Food & Water Watch

Food & Water Watch has a great inter-active site to find out where your food is (maybe) from. It's pretty interesting though. Check it out:

Coffee Cupping 101

The first time I actually learned skills to appreciate food was while I was working at Sustainable Harvest. While working with Peruvian coffee-farmers and their cupping training, I was able to learn so much myself--not just the ins-and-outs of the process (which I probably will explain in greater detail later), but how to actually cup the coffee: how to taste it, smell it, find the fine flavors and details in the coffee.

Cupping coffee, when I say this, most people look at me with a blank look on their face. ”It’s like wine tasting, but with coffee,” Ohh, right, okay. The word cupping even comes up wrong in spell check and the verb “catar” (to cup in Spanish) is not my my translation dictionary, or even online. It is just not something that people know about. Or don’t care to know.

Let me break it down: the principle elements to find in a cup of coffee are (there are other qualities, but only are talked about if the coffee is cupped in a national contest of something, the following are the basic) Fragrance/Aroma, Acidity, Flavor, Body, and After taste. The fragrance is the smell of the dry, ground coffee, where the aroma is the brewed coffee. In each category, one can find different qualities. Getting past the obvious fragrances of chocolate or fruit, you can find floral, vanilla, honey, spices, or herbs. Usually the acidity is compared to a fruit, for example, a coffee can have an acidity of citric fruit, dry fruit, or pitted fruit. The flavors are often described as malt, chocolate, or of various fruits. Body in a coffee can be strong, weak, balanced, or creamy and buttery. The after-taste is, of course, what flavor remains and how your mouth feels after the sip is gone.

Step-by-step: First you look at the coffee, look at the color and see the level of roast, a darker coffee will automatically give flavors of carbon and smoke, where a lighter coffee will have the flavors of fruit and honeys, and a very light coffee is roasted to find the defects in the coffee. Next, smell the coffee grounds. Move it around a bit, let the fragrance get out a bit and stick your nose right in the cup. Once the water is added, wait four minutes to brew then you do what is called breaking the cup. This is when you stir up the coffee, you are only supposed to stir it once breaking through the top layer of grounds that will have formed. That is when you can best smell the aroma. After this, the grounds are removed from the top–this is way more difficult than it sounds because you try and get all the ground off the top in one motion using one or two spoons, that way the grounds aren’t moved around too much disturbing the coffee. Then, after letting the coffee cool (as not to burn your mouth) you taste it by taking spoonfuls and slurping it up. The slurping is necessary to maximize the amount of coffee entering your mouth and so that it fills your mouth allowing contact with all taste buds. But it does sound funny the first time you see it, or rather hear it. Once you have tasted the spoonful of coffee, you spit it out. Unlike wine, coffee tasting cannot get you drunk or anything, but if you are tasting a lot of coffee I guess you can get a caffeine buzz. I don’t usually spit it out though, maybe if it is bad coffee, I guess, but it seems wasteful to spit out good coffee–plus I like a good caffeine buzz!

I found that it is very hard to pin-point what I actually find in the coffee. Get past the fact that I am drinking a cup of coffee and find the flavors of “honey, raisins, chamomile, cinnamon, passion fruit, or peaches” in a cup of coffee is challenging. Not only identifying the flavors, but to describe them is an even greater challenge. I find myself saying, “Hm, it has a flavor that reminds me of…something… I just don’t remember what it is at the moment.” It’s amazing, someone who is a good cupper can taste a cup of coffee and know where the coffee came from, the region, altitude, and climate, they can identify the path of the bean, the problems along the way, if it was damaged in anyway, the processes it went though. It is amazing, when I taste coffee, well, I taste coffee! I am starting to be able to pick out the flavors, but I am no where near that level.

Cupping coffee helps me to pay more attention to details. To have that mind set when it comes to eating, helps you to appreciate the food and not only that but involve all the senses, and try to find more to something that you previously knew about it. A cup of coffee is a cup of coffee. But you can find something more to that cup of coffee if you look past what you thought you knew about it.

Is it really AWFUL?

What is it with Americans and their picky-eating when it comes to food? I'm not jsut talking about taste-buds here. Essentially everything we eat is disguised so we don’t have to think about where it came from of what it was before it ended up on our plant. Meat is the main victim here. I mean, we don’t even say cow or pig, we say beef or pork instead. We even change the name of the food so it is “less threatening”. (Okay, I do realize that poultry and fish are an exception here, but we’ll leave that out for the moment. I do wonder why that is though, is a cow more threatening to eat than a chicken?) Even when we buy meat and cook it ourselves, it is cut, wrapped, and frozen so it doesn’t appear anything like the animal it was. And I will say, even a whole turkey on Thanksgiving doesn’t remind me of a live turkey.

Go into any market outside the US and you will see entire animals just hanging there, waiting to be sold: whole chickens with feathers, pig heads, and cow legs. Every time I walk through a market like this, I think, wow, so good that I am NOT a vegetarian, and how refreshing is it to see fresh meat! Although, I am being unfair, it is not just Americans, I have an Irish friend who says that she eats meat, but only if she doesn’t have to know that it was an animal first. Unconscious eating.

I realize that I have always had a different perspective on this issue than most Americans. First of all, the fact that my family has an Elk farm and while we eat our delicious elk steak, we can look out and see the animals running around happily in the back pastures. This seems morbid to most and a lot of my friends comment on it when they come over for dinner, but really–it’s not, it’s natural. (Although, I am not going to lie and say that the first time I saw my Dad cutting up an elk–mind you it was only the meat at this point–at age 17, I decided to be a vegetarian, which lasted about 6 months.) Even before moving there, my parents were never ones to hide the fact that we were eating live animals. Heck, we used to get live lobsters from the store and boil them at home, usually letting my dog bark at them for a while, and my Dad would plop that entire lobster on our plates and say, “This is Fred…Eat up!” It got to the point that if he hadn’t named the lobster that was about to be consumed, my sister and I would say, “wait, wait, what’s his name??” For me, it has never been a mystery of where my food comes from. Conscious eating.

I happened to stumble across an episode of Top Chef Masters the other day, and one if the challenges was to cook food that is “seemingly inedible to most Americans” and one of the chefs put it, or “AWFUL” which means basically the innards of the animal. Heart, ears, tongue, and stomach. This reminded of one day while I was living in Peru, some work friends took me out to eat anticuchos, which is a traditional Peruvian dish (oh, probably should note that I am living in Lima, Peru for the summer…) and it is, in more simple terms, heart kabobs. They were quite nice, very dense meat, but very rich, a bit tough but not as much as you may think for being heart. Conclusion: Yum! Another day while eating lunch, I found a big chunk of liver in my soup. And another a whole chicken foot. Okay, I didn’t actually eat the chicken foot, but that was also more due to that fact that the friend I was with was so excited and wanted to trade soups–apparently she loves chicken feet.

People always talk about "the strange things while eating abroad"...but why are they so strange? Why shouldn’t we eat every part of the animal always. I mean, thinking realistically about it, if you are going to kill an animal for food, you might as well use it all up and not waste it. And if you are already eating the muscles of the animal, whats wrong with eating the heart–that’s a muscle–or anything other organ for that matter, it all comes out of the same animal, its all part of the same package. I feel like everyone else in the world eats all these parts of the animal (and sometimes as a delicacy, paté anyone?) except for the western world or maybe it’s just US.

Latin American Food Culture

I cannot tell you the exact "epiphany moment" when I realized my fascination with food--I suppose there are a few. I know for certain that it began with my experiences living and traveling abroad. One of the striking differences about living in Latin America, specifically in Mexico and Peru and living in the United States is the way we go about eating food. There were three prominent things for me:

First, the market. The act of going to the market every week (or few days, I suppose in some cases) to buy the food for the family is a completely different concept from the quick trip to the bright shiny supermarket. To go buy the weekly food that does not necessarily come in boxes or bags, but it is displayed in luscious piles of actually freshly picked fruit and vegetables and (do I dare say it) freshly slaughtered animals. Going to the market is an experience in itself, and believe me, it would not pass the USDA cleanliness laws! The enclosed warehouse or tented street (depending on the season, day or city) is crowded with people selling ever-y-thing: colorful fruits, ripe vegetables, freshly baked breads and tortillas, an impressive array of chiles, spices, and herbs, the cheese booths, and the meat--probably the most shocking of all for the Western-born-foreigner--the entire animal, skinned, hangs on hooks for all to see, the pile of fish are on the next stall over, while the fried pig skins are displayed with a garnish of and entire pig head. One of the other aspects of the market is the concept of seasons--when a mango is not in harvest, it will not be found at a market (but, when it is in harvest, it is the juiciest, most succulent mango ever tasted). Of course, with a location close to the equator, the is something always in season! In the grocery stores of Washington D.C., or my small hometown in New Hampshire there are no seasons, the fruits and vegetables are always available and "fresh", that is to say, until you take a bite and realize the "mango" would never pass for one in the market.

Second, the lack of fast food. I'm not going to lie, there is McDonald's and every other fast food restaurants in big cities of Mexico and Peru. Not only do they attract the non-adventure tourist, but the locals seems to like them too--not to the three-times-a-day that you see in the States, but nevertheless, enough to keep the "restaurants" in business. While the locations are there, the idea of "fast food" is not, even in McDonald's, the customers still sit and eat a meal, it is not the on-the-go mentality of the U.S. customers. The whole idea of eating on-the-go is not something that is seen frequently. It is rare to see a person eating in the street, for example, when people eat, they sit down with others and eat a meal. The lunch break is an hour, or even two if wanted/needed, as opposed to the half-hour speed-lunch at the desk that is common here in the States. Even the street taco stands, which are certainly prominent, often offer a bench to sit and eat. And if there is no bench, the customers will still stand and eat there at the taco stand, chatting with the people, taking their time to eat.

Third, the idea of sharing. This is something that engulfs much of the Latin American culture, everything can be and is shared--food is one of the many. Strangers are welcomed into a home to share a meal with out questions asked. In my experience in the States, a shared meal is an intimate activity, with friends and family. Even when meeting another person for the first time for a meal, still offers the sense of familiarity, comfort and wanting to know the person better. In Latin America, it is for everyone and anyone, and now as I write this, I realize that the feeling of the meal is the same, the people simply offer this to everyone. The comfort of food is shared as an invitation to enter into the comfort of the culture.

I don't want to completely knock on my own culture here. But I do think that we need to take a moment and re-evaluate our relationship with food. We live in such a fast-paced and autonomous society in some ways, we, in my opinion, sacrifice the importance of life's essential and natural needs.

Or in other words, as my Professor put it: we need to eat like people do somewhere else.

Conscious Food

I bought a shirt the other day, using the left over holiday gift cards, at (somewhat ironically, I suppose) Gap. It says "What we collectively choose to buy or not to buy can change the face of this planet." In addition to the fact that it was only $5 and that it was the only one, hidden in a pile of t-shirts, I thought it was made especially for me.

The idea of conscious living is a new one to me. The life I am accustomed to is endurance living--just getting through the day and on to the next. Recently, I have been considering the way in which I live my life. How that makes a difference on my happiness as well as on the people and earth. How do my small actions and decisions affect the world on a greater scheme--the whole world and my personal world?
To live in state awareness is a challenge. It is unfamiliar and can sometimes lead to conclusions that I am not ready to confront. These thoughts and ideas have led me to question the issue of food. How my purchasing choices of food can allow me to express my own feelings and choose my impact on the world. And ask myself: How can I eat more consciously?

First: Cook. Cooking my food helps me to quite literally touch every item. I am not eating a cookie wrapped in brightly colored plastic, I am eating a cookie I made from butter, sugar, flour, eggs, (chocolate!) etc, etc. The other important aspect of cooking is it takes time to prepare the food, therefore the eater has greater appreciate for the food. There was time, effort and pride put into that meal--and the food tastes so much better, knowing that I was the one who created it.

Second: Think. To think about exactly what I am eating--this means not eating in front of the T.V. people--is a key concept to conscious eating. And QUESTION. Why I am eating, how it makes me feel, and where does it come from? The latter is one of the most important for me personally. Yes, I enjoy good food--but for me, (I do study International Relations, after all!) understanding the process of getting the food and the people involved. Not only thinking about what the food means to me, but what the food means for the people in the production process.

Third, Slow down. Eating slowly allows for more time to concentrate on the food. In other words, appreciate it. Not only do we eat less if we are more aware of what we are eating because we realize when we are full. And we are satisfied with the food we are eating without eating excessive amounts.

Try it. Slow down. Question. Appreciate.

Beautiful Moments

Food is not necessarily fuel. It is nourishment; it is enjoyment; it is colors, smells, textures, and flavors. It is natural. It is sharing. It is culture. Beyond all of these, food is something that we NEED. Yes, we can want it, and in the Western culture it has something that we want rather than need because of its excessive abundance. But to live, to literally exist and sustain ourselves, we actually need to eat food. I think this is a concept that is under-rated and under-appreciated in my culture. We need first to come to terms with the overwhelming necessity of food for each person on this planet, before moving to the fun part--defining food in terms of what it means for ourselves.

One of the most amazing and inspiring moments that comes from food is the meal. The gathering to share the essential nourishment with others. Food is something that can cross all borders and break down all walls. Sitting down with others, eating a meal, does not require any shared background, interests, culture, or even language, but it it is a shared moment between human beings. Every culture can be defined in terms of their cuisine and moreover, it is the part of the culture that is most easily and readily shared with others, accepted by others, and understood by others.

There was a specific trip that I remember in Peru, I went as a translator with the importing company for a Canadian coffee roaster. I have visited various coffee farms in Latin America while working for a coffee importer. (More about this in greater detail later!) Every time we arrived, we would sit down for a meal with the farmers. To see the obvious poverty and to have a meal offered to me was something so generous and appreciative. On this particular trip, after we met the farmers and toured the farm, we sat down for a meal. Squeezed between a Peruvian coffee farmer, a Canadian roaster, across from a Peruvian friend of mine who I worked with in Lima. Through the bites of soup with a chicken that could have only been killed that morning, and rapid translation of the conversations in Spanish and English, I thought to myself, Wow!, here I am, a young intern from America, sharing a meal with people coming from completely different places. Though I wanted to, I could not completely understand the lives of the farmers in that moment, nor could they understand my life, but there we all were, sitting together, sharing a meal, and it all made sense.

Food is a beautiful moment.

Introductions

Food is my passion and thankfully I am still learning... a lot. I have never blogged (save the travel blog written-I think-exclusively for my family) but this is an attempt to create outlet in which I can document my own journey and hopefully share with others what I find. These writings will share my thoughts and offer my insights on how I can live a more sustainable life through the food choices I make.

The important information: My name is Kira. My favorite food is cheese.

The more relevant background information:

I grew up in the Seacoast region of New Hampshire. My parents own a farm where we raise elk (sold for meat) and whatever else my Dad happens to decide upon, on any given day. When we moved to the farm, my Dad called it his "mid-life challenge". I am here to tell you that either he is working on keeping his "mid-life" time alive, or he just really likes a challenge. Every time I visit the farm, there is a new project of his brewing. Sometimes literally, as he enjoys making his own beer and wine, last year was a large garden of vegetables, and that was after the fruit orchard, and the Talapia fish in the basement, and the guinea-hens, and the bee-hive... (I think you get the point) and most recently, he is making his own cheese! (Pleased about this one!) So, I guess you could say that the love for food, creating and sustainable living is in my genes.

Currently, however, I am away from the farm life and living in Washington D.C., finishing my education at American University with a degree in International Studies, focus on Development and Latin America, and a minor in Spanish. I lived and studied in Mexico for a year and spent the following summer in Peru. These all have had an influence on my life in terms of my understanding and passion of food. (To be explained at a later date!)

So, Let the eating, the education, and the good time roll. (May have borrowed that last line...)

Peace.