Food Matters

Movie Dictator has been baking bread. Corn Bread. Wheat Bread. He’s also been making pizza, hummus, yogurt, and biltong (a South African version of jerky).

Ever since he arrived in the US -- a little over a year ago -- food has been an issue. He said everything was too sugary, like candy. Even plain bread. Even vegetables. I didn’t understand what he meant at first. We bought some green peas at a Stop and Shop, and yeah, I thought they were sort of sugary. But it wasn’t until we got some other peas at a farm-store on Rt. 2 that I really tasted the difference. It was unmistakable.

Back when my family first arrived in America – almost 15 years ago – I didn't know all that much about food. Which is to say I’d eat just about anything. I was that hungry. We were unspoiled and unused to the ideas of healthy eating. (In Russia, you ate anything you could find in mostly-empty stores.) We were equally unused to the large quantities of pre-processed, pre-packaged, pre-cooked foods. We did notice that strawberries were huge and mostly void of any taste. (“Pink cucumbers,” my father called them.) But overall, we were just thrilled at the abundance of everything. No long lines. No shortages.

I know better now, of course. Thanks to Movie Dictator, I actually know quite a bit. We’ve watched all sorts of documentaries about food industry and supermarkets (in the US and UK), and I’ve read What To Eat by Marion Nestle. I also started paying attention to the ingredients lists on the packaging.

(A side note: The most disturbing bit of information, I guess, was a documentary we watched just a few days ago, The Future of Food, about genetically modified foods. It’s the same old story: big companies (e.g., Monsanto) trying to take over the world, and politicians, either on the board of those companies or otherwise generously supported, doing everything they can to help. Here’s how these companies operate: when the fields of small farmers get accidentally (or allegedly!) contaminated by Monsanto seeds, Monsanto takes them to court and they are ordered to destroy all of their seeds, go into bankruptcy, give up their farms, etc. The scary thing is, it virtually guarantees that in a little while there won’t be any non-genetically modified seeds left. Even scarier is that these same companies are trying to do this abroad, by intentionally cross-pollinating fields, leaving the people to either starve or to pay to the likes of Monsanto.)

Back to our story: Movie Dictator’s theory is that food is the reason there’s so much cancer in America. (Plus, it’s overpriced.) So in an effort to stay healthy and not broke, we’ve been focusing on homemade and un-American foods. Back in Boston, we had a whole list of ethnic stores we frequented: Super 88 (Asian Supermarket) in Brighton, Russian shops in Brookline, a series of Lebanese/Middle Eastern shops in Watertown, a little shop in Methuen that made British-style meat and vegetable pies.

Now we’re in this new location, and the search begins all over. We spent this past weekend hunting for good Farmers' Markets. Given how rural this area is, we figured there would be a lot. Every town, in fact, seems to have its own, and there are quite of few of these little towns around. Unfortunately, even the bigger markets were disappointing small. Yes, I understand, it’s still too early in the season. (But I’m spoiled. I lived in Madison, WI, for a year, the home of the biggest farmers’ market in the country.) Anyway, we did buy a few things: strawberries and farm-made sausages.

We also went to West Hartford, where we found a huge Asian supermarket (better than Super 88!) that sells inexpensive vegetables; a Vietnamese restaurant next door, full of wonderfully healthy food; a Russian store (and a bookstore across the street) – small but well-stocked; an Indian shop, a Middle-Eastern shop, a true-blue Irish pub that does fish-and-chips and bangers-and-mash. It’s a bit of a drive to get to West Harvard, but not too bad.

And of course, when everything else fails, right here in Willimantic, we have a food Co-op, a Polish deli, and a bunch of Hispanic-food groceries we haven’t even explored yet.