LOSS OF FOOD LITERACY

The way our food is produced changed dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century. The family farm nearly vanished, swallowed up by industrial farming based on fossil fuels and monocultures. This has led to a dramatic drop in food prices—we now spend a third of what our grandparents did on our food. Chickens, once a prized bird reserved for Sunday dinner, are now cheap and ubiquitous. Steak is inexpensive enough for us to eat every night, and it’s quick and easy to cook. So why bother with the odd bits that often took time and effort to prepare? With a few exceptions, odd bits disappeared from the marketplace. To a great extent, this is because when an animal is slaughtered, the odd bits must be carefully separated from the carcass, and many require further processing before they can be sold. With meat prices so low, these cuts were no longer viable.
Except for calf’s liver and sweetbreads, with their special cachet, most odd bits are not worth processing and the result is that many never find their way out of the abattoirs or often end up as pet or animal food. The US government has also helped create and reinforce prejudices against odd bits by banning some of them from sale for human consumption, notably lungs and blood. In Europe both can be purchased from a butcher, and in some countries blood is available in the supermarket. Other, temporary bans, such as the removal from sale of oxtail, brains, marrow, and sweetbreads during the outbreak of mad cow disease (BSE), have further stigmatized odd bits. It is interesting to note that if we had allowed our cattle to graze instead of feeding them ground up animals, the ban wouldn’t have been necessary. At the same time as farming was being industrialized, the food supply chain was being centralized.
Supermarkets became our prime source for food, and small food shops, notably independent butcher shops, closed. Without someone to recommend a cut, save us a set of brains, brine a tongue, or share an odd bits recipe, we were left to our own devices. Even the most informed shopper must rely on the advice of experts, but supermarkets rarely provide any skilled personnel to help us shop, and they don’t employ butchers, as the meat arrives precut. This is also the situation in some of the remaining butcher shops, where there are no real butchers left: they’ve been replaced by meat slicers. We are all easily seduced by the convenience of buying everything in one place, but with no one to ask, and less and less knowledge of our own, it is hard for us to make good choices. We don’t, and often can’t, use our sense of smell or touch. Even our common sense leaves us, and we shop by price and appearance, believing these are more important than taste.
Our supermarkets prefer uniform foods that look good on their shelves, and as a result numerous apple and tomato varieties that didn’t fit these parameters have vanished. Odd bits are also victims of this need for durability and perfection, as many of them are extremely fragile and require careful handling. They cannot linger in the supermarket or in the consumer’s refrigerator, and few of them could be described as photogenic morsels. Our growing distaste for linking the meat we cook with the animal it came from has badly hurt odd bits’ popularity: some odd bits, like the head, tongue, or heart, instantly remind shoppers they are buying a part of a dead animal—something the dismembered, plastic-wrapped supermarket meat does not do. With loss of knowledge and no one to guide us, we turn for help to the new “experts”: the government, meat processors, nutritionists, and even celebrities, and we rely on the health and nutritional claims on the package to make our choices.

‘Tell me,’ she said, her voice sympathetic as she leaned over the table and restored control of the sausage casing to my clumsy fingers for the fifth time. ‘I’ve been wanting to ask you ever since you and your family arrived, but I did not wish to seem inquisitive. Please forgive me, but did your mother teach you nothing at all?’ ELISABETH LUARD

We do, as Rombauer noted, travel more than previous generations and many of us try exotic foods in foreign places. Globalized culture is marked by a fascination, almost an obsession, with the new. Cuisines the world over are in a constant state of flux, always incorporating new ingredients into their cooking. The tomato and potato in Europe are famous examples of the impact of new ingredients on established cuisines. However, these two did not conquer overnight, but took decades and longer to be accepted. Today the pace of change is much faster: an ingredient unknown to us last year is in every supermarket this year, and it seems that we can’t cook without it, whether it is balsamic vinegar or an exotic sea salt. Tantalized by the new, we neglect and forget the past. Food media aggravates the situation, with magazines promoting the hottest trends in food and cookbooks filled with banal recipes that provide little information and don’t teach the reader any skills or techniques.

More and more, we are eating variations of the same dish. It seems that we talk more about food than ever before, and the proliferation of food on television reveals that we are interested in food, but the more time we spend watching food programming the less time we spend in the kitchen cooking. The idolizing of chefs has left home cooks thinking that cooking is a specialized skill. It’s true that cooking in a high-end restaurant requires training and dedication, but making dinner is something we can all do.

By Jennifer McLagan in the book"Odd Bits : How to Cook the Rest of the Animal" Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, excerpts from pages 17 to 19. Adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. (picture from the book)