american eating is being redefined, again.

A few years ago I read a book called Waste and Want; A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser. It may seem like an odd place to start when writing about food, but America's relationship towards food has been shaped by ideas about what is fresh and what is not, and what is not is never good to eat. Right?

The development of cuisine has historically been shaped at least somewhat by necessity. What is fresh now will not last through the months of winter. So preservation techniques developed, fermentation & drying, salt curing & immersion in fat.

Today I opened a jar of pickled green tomatoes. When I bought them I was so excited by finding them (I could never find them in San Francisco) that I didn't look closely at the jar. Across the front, written in large, excited lettering, "No Vinegar, No Sugar, No Preservatives!"...when did these things become a bad thing, and how the hell do you pickle anything without preservatives?

After years of highly processed foods with high fructose corn syrup, artificial preservatives, and so many ingredients with unrecognizable scientific names, it seems that at least some of the food industry is participating in a counter movement. But is the advertising now going too far the other direction? Are we denying the classic preparation techniques that have not just allowed us to survive, but have made food good?

The first ingredient in the tomatoes was filtered water which would be impressive if any water in the industrialized world were not filtered. They could have left out the "filtered" and I wouldn't have wondered about my likely exposure to cholera. Then of course, came the two different kinds of salt: salt & sodium chloride. When did salt cease to become a preservative?

It makes sense that those preservation techniques that came about in America because we could should not necessarily continue. I don't think Twinkies should survive just because they never mold...in fact if another biological creature will not eventually grow on a food item, I don't want to eat it.

But I like pickles dammit, and pickles are preserved. So are sausages, prosciutto, cheese, yogurt, kefir, creme fraiche, kimchi, vinegar, jelly, and beer; all through one process or another. The preservation of good quality ingredients with good quality preservatives can be a really good thing. Jam is tasty when made with sugar, there is not need for high fructose anything; the empty calories and the super sweet. We don't need to cut out preservation (or claim we're not preserving something when we are), we need to pick and choose, and we need to stop using things just because they're cheap and possible.

And part of that is redefining our attitudes towards waste, towards bacteria and fermentation & in the end towards what is good to eat.