Most of our ex-patriot friends in
Umbria will disagree, and some will be appalled, but what I missed
most during our six-week foray into the Homeland was our bread.
Terni bread! Many Americans and other foreigners hate it, finding it
too bland. It contains no salt and it becomes stale after about
two days. Nevertheless, it goes well with many things already salty
enough on their own, from prosciutto to stews to cheese, and it gets
delivered to our village square every morning. We also have
casareccio or Genzano bread, two varieties with salt and a heavy
crust, for an occasional change of pace.
Our daughter Francesca, who lives in
New Jersey, is an excellent cook and is not indifferent to anything
related to food. She shops regularly at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's
and she uses mostly organic foods. So far, so good. There is a vast
variety of breads available in the US, with every imaginable type and
combination of grains I've heard of, and some I never knew existed.
Nevertheless, all those healthy Whole Foods breads we were exposed to
had the taste and consistency of marshmallows blended with oatmeal.
My Luddite tendencies came to full full
fruition with the introduction of the cellular telephone, a device
I've learned to carry around unused, uncharged and, more often than
not, turned off. On this trip I discovered that these tendencies run
deeper than I'd imagined. My aversion to cell phones has now been
matched by my disdain for sliced bread. Part of the pleasure of
eating bread comes with the joy of cutting a slice or a chunk to the
specifications of your immediate needs or desires. I've come to view
bread slicers with almost the same contempt, although not the cold
white hatred, I've always had for cars with automatic transmissions. Our
entire family shuns pre-grated parmigiano but our American daughter
goes one step beyond her parents by not owning a post-industrial
revolution style cheese grater. She uses the finger grater variety,
which takes about twenty minutes to grate a day's supply. You know
you can't grate much more from a given piece of cheese when the
grated stuff turns pink from the blood of your fingers.
The American relationship to food
appears to be becoming schizophrenic. The corporate-owned Congress
refuses to require or even permit the labeling of foods containing
GMOs or most anything else. Something like 84% of food sold in
American supermarkets is banned from sale in many other countries,
notably Japan and the European Union. The FDA, originally
established to protect American consumers, now mostly shills for the
big Agro businesses in their quest for bigger profits, no matter the
costs to the environment or human health. Secret trade agreements
threaten to undo our last shreds of food safety. Given this climate,
a large part of the public simply gives up, eating whatever is cheap
and refusing to question what they're eating. The ever smaller part
of the American public that can afford to be selective in its food
purchases has grown more paranoid about what it eats. For companies,
such as Whole Foods, which live off this anxiety, profits are up, as
are prices, and they provide more and more choices for their
increasingly nervous and demanding clientele.
On several visits to Whole Foods, I
noted the availability of such essentials as: sweet potato corn
tortilla chips; organic mild green Mojo green chilis with cheese and
a hint of lime; organic lightly salted blue corn tortilla chips;
three seed non-GMO savory dipping chips with Himalayan pink salt and
Tellicherry cracked pepper- gluten free; vitamin water ZERO naturally
sweetened fruit punch; organic anti-allergenic laundry detergent; soy
or rice WHIP vegan dairy free no cholesterol; Vitality beverage at
$3.79 for 10 oz in two flavors, pomegranate mint or blackberry
hibiscus; organic energy shots in either chocolate raspberry or
wildberry relish. You may have noticed that most of these items were
in the “junk food” section. I was desperately searching for
fried pork rinds, one of the diminishing number of typically American
things that I still crave. Whole Foods failed me here but, thank the
Lord, they were found at a more traditional supermarket. I suspect
they're banned in Europe, although I'm not sure why. Perhaps they're
fried in some popular variety of carcinogenic oil, or perhaps there's
no pork in them at all and they're fabricated from processed GMO corn
with petroleum based flavorings. Sometimes one just feels the need
to live dangerously. Fried pork rinds satisfy that need in me.
Fortunately, we have a contact in Naples who can feed my habit
through the American PX.
While in the US, we got to see the
movie, Food, Inc. It's well done, albeit chilling. Go see
this film if you've decided to embark on a strict diet. You'll have
an easier time renouncing most of the foods you may have been
overindulging in. It definitely made us grateful that we'd be
returning to Italy sooner rather than later.
It's all too easy to joke about what's
going on in America with regard to food. In fairness, I should also
take note of the changes that have occurred in the forty years since
we left. Olive oil, parmigiano, decent coffee and fresh herbs were
hard to find in most of the US in those days, and fresh vegetables
were very limited. Now, everything grown or produced in the world is
flown in from a place where it is currently picked, packed and
processed, ideally by very low cost labor. Seasons have been
abolished. This conforms to the venerated American tradition of
extreme pendulum swings.
Tobacco use was almost obligatory until
it became the nation's biggest killer. Now we try to confine sales to
the third world. A concern with alcohol abuse led to the advent of
prohibition in 1920, which in turn generated speakeasies and
organized crime until the need for respite from the Great
Depression, along with the weight of centuries of human tradition,
led to repeal in 1933 and the restoration of alcohol as a legal
tax paying growth industry. Marijuana, for which hundreds of thousands of
people remain incarcerated, is in the process of becoming legal in
the midst of the Great Recession. Weed may become a significant
source of tax revenues but, given the privatization of our prisons
and contracts with states to insure that they must be kept filled,
most of those folks, especially the darker complexioned among them,
won't be getting out anytime soon. Asbestos was correctly regarded
as a miracle product in the 40's and it was effectively used in
nearly all building materials, until it was revealed as deadly to
human health. The costs of its removal in renovation projects now
threaten to exceed construction costs.
We would love to imagine that lessons
were learned and that GMO foods could be limited, labeled or
eliminated before millions ingest huge doses of GMO related
pesticides and die as a result, just as other millions did before
action was taken on tobacco and asbestos. Living in Europe, one is
tempted to say that food corruption is just an American problem; let
them stew in their own canola oil and eat their own pink slime, but
this is a battle that won't respect national borders.
To those war lovers who advocate
bombing Iran or closing in on Russia to make the world safer, I would
suggest that you could more effectively turn your attention to the
far more deadly sociopaths hanging out in St. Louis, in K Street lobby
shops, and on Wall Street. War is hell. It shouldn't be wasted on
the wrong targets.
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