On the way back to San Jose a few days ago, Erik and I were listening to In Defense of Food on audiobook. We started talking about Michael Pollan’s instruction to eat only “real food” — not the processed “food products” people tend to eat these days — and we decided we should try harder to follow this rule. We do eat much better than the average American, but we still fall prey to fake food on a fairly regular basis. We share a fondness for certain processed foods like Kraft Singles and instant ramen (Chinese onion flavor! — and a sesame-ginger ramen that comes in a silver pouch), and I also use a lot of vegetarian/vegan products that have come pretty far from their whole-food origins. I just read Diet for a Small Planet for the first time, too, and this book and Pollan’s resonate strongly with each other. Every time I do any reading about our food habits and food system, I become a little more convinced that the local-sustainable-low on food chain trinity is the best way to eat.
Of course, the more dietary restrictions you have, the harder it is to maintain the habit of choosing only real foods. I’ve noticed this with my veg groceries, and even more so now that I am not eating lactose or gluten. Today, after my yoga class, we drove out to Culver City to visit a gluten- and casein- free bakery, The Sensitive Baker (there were two other bakeries on this block… what the heck?!). Jason found the bakery in Los Angeles magazine, and I’ve been very excited to go. The bakery interior wasn’t especially inspiring — gluten-free breads go stale easily, so everything was in a freezer case — but I felt the same thrill of “oh, I can eat everything here!” that I get when I go to a vegan or vegetarian restaurant. I bought a brioche, a frozen mac and cashew-tahini “cheese” for later, a loaf of bread, and a cupcake. It was a bit off-putting to check the bread label and see ingredients like disodium phosphate and xanthan gum (though I know xanthan gum is required for gluten-free baking). Do these items qualify my gluten-free baked goods as “food products” instead of real food? I don’t know, but not eating lactose or gluten does seem to help my stomach, so I’m keeping it up for the present. (And it’s a measure of how much my food tastes have changed over the years that I am really, really excited to try the cashew-tahini “cheese”… but the only vegan “cheese” I’ve ever liked was made of cashews and that’s why I’m so anticipatory.)
After the bakery, we were hungry for some lunch. Eating out has become difficult for me because there’s so much lactose and gluten in everything. There’s wheat in soy sauce, oyster sauce, and fish sauce, and of course in nearly all breads, pastas, and noodles, even my favorite fresh flat rice noodles.* A lot of vegetarian “meats” are made from gluten, and after a quick look through the vegetarian section in our local Thai market, I figured out that you can’t predict which ones will be soy and gluten and which will be just soy. Mexican restaurants use a lot of sour cream and cheese, and Indian restaurants ladle on the yogurt, cream, and ghee. Most non-ethnic restaurants rely on cheeses and wheat to fill out their vegetarian entrees, or else they serve the sort of Mediterranean cooking that doesn’t tempt me (dolmas, tabbouleh, vegetarian risottos… often things that tend to be heavy on lemony flavors**). I have to admit sometimes I’ve just given in and had meat, because it seemed like the simplest and most satisfying choice.
Today we ended up at Ford’s Filling Station, which I’d heard about but never tried. We had wandered around this stretch of Culver for a while and were dismayed at how bourgie everything looked, but finally we just had to pick a place or else go home. I ordered a smoked trout salad, which was just about the only thing on the menu that I could eat. Erik continued the trout theme by ordering brook trout. We were surrounded by trendy West LA people and it was a rather cold day to be eating on the patio, but when the food came, we were so glad we’d chosen Ford’s. It was real food, nothing fake about it, and beautifully balanced and prepared. My salad was composed of mild frisée, a sprinkling of pickled onions, smoked trout, creamy tiny potatoes, and a boiled egg, all tossed together in Meyer lemon aïoli. Erik’s trout came dressed in toasted nuts and brown butter on a bed of haricots verts and fine bulgur wheat. The portions were small by supersize standards, but just right for our appetites, and I had enough room to eat my Sensitive Baker cupcake*** for dessert. Processed foods can seem so alluring, it’s always easy to forget the wonder of real food until you’ve had some that’s well-made… and then, wow! You never want to eat anything else. The trouble is, of course, that that salad would have been a hell of a lot of trouble to make at home — onions to pickle, potatoes and eggs to boil, probably a billion ingredients in the dressing — and that’s how we end up eating things like Trader Joe’s pad thai out of a box. Le sigh. Well, we’ll figure it out over time… though I am looking forward to the ample counter space and the dishwasher in our new house!
*If I get desperate enough, though, I have a recipe for making these myself that uses tapioca instead of wheat starch. I did try it once, a few years ago, and it was kind of a lot of trouble, but not so much that I wouldn’t do it again.
**I have a slight aversion to citrus flavors in savory dishes, unless it’s citrus with dark bitter greens. I never put lemon or lime in my seafood or my pho. Citrus fruits alone, though, or in desserts, I looooove.
***It was a cupcake, nothing more or less. I’d get it again if I was at the store and felt like a cupcake, but otherwise, probably not.
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