherry Tomato Spaghetti. I call it noodles and veggies.
Cooking
in the dorm is a hassle to say the least, and produces only mildly appetizing
results. I had lost a lot of my hope in the fate of even my simple meal after receiving
some weathered and beaten pots and pans encrusted with old food from the Resident
Assistant. My friends and I squeezed into the tiny, dimly lit kitchen on my
floor of the dorm to cook. There is hardly enough room in this kitchen to open
the refrigerator. After a few attempts to clean the burner of left-over food
particles that began filling the room with smoke, the three of us decided to
turn on a Justin Bieber playlist a leave the water to boil. More interested in
keeping my friend from eating all of the raw cookie dough out of the package (as
a sweet-tooth, I always believe in dessert), I didn’t notice when the water
started to boil and my roommate, with all good intentions of wanting to help
with the meal, poured the long spaghetti noodles right into the pot without
breaking them.
“Sonal,
what are you doing?” my friend Myranda asked with a laugh, noticing that the
noodles looked more like an art piece sticking out of the pot than anything
else.
“Oh
shoot I should have broken them in half!” she replied. I laughed, it would be
fine. The pot for the noodles was tiny, but as the bottom half of the noodles
boiled, we were able to push the other ends into the water. Myranda and I
halved the tomatoes with plastic knives and ripped the basil into pieces with
our hands. The whole process was silly. In a separate pan we started sizzling
up the halved tomatoes and basil bits, and added the noodles and parmesan cheese
in at the end to finish the dish.
I
served one sticky glop of yellow noodles, complete with a few wrinkling red
tomatoes and cooked, wilted basil and parmesan to my roommate Sonal, and then slipped
my partially melted tongs back into the pan to get a plate for my friend
Myranda.
“Why
are these noodles so weird?” Myranda questioned, “Andrea, do you even know how
to cook?” Sonal laughed and so did I. She had good reason to wonder about my
cooking abilities. The thought kept running through my head: how do you mess up noodles? It was a
comical sight. Myranda plucked the noodle box out of the overflowing recycling
bin at her feet and read, “Extra fiber noodles. Extra fiber. What is this? Andrea,
what did you even buy? Who buys things with extra fiber? That’s just too
healthy for me.” She tossed the package carelessly back into the recycling bin.
I reasoned, “Maybe the fiber is oozing out of
them and that’s why they’re sticking together,” nudging my tongs hopelessly
into the messy creation with disappointment. Myranda rolled her eyes.
“I’m
sorry this is so gross,” I said, handing Myranda a floppy paper plate of the fibrous
noodles. Sonal slurped her noodles, leaning against refrigerator.
“Well,
guys they don’t taste bad,” she reported, twirling her fork into the clumps of
noodles. I thought the dish tasted fairly average, and that my roommate was
trying to be nice. The shriveled tomatoes oozed their warm, sweet juices over the
sticky noodles and the wilted basil and parmesan cheese added a tangy sharp
flavor to a completely bland glop of noodles.
Myranda
took a few hesitant bites, looking up with wide eyes. “Wow this is actually
pretty good,” she offered, taking a few more bites, “I love tomatoes.” At least
the tomatoes tasted good.
I
learned to never buy cheap fiber noodles ever again. They ruin a beautiful,
simple dish that I have grown up loving. I was disappointed by my perfect meal
and its taste. I expected tender, smooth noodles to be bathed in juicy tomatoes
and sparked by tangy parmesan and fresh basil. What I got was less than that.
However, my friends reminded me of what it is like to be with family. Myranda
teased me and questioned my every move, and Sonal did everything she could to
help me in the cooking process. We made fun out of a cooking debacle, laughing
at the strange noodles, the small room, dirty pans, and plastic knives. It was
fun to make something from inadequate resources, and to still enjoy it to some
degree. Although mediocre, it was invigorating to make a meal from ingredients
I purchased on my own and from my own idea of a recipe. The best part was
having friends around me to persevere with me. This process showed me that what
I value for my food intake is achievable. I felt proud to make a meal from just
a few ingredients and only a few dollars. Next time I will make sure to buy
noodles that don’t have fiber added to them, but I know that I can make a meal
for myself successfully, both quickly and inexpensively. I don’t need the best
of supplies, but of course those help. Fresh veggies do amazing things. They
were the best part of my meal, and solidified my belief in the values my
parents have passed on to me.
Maybe
in the future I will try to buy from sellers with locally produced foods and try
to eat entirely out of the industrial food chain, but for right now, my perfect
meal doesn’t have to be perfectly free of corn or artificial ingredients. I
have become more aware of and interested in the importance of eating in these
sustainable ways, but I cannot be fully committed at this point in my life. I
don’t have a lot of time or a lot of money to spend on organic products, and
with a college meal plan, I have no need to cook. I might splurge on some more expensive
noodles in the future, though. I think a perfect meal can change. A lot of my
values will remain intact as I continue to grow up, but I think I will change
in some ways, and so may my bowl of noodles and veggies.
