Ask the Food Fairy!

A follow-up on last post’s G. K. Chesterton quote about the beauty of the pig:

After marveling at it, I read on to find that he goes even further. Chesterton writes,

“You can look down on a pig from the top of the most unnaturally lofty dogcart. You can examine the pig from the top of an omnibus, from the top of the Monument, from a balloon, or an airship, and as long as he is visible, he will be beautiful… In short he has that fuller, subtler and more universal kind of shapeliness which the unthinking… mistake for a mere absence of shape. For fatness itself is a valuable quality.”

Doesn’t that just terrify you? Doesn’t it bring up all the mumbling, grumbling, ad-supported ideas about what a terrible world we would live in if more people were fat, and what a horrible state of affairs it is if more people are fat? How it is all going to lead to early death, disease, and dysfunction? How could he have said such a thing?!

Well, I don’t know the context. I came across the quote in a lovely book, “The Good Good Pig“, about an actual pig and “the valuable, life-changing lessons [author Sy Montgomery] and others learned from Christopher Hogwood, a generous soul who just so happened to be a pig.” It notes that Chesterton was musing on his childhood dream of owning a pet pig, but that is all I know.

Of course, what the fatphobic wailing in the media fails to note is that there is nothing wrong with being fat.

Fat is something of a mirage in the first place. There is no dividing line between thin and fat, no point at which we can say we have crossed over. Like money, it is associated with worth – except that with fat, the less of it we have, the more worthy we think we are.

And as with money, there is no satisfactory endpoint – there is either the spacious territory of having a healthy relationship to money or our bodies, and living abundant lives, or there is the driving worry, whether quiet or loud, that we will never have (or lose) enough.

Fat is sometimes a symptom of an unhealthy lifestyle – compulsive overeating, or eating enough but very unhealthy things, or eating unhealthily and never, ever getting any physical exercise – but it is the unhealthy lifestyle that is the problem in these examples. There are people who are considered fat who eat healthily, exercise joyfully, and were born with a larger build. There are, of course, some folks with glandular imbalances too. But there are many people without a psychological or physical care in the world who are considered, by dressmakers or photographers or their anorexic-thinking neighbors, to be fat. The fat is not the problem.

This pig strikes me as laughing at us, and all our ridiculous obsessions with losing weight. What do you think? Is fatness ever a valuable quality? How can and should we associate worth with fat?

I just came across a quote from G. K. Chesterton which is about pigs, but which unintentionally summarizes so much of the way anorexic thinking warps my view of reality!

“…Pigs are very beautiful animals. Those who do not think so do not look at anything with their own eyes but through other people’s eyeglasses.”

And how long have I spent looking at everything through other people’s eyeglasses (by shaming myself, listening to crazy ideas, and projecting them onto everyone else, imagining that that’s what THEY think and say about me) and ignoring the natural beauty of everyone and everything on this planet?

It had especial resonance for me because of the pig thing, too – associating pigs with being fat and being fat with being ugly and worthless, in a huge avalanche of unreasonable, illogical, insane thinking. What about you – what is your gut reaction when you look at these lovely pigs? And how do you feel about it?

My “brother” Austin (what do you do with people who are your brother in all but biology?) imed me today to ask for ideas. He has been married for two months (which is an outrage, since the actual wedding isn’t until October) and wants to surprise his wife (that still sounds weird to me) with dinner. And she’ll only be gone for two hours, which has to include time for him to run to the store!

AND he wanted it to include meat – not sausage, which they just had, and not fish, which she won’t eat. Remind me to go off here about things people won’t eat. I am a great supporter of my girlfriend’s theory that if you don’t like it, you haven’t had it cooked right. But I digress. Oh, and did I mention he doesn’t really cook? So it had to be easy, of course.

I suggested chopping some onions and mixing that and some seasonings into ground meat to fry himself up some burgers. I can’t think of anything that says Austin to me more than burgers, for some reason. But a veggie side was harder for me to brainstorm. So, of course, I went to Tastespotting to get inspiration.

If you haven’t been, I suggest taking a little vacation there right now. It’s a gorgeous, ever-changing collection of beautiful food pictures people find (or post) online, with links to the source. So really, it’s like a gorgeous gallery of brilliant food blogs. And while I tried to find something good for him, I found TONS of great stuff for me. And how can I not share them with you? Some stuff I want to make as soon as possible:

A Sauce of Some Deliciousness: Pooh Bear helps us all flavor up some salads and things. I need to get me some sesame oil and rice vinegar so I can do this up: you mix those with chopped chili, grated ginger, miso paste, and honey (but I’d rather use agave, which has no sucrose)…. oh, and sesame seeds, and a little warm water, and…. yum. Plus, it told me all about a blog challenge that combines books and food… two of my favorite things!

Cheesy Fried Green Tomatoes: I cannot wait until we get some green tomatoes out in my yard. To be fair, two of the tomato plants I bought came with green ones on them, and I haven’t checked how ripe they’ve gotten yet. (So far I have plants that will produce plum tomatoes, tiny red currant tomatoes, and I think maybe some enormous beefsteaky ones.) I especially like the idea here of putting a soft cooked egg on top of the tomato slices. Genius! what a fantastic breakfast that would be. I would use some nice rice flour I have, to get away from the wheat which makes my sinuses all glunky.

We have strawberries growing in the yard too, and we used to have mint. (It’s a constant battle between the mint and the blackberries about which will come back first when they’re razed to the ground, as they were recently… don’t know if we have mint yet but I wish it would smother the damn blackberries on that side of the yard!) So if I wanted to be patient enough for all this stuff to grow, I could make these dishes for Practically Free. Isn’t that the point of summer? That and being warm, which someone should remind my boss about – she likes to keep the A/C going so that we’re as cold in the summer as in the winter! And me sitting here barefoot, in two tank tops and a skirt….

(My beautiful and genius girlfriend just pointed out that we could use the cheesemaking kit I bought her for Winter Solstice to make GOAT RICOTTA for the strawberries. Holy shit.)

This Andalucian gazpacho looks and sounds so fancy, but I do feel a little wary; sometimes the sheer acidity of gazpacho makes it a little painful for me to eat. But as a side dish it sounds cooling and fascinating. And SO easy – you just throw everything in the blender and go! I tried to talk Austin into this one, and he said he’d just come up with something at the store. Pffft. (Come to think of it, we planted two kinds of cucumbers – so if I wait, this will be almost free too. All but the onion. I don’t like onions enough to have them in my yard… yet.)

Wild. Salmon. With. Shiitake. Bacon. Bits. I MEAN. That is genius. I am drooling as I type this. I’m not even kidding. Drooling inside my mouth. This recipe sets out to make the shiitake mushroom bits taste like bacon, which confuses me. On one hand, just use bacon, damnit. On the other hand, not only is making things taste like bacon an awesome art, but also, bacon-tasting shiitake actually sounds a lot better than bacon. It’s bacony AND mushroomy, for gods’ sake! Pure genius. Also: SALMON. LOVE SALMON. Such good ideas.

And finally:
Fava Bean Salad. Fresh fava beans, crushed pink peppercorns, little peeler peels of parmesan or whathaveyou, and a little vinagrette. Simplicity and genius. I want everything here!

Off to make my meal plan for the next week, and a bon appetit to you!