Of Eggs and Hens

When I said goodbye to my little flock and had to resort to getting my eggs cold from the supermarket cooler instead of warm from the nest, I made sure to choose cartons that said that the hens who laid those eggs were “free-range” or, at the very least, “cage-free.” 

Temple Grandin, that patron saint of farm animals, writes that battery hens are the most mistreated of all livestock. The suffering of cattle in feedlots is nothing compared to the misery of hens imprisoned in tight individual cages, deprived of natural light and food, forced to lay without regard for seasonal rhythms, and slaughtered after a couple of years. 

There was a time in my life when I made mayonnaise from scratch, in the blender, with garlic and olive oil, and eggs from my own lovelies. But when I was reduced to buying it at the store, I forgot to think about the hens whose eggs were used in its manufacture. Then one day, reading labels, I found mayonnaise made with eggs from cage-free hens, from the biggest producer on the planet, Hellmann’s. 

Not that cage-free hens lead an idyllic life. They don’t run around on grass, peck at bugs, or preen their feathers in the sun. They spend their lives in huge rooms filled with hundreds of their peers, making the most horrific din. Still, it’s far better than those cages. 

I bought the jar of Hellmann’s and took it home. It tasted like ordinary mayo, but I felt better as I spread it on my bread. Then, on my next trip to the store, I saw a new product on the shelf, a mayonnaise dressing from the same manufacturer that, the label said, was made with olive oil. 

I am a devotee of olive oil. As a child, one of my favorite foods was “pa amb oli i xocolata,” the all-time Catalan after-school snack: a thick slice of crusty bread sprinkled with dark, aromatic olive oil, accompanied with a chunk of almost-bitter chocolate. (If you’ve never tried it, it beats Hershey’s by a mile.) 

When the AMA discovered the benefits of the Mediterranean diet, olive oil ranked first on its list of panaceas. A powerful antioxidant, the oil is supposed to be good for the heart, the brain, the gut, and the immune system. It fights infection, lessens the risk of strokes and certain cancers, combats pain and inflammation, helps prevent diabetes and, because it keeps blood sugar levels stable, may help you lose weight. Not surprisingly, it’s even good for your mood. 

I was in the kitchen putting away the olive oil mayo when I realized that I hadn’t checked whether its eggs also came from cage-free hens. What if I had bought mayonnaise that was good for me but bad for the hens? 

The days are long gone when one could go to the store and choose stuff based on whether it looked good and how much it cost. I had barely mastered the secrets of tuna casserole when I learned that most of the foods available in the supermarket were bursting with possibly lethal substances. The first culprit, identified in the 1970s, was salt (would give you heart attacks), followed in the 1980s by fat (ditto, plus you would look awful), followed by sugar (pure poison, and ubiquitous), followed by hormones (would give you breasts if you were a man, cancer if you were a woman), pesticides, and the growing awareness of what our food system was doing to the welfare of animals. 

Trips to the supermarket became exercises in defensive warfare against industrial farming, food conglomerates, and big business, all of whom were bent on doing me maximum harm for their maximum profit. And now here I was in the kitchen, holding my jar of Hellmann’s, about to face a moral choice between the welfare of millions of hens and my own. 

But like Abraham about to sacrifice his son at God’s command, I was spared the dreadful choice. A close look at the label informed me that all Hellmann’s mayonnaises are made exclusively with, as they put it, “cage-free eggs.” 

After a year when good news has been scarcer than, well, hen’s teeth, I clutched the Hellmann’s jar to my breast. Could it really be that one of America’s major food producers had both my welfare and that of the female chicken at heart? Alternatively, could it be that consumer pressure had inspired Hellmann’s move to use olive oil, and eggs from cage-free birds? 

Whatever the reason—and I suspect it’s #2—it gives me hope. Maybe the next target for us consumers could be the bull calves that are born each year to keep their mothers lactating.  Heaven knows I sympathize with the plight of dairy farmers, but the sight every spring of farms with dozens of calves in rows of individual “calf igloos” may well drive me to veganism. In a nation that sends robots to Mars, surely there is a way we can have our cheese and eat it, with a clear conscience.

Fruit Laundry

I bought some fruit in the supermarket the other day:  apples and grapes and that key to immortality, blueberries.

The apples, now conveniently available in our nearby supermarket, came from a Vermont orchard about thirty miles from here, so they did not grievously wound the planet with pollution and waste of non-renewable resources. 

On the other hand the grapes and blueberries, may Gaia forgive me, came as far south as you can get without hitting Antarctic ice--the land of guanacos, vicunas, and Isabel Allende.  On the way home from the supermarket I tried to imagine the odyssey of my bag of grapes and my carton of blueberries from their south Andean slopes by fume-spewing truck to some Chilean airport, then north over the snow-capped volcanoes of  Peru and Ecuador, over restless Colombia and Chavez-mourning Venezuela, over the blue Caribbean, the blue Gulf of Mexico, the Deep South ankle-deep in azaleas, and the sodden mid-Atlantic.  After a brief rest in some American airport, they were flung into a truck and taken to a warehouse for packing.  Another truck conveyed them to the supermarket, and finally my Subaru, weaving and sliding up our muddy driveway, delivered them into our kitchen....

Of course the main reason I had bought the apples, grapes and blueberries was not their taste--does anybody buy supermarket fruit because of its taste anymore?--but their antioxidants.  But eating one of those grapes right out of the bag could be downright  harmful to my health, for who knows what Chilean growers do to their fruit before they ship it north, what pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers they use to maximize their profits? 

The apples I was less worried about.  They are not organic, but the grower's website states, "[We] adhere to strict growing practices that emphasize the health of our soils, waterways and workers, and encourages [sic] beneficial insect species in the control of pests.... Sometimes [however,] we must treat the orchard with a chemical because we have exhausted all other options." http://sunriseorchards.com/growing-practices  Nevertheless, apple sprays being among the most toxic, I couldn't eat an apple straight out of the bag either. 

No.  Before I could put these health-giving, perhaps even tasty, fruits into my mouth, I would have to do fruit laundry.

Fruit laundry involves more than a casual rinsing under the kitchen faucet.  You cannot count on mere water to get rid of the poisons that cling to the skin of apples, grapes and berries. And getting rid of the peel won't do the job either.  What you need, according to Dr. Andrew Weil,  is dish soap and elbow grease:  http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/QAA298790

This is what I do with every piece fruit I buy in the store:  I plunge it into bubble bath of detergent-laced water.  I scrub it (well, not the grapes and berries--I'm not that obsessed) with a brush.  I rinse it, then rinse it again.  I rinse it some more.  I then wonder whether those antioxidants are worth all this--couldn't I just swallow a vitamin pill?  But I persevere and drain the lot and pat it dry with a dish towel.   Finally, when the fruit laundry is done, I eat a couple of grapes and a blueberry.

Which is why I can't wait until our own blueberry bushes start bearing, and why I try to take such good care of my apple trees.  As for the grapes, I'll take mine in the form of wine.  There's nothing like a glass of dark red Malbec to banish the worry about what deadly stuff I am putting into my body.

My Mother And The Mediterranean Diet

If my mother, who turned 95 last week, could understand it, she would feel pleased and vindicated by the recent brouhaha about the Mediterranean diet.  In case you have been news deprived lately, this has to do with the large study in Spain which had to be halted because the positive effects of the diet on the experimental group were so strong that it was deemed unethical to deprive the control group (who were eating a "healthy" diet based mainly on lettuce and such) of its benefits.

Here's what to do if you want to live forever.  Eat little dairy and meat.  Eat fish three times a week. There's no such thing as too much olive oil. Eggs are fine, as is chicken, in moderation.  You can eat all the nuts you want, as well as veggies, legumes and fruit. Chocolate and wine are good.  And, this is my favorite part: several times a week, saute onions and garlic in olive oil, then add tomatoes and simmer;  eat this on rice or pasta.

I was born a few blocks from the sea in the days when Mediterraneans still ate the Mediterranean diet.  My mother used to buy olive oil in four-litre cans, and garlic by the braid.  Every morning she or the maid (in post civil-war Spain you didn't have to be wealthy to have a live-in maid) would grab a basket and go to the market to buy bass, whitefish, mackerel, sardines, octopus, squid, mussels or crayfish, which we would have for the main meal, between one and two in the afternoon.  Dinner, around ten at night, was a one-egg omelet, cooked in olive oil.  For an after-school snack, I was given the food of the gods, pa sucat amb oli i xocolata--a thick slice of crusty bread sprinkled with olive oil and salt, and a piece of barely sweet dark chocolate on the side.


Our diet varied according to the season:  salads and green beans and melons in summer;  cauliflower and swiss chard and dried beans in winter, with almonds and raisins, and the occasional orange, for dessert.  A glass of wine with every meal.

Except for the after-school snack, everything we ate had to be prepared at home.  Meat and vegetables had to be washed, trimmed, sauteed.  Sauces--the garlic and onion sofregit, the velvety bechamel, the almond-based romesco, the divine allioli--had to simmer patiently.  The table cloth had to be laid and the table set, the family summoned.  After each meal the dining room had to be swept (you wouldn't believe what a mess all that crusty bread makes), and the dishes washed and dried by hand.  Food was not a casual affair.  It kept women from becoming lawyers, accountants and astronauts.  It was a daily ritual that enslaved its priestesses.

One thing people hardly ever cooked at home was dessert.  The only home-made one I can remember was the crema catalana, similar to creme brulee, that my aunt who lived with us made on the feast of Saint Joseph.  All the other desserts came from the pastisseria, the neighborhood pastry shop:  tortell de Reis for the feast of the  Epiphany;  mona de Pascua at Easter; coca de Sant Joan at the summer solstice;  panellets and ossos de sant (saint's bones made of marzipan) at Halloween;  and turrons for Christmas.  These formal, celebratory desserts were washed down with champagne and followed by a tiny cup of extremely strong coffee. 

One thing that my mother, whose mind was taken away by encephalitis three years ago, still reacts to is Mediterranean food.  She rejoiced over the turrons that one of her granddaughters sent her at Christmas, and for her birthday I mailed her a package containing the soulful combination of a wedge of manchego, a sheep's milk cheese, and a chunk of membrillo, a barely sweet, fruit-scented concoction made from quince. 

Now that her ability to comprehend and communicate has vanished, food remains as a vehicle for emotion, an assertion of her will to live.  Unlike most people in her dire circumstances, who shrink  with each passing day, my mother in her great old age has grown round, almost spherical.  Her vital signs, the nurses assure us, are excellent.  She has never lost her appetite.

If I could, it would give me joy to reciprocate the earliest gesture that she made for me, the offering of food.  I would make for her a long-simmered sauce from my own tomatoes;  a simple omelet from my own hens' eggs;  and a thick slice of crusty bread sprinkled with olive oil and salt, with a hunk of dark chocolate on the side.

My Carnivorous Childhood

I grew up on the Mediterranean diet--the real thing, not the kinder, gentler version popularized in the U.S. by a culinary and nutritional establishment compensating for decades of over-consumption of beef products.  In my Mediterranean diet, we ate animals twice a day.  (Here, I am counting eggs--which we typically ate for dinner--as animals, since my grandmother's hens ran with roosters, which meant the eggs were fertile.  Michelle B. and her legions will applaud me for this, I'm sure.)

Most of these animals appeared on my plate with many of their attributes intact:  fresh little sardines with eyes and heads and fins and tails;  whole baby octopuses, less than two inches long, swimming in my favorite soup;  squid, cut into rings but slathered in a magnificent black sauce made from their ink, which made the serving platter look like something from Goya's black period.  And the mussels, clams, crayfish and tiny lobsters that inhabited the Sunday paella, complete with the black, gray, ecru, or translucent shells in which they had lived.

That was just the first course, for which my mother shopped in Barcelona's fabulous fish markets.  It was my grandmother, from her farm in western Catalonia, who sent us the birds and beasts we consumed next.  My grandparents kept pigs--huge, pink, sausage-shaped beasts--and slaughtered  a couple every autumn.  I was never present at this ceremony, but I loved every ounce of the results:  rich, greasy serrano hams (today one of the most expensive foods in the world);  crisp little cubes of fatback that brought to life a serving of beans;  and garlands of sausages made by my grandmother's hands:  butifarra blanca, butifarra negra (blood pudding), xorisso....

My grandmother kept rabbits--cheap to feed, prolific, and a source of high-quality protein.  In the summer, I would watch her slaughter one in the courtyard of the farm house.  It was like a speeded-up film sequence:  grab rabbit by hind legs, stun with blow to head, cut off same.  Hang body from hook.  Cut circles around hocks, and somehow (my vision was hampered by my short stature) yank off skin in a single motion, like a glove.  Cut open abdomen, scoop out entrails, call cats to feast.

An hour later, a rabbit arm lay on my plate, reddish-brown and transmuted by a sauce made with mortar-chopped almonds.  Next to the arm lay a special treat for me, the single child among twelve adults:  two small bean-shaped organs, what my grandmother called the ouets, the little eggs.  Were they kidneys, testes, ovaries?  I never thought to ask.  Were they good?  I don't remember.

There were chickens, too, and for Christmas, a couple of capons instead of a turkey.  Not a part of these was wasted.  Breasts and thighs and legs were brought to the table, but while we ate them, the next day's soup was simmering on the stove, made up of chicken backs, and heads, and legs.  For some reason, the comb---la cresta--perhaps because of its decorative merits, was brought to the table.  And yes, served to me.  Can't remember how it tasted.

What else did we eat?  Very little beef.  No milk after age two.  Gallons of olive oil, entire braids of garlic, ovenfuls of crusty bread to soak up all that oil and all those sauces.  Seasonal vegetables in moderation.  Every month or so, there was a religious holiday with its own special dessert, which you always bought ready-made:  turrons at Christmas;  tortell for the January feast of the Epiphany;  crema catalana on St. Joseph's day, in March;  la mona de Pascua at Easter....Otherwise, it was fruit and nuts.

If she knew what I eat today, my grandmother would be mystified.  For some reason, I have become reluctant to eat anything that looks like an animal.  Anything remotely anatomically accurate, I'd rather do without:  chicken knees, turkey wishbones, the blood of a cow oozing off a steak.  Is this hypocrisy?  Does it mean I'm o.k. eating meat--say, "chicken tenders"--as long as it doesn't remind me of the death of a living being?  Do I think eating meat is immoral?

I want to make it clear that I don't think eating meat is morally wrong--or I would be a hypocrite for drinking milk and eating eggs, which condemn to death 99.9% of the males of the species.  I do think that consuming the meat (or the eggs, or the milk) of animals that have been kept in inhumane circumstances is immoral for those of us who have the resources to make other choices.

I don't know what's right--do you?  It's possible that some people's physiology makes it impossible for them to thrive without daily servings of meat.  On the other hand, other people's preferences/philosophies/aesthetics make it important for them to avoid animal products.  This is a uniquely contemporary debate:  never before have such choices been available in such abundance.

How do you feel about eating animals?

The Post-Prandial Bone

Twice a day, after their meals, Wolfie and Bisou chew a bone. Even though our house looks like a midden, with so many bones lying around, Wolfie and Bisou always chew the same bone, passing it back and forth between themselves. They make an amazing racket. After a long session of this, they fall over on their side and go to sleep.

This reminds me of feast-day meals in Catalonia, when I was a child. Epiphany, St. Joseph's, Easter, Corpus Christi, Saint John's--there was at least one every month, complete with office and store closings and huge family meals. These meals took place in the middle of the day, that is, two in the afternoon, in Spanish terms.

They would begin with an "entremes": at least four kinds of olives, roasted sweet peppers, thinly sliced dry xorissos and butifarras, and some anchovies and capers to make sure you were thirsty enough to drink lots of vi blanc. A few leaves of endive, sprinkled with olive oil, and lots of fabulous crusty bread. Then there was a paella, bursting with fresh crayfish and clams and mussels, with some green peas for color. Chicken or rabbit would follow, with a tomato sauce and more bread to soak it up, accompanied by a glass of vi negre (red--not black--wine). Dessert varied according to the occasion: the ring-shaped Tortell de Reis for Epiphany, Crema Catalana (the best creme brulee you ever dreamed of) for Saint Joseph's, Mona de Pascua, a fancy cake crowned with a chocolate egg, for Easter. We (yes, even I) drank champagne with dessert. We didn't eat cheese--formatge--as part of a festive meal because we ate it on regular days.

But I digress. I meant to get to the post-prandial part, which consisted--though I wasn't allowed to participate, being a child--of coffee (strong, in tiny cups), brandy (in tiny glasses), and cigarettes or, on really big occasions, cigars. We would sit around the table, idly sweeping bread crumbs off the tablecloth (I used to eat every one I could find), and the grownups would sip, and smoke, and talk, and loosen their belts. And then everybody would go and take a nap.

Just like my dogs. And, just like my dogs, nobody was fat.

Fear Of Food

"Americans," I remember hearing Julia Child warble, "are afraid of their food."

So true--for me at least. My first apprehensions about food were based on a realization that, unless one was extremely careful, food could make one fat. But since those days, my food fears have expanded and become more sophisticated as a result of years of exposure to "healthful hints" and the latest reports on what is likely to kill us in the food we eat.

On grocery-shopping days, my food fear escalates into a phobia. Take today, for instance. Heart full of dread, I wheeled my cart into the supermarket's produce section. Ostensibly, this should be the least fear-inducing part of the place. What could be healthier than fresh veggies and fruit?

Because I grow most of the vegetables that can be frozen, I don't even look at broccoli, spinach, chard, and so on. Those are safely in my freezer, and I am not afraid of them. But I don't grow my own apples, for example. And here the dilemmas begin. Should I buy expensive organic apples that have been trucked across the continent with much damage to the environment, or opt for local apples that have been sprayed with god-knows-what? There is a new apple on display today, the "Pinata," fresh from Washington State and combining "typical apple character with tropical flavors." What kind of idiot do these grocers think I am? Don't I know genetic engineering when I see it?

O.k., but I need some fruit. What about grapes? There they are, in seedless splendor, just arrived from Chile. Forget the hydrocarbons that their trip shot into the atmosphere. Who knows what they were sprayed with? Ditto for those beautiful pineapples, and the oranges, and the off-season berries. I leave the produce department with some sweet potatoes (at least you peel those) and a box of raisins (I need those antioxidants in one shape or another, and these come from nearby California).

I push my cart to the fish department. Fish is supposed to be good for you, and I like fish. I like salmon. Here's some--oops, no. It's farm raised. You thought factory-farmed chicken was bad? Wait til you hear what the fish farms are doing not just to the fish, but to the coastline. Plus, see that orange color? Do I really want to put that into my body? There is some fish that is not farm raised: it comes from Ecuador, and from Indonesia. I can just see the black clouds of diesel behind those trawlers. I can feel the emptiness of the over-fished depths.

Deep in the bowels of the store are canned goods, sitting in their baths of salt. I put a can of organic chickpeas in my cart anyway. Who cares where they came from? Here be pastas. What could be wrong with macaroni? Wheat, that's what! Wheat these days contains high amounts of gluten, and you should eat it in only tiny amounts. But, you say, bread is the staff of life! As if.

I pick up a 25lb bag of white rice--don't worry, it's for the dogs! So is the big tray of chicken drumsticks, and I even feel guilty about feeding those to the dogs, given what we all know about Purdue et al., but it's better than the regular dog food, which contains even worse horrors.

The Mediterranean diet is supposed to be the epitome of healthy eating. I was brought up on the real thing, and I love that kind of food. Which begins with olive oil. I have always looked down my nose at the "extra virgin" stuff, preferring the darker, more flavorful oils. But it turns out that something in the processing makes the extra virgin oil kinder to your heart. I used to like buying olive oil. Now I do it with a frown.

Forget the cereal aisles, the bakery, the ice cream section. I pass those by, a monk in the midst of Vegas. In the dairy section, I buy a big package of string cheese, which I will cut up into tiny pieces for dog treats. I look at the racks of eggs: regular eggs (from hens enduring unspeakable torments in cages), organic eggs (well-fed hens, but probably still caged), cage-free eggs (a million hens kept in a building, as free to move about as people on a metro platform at rush hour), and finally, free-range eggs, almost as expensive as the Faberge kind. Well, at least I have my four girls at home, who are a little bored because they cannot go outside, but are otherwise all right. I go back to the produce section and buy them a couple of cabbages to peck at.

It never fails--by the time I get to the checkout, I am depressed. Isn't it ironic that, in the midst of plenty, I am practically starving. Surrounded by foods from all over the planet, I can allow myself to eat only a tiny percentage of them. What is wrong with this picture?

On my way out of the store, I pass by a new display rack--garden seeds! Utterly premature in this climate, but there they are--the embryos of chard, spinach, lettuce, peppers, basil, tomatoes...my only hope, my bulwark against starvation.