All intellectual justifications aside, I have to confess that my efforts to remove dairy from my diet have been hampered by my appreciation for centuries- old food traditions. And when you add to that the I come from a long line of people who not only depended on dairy but improved upon it, I feel like I’m denying my roots every time I pass on the slice of cheese. Half of my family, on both my father’s side and my mother’s side come from the area of northern Italy that invented the Parmesan (the true Parmiggiano Reggiano). There’s also some sprinkling of Dutch (also known for being big on dairy) and lots of Portuguese. When the Italian side of my family immigrated to Brazil, many settled in the fertile lands of Minas Gerais, which is known for its Queijo Minas.

Although it pained me, I was prepared to give up dairy if I felt it significantly improved my health. But after a while without eating any dairy product and being very careful of what I ate, I felt no significant improvement. It was nothing like when I discovered a couple of years ago that I have an intolerance to white rice and a mild intolerance to wheat and actually minimized my exposure to those ingredients. Replacing white rice and wheat for other grains improved my life significantly. I now have lots of energy and feel much more focused. Avoiding dairy did not have a similar effect. In fact, drinking coffee without a bit of dairy in it is a bit hard on my stomach. Even if I replace it with non-dairy milk.

For me at least, looks like cutting dairy completely is not the solution.

Lunch was basically the leftovers from saturday – beans, polenta, and kale. For a snack mid afternoon I had some quinoa pudding. And then for dinner, I stopped for a quick soba noodle soup at our favourite sushi place. It was very simple – just buckwheat noodles, a vegetable broth, some mushrooms and scallions. A good day although the black beans and corn makes me feel quite full.

• 2 cups tomato sauce [since I didn’t think it would be enough for a pound of pasta, I added a small can of chopped tomatoes)
• 2 garlic cloves
• 3 small shallots
• 1 bunch swiss chard, stalks and leaves washed and chopped separately
• 1 head broccoli
• 1 tbsp chopped capers (optional)
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1lb pasta (I used fusilli)

Heat some olive oil in a saucepan, add shallots and cook for a few minutes, until it begins to brown, add the garlic and the stems of the chard and let it simmer for a 2-5 minutes. Add the white wine and once it has reduced by half, add the chopped tomatoes and the tomato sauce. Let simmer for 20 mins, add capers and chopped broccoli florets and let cook for another 5 mins or until the broccoli is cooked to your satisfaction (I like al dente). Cook the pasta and add the chopped chard leaves in the last minute of cooking. Strain the pasta and chard and mix in the tomato sauce.

7:00 AM – savoury oatmeal & red river cereal cooked with celery, ginger, and turmeric and seasoned with soy sauce and sesame seeds. Served with an egg on top.

10:00 AM – a cup of black coffee at the library

Noon – leftover couscous salad with kale, dried cranberries, & walnuts

2:00 PM – coffee at coffee social at department

7:00 PM – Veganomicon’s Chickpea cutlets served with homefries mixed with spinach, shallots, and mushrooms cooked in a white wine sauce. The sauce on the cutlets is homemade ketchup. The cutlets were… ok… a bit flavourless, I have to admit. I don’t have much luck with seitan or anything made with vital wheat.

It was in Barcelona that I truly began to reconnect to a simpler life, to go back to basics. Although there were a fair number of supermarkets near our house, I quickly noticed that there were also lots of small independent shops where many of the locals shopped. Each neighbourhood had its own farmers’ market. Ours was the Mercat de l’Abaceria Central, in the neighbourhood of Gracia. I quickly learned to shop according to the seasons. In the last two months in Barcelona, we lived with our friends Jackie and Sebastian. Sebastian was trained as a cook, worked as a chef for a while, and now teaches cooking to the unemployed. Both he and Jackie have a keen interest in food but not in a stereotypical foodie sense. There was nothing fancy, exotic, processed in their house. Just lots and lots of whole foods. Shelves were stocked high with jars of dry legumes and grains of all types. There was not shortage of spices, vinegars, oils. Living a block away from the Boqueria market, everything was bought in small shops or directly from farmers. Daily meals were simple and basic – a few grilled vegetables and seafood with plain noodles;  maybe a simple curry. Meat often as a dressing rather than as a main focus. They shopped often, never for more than a few minutes, and were never stressed about food.

Coming back to Toronto was hard at first. The typical North American grocery store felt huge and intimidating. I wanted to the shopping habits I acquired in Barcelona. I longed to connect with the people from whom I bought my food. I wanted to keep eating seasonally. So we started shopping more at Kensington Market. I began to get my dry goods from local bulk food stores. 4 Life quickly became my main shopping place. I buy all of my dry goods there and store them in canning jars at home. It’s also our main source of local yogurt and kefir. Pots, the owner, gets a lot of his produce from local farmers and is very picky about the quality of everything he carries. He is always true to himself and will rather not make money than compromise on his beliefs. Some of it can be controversial – for a shop that sells only organic produce, I was surprised not to see any soy milk. When I asked about it he told me he believes the hormones in soy were not good for us so he chose not to sell it in his store. Over time we became friends and he now greets me with a big hug when I walk into his store and quickly brisks me to the back to show me his latest food creation in his ceramic rice cooker.

When I need cheese, I go to the cheese store. When I need spices, I go to the spice store. We buy cleaning products at local health food stores. I’ve never liked strong chemicals so choosing to buy natural cleaning products is a no-brainer for me. I don’t eat meat very often but when I do, I buy it at the butcher on my street who specializes on meats from local, humanely raised animals. But what has really connected me to local food supplies and made me feel more a part of a community was joining a CSA. Every week I get $25 worth of fresh produce. I get to really experience the seasons. I also get to buy jams, pickles, maple syrup, bread, flours, fresh pasta, produced locally from real ingredients.

All of that was no sacrifice. Most people find shopping and doing errands a chore. To us it is our break. It’s when I’m able to relax from my hectic week. We wake up on saturday morning, go out for breakfast and then go visit our friends at Kensington Market. We stop at the bike shop to chat with our friends Sean, Liam, Derek, and pet little Mabel (heck, they even put us on their website!) , we then proceed to 4 Life where we spend at least half an hour chatting with Pots and Dwayne, one of the local farmers that helps Pots on saturday mornings. We often meet interesting people at the shop and although I pick up most of what I need in less than 10 mins, we seldom leave the shop in less than 40 mins. We buy our coffee and tea at Casa Açoreana, where we spend some more time socializing with Ossie and his brothers and some of the locals. Either before or after our shopping, we stop at Manic Coffee where we spend some more time chatting with Louie, the portuguese skate-boarding barista that makes the best cortado I ever had.

On wednesdays, after work, we go to the U of T farmers’ market to get our share from Kawartha Ecological Growers and hang out a bit with Shannon, who manages the stand, and her remarkable three year-old son Elliot. Alan meets me there and he and Elliot hang out while I shop. Last time I overheard Alan telling Elliot about the big bang. When we run out of anything – milk, bread, olive oil – we run over to Pusateri Fruit Market, a family-run small grocery store across the street from our place.

The other day we ran into the Dominion grocery store at Yonge and College where we used to shop to pick up a loaf of bread. It’s not particularly large but it is your average chain supermarket with lots of cashiers, and aisles after aisles of … stuff. We hadn’t been there in many months. I hadn’t realized the difference between shopping the way I had been shopping and going into a typical supermarket until that day. It felt completely overwhelming. There were SO many choices of everything. Shelves and shelves or colourful, attractive packaging. Lots of light. No wonder most people feel stressed and anxious.

So when people look at me funny when I say I don’t want to go back in there, I explain how easy* it can be. All of them say they would love to do that but it would be too expensive. I have honestly not compared every single produce I buy against the supermarket’s price. I find life is too short for that. All I can say is that we spend less overall – perhaps because we are not tempted to buy all kinds of processed junk we dont need since we rarely see them – and that we can still pay all our bills, go out, and do all the same things we ever did. And we are far from being well off. I’m a student and my husband is a pensioner. It’s not a question of money, it’s a question of will. Or of changing habits. But worth every minute.

* I have had the occasional person tell me that it’s easy for me to do that because I don’t have kids. I think I would be even more likely to stay away from the supermarket if I had kids. Besides, families with kids shop this way all over the world, every day. And I see them at Kensington Market every saturday. The kids walking around on their own, the whole family (often three generations!) shopping together and making it a big family event. I’ve seen them going over the years, the kids growing from babies to 7 year-olds who know the local shop keepers by name and who can pick produce on their own. The beauty of kids is that it is up to us, adults, to get them used to the lifestyle we want.

One of the interesting aspects of Julia Child’s memoirs is precisely her disregard for the then new industrialization of food production in America. She doesn’t measure words when describing her disdain for pressure cookers (“the stinking, nasty, bloody pressure cooker… [i]t made everything taste nasty!), margarine (which she called “the other spread”) or even the quality of produce and meats. When researching poultry for her cooking book, she came to the conclusion that the “American poultry industry had made it possible to grow fine-looking fryer in record time and sell it at a reasonable price, but no one mentioned that the result usually tasted like the stuffing inside of a teddy bear.”

After books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, or films like Food Inc., we now know that the process made more than simply make food taste bad. In the video below, Bill Maher interviews Michael Pollan on the subject:

Also interesting is this article on the NYT in which Pollan talks about how “American cooking became an spectator sport” in which we have become completely fascinated with cooking shows and celebrity chefs while fewer of us actually cook. Most people assume cooking is complicated, time-consuming, and not worth the effort since it is so much cheaper to simply buy ready-to-eat food. That’s very sad. As Michael Pollan points out in the video above, “what happens on your plate represents your most important engagement with the natural world.” It is also our clearest engagement with ourselves and mental and physical well-being.
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While Pollan is great and I’m a big fan, he’s not always right, of course. For some interesting critiques of Pollan’s latest article, take a look at this and this.

Michael Ruhlman offers another interesting comment on Pollan’s article and the influence of Julia Child. Take a look here.

But the one part of his comment that stuck to my mind was when he referred to the impact on the poor of the world. I confess I know next to nothing to what extent North American food production impacts the rest of the world beyond the nefarious health effect of the growing popularity of western fast food in many parts of the world. I’ve since learned of two examples of the devastating effect that North American agribusiness have had on the developing world. The first one was in India. In the 1970s and 1980s biotech companies convinced Indian cotton farmers that their patented seeds would result in higher yields and more profits. Entire regions switched to these genetically-modified cotton seeds only to witness year after year their yields plumetting and their costs soaring as they were obligated by contract to buy the seeds and pesticides from companies like Monsanto. Over 1,500 farmers committed suicide in that country because of the trap they found themselves in. There’s lots written about it, and campaigns have spread to get rid of Monsanto in India. Cases related to it have reached the Supreme Court in India.

Now a similar thing is happening in Iraq. Following the US invasion of Iraq, American policies there have compelled Iraqi farmers to abandon 10,000 years of agricultural practice to use Monsanto’s seed and plant products if they wanted to do business with the US. This has generated all kinds of concerns and fear that what happened in India will repeat itself in Iraq. This seems entirely the wrong way to get the Iraqi people to understand the Americans are on their side.

If you are interested in these issues, I highly recommend this recent article on Vitality magazine by Helke Ferrie. A physical anthropologist and a medical science writer, Ferrie draws attention to Prince Charles’ campaign against GMOs for its negative impact on the world:

Prince Charles, ignoring the pressure to shut up exerted by Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, called for an end to biotech farming, quoting Mahatma Gandhi’s warning against “commerce without morality” and “science without humanity.” He was referring to the suicides among Indian farmers, terminator technology, and recent research conducted by Syngenta which used children for GM food trials – sponsored by Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Prince also called attention to the lie that biotechnology is necessary to feed the world. In fact, according to organizations studying hunger and food shortages, the world produces annually about twice as much food as required – through non-biotech farming. Organic methods consistently outperform conventional and biotech, methods: Brazil and Ethiopia increased their yields by 250% when they switched to organic methods.

For years, the Prince was made fun of for his views on the environment. His concerns have been proven justified time and time again. The problem is that most people assume that technology, anything that is “modern”, is better than traditional of common-sensical approaches. If it doesn’t involve technology and some form of fancy gadget, it is somehow old-fashioned and in need of “modernizing”. Let’s hope we shed this assumption and make more careful choices. The implications are vast.

On monday I tried another of her recipes: Fried Rice with Scallions, Edamame & Tofu. It was very good! It also looked amazing.