FILM FARMING AND MATISSE

Photo by B.C.

NHK World, a PBS counterpart network based in Japan (community-supported and focusing on arts and science), had an interesting documentary feature last night, "Film Farming," about soil-less growing of fruit vegetables using plastic sheets made of hydrocarbons, rows and rows of them in a greenhouse acting as growing beds. The inventor's ecological goal is to stem the tide of the rapid depletion of arable land on earth -  because there's not much left of it -  and vis-a-vis saving the planet's fresh water systems - ditto - as hydrocarbons are otherwise stable molecules that sustain the plant at the cellular level from seed to maturity, and is also an organic element the borrows earth's sweetness in a micro-drop, thereby producing the real cherry in the tomato. 

Matisse, the French painter, loved sky blues and shapely figures and orange drops. At The Met Museum in New York there was a painting of his of a fishbowl on a kitchen table that playfully visualized these signature strokes and colors in the modernist style. The photos in this blog function as the cinematography of food, and they are mutually exclusive to its intended theme, metaphor, and inspiration. (Look at the pictures again through the lens/window of the title.) Cooking results from this inspiration, whether for writing or eating. Thoreau said to "suck out the marrow of life" so I draw from the nectar of my experiences inside out with words. 

My friend took a picture of my food and it reminded me of Matisse. I just picked the basil, nasturtium flower, and cherry tomatoes from my porch, washed them  and dried on paper towel, and they reminded me of film farming. Eating is real as science and art. I just told my roommate he can have the extra corn-on-the-cob (husks on) in the fridge and heat it up with its saved juice in a separate container. Steaming now, I can smell how concentrated its sweetness is, and I recommend he spread almond butter on it and suck out its marrow through the teeth. Pablo Neruda said in a poem that "my mouth had no way with words, my eyes were blind, but something started in my soul." Eating, hands down, is as good as it gets. 

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"WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS"

Fruits; plus Brown Bread and Oregano-Tomato Cured Rice.

This blog is about the review of food through the lens of poetry and books. In the preparing and eating, this blog is the criticism of sources and tastes. But in the gathering and giving, significantly this blog is the denouement metamorphosis of nature to cuisine, and conversation. And listening.


The podcast on the radio today, On Being with Krista Tippett, was an interview of Isabel Wilkerson, historian and acclaimed non-fiction author whose literary style comes from the poetic tradition. Her book of the same “title” (extracted from the works of the poet and civil rights writer Richard Wright) is about empathy: “to be inside someone’s life… and this is to be differentiated from pity, who looks down and feels sorry; and not sympathy, who looks from a distance but detached.” Empathy is to inhabit pain, and to be that pain. It’s not understanding, it’s knowing. But it is more than the capacity to know: as more the capacity to love your neighbor.

Richard Wright wrote: “I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown… I was taking a part of me to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps— just perhaps — to bloom.” Ms. Tippett said: “The great migration gave the world a bounty of brilliance while also planting harder foundations that continue to touch on every American in some way.”

The metaphor photographs of the blog is the blooming of “what it means to be human.” And in this food blog it embodies the flourishing of a beautiful story as the seed of intelligence and challenge for all of us to help plant, and realize this much, that it could be now, for all human race.

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FOODJI

..Recipes, he writes, are like postcards from another time: “The time before this, when you could just take a subway, a taxi, a ferry or a plane without thinking twice, and when you could arrive wherever you were going and walk down a street where the lights were on and the doors were open.” —Pete Wells, NYTimes, May 26, 2020

I go to the East Village to find temple food. Unctuous sesame noodles with steaming scallions. Fried rice seasoned in celery-fish sauce and duck egg wash. The honeycombed slices of white lotus kimchi. Sake-soaked plums in shot glasses. In Miwang-sa, S. Korea, where I had stayed once during the harvest moon festival, the monks only eat and prepare what they grew; everything was vegetables and served on small plates, and the barley tea was blessed by the mountain water. I celebrated a birthday once at a Tibetan restaurant on the corner of 3rd Ave and St. Marks Place and we were all seated on a mandala floor. Outside Kyoto, at one of the sites of Basho’s pilgrimage, was a rural stream strewn with cherry blossoms and leaves. The inn there offered for breakfast a tamago omelet folded in an eggplant confit with a side of tiny watercress salad dressed in persimmon vinegar. A serene food. Ancient in spirit gastronomy. Cultivated in flavors. There were water spiders gliding on the pond. The picture inset is of Taipei, the spiritual sister of New York City. In gratitude, we acknowledge the blessings of the universe before we eat. Food is healing.  Temple food is a house of nourish. In Ubud, Bali, a statue of Ganesha, god of poetry, is enshrined at every traditional compound. Incense always burns, plumerias always burn. In the forest, gathered around the bonfire with the sacred wine baya in our cups, the descendants of the Ifugao connected their ancestral land with human perseverance, if the rice terraces were to survive a living ruin. I have created these sacred mountains on my table of food. Gazing now, I am waiting for the clouds to move and show me heaven’s peak. 

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Weeds Salad and Milky Tagliatelle

Food is emotional because thoughts are on what could be good. Good is also inspired by teachers. Who invented nature's diverse flavors? In the wild is a delicious guessing game, as edible as they can be books. So I read and listened and cooked. And this is how to prepare the weeds salad (as weeds signify the savour:aromatics of the dressing oil in its standing marinade): ●water has already been removed from the fresh mozzarella ball and in the container was added extra virgin olive oil, cracked black pepper corns, one leaf of rosemary herb, lemon twists coils, and a good pinch of rock salt around, then set aside ●as the salted boiling water in the pasta pot is simmering gently, drop the tender stems (with leaves) picked at the heart of the celery stalk, the dandelion weeds, the wild nasturtiums weeds and dark shoots of the chili pepper plant and blanch them for a minute in the water and quickly harvest out, then set aside to cool ●cut the chilled plum tomatoes crosswise in coins, then rough chop the diverse-flavored weeds minced like chimichurri and toss together, then fold in the dressing marinade from the mozza into the weeds salad and slice up the ball like the tomatoes and mix them well, then serve in a black shallow bowl ●and that is your weed salad! Weeds, according the wild food experts, have a particular bitter taste but when balanced with particularly neutral-tasting plants of the mountain, will nuance and complex your salad flavor making it toothsome and savory with brine and citrus freshness. The fresh pasta was cooked in celery and rosemary water milk of ricotta, and when al dente scooped out and plated immediately and sprayed with black pepper crackles, then anointed with olive oil generous enough it hides under the pasta reserved for mopping later, with bread and the juice of the salad, milky, peppery, salty tang, bittersweet, all weeds together for contentment.

“Going for a forage with Dirce was keeping an eye needled on opportunity; it was bearing in mind the specific needs of calf, hens, rabbits, the kitchen cauldron and her son Alfonso, who came back from Carrara at night. It also involved a kind of eager childish delight in the sudden spring-time warmth, the breeze on the mountainside, the freedom of leaving the village. Since I love all wastes and solitary places, I am wandering about picking asparagus in the wide landscape, when I should be hoeing. There is snow in the wind, the wild pear trees are crowned with white flowers, the asphodels stand out like candelabra lit with stars, the bee orchid is underfoot, and rosemary is again covered with blue flowers. A food gatherer sees in a far field men and women laboriously planting out early tomatoes, the tomato race having already begun.” — Patience Gray 

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