Eating with full consciousness

In the third part of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan narrates his experience of cooking a meal entirely made by himself, that is with hunted meat and gathered mushrooms, fruits and vegetables. From the salt -yet the experience was unsuccessful- to the wild yeast for the bread to the bones-made broth, the journalist tried to cook what he qualifies as unrealistic in the daily life: a real homemade lunch.

This experience went beyond the learning of hunting and the knowledge of the fauna and flora. It was first a human adventure. The sharing of Angelo's skills in natural life, the common risks taken with a friend to fish abalone, the patience endured while waiting for the prey to hunt,… Nothing, from the starter to the dessert of Pollan's perfect meal, could have been made without the help of his accomplices. The perfect meal, as the journalist qualifies his dinner, does not have so much to do with the food itself but with this gathering of friends passionated by nature and food and with the accomplishment of something "real".

On page 391, he writes this: "I seriously doubt that any of my guests, assuming I was out of earshot, would declare this a 'great meal'. But for me it was the perfect meal, which is not quite the same thing." And later on, "No, little if anything about this meal was what anyone would call 'realistic'. And yet no meal I've ever prepared or eaten has been more real." Indeed, despite the difficulty of the task, nothing could make you more aware of the process of eating than a full preparation, from the hunting/gathering/gardening-harvesting to the cooking in itself, the human sublimation of Nature.

"Cooking doesn't only distance us from our destructiveness, turning the pile of blood and guts into a savory salami, it also symbolically redeems it, making good our karmic debts: Look what good, what beauty, can come of this!"(405) 

However, what was probably the most striking about the reading is the attention paid to consciousness while eating. Michael Pollan, with this completely -or so- homemade meal, got aware of what it actually means to eat, and in particular to eat meat. The killing part involved in eating meat is ignored for most of us. We buy our steaks at the supermarket without thinking a single second to the beast, alive, full of hair and with sad eyes (that's just for the dramatical tension) whose flesh made our lunch. The honesty of the journalist, when he describes the succession of feelings after shooting the pig (joy, disgust), refreshes the reader and underlined this fact: would we eat meat if we would have to kill the beast that it comes from ? Probably not. To meditate. 

Rock City Eatery, part III

I did not imagine that being a food critic would be even close to what we commonly call work. I was wrong. I thought the task of reviewing a restaurant would consist of eating and saying whether or not it is good. It is actually way more complex than that. The work of a food critic requires a perpetual attention to details with a fast and lively mind (and hands !) The waiter dropped a plate on a customer ? Note taking. The restaurant setting is unusual ? Note taking. The seats are uncomfortable ? Note taking. The biggest difficulty is to get a global understanding of the place and its customers within the less time possible, which means being careful about the menu while not eating all of it, looking at the others' plates while tasting your own, tasting the alcohol while staying sober enough to write about it and so on. I found out that being a food critic is not as easy as one might think.

About the place, I had very low expectations (barflies, dirty restrooms) and could not but be positively surprised, which is exactly what happened when I entered this popular restaurant.

Since I did not see any coherence in the Rock City Eatery -regarding either the menu or the decor- I would hardly consider the restaurant unauthentic: since the place does not claim any belonging (of origin or of quality), it cannot be but authentic for its uniqueness. When there is no norm to rely on, there is no risk of overstepping them. As for the question of tourism (is dining in a restaurant a kind of tourism?), I would say that it depends on the restaurant. As long as the restaurant allows the customer to experience otherness -foreign food restaurants in particular-, it can be seem as tourism. However, if tourism is, as Long's suggested, getting out of your daily routine to see the other's daily routine as very exotic, dining in a restaurant could be seen as tourism only insofar eating out is an unusual practice. Eating out, when it is part of your daily routine, is not properly tourism for me.

As an international student in Kalamazoo, all my experiences here have first felt foreign to me. The ice in the water, the A/C or the tips have been some of the most exotic things I encountered when I arrived in America. But people change and so I did. I can say that I start now, after 9 months of immersion in this culture, to feel a belonging and a familiarity regarding American food. I am crazy about peanut butter/jelly sandwiches and bacon-based brunch on a Sunday morning. Tourism (or the lack of) has to do with time. It also has to do with home. What is home cannot be tourism. The home I found here prevents me today to consider myself as a tourist in America. However, I do not feel fully integrated yet. I guess, it is the perks and the drawbacks of biculturalism.

After a messy making out, find the seventh heaven at the Rock City Eatery

Like a lovers' room, the ground being scattered with clothes and a purse flippantly half- empty on the coach, the Rock City Eatery -a storefront in the Hamtramck neighborhood in Detroit- offers a chaotic view at the first sight. Don't trust this apparent mess, a treasure of surprise is contained in this hipster-affordable restaurant.

From the pickled roasted beets to the Nicole's poutine to the Sichuan chicken wings, the menu of the RCE might disconcert the followers of consistency. There is none to expect from this place which is not devoted to any theme except diversity.

On the full-of-oil-stains sheet that is the menu, there is no separation between appetizers and mains, just a succession of dishes whose price goes from $7 to $12 and that are to share or to keep jealously for one.

The names of the courses are as exotic as varied. The traditional American Mac & Cheese stands alongside the Mexican Chicharron and Patacones and the Thai shrimp. The keyword of this menu is: condiment. Cilantro, curry, thyme, scallion, ginger, jalapeño, garlic, Harissa color the dishes and awake the taste buds. They can disturb or overwhelm them too, like a hot boyfriend. Maybe too hot.

This variety of tastes -in all the senses- also applies to the décor. It consists of a superimposition of raw materials -one part of the wall is made of red old bricks, another of cheap plywood-, luxury items like a magnificent glass chandelier, punk posters and mismatching tables and chairs, the whole being surprisingly contained in a 30m² rectangular room.

If your dining companions are boring, you can still have fun with the cutlery system, which is playful: you pick either silverwares or chopsticks from a glass jar put in the middle of the table. Help yourself, like at home. Like at home as well, the dishes don't match and each plate displays a new painting pattern and new sizes and shapes. As kitschy as nostalgic: Among past lovers, there are also all kind of sizes and shapes.

In this scenery, you'll find a flowerbed of red, blue, green and purple haired and tattooed people, half of them bearing big beards (the other half being women.) A very hipster audience that will make a lot of noise. Well, that's good because it is preferable not to be heard after a gin fizz -well-balanced between sweetness and basil- and two pints of a syrupy local beer. Thanks to this loud and relaxed atmosphere, it is not embarrassing to be drunk here. Nor to wear a sparkling dolphin-printed T-shirt.

But this lack of coherence does not make the Rock City Eatery a mess. The restaurant -run by its chef Nik Santches-, is quite popular in the dirty-reliving Detroit, so expect the place to be busy. In spite of a reasonable waiting time if you don't have any reservation (around 20 minutes), the service is efficient and the waiters, very friendly.

It might be hard to read the entire menu before the orders are taken. However, no pressure to choose, eat, drink and leave the restaurant. Going to the Rock City Eatery is like having a very convenient sex partner: it can go fast; it can also take hours. It depends on your needs.

The intensity of the (inter)course depends as well on your desires. For the very lustful eaters, the Bourdain Dinner ($12), a bone marrow topped with raw urchins and assorted with homemade bread is a pure ecstasy. The way the bone is cut -in two vertical sections rather than in one piece, like two branches of celery- is surprising. Topped on the marrow, the orange urchin color the dish which is seasoned with chimichurri, a South American condiment made of parsley, garlic, chili, oil and vinegar. The bread, both firm and fluffy, can be stuffed with this preparation but the marrow and urchins do not need any addition, they can easily be eaten with a spoon.

This astonishing combination of products, once in the mouth, will explode in a multitude of flavors. The creaminess of the marrow is soon overcome by the salt of the seafood. The fresh urchins lighten the oily meat and spread a subtle smell of ocean on the tongue. Finally, the kick comes from the chimichurri: the astringent garlic, with spicy notes, punches the dish which would have been a little flat without the condiment. The mix of textures -crusty with the bread, melting with the marrow and urchins- as well as the mix of flavors tends to create no less than a bite of heaven.

The brussels sprouts, although a bit soaked in the soy sauce, are well-balanced with the

cilantro -which gives a fresh and lemony note to the dish-, the entire peanuts and the green and red tomatoes cut in halves. Spicy but not too much, the vegetables are cooked in a delightful way: seared just enough to stay fresh and crunchy. (They are all fresh and crunchy, at the beginning.
As for the crusted lamb, it is prettily accompanied with romaine entire leaves, is both cooked outside and rare inside, the crust of spices around the meat impregnating deeply the flesh with flavors. Without the curried Harissa sauce, it would be flawless.

And now, to cap it all, the dessert. It's not complicated to choose, there is only a choice of two sweets, different every day. If you fall on the berries pie, be careful, you could fall in love. The lukewarm dough is thin and barely perceptible, being overwhelmed by the mashed fruits. With or without a scoop of vanilla ice-cream, it is a fulfilling and sincere dessert: no cheating with artificial flavor. It is made by the chef himself, fresh from the day. The bread pudding is a success too. Although maybe too sweet, the texture, moist and tender, testifies of its quality.

At the RCE, you will find better than a plate of food. You will find a partner. And a less flawed one than any boy around. 

The triumph of corn over Americans

In the first part of his essay, the Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan displays thoroughly the many steps food covers, from its production to its consumption.

The consumers, because of all these transformative processes, cannot clearly identity the produce they are eating: A piece of meat at the supermarket does not have anything to do any more with the animal that grew stuck among many other fellows in a farm. How can we be fully conscious while eating, when what we eat doesn't look like food any more ? A tighter producer-consumer link would on the contrary support and encourage such a mindfulness in our consumers' heads.

Beyond that alarming fact, there is worse. While the system of overproduction of corn is working well economically speaking, its consequences over the producers, the consumers and the nature are catastrophic.

Based on scientific datas, historical facts and economics strategy plans, Michael Pollan proved this terrible -although strange- statement: corn is killing Americans.

On the page 34, he writes that “American farmers like Naylor are the most productive humans who have ever lived”, “feeding some 129 Americans.” In spite of that, they're going “broke”, as Pollan explains.

To simplify the complex mechanism of self-destruction farmers have been pushed to pursue, we could say that governmental farm policies, for the sake of the country's economical stability, encouraged the monoculture and overproduction of corn, creating both a decrease of the corn's price, synonym of the impoverishment of farmers, and an increase of obesity and alcoholism, a result of the very cheap price of corn-based produces and alcohols.

More over, the single use of corn in the fields of the MidWest destroyed the biodiversity and created ecological problems such as the water pollution due to the massive use of fertilizer and the exhaustion of the soil resources, among other things.

The question we can ask is: Who benefits from that overproduction of corn, except the corn itself ? Because it seems that neither producers nor consumers, the principal concerned parties in that vicious game, do.

Pollan notes that “in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition -a billion- had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition -800 million.” He adds, a few lines below, “when food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat.” (p. 102).

It is remarkable to see that such a global health issue, not only isn't taken into consideration by the government, but is maintained for the sake of economics, through farm policies.

 We can wonder: What can we do against that ? If the problem cannot be solved at an individual scale, to boycott processed food, most of which comes from corn industry, would be a starting point. To refuse to eat something we ignore the origin and transport until our plates is another idea. To read The Omnivore's Dilemma is a requirement.  

Between hell and heaven

Like a lovers' room, the ground being scattered with clothes and a purse flippantly half-emptied on the coach, the Rock City Eatery -a storefront in the Hamtramck neighborhood in Detroit- offers a chaotic view at the first sight. Don't trust this apparent mess, a treasure of surprise and delight is welcomed in this hipster-affordable restaurant.

From the pickled roasted beets to the Nicole's poutine to the Sichuan chicken wings, the menu of the RCE might disconcert the followers of consistency. There is none to expect from this place which is not devoted to any theme except eclecticism.

On the full-of-stains brown thick sheet that is the menu, there is no separation between appetizers and mains, just a succession of dishes whose price goes from $7 to $12 and that are to share or to keep jealously for one. The names of the courses are as exotic as varied. The traditional American Mac & Cheese stands alongside the Mexican Chicharron and Patacones and the Thai shrimp. The keyword of this menu is: condiment. Cilantro, curry, thyme, scallion, ginger, jalapeño, garlic, Harissa color the dishes and awake the taste buds. They can disturb or overwhelm them too.

The crusted lamb loin chop is a delight, particularly without the Ras El Hanout sauce, the perfectly-cooked flesh of the meat being sufficient in itself. However, the add of cilantro to the roasted brussels sprouts gives a delicate lemony freshness to the vegetables, soaked in a too present soy sauce.

As for the décor, it consists of a superimposition of raw materials -one part of the wall is made of red old bricks, another of cheap plywood-, luxury items like a magnificent glass luster, punk posters and unmatching tables and chairs, the whole being surprisingly contained in a 30m² rectangular room.

The system of the cutlery is both surprising and playful: you pick either silverwares or chopsticks from a glass jar. Help yourself, like at home. Like at home as well, the dishes don't match and each plate displays a new painting pattern and new sizes and shapes. As kitschy as nostalgic, especially if your grand-mother was fond of tableware collections.

In this scenery, you'll find a flowerbed of red, blue, green and purple haired and tattooed people, half of them bearing big beards (the other half being women.) A very hipster audience that will make a lot of noise. Well, that's good because it is preferable not to be heard after a gin fizz -well-balanced between sweetness and basil- and two pints of a syrupy local beer. Thanks to this loud and relaxed atmosphere, it is not embarrassing to be drunk here. Nor to wear a sparkling dolphin-printed T-shirt.

But this lack of coherence does not make the Rock City Eatery a mess. In spite of a reasonable waiting time if you don't have any reservation (around 20 minutes), the service is efficient and the waiters, very friendly. It might be hard to read the entire menu before the orders are taken. However, no pressure to choose, eat, drink and leave the restaurant. Going to the Rock City Eatery is like having a very convenient sex partner: it can go fast; it can also take hours. It depends on your needs.

The intensity of the inter-course depends as well on your desires. For the very lustful eaters, the Bourdain Dinner ($12), a marrow bone topped with raw urchins and assorted with homemade bread is a pure ecstasy. The way the bone is cut -in two vertical sections rather than in one piece, like two branches of celery- is surprising and playful. Topped on the marrow, the raw urchin color the dish which is seasoned with chimichurri, a South American condiment made of parsley, garlic, chili, oil and vinegar. The bread, both firm and fluffy, can be stuffed with this preparation but the marrow and urchins do not need any addition, they can easily be eaten with a spoon.

This surprising combination of products, once in the mouth, will explode in a multitude of flavors. The creaminess of the marrow is soon overcome by the salt of the seafood. The urchins, raw and fresh, lighten the oily meat and spread a subtle smell of ocean on the tongue. Finally, the kick comes from the chimichurri: the astringent garlic, with spicy notes, punches the dish which would have been a little flat without the condiment. The mix of textures -crusty with the bread, melting with the marrow and urchins- as well as the mix of flavors tends to create no less than a bite of heaven. A culinary orgasm.

The brussels sprouts, although too soaked in the soy sauce, are well-balanced with the cilantro, the entire peanuts and the green and red tomatoes cut in halves. Spicy but not too much, the vegetables are cooked in a delightful way: seared just enough to leave them fresh and crunchy.

The crusted lamb, prettily accompanied with romaine entire leaves, is both cooked outside and rare inside, the crust of spices around the meat impregnating deeply the flesh with flavors. Without the curried Harissa sauce, it would be flawless.

And now, to cap it all, the dessert. That's not complicated to choose, there is only a choice of two sweets, different every day. If you fall on the berries pie, be careful, you could fall in love. The lukewarm dough is thin and barely perceptible, being overwhelmed by the mashed fruits. With or without a scoop of vanilla ice-cream, it is a fulfilling and sincere dessert: no cheating, no artificial flavor. It is made by the chef himself, fresh from the day. The bread pudding is a success too. Although maybe too sweet, the texture, moist and tender, testifies of its quality.

  At the Rock City Eatery, the making out is messy but the pleasure, guarantied.  

Expectations about the Rock City Eatery, Detroit

For my review, I finally chose the Rock City Eatery, a little restaurant in the heart of the Hamtramck neighborhood in Detroit. I mean, choose is a big word. Until 5 minutes before we entered the place, I did not know where I was going. In the car, on our way to eat in a Polish restaurant (that was decided a few minutes previously as well) my companion received a call from a friend who recommended him the Rock City Eatery, allegedly a very unique place. After a change the GPS' directions, we arrived in J. Campau Avenue curious and hungry. The short amount of time that I had before going into the restaurant did not allow me to have a lot of expectations. The name of the place, the Rock City Eatery, foretold the worst. It reminded me some of the sketchier bars of Strasbourg, France. Not to speak about the menu: I was absolutely unable to picture any food in a spot named like that. Expect toilets full of pee, barflies and hard rock music, I could not imagine anything. However, I hoped to be surprised. A restaurant recommended by a friend cannot be that bad, right ? I had good company as well. So I was more than ready to have a good time, even though I did not what kind of good time it would be. 

Regarding the experience of writing a review, I expected to take less notes than I actually did. At some points, this task just prevented me really appreciate the moment: I was so absorbed by taking notes than I was unable to keep a consistent conversation with my companion. Being a food critique is a real job, definitely. I did not expect for example to be overwhelmed by ideas, rushing to write them all at the same time. Naively, I thought that I could calmly speak about the decoration while drinking a cocktail; then, that I could briefly describe the appetizer while waiting for the main course. The reality is completely different: the waitress dropped a plate on a customer while I was already trying to write about everything that was going on over there. And then, the food arrived faster than expected. And also, I interrupted my work to be a nice dining companion and entertain the conversation. That was messy and tedious. I did not realize that being a food critique required a real method of work. You cannot just come and take some notes. It does not work like that. To be fully honest, I did not expect either to be less efficient in my analysis after several drinks. It sounds obvious but I just never thought about it before. The adjectives to describe the dessert in particular were reduce to this one (and the worst is that I've been helped to find it !): moist. You better hold your alcohol if you want to be good at reviewing a restaurant. Finally, the food, since it has to be analyzed, is not as appreciable as when you eat out as a non-professional eater (i.e. almost everybody.) Such a hard task to recommend a place for the pleasure of others when yourself are at work. 

This experience dramatically challenged my perception of the work of a food critique, already altered by Sam Sifton's article about calories. I am glad to know more about reviewing and journalism.

What's a good restaurant ?

What is a good a restaurant ? If you read carefully the pieces of critique of Pete Wells, Sam Sifton, Jonathan Gold or François Simon, you will be struck: a good restaurant does not necessary serve good food. Vice versa: good food does not necessary make a restaurant great. At the Lincoln Ristorante, the pastas are delicious, but, come one, they're overpriced and the place does not have a real identity. At Guy's American kitchen, it is easy: nothing works. The menu of Kenmare is not worth it but you like to eat over there because of the atmosphere (the club, in the basement of the restaurant is likely to influence your judgement.) Even at the best-rated French restaurants, you might be disappointed: the pressure of entering a place of perfection will simply ruin your evening. The critique of the Figaro's magazine, François Simon, says wittily that "sometimes the food isn't great and the wine is mediocre, but the atmosphere is authentic and it's difficult not to be charmed by it."

So, what are we looking for when we go to the restaurant ? If it's not (not only) about food, what is it about ? Of course, depending on our companions, our mood and the place we are at, the adventure of eating out can dramatically vary. Nothing will indulge me more than a kebab at the corner's hash house, shared with the tattooed people I just met at this black metal concert. It is 3am and I reach a nirvana of food-gasm. However, it was not less amazing when I ordered those appetizers -lobster, cream and vegetables- at the top of the Hancock building in Chicago. With cocktails I don't remember the name and two charming men in front of my friend and I, what to wish in top of that ? A good view ? Checked. It was not less amazing in Arles either, when I ate those entire garlic cloves, surrounded by candles on a cozy terrace and soothed by the sounds of the bugs: the magic of south France in the summery twilight. It was as much as amazing, after being starving for more than two hours, to savor the rustic pea soup accompanied with thick brown bread, in a Canadian farm while it was 0°F outside. And there are many more like that.

Is it to say that food criticism is not worth it because eating is an eminently subjective adventure ? Maybe. Food critics clear our horizon of the false idols and, pragmatically, save us from wasting our money. However, the magic of food is never guarantied and to be honest, most of time, it comes where we do not expect it. So, my advice would be: never expect too much.

 My initial question was: what is a good restaurant ? Well, I think it is a restaurant that will surprise you. Another question now is, will you accept the surprise ?

What is French cooking, really ?

To be honest, I don't really know what to think about Adam Gopnik's article, “Is there a crisis in French cooking.”

How singular it is to read an article about French cooking written by an American critique when you are French yourself. There is always a feeling of both curiosity and distrust when comes the moment of truth : here's what France is, here's what French do. The fact that what is said is both true and false (true in general, false in particular - like all stereotypes) gives me an unpleasant sensation of awkwardness. It makes me wonder: what is French cooking, really ?

What the critique seems to reproach to French cooks is their lack of innovation. He compares new French cooking to a reformation: “A revolution can sweep clean but a reformation points forward and backward at the same time.” In other terms, French cooking has a hard time getting rid of the recipes of the old times. Well, thanks goodness ! Would French cooking still be French without this attachment to the past ? That's a rhetorical question.

Gopnik gets further in his explanation: “With movie (…), with airplanes, and now even with cooking, France has again and again made the first breakthrough and then gotten stalled. (…) The Enlightenment took place here, and the Revolution worked out better somewhere else.”

More spices, more grill, says Gopnik. French, please imitate and emulate British and Australian cooks ! Get rid of the heavy butter-cream-fat lobster ! Would he still call it French cooking, then ?

Well, here's my response to Gopnik. You cannot ignore the World War Two. You cannot ignore Carême or Escoffier either. Even if you want to. Because they are French cooking. There is no French cooking without heaviness. There is no French cooking without rules. There is no French cooking with saffron or cilantro or grill roasting. So, let's leave French cooking in peace, in its golden showcase. It is dusty and old-fashioned. You don't insult a dead man, do you ?

This French traditional cooking is not the one French people eat. Even the new French cooking is not the one French people eat. Because people eat at home, not in restaurants.

So, I would like to pay tribute to the all the cookings which allegedly do not deserve to be called “French.” To be true, which allegedly do not even deserve to be called “cooking.” It includes North African recipes, Spanish food, German tradition, Italian influence. It includes all the products that comes from the rest of the world: coffee, bananas, chocolate, spices. It includes all the practices and utensils that were brought during colonization. The pressure under France's shoulders about good food is unfair to me. One day, someone declared it was the best cooking of the world. Another day, it is the worst. To them, I would like to say: go to France, you will find the best and the worst. Both French cooking. Or neither one.

 There is no French cooking and there are many of French cookings. For me, they all deserve credit and respect. Maybe even more than the great chefs' butter-ness.