Autumn 2015
Food, Drink, and Nature
Nature Is the Foundation for the Way We Talk about Delicious Food
By Edward Behr
Nature is the point of reference for all we eat and drink. It provides almost every one of the countless comparisons we use to describe flavor, common words such as lemony, apply, green, earthy, berrylike, vegetal, woody, even fresh, and many, many more uncommon ones. How else would we describe natural things except in natural terms? We almost never make a comparison to something artificial such as plastic. Nature was the foundation for the two most famous statements about French food: “Make it simple” (Escoffier) and “La Cuisine! That’s when things taste like what they are” (Curnonsky). Our fruits, vegetables, and farm animals have been bred over hundreds and in some cases thousands of years, by way of selecting inherent genetic traits. Nature remains at the center of life. When I read Bill McKibben’s argument in The End of Nature, published back in 1989, it made sense. Nature no longer existed as a force independent of humankind; above all by warming the planet, people now played a powerful opposing part. And we’re only beginning to know what genetic modification may bring, and new foods such as in vitro meat.
I grew up in the Mid-Atlantic state of Maryland, spending part of the summer in New England, loving the outdoors. I thought a picnic might be the ideal meal. We played in yards and the street, but also often in the woods. We thought nature was friendly and interesting, maybe beautiful, though we didn’t say that. Now in the northeastern United States we worry about children playing anywhere near the woods, out of fear of ticks carrying Lyme disease. We often pull back from nature, instead of stepping in. We’re in touch with our screens. Not many people grow up in truly rural places, and almost everyone eats lots of industrially raised, heavily processed foods, including many sweet ones (which dessert chefs in fashionable US restaurants play on).
Where I live now in the rural state of Vermont, during the warm months I grow vegetables and a few berries, mainly to have absolute freshness and certain varieties otherwise impossible to find. I can have shell beans that are mature but still green in their pods, not yet dried. I can pick skinny four- or five-inch green beans that a farmer couldn’t afford to grow. I can pick rose petals and looseleaf lettuce early in the morning before they’re depleted by the sun, and, conversely, I can pick tomatoes that are sun-warm, which for them is better. The only things tainted by the refrigerator are occasionally lettuce (to prevent it from wilting in a July sun) or an abundance of cucumbers (to prevent them from becoming any more mature). My garden terroir isn’t ideal for everything; beets and carrots lack some concentration and sweetness. But to me growing a garden is deeply worthwhile for both the taste and the pleasure of being outdoors.
Right now in the first days of November, the garden doesn’t look like much, but we have beets, white turnips, viola flowers (johnny-jump-ups), arugula (sweet, peppery), leeks, spinach, chard, a few heads of lettuce, lots of mâche (tender, nutty), and plenty of herbs (chives, sage, savory, thyme, hyssop, sorrel, and parsley). The spinach is leathery, but that’s part of the taste of the season.
If you’re estranged from nature in daily life, and the best vegetables you can find are at a farmer’s market (where things are rarely if ever picked that same day, and few vegetables are in an extreme state of deliciousness), then the better-than-ever produce in many European and American restaurants is very special, even the main reason to go. It may explain why chefs exalt ingredients and minimize transformation by cooking. It’s as if they were guided by “first, do no harm,” which isn’t exactly a bad thing. It’s only that sometimes there’s a further place to go, while still letting “things taste like what they are.”
We’re coming to the end of nature with food and drink, though a warmer climate in some places can make things riper and more delicious. With wine, however, in Champagne, in Beaujolais, in Languedoc, what was natural in wine 30 or 40 years ago is no longer, and that’s not always better. Lately I’ve been speaking with wine producers in diverse French regions, and they raise the topic. Some have more alcohol in their wine than they want. Only in the mountainous Jura did I find an accomplished grower-winemaker who sometimes still chaptalizes (adds sugar to the fermenting juice to increase the alcohol in less-ripe years), because the particular yeast characteristic of the region’s vin jaune thrives only with a certain level of alcohol.
And yet nature remains a whole, complex, if sometimes inscrutable system. There’s certainly no replacement in sight. Even as we change nature, it’s still the essential, the best point of reference, the best way to talk about what we eat. And the more you know about the natural world, the better you understand what’s in your glass and on your plate. ●
