eaters who rummage through the food waste of area grocery stores, and provided their treasures to the rest of us. My first “dumpstered” dish was lamb that had been retrieved from behind a Trader Joes, and I remember marveling at how such an exquisite meal could have emerged from the largess of the machine.
Local eaters from across the project gather for Local Food Friday lunch.
Some of our eaters were squeamish about eating dumpstered food and insisted that it be labeled. Others felt that developing a dependency on a dumpster signaled an unsustainable relationship to the commodity food shed.
Since then, Moya has taken the whole notion up a notch by filling the company fridge with her “off spec” dairy program. She intentionally intercepts dairy products that are about to be thrown away and brings them onto project with a “use at your own risk” message. And they do get used.
There are other disputes, of course. There is the vegan camp that wants every ingredient labeled, and the carnivorous camp who wants to serve up monster racks of Emily’s “happy pig” ribs, and would like to merely pound a sign in the grass outside the kitchen with a label that says, “vegan option.”
There is also the problem of guests. Guys like me like to invite multiple people to Local Food Friday, such that I can knock out three meetings or obligations at a time. I’m guessing there is a bit of my brother Jim’s influence here. He is a time management guru, and he would approve of how I can cover a lot of ground with a lot of people in the least amount of time. But serving guests puts a strain on the budget, and so a “donations” fund has emerged in which guests throw some money into the pot and the pot is spent on staples like cooking oil and honey and molasses.
People have dropped out because it is too loud, or because preparing a sit down meal for fifty is overwhelming, but at its core Local Food Friday is a solid fixture that functions well.
What is less known about this institution is that it had its roots in the company lunch room of twenty years ago where a number of us would gather in our coats and our ties with our brown-bag fare.
I would turn to Steve and say, “You know, I could make you lunch everyday next week if you would reciprocate the week after that.”
Steve would reflect on the offer, and agree, and I would go out and shop for the two of us. That was an era before I understood my relationship to energy, or had ever contemplated local food. I recall those lunches as being well stocked with potato chips.
Steve and I would be happily sharing the lunch burden together and someone else at the table would enquire as to what we were doing, and I would explain that it was the “Communist Lunch Plan,” in which food was shared between us, and I would invite them to join. And they would. And one of us would find ourselves delivering five lunches for three, and taking weeks off. And so on.
The Communist Lunch Plan would build, and then collapse under its own weight. For her week, Tami would go to Fresh Market and spend a fortune on exotic nuts and chocolates and deli meats with artisan bread. We would be appreciative of her efforts and enjoy her week, and the next week Skip would come in with bargain basement corned beef vacuum packed from the Sav-A-Lot, causing Tami to storm out, announcing that she would never participate in Communism again.
At which point the entire program would collapse, everyone involved would cite the reasons they preferred to dine exclusively on their own food, and we would all be back to our individual brown bag lunches.
Months would pass, and I would suggest to Steve that I would make his lunches for a week if he would agree to reciprocate. He would agree and Communism would rise again.
This pattern ensued for many years. I suppose it informed my thinking about the commons. Communism would rise and fall, the company grew and grew and it was not unusual to have a half dozen communists sharing lunch together at a table with a half dozen skeptics, and a couple of avowed individualist eaters.
I sold that company to the employees, and the new owners of the firm were skeptical of the Communist Lunch Plan. But I suspect they saw some sort of morale value in bringing people together for a common meal, so they instituted “Grill Thursday,” in which one group of people would take turns grilling for the others.
Grill Thursday worked for a while. It became an eclectic mix of people in an office building that housed a variety of firms. At the time I was entering into biodiesel, and I entered a “team” that would cook for everyone on our appointed Thursday. We were migrating deep into low energy food production and organics that was at odds with the palette of some. One eater claimed to be on doctor’s orders not to eat organic. It was bizarre. And the same thing that would repeatedly break the Communist Lunch Plan would happen to Grill Thursday. Tarus would bring in his propane tank and stand to deep fry a turkey when it was his week, and would quit the program all together when the next week he was served generic hot dogs on commodity buns.
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, makes some astute observations about food and cooking. He suggests that Americans spend so much time watching cooking shows that they have no time to cook. He cites Richard Wrangham’s book, Catching Fire, when he suggests that cooking has been central to human evolution.
From an academic perspective the argument goes like this: because humans discovered how to cook, they could eat a wider range of foods, and because of that required less in the way of stomach, allowing for more in the way of brain. Not so for the cow. Adapted only to eat grass, it requires three guts to extract the food energy it needs. Yet nowadays the process appears to be working in reverse. Our food supply has become so over- processed and prepared, so cut with chemicals and non-food fillers that we are requiring more in the way of the gut. I’m not sure of the technical term for it. Human beings have started evolving in reverse?
I run a lot of Pollan’s work through the filter of Tami’s family. Her grandmother Ruby worked like a dog all her life. She canned, and cooked, and preserved the food her husband grew on the farm, at the same time holding down a job at a local department store in Raleigh. Unlike the cooking-show viewer of today, who presumably gets a lot of time on the couch, Ruby spent most of her time working to feed the family.
Ruby’s daughter Anne got a pass on the cooking grind. By the time she came along food was pre-prepared for her. It was cheap, and abundant, so she didn’t have the need to invest in cooking. Which is why, when I met her daughter Tami, Tami simply couldn’t cook. Her inability to cook, in fact, was legendary amongst her friends.
When we moved in together, I did all the cooking. Our only appliance at the time was a woodstove, which meant I subsequently started off almost every meal with bacon. A hot frying pan, pre-oiled with bacon grease was always a good start point. And from there, Tami not only learned to cook, but went on to become an excellent chef. Nowadays most people, who are intimate with the two of us, put Tami at the head of cooking for our household — which is at least true for those who have had her biscuits.
What I find intriguing is the yearning on our project to go back to the Ruby days. People have become so obsessed with meeting their own food needs that they belong to multiple CSAs, and run expansive gardens, and are taking up deer hunting, and figuring out ways to process foods for storage. We are returning to Ruby’s almost-lost arts in the name of increased nutrition, or in the name of food security, or in the name of increased self-reliance.
The weakness of Grill Thursday was the disparate relationships to food within the group. There were those of the “convenience generation” offering up fare to those of the local/organic crowd. Some locavores were serving up food to folks who cared
