Waste not, want not

I've tried several times now to de-clutter our refrigerator.   You'd think I'd be delighted to get back to our U.S. sized double wide fridge after barely managing with skinny French frigos for several years.  I appreciate the space of the U.S. version, but I find that more space means I don't have to be so strategic about how I organize or purchase the food, and it's really easy to over-buy.  I have to be honest; in our U.S. home we have two refrigerators, an old one in the basement for drinks, plus a standing freezer.  Sometimes we can't possibly eat all the food in storage before it spoils and this is precisely one point made in an article about the growing popularity of refrigeration in China.  Experts note that despite the advantages of refrigeration for food storage (to prevent waste), too much refrigeration can also lead to waste, at a later point in time.  (See Twilley, Nicola. 2014 (July 25). "What do Chinese Dumplings have to do with Global Warming" NY Times magazine online.)  The tendency to keep shiny big refrigerators well-stocked often means those same refrigerators serve as nice cold trashcans when the overstock isn't consumed fast enough or gets lost behind other more newly purchased food.  Anyone that has been to Costco knows these problems--how to consume the contents of the large boxes of lettuce or giant tubs of sour cream before they spoil or where to find that special condiment behind the big bottles of other ones.

The waste problem applies to other overly-abundant consumer goods too.  James Collins writes amusingly about his discovery that the box(es) of replacement staples for his paper stapler and his other office supplies will outlast him: (2014 March "Let Me Count the Days" NY Times Opinionator.)  He calculates that he uses about 15 staples a year, which means his box of 5000 staples is really overkill.  That box of staples is going to be something his descendants will have to deal with, and I'm afraid I have the same staple supply problem, even after parsing our belongings twice in 4 years to accommodate a move to Europe and back again.

Then there are the extra spaces that some of our homes come with which also create opportunities for waste: the garage, which everyone in the U.S. knows isn't really for our car but for storing all our STUFF, and the attic.  In France, we were lucky enough to rent a dedicated garage 'box' as they called it, but it was so small that we could barely get our car to fit into it, let alone any stuff, and it was a block from our home.  So not much storage there or opportunities for waste, but we did have ample space in our apt. for bikes that were hardly ridden and toolboxes and countless supplies bought at the hardware store.  As for our attic here in the U.S. house, we packed it with all of our belongings that we didn't take with us to France, and....it still contains a large portion of our belongings that we didn't take with us to France.  I think we could easily empty the attic and not even realize what we are missing.

Having abundance, of goods and spaces, is a privilege for sure and having access to refrigeration is too.  I wish everyone would have such privileges, and I appreciate how these can contribute to lowering some of the costs of living.  But, there is something to be said for that mindful shopping, that careful planning, that is required when we are dealing with less space, fewer means, and fewer options.      

Longhand reading

Since my family's return to Seattle five months ago, we've noticed all kinds of differences and similarities between our brief French life and our American one.  (See The big (and) easy, 11 Dec. 2013, for some of those initial discoveries.)  More recently, I've noticed how tethered I've become to my smart devices, and how that has affected my concentration and memory.  Because I'm now in the same time zone as my students and colleagues, their emails bombard my various inboxes in real time all day long.  I am jumpier and reactive and spend little time reflecting.  By the next day, if I haven't taken notes about what I did or with whom, I forget some of the more mundane interactions and transactions of the previous days.  Similar effects are now being documented by the scientific community, such as the one about note taking.  UCLA psychologists have found that students who take notes longhand have much better retention and more sophisticated understanding of what they are learning than those that take notes onto their laptops or tablets. The latter mode tends to discourage students from engaging actively with the ideas but promotes instead the tendency to just transcribe word-for-word what is being presented.  (See Barbash, Fred. April 28, 2014. "Why students using laptops learn less in class even when they really are taking notes" Morning Mix. The Washington Post.)

For me, the more laborious, tactile, longhand approach also applies to reading.  In France, I read a lot of books, magazines, newspapers, usually in print, in French, English, Finnish.  Aix-en-Provence is a bookish town, and we were surrounded by bookstores, even a well-stocked English-language one. We bought books in London, in Helsinki, and occasionally, supplemented with orders to Amazon.uk.   A few times during our French sojourn, I used my ipad and the Barnes and Noble nook store to order and read some books for an Anglophone book group I had joined and during our final months in France when I did not want to add any more books to the numbers of boxes we were shipping back.  It is those books that I read electronically that I can scarcely remember.  For example, this past fall I read two such books on the ipad that I remember finding riveting and sociologically relevant but that I did not remember to add to my blog's book list.  I recently found the books again while idly tapping on my device and now I have had to skim them in order to refresh my memory. I believe my forgetfulness is partly due to the lack of my physical engagement with either book.  I saw the covers perhaps once, when I opened the books electronically initially, but the physical books were never lying around on my bedside table or on a chair so I do not have a very strong visual memory of them.  And with e-books, flipping pages and re-reading a passage or section, or skimming is awkward so I don't engage much in these ways.  It's no wonder Appassionata by Hoffman and Ousby's Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-44 both slipped out of my mind entirely: I simply had not had a 'longhand' reading experience with them.  Touching the physical book DOES matter to me, sometimes, however quaint this sounds.  (Mireille Silcoff writes about this quaintness amid the death and fetishization of books in this past weekend's New York Times Magazine. The online article is titled and dated: "On Their Death Bed, Physical Books Have Finally Become Sexy." Riff column, Apr. 25, 2014.  The picture on this post shows my color-coordinated but unsexy bookshelf of some of my English language reading over the past few years, and a small piece of the Berlin Wall that I brought home in 1990.)  I certainly read work documents, student work, and journal articles online regularly, but it seems that depending upon what I'm reading, the tangible physical experience may matter.  An academic journal article doesn't come with a great deal of visual 'personality' so reading it online doesn't change my experience much, but reading a book, a popular magazine, and even a newspaper is a much more colorful and lively experience when it's in my hand and I can feel the pages.  If that makes me fusty, then I embrace that characteristic.  Now my challenge is to keep finding those physical books and print media: one unfortunate discovery since my return to Seattle is that the local shopping center no longer has a single bookstore!

Provence, 2013

While not as macabre as the gory scenes in the horror movie my sons watched with their friends last night in honor of Halloween, my local boucherie (butcher shop) is featuring brains, hearts, kidneys, necks, and intestines right now.  All parts of the lamb are available, including cervelle d'agneau (lamb's brain), coeur d'agneau (heart of lamb), rognons d'agneau (kidneys), as are pale legs of veal and filet mignon porc (what we call pork tenderloin in the U.S.).  The clerk at the butcher explained to me that it is butchering time. Some of the foods associated with this time are regional specialties from here in the South, such as pieds paquets (lamb's legs and tripe).  And not only this, it is also hunting season in France (last year at this time I first tasted wild boar, see Les plats traditionnels, Nov. 2012).  Sciolino of The New York Times Paris bureau describes the culinary excitement in Paris that comes with the annual start of this wild game season (see "Turning the Hunt into a Trip to the Market," The New York Times, Oct. 28, 2013).

At the Boucherie du Palais, Oct. 2013

Because of my family's sojourn in France where food and the eating of it are considered quintessential to the French way of life, food has been a topic more than once on my blog (see À table, May 2013, Où est le boeuf? February 2013, La cuisine fusion January 2013)  However, I haven't fully explained that there is a sociological specialty that considers how food and eating are intertwined with our social experiences, institutions, and structures. Food and its consumption is highly sociological because food has meaning not only on the personal level, but socially and culturally too.  What we eat, how we produce the food and process it for consumption, and how we eat it are all closely tied to who we are as individual and social beings and what we represent as societies.  The connections between society and food happen to be especially evident in France, with its tight seasonal and regional following of food and wine traditions, as represented by the autumnal dining focus on organ meats and wild game described above, and the myriad specialties associated with the different regions in France.  This week, I discovered in Marseille another specialty, this one associated with the Mediterranean part of France, a pan bagnat.   It's an excellent version of a tuna sandwich that comes from Nice, and it typically features bread moistened with olive oil, and olives, anchovies, and capers.  (Here's a recipe from the New York Times, "Pan Bagnat" by Melissa Clark, June 12, 2013.)

If you can avert your eyes from the outstanding view, the sandwich on the left tray is a pan bagnat

As we know, the French food culture has had foodies from elsewhere gushing and writing about it for decades.  Yet, France is not alone, nor is its culture frozen in place.  All societies have intimate connections to food, and they all have their food moments, when new processes, ideas and even new practices come about.  Just as societies evolve while retaining traditional elements, so do their foods and the rituals associated with them.  I've just picked up Luke Barr's Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard and the Reinvention of American Taste where he writes about a seminal moment in the evolution of the U.S. food culture, and in a more contemporary vein, I've casually been following the popular New York Times' food writer Mark Bittman's growing emphasis of vegetarian and vegan recipes over the past 2 1/2 years.  As it turns out, my family's French food moment, let's call it Provence, 2013, is ending soon, as we are returning to the U.S.  Bittersweet as that may be, it doesn't mark an end to my sociological observations of daily life. It just means that now I will see for myself if a vegetable-based food revolution is taking place in the U.S., and how that may be reflected in social terms.

Où est le boeuf?

Lately I've been having some fun collecting creative food names in French, particularly in the sweets department.  The highly descriptive millefeuille (thousand leaves or sheets) is what the French call a Napoleon, and langues du chat (cat's tongues) are lovely shortbread-like biscuits. Last week I discovered les lunettes de Romans (the Romans' glasses) at the grocery store, and then there are the hilarious pets de nonnes which are currently available at several local bakeries in Aix (these 'nuns' farts' are just doughnut holes to you and me).  I can enjoy all of the above with a noisette, which is an espresso shot with just enough milk to turn the color of a hazelnut for which it is named.  The French aren't all that unusual, as I can think of creative names for foods in other places I've lived; in the U.S. we eat elephant ears, or pigs in a blanket, and for a simple meal I really enjoy köyhät ritarit (poor knights) as they are named in Finnish, which are French toast in English and pain perdu (lost bread) in French!  How's that for creative?

In Europe, some overly creative naming of food is very much in the news right now, after the discovery that horsemeat has been packaged and labeled as ground beef, and manufactured into packaged meals and sold to European consumers.  The scandal implicates a French company and reveals a convoluted European food supply chain.  Indeed, où est le boeuf (where's the beef)?  On the one hand, it seems that the French are generally less scandalized by the creative advertising of horsemeat, and this is in part because horsemeat is consumed here.  Apparently there is a stand at the market in Aix where la viande de cheval (horsemeat) is available, and in Paris too there are boucheries (butchers) that specialize in it.  The outrage is apparently particularly great among the Brits for whom horses are dearly beloved pets and not meant to be consumed as food. (See The French Observatory blog post Why are the British so fussy about horsemeat? 2/13/2013).

For the French, their real beef more likely lies in the implications of the story of la viande (meat).  French factory-processed, Romanian horsemeat lasagne just is not consistent with the hallowed French traditions surrounding food, knowing where it comes from, buying it specially selected, preparing it with elaborate techniques, and then, serving it and eating it slowly with great pleasure and with great wine.  Revering locally produced food is a big part of these traditions.  We have a great deal of local produce available to us in the south, but even so, many food items are expensive here, especially meat and poultry.  Our family consumes much less meat here for that reason.  We've made a few exceptions, for example, we bought an 8 kilo (about 18 lbs) Thanksgiving turkey at the neighborhood boucherie (butcher/meat shop) to prepare for a belated Thanksgiving with our French friends.  This French bird cost us 66 euros or 88 U.S. dollars!  Even sweets can be expensive.  In early January we had some school and sports families over for an epiphany party where I served epiphany cakes from two local shops.  The bill for the brioche-style  gateaux (cakes) for 20 people from the best patisserie (pastry shop) in town, was..., ahem, over 100 euros !  Okay, the line was out the door when I went to get my special red boxes from the shop, the gateaux were really, really delicious, and they contained real santons (figurines) for the lucky recipients, but they sure were pricey!  Certainly, these were special foods for special occasions, but even the weekly meat purchases and our Sunday afternoon cakes add up.  I have adolescent boys who are always hungry, so I resort to buying multipacks of meat, big bags of produce, room-temperature milk and sometimes, les plats préparés (prepared meals) at the local supermarkets, hoping I'm getting good quality, much like many, many French families do.  I'd love to buy more food in bulk, and meat from a farm, like we do in Seattle, buying from relatives who grow happy beef, (and there are sources here, even grass-fed beef raised by a former Seattle family in SW France: http://bratlikeme.com/), but where would I store this food in my French apartment and how often do I have time to prepare it well, working as I am?  The freezer in our tall but skinny French refrigerator is always jammed full, and I am always in a jam trying to squeeze in decent meals on the days I try to both work and schlep children to activities.  Perhaps this is the most scandalous thing about 'le faux boeuf' (the fake beef); it brings to light the fact that even though the French famously love their food, to be able to buy the best quality from local sources, to have the time and resources to prepare it and enjoy it slowly and lovingly, this all requires far more money, time, and creativity than many people can muster.

La cuisine fusion

Having been away from the U.S. for a year and a half, there are definitely foods and flavors we are missing.  Initially, we really missed Mexican food, improvising with chile peppers for jalapeños, and white or kidney beans for pinto beans.  We've gratefully accepted and frozen 100% corn tortillas from the U.S., yet we do appreciate the excellent avocados, coriandre (cilantro or fresh coriander) and seasonal tomatoes here.  More recently, it's the flavors of Asian food that we are craving.  There are several ethnic food stores in Aix, specializing in halal (food prepared according to Muslim dietary rules), orientale (Asian), and exotique (some of the above).  The one closest to us stocks the Asian foods we are most familiar with given our Seattle ties, and lately, I have been there more frequently than usual, adding tamarind paste, miso paste, and lemongrass to my regular purchases of fresh bok choy, soy sauce, noodles, and rice.  This is in part thanks to our purchase of a cookbook from the British-based restaurant chain Wagamama, which we visited twice while in London.  Certainly, Aix restaurants offer la cuisine orientale (Asian food), especially Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese, but what's missing are the Asian fusion foods that are so typical in the bigger U.S. cities, and that we so happily discovered in London.  We miss that amalgam of flavors and menus and ethnic specialties, where lemongrass mixes with soy sauce mixes with ketchup, and Korean noodles find themselves in Japanese miso broths alongside Chinese cabbage.  Some call this 'fake' Asian food, but what is authentic food anyway?

Here in France, one might say we are eating somewhat more authentic national cuisine, as it seems that everyone living here is intimately familiar with this cuisine, with its ingredients, how it's prepared, and how one eats it.  Traditional French foods we've eaten in the past weeks have included les entrées (appetizers) of escargot, or snails, main dishes of daube (meats cooked in wine sauces) or confit de canard (duck legs in their own fat), and plenty of cheeses and desserts.  Our kids' school meals are especially traditionally French, in the number of courses and what they contain.  In the U.S. on the other hand, we have grown up eating from a much broader plate, where meals, even single dishes, are comprised of a variety of ethnic flavors and foods.  When you think about it, all of American cuisine is fusion-based, since most 'American' foods have come to the U.S. via the movement of people across borders, from all directions.  (Much of it comes from immigration processes, but we also must account for the forced migrations and uprootings of peoples too, all of whom have and had their own food traditions.)  In the process, whatever traditional, 'authentic' recipes were brought by immigrants, or slaves, or indentured servants, have been fused to what is locally available (remember the stories of how the natives taught new arrivals how to plant corn?).  Later, the flavors of the meals become more complex with increased interactions with other new arrivals of different backgrounds.  In some respects many so-called traditional foods are not even so similar or authentic anymore to what is made back in the country-of-origin, such as the 'Chinese food' or 'Tex-Mex food' in the United States.  In my own ethnic traditions, even the processes have changed, in the opposite direction; what I learned to prepare from my immigrant mother were the Finnish holiday sweets, made 'authentically' from scratch, where butter pastries were laboriously mixed and folded over and over before being rolled out, and fillings were cooked from scratch, whereas my friends and cousins in Finland just go to the grocery store and buy the cookie doughs and fillings ready made.  The theme, of fusion, is something one recognizes with other social forces too, and not just in relation to food preparation and the meals themselves.  For example, this quarter in my sociology of religion course, we explore how the effects of immigration and the interactions and experiences with new people in a new place often result in new forms of immigrant religious practice.  Surely, these feel authentic to those following them.

As for France, its sources of immigration are much tighter geographically (coming mostly from the south and east), and thus, the external influences on its foods (and other practices) feel narrower or smaller.  There are certainly regional variations in the French cuisine that are influenced in part by the movement of people across borders, from the heavier German-style cuisine in the northeast Alsace region to the Mediterranean flavors here in the south.   Yet, it still seems to me that there is a tighter definition of what French food is and how it is prepared and experienced, and this is shared across the entire country.  Maybe it's because of the French school system's lunch offerings or standardized French geography lessons where children learn about the culinary and viticultural specialties of each region.  Maybe it's the relatively narrower range of foods available in regular grocery stores.  Or perhaps immigrants here face greater pressures to assimilate to French ways; people here are either French or they are foreigners, and fused, hyphenated, French-something or other identities are not as commonly expressed or recognized as they are in the U.S.  Whatever it is, as foreigners here, I feel grateful to be able to experience French cuisine, however authentic it is or isn't, in the place where it originated, while also satisfying my family's hankerings for foods from 'home'.

So, you can just call me a wagamama,* as I cook my way through my new cookbook, creating new fusions of la cuisine fusion, where tonight's Asian-influenced mackerel with soy and ginger was in fact pêche en Méditerranée (fished from the Med's waters) and the spicy vegetable stir-fry consisted of bok choy grown in the French town of Orange, west of here, and the peppers came from Vietnam.

*Or am I?  Apparently, a wagamama is not a mama at all, but a willful person, or even a naughty child, perhaps meant to signify the restaurant chain's philosophy of not following any one food tradition too religiously.  (http://www.wagamama.com/about-us)

Manger ~ bouger

The French may not be as 'sporty' as Americans and northern Europeans, but they seem as likely as the rest to use the new year as a catalyst for getting one's body and physical fitness in order (like one tries do with one's living spaces too, see my previous post, Faire le ménage).  Despite the worldwide attention that rich, delicious French cuisine gets, and the popularity of books that tell us that French women don't get fat, obesity is in fact a growing healthcare problem here as it is elsewhere in the West.  A recent interview in Paris Match with the Health minister Marisol Touraine highlights this fact (Chavelet, Nov. 12 2012. "Marisol Touraine fait monter la température." Paris Match ) as does the revelation in the New York Times Magazine that weight-management company Jenny Craig is alive and well in France (see Dominus, June 2012. "French Women Worry About Getting Fat, Too, The NY Times").  The French obesity rate is half of that in the U.S., but within France, it has doubled in about 15 years.  This tells us that the French are no different than citoyens (citizens) of any other post-industrialized society where the standards of living are comfortable and most people eat enough, but where as a consequence of this 'plenty', the food choices and physical activity do not always balance each other out. Obesity is an epidemic health condition in well-to-do societies.

The French get their taste for sugar early on.  The normal gôuter (the small snack for kids after school) as I've seen it here in the south is often pain au chocolate (either a factory-made soft roll with chocolate which the grocery stores stock in large quantities, or if you're lucky, a fresh bakery-made flaky croissant with chocolate--it's small, but it's sweet).  My own kids marvel at some of their classmates' obsessions with candy and soda, and the food young rugby and soccer players eat between and after matches at tournaments is astonishingly junky.  It's a lot of sugar and carbohydrates and fat.  The upside is that these foods are generally not made with high fructose corn syrup, like in the U.S. (even the soda tastes different here), but sugar isn't exactly good for you either, nor is the processing of natural ingredients into food products like Nutella (the hazelnut chocolate spread, which one of my sons really likes).  In November, the government began pursuing a Nutella-tax, on palm oil, as one way to reduce the consumption of saturated fat-laden foods in France. 

One response to the concerns about the deteriorating physical conditioning of the French is a public health campaign similar to the American Let's Move initiative led by U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama.  The French version is called  Manger Bouger and the goals are: bien manger (to eat healthfully) and bouger plus (to move more).   Living in a relatively temperate climate in the south of France, it's easy to bouger, even though it took a while to discover where people exercise and what they do.  This is not a country of large-scale, 24-hour health clubs as my spouse discovered (some are even closed on the weekends and evenings!).  But if I get up early enough on a weekday, or take a late weekend afternoon walk, I see Aixois going for jogs or walks around town or in one larger city park with running trails.  Every time we've gone for a swim, the lap lanes at the city pool near us have been crowded.  More recently I've discovered the popular randonée (hiking).  The parking lots at trailheads in Provence are frequently crowded in the afternoons and on the weekends, and there are people of all shapes and backgrounds hiking.  Numerous hiking clubs around the area also organize weekly or monthly hikes at the calanques on the coast or in the rocky fortresses and canyons further inland. Luckily for me, a Finnish friend and I have formed a casual hiking club of two, and we have walked near the dams that supply drinking water in our area, and below, I'm pictured on a trail near the base of Aix's rocky Mount Sainte Victoire.  It's only during the summer that hiking is difficult as the trails are opened for limited times due to the very dry conditions, the heat, and the fire danger.  By that time, I suppose, we should all have mangé'd and bougé'd enough to get ourselves in shape for the beach or the pool, the only really comfortable places to hang out during the broiling summer months.

Disposable stuff

A few years ago, IKEA, the Swedish super-furnishings store had a marketing campaign in which it advertised that if you grew tired of your IKEA lamp or bedding, you could just get rid of it and get new stuff, because IKEA's prices were so low. I remember feeling vaguely uncomfortable with that message, with the idea that furnishings could be so disposable, and it turns out that so did many other consumers, and IKEA ended that campaign rather quickly.

It's interesting to see how the mindset has changed from one of rabid consumerism to one of careful consumption, at least in pockets of the U.S. We recycle avidly here in Seattle of course, not just paper, glass, plastic, but also our food waste and yard waste. I have learned to feel guilty if some jar is just too icky to clean out, or if I'm somewhere where composting isn't possible. This is why I'm feeling a little strange this week because my spouse and I are at the point in our packing where we are wearing what we have come to call, 'disposable clothing.' These are clothes not quite decent enough to pass onto charity, but still suitable to wear, but definitely not going with us to France. Throwing out a perfectly good, but dirty and faded t-shirt after wearing it one day this week just feels wrong! Not only that, I am just horrified by the amount of shredded paper waste that is coming out of this household. Somehow I managed to save bills from 1999 onward and now I have the monumental task of shredding or recycling those documents. This paper in its shredded form is only good enough for the compost bin according to City of Seattle and I've been filling my neighbors' compost bins as well as our own with bags of the shredded stuff. Embarrassing! On the other hand, a few weeks ago I had some things that just felt too good to give away to charity, and I offered them via a group email to my friends, who surprised me by snapping them all up (even the IKEA items!). One friend sagely observed that these items were probably laden with strong memories and that was making their disposal a bit more emotional and thus more difficult. She was right as I happen to be one of those people who remembers where I acquired something, who I was with, or what the circumstances were around a particular object, whether it be as mundane as the cheap laundry basket from Allen's grandparents' house that I snatched up when the house was being emptied to sell, or as cherished as the secondhand dishes I bought with my friends on a girls' weekend on Whidbey Island several years ago. Those objects help me remember certain social connections.

I wonder how much of our 'stuff' adds meaning to our lives, and how much just adds clutter, to our space and in our minds. I also wonder how much stuff we will accumulate during our French adventure, and whether we will be able to live more minimally than we have recently. (I like the idea of this.) There will certainly be things we will want to buy and bring home that are different from what we can get in Seattle, but will we have the boxes of papers, old clothing, candles, dishes that have been so cumbersome to deal with these past few months? (And will we be as able to recycle, compost and pass on our things as we have here? What I've seen in Aix-en-Provence hasn't convinced me that recycling is as popular there as here.) As for a new minimal lifestyle, I think that we might succeed for a while, but as we meet new people, explore new places, and entertain visitors from home, we will engage in that age-old custom of exchanging gifts and goods that add meaning to our social relationships. And that means we will likely have 'stuff' to deal with upon our return as well.