lean and mean

Happy new year! After convalescing from the heap of food rituals that formed the month of December, the Ambivore rises from her post-Christmas torpor, surveys the horizon of the brand new year, and says: WTF???

January, it appears, is the month of self-hate. CBC shows can’t stop nattering about diets and the HEALTH CRISIS, and the Globe and Mail last weekend was all about fat fat fat. At gyms across the city, cash registers ring like a Carillon church bell, herding everyone to the gym to pay for their guilt and shame. There should be a confession booth at the end of the treadmill; it would give some reprieve to the poor souls following their personal trainers around, genuflecting, panting, and wheezing their way to virtue.

How can we argue with a booming multibillion dollar diet and fitness industry? Let the Ambivore make it easy for you. The modern day ethos can be distilled to this: Eating salad will make you happy. Salads make you good.
And to illustrate this truth, you can visit “Laughing Alone With Salad”.

So how do we counter this ridiculous orthodoxy, other than reaching for our stash of chocolate (as in “Laughing Alone with Chocolate”)?

Perhaps we should let February be about the RE-TOX.

It can be about celebration and reviving the core tenant of eating: joy! We can eat food we love, eat with our hands, and start and end each meal with gratitude for our bodies. Even if (or maybe because) as we age our bodies continue to shift, expand and decrease in ways that surprise us.

comfort me with apples

Two school girls in Uganda, sneaking fruit from the hotel garden. Beauty!

Stag writes:

It is a hot, sticky Sunday afternoon and my 13-year self is slumped in the church pew, passing time by flipping through the Old Testament. Why hey now. What’s this in Song of Solomon? “Comfort me with apples for I am sick with love…Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor.” Wha–? What could her navel possibly want?! “Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.” !! By now I am convulsing, trying to suppress my laughter. “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.” Oh, who can stand this hilarity!

Over Sunday dinner I ask how Solomon made the cut into the old testament as he was clearly obsessed wit food and women. My older teenage sister leans over and says: ‘DUH. It’s SYMBOLIC, stupid. He’s not REALLY talking about women. It’s about God’s love for his flock. Or, you know, something.”

I was reminded of this lesson in food and sex metaphors when I recently saw Eat Pray Love (EPL), a tripartite travelogue that pays homage to self-actualization. In the first chapter, our heroine goes to Italy, where the audience endures bumper-sticker comments like “I just want to make love to pizza” and sits through long scenes of Julia Roberts meditating over a bowl of pasta. Once Roberts has finished working through her relationship demons, she jets over to India for her next self-awareness project where she promptly sinks into an existential crisis, symbolized now by her reckless and emotional eating that is so excessive her meditation mate nicknames her “Groceries”. I admit that by this point in the movie I was feeling so bludgeoned by the script I stopped listening, and instead settled into admiring Julia Robert’s ability to well up beautifully in front of the camera. She sure is pretty.

Then, at long last, our last chapter, “Love”! As in most Hollywood movies, Julia’s first date predictably involves engaging with something exotic, earthy and culinary (insert market stroll, picnic, or cooking scene), a harbinger of the delectable passage to the lover’s sweet spot–or to the “blinkity blank blank”, as my mother would say.

But Javier and Julia stop eating after this market stroll, and instead of usual scenes of pre- or post-coitus flirting over food we are subject to more yammering about enlightenment. No surprise then, that the consummation scene unfolds like a Puritan sex manual: we never see it. This is all starting to feel vaguely Calvinist to me, where enlightenment transpires only after excising earthly pleasures and wrestling with demons like jealousy, regret, or desire. By the end of the movie, I’m feeling the way I do after reading an Oprah magazine, burdened by the growing list self-improvement projects.

Flip over to the other current foodie/romance film “I am Love”. In this film, food is a main character, occupying each scene from the heroine’s first flush of love to seduction. The sex scene is so breathtaking that for the first time it occurred me that the word “consummate” comes from “to consume.” Unlike EPL, the true subject of the movie isn’t How to Be Better, but rather a celebration of abandoning the strictures of should’s and giving into joy and rebellion.

After mulling over why I found I EPL so grating despite some delicious moments, I’d like to say this: Bite me, you film directors and Sunday school teachers who divide life into neat self-improvement chapters or suggest that food and sensuality are mere metaphors in the journey to spiritual enlightenment. I think Solomon really did find joy in the intimate entanglement with earthly pleasure.

Comfort me with apples. Make me strong with wine cakes. Let’s stop reading and dine instead.

back-to-school voodoo

Turnip says,

Many moms I know are teachers of some sort or another, which means Back to School for their kids is Back to School for them, too. My first class of the term invariably falls at 9:00am of my boys’ first day. My own new-classroom nerves are exacerbated by my guilt about not personally holding Son #2’s hand as he searches for his Grade One teacher amid the playground chaos; not watching Son #1 scrupulously ignore me as soon as he spots his friends.

But here’s an intriguing phenomenon: all these Back-to-School moms, including me, will bake. We will bake something special to tuck into our kids’ lunches. Brownies. Chocolate-chip cookies. Date squares. Never mind that our introductory lectures aren’t prepared and we can’t find the keys to our classrooms. Never mind that it’s ninety degrees in the shade. We will bake anyways.
I discovered this strange practice by accident: my neighbor (a teacher-librarian with a kid starting JK) commented that it smelled good on my porch (brownies) and that hers smelled the same (cookies). Weird, isn’t it, she said, for baking smells to be wafting outdoors into the humid, late-summer air?

So I started asking around. One colleague got up early to make banana muffins. Another called her mother-in-law on the weekend in tears, and the heroic woman arrived with home-made, plastic-wrapped popcorn balls and a ride to school for the kids.

Where did we get the weird notion that baked goods are mandatory for the first lunchbox of the year? I mean, I know that many of my most extreme domestic behaviors are guilt-induced, and that for many of us, such behaviors were modeled by our own mothers, who performed them out of habit or necessity or—who knows?—a deep love of the kitchen. Maybe we feel watched, or judged, by our kids’ lunchroom supervisors, and we want to make a good impression right off? Because if it’s a good impression we’re after, I know for a fact that dinosaur-shaped fruit gems in foil packets would have been a more impressive “kids-I-love-you” telegram than the brownies I sweated over.

Here’s my hypothesis: baking for Back to School is talismanic. It’s a ritualistic gesture by which we assert our motherly skill and goodwill against the looming evils of one-size-fits-all schooling, peer pressure and corporate advertising. If we do it just this once, we tell ourselves, the world will be warned: watch how you treat them, because these children are Loved.

There’s guilt in my brownies, yes, and maybe a touch of fear. But I propose that there’s fierceness and power in them, too.

So eat, my handsome lads, and be blessed. Because after this it’ll be Snackeroos until Christmas.

late

Turnip says:

Due to my recent hosting anxieties, it’s been a long time since we’ve had people over for dinner. But when friends from Switzerland called to say they’d be in town for just a few days and they’d love to see us, what could I possibly do but assure them we’d have steaks on the barbecue and beer in the fridge by 6:30pm? “Could you make it 6:00pm?” they said, “Our kids will be so jet-lagged.”

I am now sitting on my porch at 7:05pm. I have checked all phones and email in case they’re lost, or someone has taken ill. My kids have dragged their daycare-addled selves upstairs to watch TV, stupefied with a hunger despite stirring through the 7-layer-dip I assembled. (Son #2 would normally be in the bath by now on his way to bed). The spinach salad is getting limper by the second, and the neighbor’s cherry pie I put in the oven for the occasion will be stone cold by dessert time. I’ve drunk a second glass of wine on my empty stomach and now feel a bit muddled as well as anxious.

The unsettled feeling provokes a flashback to six years ago, when Stag organized a postpartum food tree (friends were scheduled to drop off dinners for us in the weeks following Son #2’s birth). This same friend lived close by at the time, but she arrived on her day ninety minutes behind schedule, on foot, with a salmon-and-spinach concoction not really intended to be stored long or transported any distance. She’d also brought two of her own tots, whose clamoring for a spontaneous play-date was backed by their mum’s reasoning that “Well, we’ve come all this way. . .”

What makes people late for dinner (or with dinner)? I mean, our friends are wonderful people—once they finally unloaded their clan from the rented car, it was a warm reunion that reminded me how generous, humorous and kind-spirited they are. The impression created by their chronic lateness—selfishness, arrogance, carelessness—doesn’t at all reflect what they’re really like.

Or does it? A quick Googling of “chronic lateness” sets off an avalanche of judgmental diagnoses: “unrealistic goal-setting,” “drama-seeking behavior,”“inner brat,” “self-sabotage,” “lazy thinking.” Others, it would seem, feel as jilted as me when forced to wait for someone late.

My mom would send one of us to holler at the bottom of the stairs to my dad that dinner was ready. He’d have headed up to change after work and not come down; we’d often sit down to eat with his food on his plate getting cold, have to choke down our first few bites through Mom’s fuming. An unfortunate mealtime stress to grow up with, granted–but as primary cook in my own home I did and do see her point.

So take it from an Ambivore: A dinner party is different than a regular party, folks. You can be late for a regular party—if the invite says 7, go ahead and roll in at 8 with your bottle of wine; the only people who’ll be there before you are those with sitters with curfews, anyway. But if someone is cooking for you, arrive on time. Lay your flowers on the kitchen counter, sling your coat over the nearest barstool, roll up your sleeves and say, “What can I chop?” Say, “Oh my God, is that cherry pie?”

And then say, “I’m making quiche the Sunday after next; please come over”—because the only thing better than a punctual dinner guest is a dinner guest who reciprocates promptly, and with enthusiasm.

in search of Canadian food, James Bay

Stag says:

I suppose I can blame The Plains of Abraham, my beloved childhood novel, for fueling visions of goose meat slow-cooked in a teepee, berries and herbs plucked from the forests. Like many white Canadian kids spoon-fed tales of “the Indian”, I spent one childhood summer in braids, stubbornly bare-foot and adorned in “war paint” (courtesy of Mom’s stash of Mary Kay).

Fast forward, and I’m sitting on a bewildering bit of food history on James Bay, northern Ontario, with no berries or moose meat in sight. The reason? For starters, here is how the European forefathers sliced up this island: if I walk 20 metres up the road, I am on First Nations Territory. Here, that means if I were Cree I can hunt, trap, fish, and prepare meat any which way I want. But I’m not Cree. I can, however, eat at any of the the five “restaurants” on this little splash of land: the diner, Pizza Hut, or KFC (on the reserve), a snack machine at the tiny hospital to my right (provincial land), or the new Ecolodge up the road on my left (federal land). All are about a 5-20 minute walk from where I’m staying.

Local canteen now closed; PizzaHut and KFC taken over.

The best choice, obviously, is the beautifully designed Ecolodge. And certainly the food will be delish! Local greens and fresh meat!

But no. The chef apologetically explains that because it’s federal land, he can’t purchase food from the rez because meat has to be sliced and diced at government-sanctioned abattoirs a five-hour train ride away. So instead–to the chef’s chagrin– all restaurant ingredients have to be imported from the south, which arrive once a week in a heap on the river bank. The food is delicious (and blueberry dumplings gorgeous), but the imported vegetables taste like a long train ride (I’m guessing the pale pink tomatoes and berries are from California). And anyway, the prices are pitched to the deep pockets of Euro-tourists and steady stream government workers, not the locals.

I’ve been here 7 days so far, and here’s what I’ve learned: many families spend 1/2 their paycheck on food. and the prices rapidly climb the father north you go. At the community events, I see the tables scattered with pop, candy, pogo sticks and hotdogs; no bannock here. I learn that Cree health workers are working hard to start community gardens to improve access to vegetables, and some elders express concern about the diminishing practice of hunting, fishing and trapping. I hear about the devastating impact of government’s residential school system–a calculated effort to eliminate Cree language and culture.

First community garden

And so we swing open the door to the post-colonial world and usher in this modern reality: excessively high cost of imported food from the south, scarce supply of local fruit and vegetables, diminished knowledge of sustainable agricultural practices, and disproportionately high rates of Type II Diabetes. Food security is a struggle for many, and the cheaper alternative is the unhealthier one. One woman explains to me in the only grocery store on the island: when the choice is to pay for heating bills or groceries, what do you choose? My own modest bag of groceries for one is a $100.00; I see her point. I learn later that when the Northland grocery store first set up shop on the reserve, they built in a clause that no competing store can open on reserve territory, thus securing a tight monopoly on food.

If that’s not bad enough, I hear anecdotes that sound like a sick joke: a local mom tells me her daughter came home excited to “dress up as an Indian” at school and sing the “Indian” folk song “Land of the Silver Birch”. “But darling,” she explained to her daughter, “YOU are ‘Indian’! YOU are Cree!” To which, the mother reported, the daughter returned a blank, uncomprehending stare. “We have to practice living through our culture, not simply learn about culture-especially not this way”, she explains. But given the efforts throughout history to strip down their culture to dollar-store imitation costumes and fossilized versions of “the Indian”, she admits that this is no easy task.

Despite my plan to explore food culture, I haven’t had success in tasting any local fare. It’s taken a week of chatting to locals to figure out where I can taste the elusive teepee-smoked goose and eat moose meat stew. How to find a guide to show me the famed orchids and birds in the swamp lands, watch the mating whales in the bay, and bring me to Fossil Island. Who will show me the edible food in the woods, and where to find the growing and vibrant local arts and music scene. The trick is pretty simple and pre-dates the era of Lonely Planet guides: you have to make friends, be invited, and people need to trust you.

Given the stench of colonialism and the growing corporate suite of mines and dams across the north, I think I’d be wary of outsiders too, particularly ones with “development ideas”. For now, I’m resolved to wait for an invite for a home-cooked dinner, and make my way to the Northland Grocery store. Where the fox and beaver pelts hang in the aisle between the Tupperware and mac n’ cheese.

But when I make my way down to the dock, I see this too: the northern lights stretching like wisps of pink cotton candy across the ink blue sky, and the air heavy with the scent of sweet pine. And in the night sky, the river sitting like a pool of black coffee, swaying silently in its bowl.

O Canada! Our true north: pain and glory.