This all got started with a simple desire to share our love for food. Casey was regularly answering emails from friends requesting restaurant recommendations and all sorts of cooking advice. I was always snooping around looking for unusual places to eat and an outlet for my never ceasing curiosity. A few emails were bounced back and forth, we picked a name, bought a domain and our chronicle of delicious conversations began.
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image courtesy of Flickr user DC Products

But why am I telling you all of this? We’re a food site, not American Lit 103. Well, my dears, instead of wolfing down some halal chicken from a street vendor during his lunch breaks at the Museum of Modern Art, Frank used the time to write poetry at breakneck speed. His 1964 tome Lunch Poems was thus named by City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (the same man who published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and defended the book against obscenity charges) for the provenance of its contents.

And so, for all you readers dreaming of the freedom of your lunch hour, here’s one of my favorite pieces summing up New York in summer, celebrating those few shining minutes when you’re released from your windowless cubicle and are able to immerse yourself in a glass of papaya juice and the crowded lifeblood of the city.
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Moving on from the global cuisine of London, intrepid contributor C.C. finds herself in an old outpost of the British Empire: McLeod Ganj, India, home of the Dalai Lama and the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile. She eats, prays she won’t develop a stomach virus, and loves much of what she finds—especially the chocolate desserts.

In a particularly efficient way of checking major experiences off life’s to-do list, C.C. has fulfilled two lifelong goals simultaneously by going to McLeod Ganj, India to do a yoga teacher training course. It’s a rigorous program with early morning meditation, classes in anatomy, philosophy, ayurveda, yoga ethics/business, and four hours of asana practice a day, which makes a girl hungry and justified to eat whatever she wants, even typically taboo foods like crepes, cupcakes, and pizza.

This is a good thing, since 14 of the 16 people on the course become predictably ill as will happen to western travelers to India, thus requiring a paranoid girl like C.C. to beef up her attempts to avoid parasites, amoebas, bacterias, giardia, hepatitis, and all other manner of unsavory stowaway germs lurking in the hill town’s water supply and on any cooking or cutting surface. She assiduously avoids anything that may have been grown in manure like fresh vegetables, things with absorbent qualities like tofu, and all meat—not a big deal for C.C. and really appropriate in mostly veg-India anyway, not to mention yogic.

CC and the monkey disagree on dietary restrictions

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Two weeks ago, Justine van der Leun, author of Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love, wrote an amazing guest post for GFS about the life lessons she learned from eating locally in Italy. Today, I’m happy to share my review of Justine’s book which is rich with stories about food, farming, and Italian traditions.

The story begins in New York where Justine, in her mid-twenties, is struggling to find her place. She’s got the magazine job she always wanted, and a boyfriend who seems perfect on paper, but she yearns for something different, mainly because she understands that she is different. Enter a handsome Italian gardener she meets on vacation in Umbria and boom, Justine packs up her Brooklyn apartment and moves to the 200-person farming village of Collelungo. The bloom is quickly off the rose with the gardener, but Justine becomes deeply enmeshed with his family. Justine also finds a neglected, nameless English pointer living alone in an outdoor pen.
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Today we’re proud to introduce Eating My Words, a new feature by contributor Rebecca Peters-Golden where we’ll revisit food scenes from literature and recreate the dishes described therein. Rebecca, a graduate student in literature at Indiana University, is also a compulsive baker who has been known to make three-layer chocolate cakes out of boredom, so we’re happy to make the most out of her vast talents with this series.

While visiting my sister in Philadelphia this past December, I was bemoaning the grayness of winter and wishing for more fun in my life. Always eager to make me stop whining help, my sister suggested that I participate in the Philadelphia Artclash Collective‘s annual “Fun-A-Day,” through which I might combat precisely such grayness and lack of amusement by creating something every day of January. Projects ranged from the artistic (some genius painted a picture of a Buffy character every day) to the happenstance, and everything in between. But what would I do that would be truly Fun?!

In the year and a half before Fun-A-Day, I had been working on my dissertation in literature and feeling a creeping anxiety that reading for pleasure was becoming a thing of the past. To this end, I wanted not only to do something that would combine my favorite things—reading and cooking—but also to remind myself of the pleasure I take in reading by removing it from the realm of the purely academic and placing it in the realm of . . . well . . . fun.

So, I decided to recreate some of my favorite moments of food in literature. And then, you know, eat them. Now, six months and many, many sticks of butter later, I feel at peace with literature and more excited about food than ever. For my first good food story, then, here is Truman Capote’s combination of literature and food: a scene from In Cold Blood, Capote’s non-fiction novel that tells the story of the 1959 Clutter murder in Holcomb, Kansas.

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I love Pennsylvania. If you happen to be driving through the town of Lake Ariel, perhaps during a weekend trip to the northern Poconos Mountains, you may suddenly get a whiff of BBQ. Rocco caught it first.

All I saw was an antique store, but…

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Rocco has many friends, one of which is Marcus, a dog on the brink of fame. Justine van der Leun found Marcus while living in Umbria, a beautiful, rustic region in central Italy. Her memoir Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl about Love was released yesterday by Rodale. Today, we are very excited to share with you a piece that Justine wrote exclusively for Good. Food. Stories. about her experiences with family, love and pork.

A pork chop followed by cured pork topped in pork sauce paired with a side of pork.

This is Umbrian cuisine, simplified. This is the diet that nearly imploded my fresh Italian romance. This is the diet that drove me temporarily mad. This is also the diet that changed how I think about food forever.

I moved to a 200-person Umbrian village the way only a 25-year-old woman in love with a foreign gardener can: Immediately, unironically, entirely. I had met Emanuele on vacation. Three weeks later, I pledged to return for good. I just had to sublet my apartment in Brooklyn, pack all of my worldly possessions, and score a one-way ticket to my new life. No biggie.

It didn’t occur to me that one of the most disconcerting and unfamiliar aspects of the move would be my brand new diet. My brand new, inescapable, pork-filled diet.

Of all the strangeness that I faced as an expat—language barriers, social constraints—it was the culinary culture shock that threw me for the biggest loop. This was the Slow Food Movement before it had a name. This was hardcore local eating. This was a place where I, a New Yorker accustomed to global cuisine, could not get a taco.

“What is a taco?” the Italians asked. “What is Thai food? Sushi?” When I explained it to them, they turned green.

“Che schifo!” they shrieked. How gross!

From the beginning, I ate with Emanuele’s family, a group of people I immediately adored. I ate as landlocked rural people have always eaten: Home-raised meat, potatoes from the cellar, wine from the vineyard, and minimal greens in the winter. Emanuele’s mother, Serenella served me clean, well-prepared, homemade food every night. I was in the cocoon of a new family, exploring a brutal and beautiful countryside. It should have been blissful.

And yet, after a month of Serenella’s food, I would have begged, robbed, and mauled for a smoothie. Or an imported Chilean orange. Or a falafel pita. Even at the local restaurants, one menu prevailed: 20 types of pizza (salsiccia, salame); pork chops; prosciutto; a porchetta sandwich. There were exceptions: A luscious arugula slice; a creamy black truffle pie; a crisp antipasto dish; sautéed, garlicky greens. But in the end, the flavors were monotonous. To a local, they tasted like home. To a guest, they tasted like the rustic countryside. But a month into my stay, they were making me claustrophobic. I was accustomed to variety. Like someone who’s watched too much reality TV, I couldn’t focus on a classic novel.

One day, sitting on the concrete floor of the mansion where Emanuele worked as a groundskeeper, I wrote an email to a friend back home. I wrote in a word document on Emanuele’s computer because it was impossible to stay hooked up to an internet connection for long enough to finish an entire email.

In my letter, I bemoaned my new life: I focused on the relentlessness of the cuisine. I was used to Caribbean chicken stews and three-spice fish tacos, to banh mi with crunchy pickled cucumbers, to green tofu curry, southern-fried chicken. From my apartment in Brooklyn, I could dial 100 numbers and get thousands of dishes delivered to my door. What I would give for a cheeseburger or some lo mein—anything to break up the wretched monotony of il maiale. The dreaded pig.

Before I sent my email, I saved it on Emanuele’s computer. Then I left town for a week, on a work trip. While I was away, Emanuele called to say he had found the email. In which I insulted his mother’s cooking and praised my urban culture above his.
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Next week, I’ll start receiving deliveries from my neighborhood CSA, which means I’ll have a summer’s bounty of organic produce, grown locally in the Hudson Valley. Sometimes being a locavore means supporting local businesses as opposed to the big chain stores. As I sit here drinking direct trade organic coffee at Indian Road Cafe, I see that the menu boasts bread from Balthazar Bakery of NYC, meat and sausage from Vincent’s Meat Market in the Bronx, and vegetables from Migliorelli Farms in Tivoli, NY.

Eating locally is a choice that requires a lot of effort. Ironically, it’s far easier to go to your local grocery store and buy meat raised and processed in Kansas, fruit from Chile, and seafood from Indonesia. I contemplated what my food choices would be if I lived in the Middle Ages, when one’s options were to eat what was raised and grown locally or starve. Then, I started researching exactly what people were eating five hundred years ago in Western Europe. The upshot is similar to the scene today: Food in Italy, Southern France, and Spain was quite good, while the diet in Germany and England left much to be desired.

People along the Mediterranean enjoyed a diet rich with grains like spelt, olive oil, fennel, fava beans, and fresh fish. Almonds were used to sweeten and thicken food. Today, almond milk has gained popularity and I’m constantly seeing farro (spelt) on upscale menus.

The inland regions ate much of their food dried, pickled, or salted. Porridges of grains including spelt, barley, and wheat were the staples of most everyone’s diet. Pottage, a general term for a boiled vegetable stew, was also standard. Wild game like pheasant was a mainstay of the aristocracy. The nearly impermeable class divisions also dictated how well you ate. The closer you lived to the land, the closer you ate from it. In the Middle Ages, you were what you ate.

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When a trip to Nicaragua was first proposed to me, thoughts of AK-47s and Oliver North with his right hand raised popped into my head. But hey, that was the 1980s, and if Madonna can continually be reborn, then so can Latin American country, right? Right!

For the past few years I have heard of Nicaragua being “the Costa Rica of 20 years ago” with an unspoiled wealth of nature, beaches, and jungles with safe, friendly locals who are glad to see you. And upon my return from a week’s venture into the country, I can safely and proudly announce Nicaragua’s new slogan: “Think sandy beaches, not Sandinistas!”

With the largest land mass and smallest population in Central America, Nicaragua is a true escape. We ventured to the Rancho Santana, a gorgeous development with five distinct beaches in the southwest corner of the Rivas region. The geography, produced by volcanic activity, is rocky and mountainous with the flora and fauna of a desert, but the climate is definitely tropical. To get there, you must forgo paved roads, ATMs, and most symbols of modern life and trade them for dirt roads (or mud, depending on the season) that lead to absolute paradise.

In the true paradox that is the third world, even though we were in one of the most untouched outposts of a poor country, our group of five managed to score a $250 per night (total!) guest house at a fully-amenitied mansion on a hill overlooking a pristine, world-class surfing beach.

Although we did have staff, they did not cook for us, and the local ex-pats quickly filled us in on the places we just had to try. On our quest for the best food experience, we found passionate people operating simply, where life is not what material possessions you own but how you spend your time living. All of a sudden, my big HDTV seemed meek to the concept of a slower pace of life, co-existing with nature and animals and restoring the art of conversation, family and appreciation of life. Food helped lead our journey that week, and our memorable meals encompassed this feeling.
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