Do this. Do yourself a favor and start the year with a big batch of buckwheat galettes. We made them Christmas morning, and still my taste buds linger over the memory of that soft Gruyere melting into the sweet red onion, tempered with the salty taste of prosciutto and a tart bite of apple.

We specifically modeled these galettes on the first proper French-style crepes I’d ever eaten, in Cambodia, in a little place called Kep on the Gulf of Thailand. Decades ago, the town had served as a playground for the country’s elite. But war came, and Kep fell to the Khmer Rouge, and jungle crept its way through once-glamorous mansions. Their ruins still stand—and crumble—among the trees, like the ghosts of bygone time.

But Kep is seeing something of a quiet revival, and we stayed at a serene set of renovated villas originally designed by Cambodia’s elite class of architects trained in the style of Vann Molyvann and Le Corbusier.

We lounged in a seaside cabana, swam in an infinity pool and took our meals in an open sala with a thick slab table weathered by salty breezes.

One morning, the Frenchman who ran the place created for me the most exquisite, gluten-free thing: a buckwheat galette folded over grilled onions, melted cheese and little chunks of ham. It tasted so good, and the air felt so fresh, I thought it might be the best breakfast I’d ever have.

A few years later, in Paris, I stopped at a street stall and bought a warm galette with salmon, chive and creme fraiche. Truthfully, it wasn’t as good as the epiphany I’d experienced in Kep. But I was in Paris, so I loved that crepe just the same.

Buckwheat galettes, I think, are best when savory, but a hint of sweetness can add spectacular depth—such as a slice of apple to pair with onion and cream. Last weekend, we knew we wanted certain things, and certain combinations of things, to go inside our Christmas galettes. So we bought all of our ingredients the day before, and we made the batter just before heading to bed on Christmas Eve.

That’s the one thing about galettes: they require a little planning, if using an entirely buckwheat batter. We followed Sharon Louise Crayton’s recipe in her book, One Taste. It’s a simple list of ingredients: 2 cups of buckwheat, ½ teaspoon sea salt, 3 cups tepid water, a little oil and 2 optional eggs (we used one); all whisked until bubbly. The batter sat overnight in the fridge, and by morning, it was perfect for a Christmas feast.

We covered the counter in an array of little dishes: diced prosciutto, shaved gruyere, finely chopped yellow onion, minced garlic, a wedge of goat-milk brie, a dollop of creme fraiche, thin slices of apple and mini pieces of Manzanilla olives.

Mixing continental influences, I also took cues from my brother-in-law’s Argentinian cookbook: I snipped a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and sautéed it with red onion, until the entire kitchen smelled of that rich, herbal aroma.

And we set to work.

The key is to maintain a very thin consistency. The recipe calls for a nonstick skillet, but we used cast iron, over medium-high heat. To ensure the batter wouldn’t burn, my husband added a little butter and grapeseed oil, then followed the recipe’s suggestion of brushing the skillet with oil and an apple slice on the end of a fork (do this as often as necessary). He ladled the batter into the skillet and swirled it until evenly spread. After a couple of minutes, he flipped the crepe and cooked until slightly browned, then set aside.

When all the crepes were made, we began stuffing them, one by one, with an assortment of fillings. Galettes can be folded two, three or four times—as many as you see fit (or as many times as necessary to keep the crepes intact). We rolled ours burrito-style, then gently heated each in the skillet until the fillings had melted and warmed into the crepes.

We made one after the other after the other, each a little different from the one before. Yet they were all divine.

I couldn’t think of a better breakfast to kick off the New Year.

See more of Jerry Redfern’s photos at Rambling Spoon.

1 large artisnal loaf bread, cubed (12-14 cups of cubed bread)

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon evoo

2 leeks, white and light green part only, washed and sliced into 1/2 moons

1 fat garlic clove, minced or pressed

1 bunch Swiss chard, stems removed, leaves chopped

3 cups half and half or milk

8 large free range eggs (because it’s nicer)

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon white pepper

2 cups shredded Gruyere cheese

2 pats butter

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1) Pre-heat oven to 350F. Place the cubed bread on 2 dry, ungreased baking pans and bake for about 15-20 minutes, until lightly toasted, but not colored. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. Keep the oven on if you plan on baking the pudding immediately.

2) Sauté the leeks and garlic over medium-high heat in the 1 tablespoon butter and evoo. Cook until soft– about 5 minutes– then add in the chard, stir, cover and reduce heat to medium. Allow to steam-cook until the chard is limp, but still deep green, stirring occasionally.

3) Whisk the half and half or milk together with the eggs, salt and pepper. Place the tasted bread cubes into a very large bowl and pour the creamy-egg mixture over top. Toss well to coat all the bread then add in the leeks/Swiss chard and toss again. Now add in the Gruyere, tossing one more time. The pudding can be held like this for up to 8 hours.

4) Smear a large baking dish with the last 2 pats of butter and pile the bread/egg/chard/cheese mess into it. Scatter the Parmesan cheese across, cover and bake 45 minutes. After 45 minutes, remove the cover and continue to bake for 15 minutes longer, to brown up.

Serve at once. Makes 12-14 servings (awesome left-overs), but the recipe can easily be halved.

It’s well known that Detroit has been hard hit by the economic crisis—it’s unemployment rate is a staggering 28%—but it also has one of the most well-developed urban agriculture scenes in the country. Over the past decade, resourceful Detroiters and organizations such as DBCFSN have been converting the city’s vacant lots and fallow land into lush farms and community gardens. According to the Greening of Detroit, there are now over 1,351 gardens in the city.

I spoke to Yakini, one of the leaders of Detroit’s vibrant food justice movement, about  the problem with the term “food desert,” how Detroit vegans survive the winter, and what the DBCFSN is doing to change the food landscape in Detroit. “We’re really making an effort to reach beyond the foodies—to get to the common folk who are not really involved in food system reform,” says Yakini.

Tell me about the origins of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

It grew out of some earlier work. I was principal of an African-centered charter school in the Detroit area called Nsoroma Institute Public School Academy. In 2000 we started doing organic gardening on a serious level and developed a food security curriculum. That initial garden evolved into something we called the Shamba Organic Garden Collective, where we had parents and teachers planting gardens in their backyards and in vacant lots next to their houses.

We had a team called the groundbreakers who would go out and till peoples’ gardens for them—because that was the most labor-intensive part. We had about 20 gardens spread out over the city as part of this collective. And as the work continued to grow, we were looking for a way to expand it and involve more people. Informally, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network grew out of this work.

In February of 2006, I called together a group of 40 people who I knew were either gardeners, chefs, raw foodists—people who had some connection to food—for the purposes of starting the DBCFSN.

One of the main activities of the organization is to influence public policy. Is there a political leader in Detroit who has become a powerful advocate for the food justice movement and has helped push through laws that protect community gardeners and promote food security?

The one who has been most supportive has been councilwoman JoAnn Watson. And councilman Kwame Kenyatta has been supportive as well. In fact, it’s through JoAnn Watson that we were able to have the City Council approve the Food Security Policy that our organization wrote. She was able to give us the traction we needed to get the City Council to appoint members of the Detroit Food Policy Council.

What policy goals are the DBCFSN working on right now?

The big issue right now in Detroit is creating ordinances to regulate urban agriculture. There’s a big impediment and that’s a state law called “the Right to Farm Act.” Essentially it says no municipality has the authority to create ordinances that regulate agriculture within their jurisdiction, because of this state law that supersedes it. Just last week there was a bill introduced to the Michigan house to exempt Detroit from the Michigan Right to Farm Act, which was passed in the early 1980s. It was passed to protect rural farmers from suburban sprawl and from complaints from people who were moving into rural areas where farming was taking place, who wanted it to be like a city. So the law was to protect the farmers, but it didn’t anticipate the urban agriculture movement we have now.

At this point, our policy work is primarily done through our involvement in the Detroit Food Policy Council. Our farm manager is a member of the Michigan Food Policy Council. So we are trying to move policy forward through our involvement in those two organizations.

Do you think there’s a chance the Michigan legislature will pass this bill?

It’s a question of building the proper coalition on a statewide level. We have to find a way to get enough Michigan state legislators to vote for that exemption. But that’s challenging because Michigan is a very large agricultural state. In fact, it has the greatest diversity of crops outside of California. But most of what is grown in Michigan, like every other state in the United States, is corn and soybeans. And so these corn and soy farmers are not the natural allies of the sustainable ag folks in Detroit. It’s gonna take some networking across traditional interests in order to build the kind of support politically that we’d need to get an exemption.

Flint and Grand Rapids have very large urban ag movements, too, and they’re handcuffed in the same way. So there are some natural allies out there. But in order to move this thing forward we have to have some allies in rural Michigan—the traditional farmers.

Does that mean that urban farmers in Detroit are technically defying the law right now?

There’s a woman on the Food Policy Council who is an employee of the City Planning Commission. She says there are some things that are illegal and some things that are unlawful. It’s illegal to have farm animals like cows in the city of Detroit—there’s a law prohibiting that. But there are other things like bees that the law doesn’t speak to specifically. So there’s no law that permits it and there’s also not a law that prohibits it. It’s not lawful but it’s not illegal. So we’re kind of caught in this grey area right now.

It’s been estimated that Detroit has about 6,000-10,000 acres that are vacant—that’s about a third of the city. So you have a lot of commercial interests beginning to look at Detroit as a place to do agriculture. Because the city doesn’t have the ability to regulate it right now, we don’t have the ability to say to these large commercial interests that we don’t feel that this scale of agriculture is appropriate for Detroit. Getting the exemption from the Right to Farm Act would allow Detroit to define what is appropriate in terms of scale and in terms of things like composting.

What about policy on the national level. Does the DBCFSN have any position on the farm bill?

Several of us have been involved in webinars and meetings to bring us up to speed on the farm bill. But we haven’t actively taken a position as a group.

We’re more focused on local policy. After studying the farm bill over the last several months, I have a concern about what it takes to build the type of support nationally, across various interests, to get anything passed in the farm bill. It’s much easier to build that level of consensus on a local or state-wide basis.

I think big ag will continue to get billion dollar subsidies. Some of the things that were added in the last farm bill were good: Our organization got a hoop house from the USDA as a result. But when you look at a hoop house that cost $8,000 and maybe there are 5-10 of ‘em in Detroit, that’s $40,000 to $80,000. But then you’re looking at billions of dollars that are going to these folks who are growing corn and soybeans.

So really, if we want to have a major impact on the food system in the United States, the paradigm has to be shifted. So that sustainable agriculture is incentivized and this unsustainable model of industrial farming is dis-incentivized. The best way to do that is through money. Of course, that is a big fight because the food lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies that exists. And I really haven’t heard answer of how you build the level of power, how you galvanize that level of support, on a national level.

The DBCFSN has a “What’s for Dinner?” lecture series.  What speakers have you had and what are they about?

This year we had four lectures. The first was called “Is my garden legal?” by Kathryn Underwood, the woman who is on the Detroit Food Policy Council. She spoke about the laws or lack of laws regulating agriculture in Detroit. The second lecture was a guy named Kilindi Iyi and he’s a mycologist. His was on adding mushrooms to your garden and the technologies of growing mushrooms. The third lecture was the board president of our organization, Ife Kilimanjaro, and it dealt with the global food shortage and how that is a man-made phenomenon how it has been manipulated through these multinational companies that are are controlling much of the food supply.  The final lecture was one I did on the impact of global warming on agriculture.

So this lecture series—as well as some of the other things we do—is geared towards raising public consciousness. Because we realize that it’s not just a question of greater access to food. But people have to have knowledge about the food, and have to have some understanding about why sustainable growing is better than the industrial food system that provides most of the food. They have to have some understanding about food culture. Because much of our traditional food culture has been lost over the past generation, due to the rush towards convenience in the post World War II period, and then the fast food proliferation which occurred in Detroit and other places throughout the country. Our families today rarely sit down and eat a meal that’s prepared from scratch. So there’s a lot of education that has to go on in order to support the growing of fresh produce. And creating markets in which to sell it. We have to increase demand at the same time as we’re increasing access.

Is D-Town Farm the DBCFSN’s only garden? Or do you have others?

We just have one location. We started out initially with two acres and we currently have seven acres—so it’s a pretty large project. We’re trying to stay focused and not have various locations around the city. Frankly we don’t have the capacity to manage that. Even managing the seven acres we have now is challenging!

We consider ourselves to be a model. Rather than trying to start gardens all around the city, what we’re doing is creating a learning institution where people who are interested in doing this work can come and learn various techniques and strategies that they can take back to their neighborhoods. So we see ourselves as a catalyst.

So the produce that’s grown at D-Town Farm—is it sold there at a farm stand or at Eastern Market?

We sell it at Eastern Market and also at a few farmers’ markets. We also sell to a few restaurants. We’re working on a project called “Take it to the Marketplace” that will put some of our products in grocery stores. It’ll be a producers’ co-op that we’ll be part of and we’ll invite other local food entrepreneurs to be part of. But it will sold under the D-Town brand. And we’ll collectively market and promote those products, and collectively distribute those products. So that’s our next move: to have locally grown options available at stores that people normally shop at.

Speaking of grocery stores, you said something interesting at the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Oakland: that implicit in researcher Mari Gallagher’s definition for “food desert” is the notion that grocery stores are the only solution to food deserts. In fact, what she and others including you stress is that multiple solutions are needed—farmers’ markets, food co-ops, urban farms. But don’t Detroit residents—even those who buy their food from D-town Farm—rely on grocery stores in the winter? Even with hoop house technology, you can’t possibly grow enough produce in the winter months for people to be food secure—can you?

Not at all. We don’t even grow enough in the ground in the summer to be self-sufficient. We’re producing a very small amount of the produce consumed in Detroit—probably less than 1 percent. We are at the embryonic stages. We think we have much greater capacity. But we’re nowhere near that point right now.

People are accustomed to going to grocery stores to buy food and they’re used to these large, pretty pieces of produce. Often, organic food is not as large and sometimes it has flaws. So we have to re-educate people about the aesthetics of food and the nutritional value of food, at the same time as we educate people about the value of eating whole foods.

We’re not self-sufficient even in the summer time—less so in the winter. We are producing food in the winter using hoop house technology, but of course you can only grow limited crops in the winter using hoop houses unless you have some external heating source. People are primarily growing salad greens, collards, kale, and things like that. They clearly aren’t growing peppers, tomatoes, and squash in the winter in hoop houses.

Without a full-service grocery store, where do you find sustainable dairy, meat, or bread? Does Detroit have any meat CSAs?

Because I’m a vegan, I haven’t done a lot of investigation about sources for eating meat and dairy. Although that’s my personal dietary preference, that’s clearly not the dietary preference of the majority of the people in Detroit. So since the majority of people do eat meat, we need to find ways of finding high quality meat at affordable prices. I’m very ignorant about what those options are, but that’s an area I intend to educate myself about in the near future.

But even as a vegan, it must be a challenge to find enough healthy food in Detroit in the winter. Do the locally-run bodegas in town—the “party stores”—have any fresh produce?

Unfortunately, many of us, particularly those of us who are trying to eat organic foods, have to leave the city to find those. I’m privileged enough to have an automobile. [Note: 1/5^th of all Detroit households are car-less.] I’m able to drive the couple of miles from my house to get to Ferndale, where they have food outlets that sell organic food. They do sell some local produce but of course during the winter that selection is very limited. And so although I am dedicated to eating local foods, I’m not able to do that to the extent that I’d like to during the winter time.

I read an article that asserted that Detroit and Cleveland have plenty of corner stores, many of which sell produce. The USDA overlooks such stores when they designate a neighborhood a food desert. (They define supermarkets as grocery stores with at least $2 million in annual sales.) But don’t these so-called “fringe stores” sell mostly processed food, liquor and cigarettes?

There are small grocery stores in Detroit. Mari Gallagher’s 2007 study said there were something like 1,075 food outlets in the city of Detroit. The vast majority, though, are convenience stores or what we call party stores. The problem is that far too many of them sell food that is of an inferior quality, sometimes at inflated prices. And the sanitary conditions in the stores often leave something to be desired. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, because there are some very good independently-owned grocery stores in Detroit. A few. So I don’t want to leave the impression that they’re all terrible. Many of them are terrible. But even the decent ones aren’t selling organic produce. And for me, eating organically is very important.

Your friend Malik Shabazz of the Marcus Garvey movement has been videotaping some of the blatant health violations at “party stores” such as rat feces, and is reporting them to the Department of Public Health.

He’s also finding meats that have another label placed over the expiration label. He’s finding stores that are selling alcohol to minors. He’s documenting all of these things. His organization creates the kind of pressure and public scrutiny that’s needed to close down drug houses, too. It’s part of an overall effort to create a higher quality of life in Detroit’s African American community.

In Oakland, you cautioned that racism is prevalent in the food movement—that some white food activists will come into an African American community and tell them what to do. Can you give an example of a white food justice organization in Detroit who is a good ally of the DBCFSN, who works with you in a collaborative way?

The main ally we have is Earthworks Urban Farm. The manger there is Patrick Crouch. We do quite a few things together including participating in the “Undoing Racism in the Detroit Food System” initiative. They are probably our best predominantly white allies.

One of the goals of the DBCFSN is to promote healthy eating habits amongst Detroit’s youth. Any tips on how to do this?  Kids can be tough critics.

When children are involved in growing food, they feel a sense of ownership. Like, “I grew that carrot, I planted those seeds.” That’s a big incentive right there. But also just bringing in fresh greens and having the kids taste them. Typically they enjoy it—they like it.

We have a youth program called Food Warriors youth development program that functions at Nsoroma. Also, there is a food security curriculum that’s woven into the fabric of the school.  Every teacher has to have one lesson per week that has a food security tie-in. We look at food security in a very broad sense, not just in terms of providing access to food but we look at all aspects of the food system. With some of the younger children, rather than inundate them with a lot of theory, their food security lessons are more hands on. Preparing things, tasting them. Exposing them to foods that they don’t normally eat.

Healthy eating is part of the culture at the school—and it has been for some time. Gum, candy, and soda pop are not allowed in the building at all—either by students, staff, or parents. That’s been a long-standing policy. There’s a catering company that provides lunch every day. So we have whole grains—no white rice is served—it’s always brown rice. There’s no red meat served. And so we’ve created a cultural environment that is supportive of healthy eating. So the Food Warriors are building on a culture that already exists in the school.

What about public schools in Detroit? Are there people putting pressure on them to improve their food?

The food service director of Detroit Public Schools, Betti Wiggins, is very progressive. She was recently elected to the Detroit Food Policy Council and she’s very active in the food movement. She has reached out to local growers. Of course she’s working for a bureaucracy that slows down what she’d like to do. But there couldn’t be a better person in place pushing for this to happen.

She is involved in the farm-to-school movement and has piloted that in several schools in Detroit, and has encouraged several schools to start gardens. So she is a very strong ally in this movement.

What do you think of entrepreneur John Hantz, and this ambitious plan he has to create “the largest urban farm” in Detroit?

That is the inevitable question. All interviews lead to that question.

I find it to be problematic for several reasons. The first reason is because the city is 77%  African American (according to the latest Census Data), and the key players in the Hantz project are white men. That’s problematic.

Secondly, they are not committed to organic agriculture. They propose some type of mixture of the traditional industrial farming model and sustainable techniques.

Thirdly—and most alarmingly—they don’t have any sense of using urban agriculture to empower communities. They are driven by the profit motive. The current urban ag movement is clearly steeped within the social justice movement and clearly is trying to empower people, communities, and community organizations. And none of that is on the radar of the Hantz project. So that is very troubling.

Although Mr. Hantz is proposing this very large farm, what a lot of people don’t know is that he’s proposing that only ten percent of what he grows is produce. The rest is Christmas trees! Most people think he’s going to have thousands of acres of tomatoes and peppers and lettuce, but that’s not the case.

Mr. Hantz has also said that really what he’s trying to do is create scarcity, thereby driving up the value of the land. At a public forum, someone said to him, “Well that sounds like a land grab.” And he said, “Yes, it is a land grab.” That’s another problem. There are major questions around use and ownership of land. And how land serves the common good as opposed as trying to serve the interests of wealthy individuals who are trying to make a profit.

Has he reached out to the black community in Detroit in any way?

After much criticism, there has been some reaching out to community members. But it seems to be an afterthought, after he received so much criticism. He’s also made overtures to me. I’ve been involved in a couple discussions about trying to sit down with him to understand more fully what he wants to do.

I have a good relationship with Mike Score, who is the president of Hantz Farms. Mike is the person who is leading the farm effort right now. He’s a legitimate farmer and an honorable human being with a very high level integrity. He and I have talked about trying to set up a meeting with Mr. Hantz and some of the key people in the urban ag movement. But Hantz has been resistant to meeting with a group of people.

You were awarded a two-year fellowship with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Do you mind my asking how you’re spending the $35,000 stipend? What project or projects are you working on?

I proposed a project called Be Black & Green. What I’m doing is video documentation of black farmers, gardeners and food activists throughout the country. I just posted an interview with David Hilliard (of the Black Panthers) that I shot in  Oakland, and I have five others in the can that I’ll be posting soon. What I’m doing is creating a network of black farmers, gardeners and food activists so they can know each other. I’m also raising the profile of black farmers, gardeners, and food activists in the larger food movement.

We want to assert that black people have always been involved in agriculture in this country and we’ve always been involved in sustainable agriculture. And that we have as much claim to this movement as anybody else does. And so by telling these stories and really allowing others to tell their own stories, and raising the profile of of black people doing this work, I hope to help people understand the role that we play in this movement historically.

It’s out of the bag: kale is your favorite food.  What’s your preferred way of preparing it?

Raw kale salad. I’m just addicted to it. I serve it with a special dressing: toasted sesame seed oil, nutritional yeast, cayenne pepper—those are three of the main ingredients. I can’t tell you the rest of the ingredients, but I can say that people really seem to like it.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Food justice is people being treated justly by all of the venues that they interact with to obtain food. The other part of food justice has to do with economic justice: that when people spend money on food, they need to derive some benefits from the money that they spend beside just trading food for money.

The money that they spend on food needs to enrich their community. In too many cases, we have wealth extraction strategies—where people spend money in their communities on food and money is taken out of their communities and creates jobs and wealth in other communities. So part of food justice is circulating the money that people spend on food in their community for their own benefit. It also has to do with simple things like people being spoken to respectfully at the places that they go to purchase food, with their human dignity being upheld. Having equal access to good food sources—that’s a big part of food justice. So I would say, the access piece is key, upholding peoples‘ dignity is key, and the economic justice part of it is key.

This is your egg on climate change. Any questions?

World leaders are meeting this week at the UN Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, in a continuing saga of geopolitics. Debate centers on the question of how best to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. The gathering comes on the heels of an important report showing that what goes up also comes down. Carbon dioxide not only pollutes the air, it turns the oceans acidic. When that happens, corals and shellfish die. It’s happening right now to oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest.

Scientists knew this would happen. But it’s happening faster than many expected.

Here’s what’s going on: the world’s oceans are absorbing about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide humanity pumps into the air. When CO2 mixes with water, it forms carbonic acid (think soda bubbles). Carbonic acid dissolves calcium carbonate, a critical component in the exoskeletons of shellfish—including those we love to eat: lobsters, clams, mussels, oysters. Too much acid in the ocean, and we can kiss goodbye those oyster hors d’oeuvres.

We can pretty much say adios to a vibrant underwater world. “It’s just basically a moonscape. Nothing is living there,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert described acidic seawaters during an October lecture.

Acidity and its counterpart, basicity, are measured on a pH scale from 0 (highly acidic) to 14 (very basic). The pH level of household bleach is 12 or 13, pure water is a neutral 7, tomatoes an acidic 4, vinegar 3, lemon juice 2. (You can find a handy chart here) Soda water typically ranges from 3 to 4, although some varieties contain additives to help neutralize the sour taste.

For a long time, the pH level of seawater was about 8.16. But that number has dropped (turned more acidic) to about 8.05 in recent years.

I remember Kolbert mentioning that coral will dissolve in vinegar. With that in mind, I decided to conduct a little experiment—with a few tweaks. I plopped one chicken egg, two clams and two mussels each into separate jars. I filled the first jar with vinegar and the second jar with soda water, then covered both. My husband propped up a camera and set it to take a picture every minute, for hours and hours (until the battery died, he replaced it, and the cycle continued). Click, click, click, all through the day and night.

Why the eggs? Obviously, ordinarily, chicken eggs don’t end up in the sea. But they do contain thin shells high in calcium carbonate. I thought they might provide interesting visuals.

Things happened inside those jars—much more quickly and dramatically in the vinegar. Little bubbles covered that egg, which started to float. Bits and bobs of gunk came off the clams and mussels, and then a couple of them drifted upward. The eggshell cracked.

The two jars sat nearly 24 hours before I opened the jars and examined the contents. I had started with tight-lipped clams and mussels, but a day in acid caused the shells to open and the flesh inside to bubble. That happened in both jars. But the vinegary egg revealed the most palpable results.

It was a rubbery, quivering blob. I rinsed it in tap water, and the auburn color washed away. The egg no longer had a hard calcium shell; nothing but a membrane held it together. I poked my fingers into its side, reshaping the egg as though it were a lump of silly putty.

Now, granted, this experiment was conducted for fun (and visual entertainment) more than scientific purity. It happened in our kitchen, not in a lab. I’m a journalist, not a scientist. But the results revealed precisely what scientists say will happen to a shell when subjected to acid.

If only that gelatinous gob of an egg could board a plane, fly to Durban and speak for itself.

Photos by Jerry Redfern. Check Rambling Spoon for more pictures and a blow-by-blow video of the experiment.

Today’s the day.

Today, the world’s population hits 7 billion. From here on out, we inhabit a planet of 7 billion mouths attached to 7 billion bodies with 7 billion daily needs to eat.

It is, of course, a symbolic mark of an elusive event. No one really knows precisely when the 7 billionth person will arrive, and global population clocks differ slightly in their calculations. But the United Nations has chosen to mark this day, Oct. 31, 2011, as Baby 7Bn’s birthday.

I wonder: who is that newborn baby? Who will he or she become? Will he grow big, chubby cheeks on a diet of milk and honey? Will she grow gaunt from a life of want?

One NGO, Plan International, pins an actual name and place to Baby 7Bn—she’s a little newborn named Nargis, born near Lucknow; a poster child for the group’s campaign against female foeticide.

Whether she’s Nargis or not, the whole ticking clock of population raises a slew of questions about the future of Baby 7Bn—and the future of humanity.

I wonder, wherever he or she is: will the little one make it past the critical age of 5? Or will that babe be the one in 15 to die each year in developing countries?

Will improper nutrition stunt that kid, along with 195 million others?

Or will she join a crowd of 42 million youngsters worldwide fighting obesity and overweight?

So much rides on the flip of a coin—chance, luck, karma or kismet. Somewhere on the map, at some unknown hour, Baby 7Bn is born. North or South, city or village, mountains or plains—that baby’s life is largely prescribed by parameters defined before her arrival. So is the answer to the question, Will she have enough to eat?

Experts say the world’s farmers must produce 70 percent more food to meet the increased demands of population.

Others say the entire world will eat only after global economies change shape and form.

I thought about  Baby 7Bn the other day, when Elizabeth Kolbert spoke at the University of Montana about her book (which is required freshman reading). She approached the podium with a serious brow and a sense of intensity that mirrored the dire findings in her research. “We are changing the planet permanently,” she said. “There’s no going back.” And there’s no telling the future.

Ice caps are melting, seas are rising, and people seem “incapable” of limiting their greenhouse gas emissions. Even if geoengineering succeeds in offsetting some of those emissions, Kolbert said, it won’t keep the oceans from turning more acidic.

Most experts agree that dramatic shifts in climate will alter agricultural production. What will Baby 7Bn eat by the time she reaches 18? If she reaches 18?

In the years since Kolbert researched her book, published in 2006, she has seen both “global change” and “global stasis,” she said. “What has changed is the world…. What has stayed the same is our behavior.”

For a few moments, she took off her journalist hat and spoke to the crowd as a mother, appealing to her fellow inhabitants of Planet Earth. She asked the audience to act—do something, start somewhere. Help to change the political strictures that keep us in a state of stasis.

Some solace, Kolbert said, lay in the fact that no good comes from despair. People must channel their energies toward better ends. What in the world are we waiting for? she asked.

I have thought of Kolbert’s words every day since she spoke. Actually, I have thought of her words ever since I read the precursor to her book as a series in The New Yorker.

I will think about that, about her, and about Baby 7Bn as I head home now to a fully stocked fridge and the privileged dilemma: what shall I cook for dinner?

Photos by Jerry Redfern. See more at Rambling Spoon.

“Welcome to HouseMade! May I shake your hand and build a bond with you, the 15^th of God’s children to Make the Right Decision to dine with us tonight? Is that real human skin or a handspun silk glove? Oh, my Maker, it feels soft over those meaty palms.

Well, I hope you’re hungry. We’re very proud of our concept: “Real Everything. Made Here.”  Take your pick of booths. We hand-carved the wood from the trees that once grew on this land 113 years ago. Then we upholstered it with fabric made from their preserved, unsprouted seeds. And, don’t make a federal case out of it, Hya-Hoah!, but we used the Native American tools found at a nearby archeological dig to put the whole building together. It’s ironic, yeah, but it’s also a real socially responsible testament to the people who made their lives here before us.

But enough improvisatory babbling! I know I can make these conversations last forever, and I can tell all this chatting has made you thirsty. Lemme have one of our 18 toddlers behind the bar grab you a human-thrown ceramic cup, filled with our blog-prize-winning water, which we ice with liquid nitrogen created in our proprietary lab. FYI, that’s where we also make our DIY fluids, and the house water’s a fragrant blend of artisanal hydrogen and oxygen reclaimed from the lungs of our bighearted line cook Ramon. Just so you know: Ramon’s from Patagonia, so his stuff’s totally clean and natural, made from the finest unharmed cells.

Or maybe you want some genuine Baby Bathtub Gin? The head barkeep, Jesus, also uses HouseMade anti-matter to provide the flavor-dissonance in our cocktails. It’s a real meta-physical approach, and we make the stuff right here in the next room with our vintage particle accelerator from CERN, Switzerland. Gives the Martini new… life!

As for appetizers, I highly recommend the Erect Salad. Enough with the “deconstructed molecular gastronomy” mumbo-jumbo. Here we build salads based on the exacting designs of Richard Neutra’s grandson, Ivo, our Food Architect. The air-hardened veggies are grown hydroponically downstairs in the cellar next to our cannabis and magic mushroom crop. Which, you guessed it!, goes right onto our Veg Plate for a hallucinatory experience organic to this micro-terroir.

But really, what makes the Veg Plate unique is that we serve it on an edible disc made from the natural pieces gathered off our all-soil parking-lot/dog park. Our locally foraged ingredients are slow-cooked in neo-oil direct from my biodiesel—slick that originally came from our fryolater the first time we cooked up our beloved liver tempura. Talk about some gorgeous, seriously made post-industrial musk, and the mystifying Cycle of Life.

How’d I come up with this idea for an Eatery? Well, shit… Good question. I guess it just seemed to me that everything’s outsourced now. Everything’s so un-genuine, so pre-fab. I just wanted to make stuff that was insourced, un-fab. Completely generative. Born.

Take, for example, tonight’s special entrée. I’m offering braised medallions of my right kidney. Only available while supplies last, so you might want to put your order in now. The surgeon gets here in 20!

Other choices include Brains of Tweeti, our head waitress, who moonlights as a social media publicity consultant. She gladly donated those delicious folds of grey matter to fill three of our cardboard mini-ramekins. Sorry, Facebook: She’s ours!

We also have a Community Offal Donation Program. It works like a co-op. Put in something valuable and tasty—who doesn’t like marinated Asian ribs or Boston butt?—and get something back. That just makes sense to me. If we want to have a truly engaged social makeup in this hood we have to make it happen. In House.

But look, I totally get it if you’re not into the Making Movement. If you’re at all worried about our food’s origins, download our mobile app and view slideshows of the exceptional humans who’ve given something of themselves to HouseMade. We don’t like to exclude, but we’ll only let you join if you’ve been fed an offal diet since birth.

What’s that moaning? Oh, Fuck, yes! Tweeti and Ramon are going at it again in the kitchen. They’re so generous. Sounds like we’re gonna have some new entrées on the menu in, oh, nine months, give or take. You wanna make that advanced reservation now or on your way out?”

–As told to Adam Baer

Whether or not you like fish sauce, it is integral to this dish and no one, (not even my friend Emma who acts like a feisty toddler in her non-fish-sauce food demands) can detect it. It just makes the salad gooooooood.

1 large green papaya (found in Asian markets)

1/4  cup fish sauce

1/4 cup light brown sugar, packed

1/4 cup lime juice

1-2 Thai (birds eye) chili, trimmed and minced (depending on the heat that you like)

1 fat clove garlic, minced or pressed

1 bunch green onions, sliced up until the dark green part

1 large ripe tomato, chopped

1 medium carrot, shredded

Handful of chopped peanuts

1) Peel the papaya with a vegetable peeler. Cut it in half lengthwise and scoop out the alien looking bits within. In some fashion, slice into match stick size slices. If this is too daunting, simply grate in a box grater (although this will not look quite as nice in the end). Place into a large bowl.

2) Mix the dressing (fish sauce down to green onion) in a bowl. Set aside. Mix everything else in with the papaya. Toss then pour over the dressings. Toss well. Stash in the fridge until ready to serve– no more than 6 hours. Serve and watch it disappear.

Serves 8-10 as a side dish

When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.

When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair.

Mark Bittman had an op-ed in the Times a few weeks ago in which he argued that, despite subsidies, junk food can actually be more expensive than cooking meals from scratch. You have said in the past that we live in a country where it’s cheaper to feed our children Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. So, which is it?

We live in a country where it’s easier—to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Sometimes that’s price but a lot of times that’s access and a lot of times it’s knowledge, too. Price, access, and knowledge come together as this set of three factors, which can make it really hard to do the right thing when it comes to food.

Take potato chips. To buy a pound of potatoes in the form of potato chips, you are probably spending $11 or $12 a pound for potatoes. And potatoes, even the fanciest organic fingerlings, are never more than $2.75 or $3 pound, which is obscenely expensive. (Generally potatoes are $1 per pound.) So we’re talking ten or twelve times more for the junk food version.

Now the issue with that, though, is that it’s not just a matter of personal choice. It’s not that low-income people are making bad choices—it’s that they live in a food environment where making good choices is really really difficult. And so we need to change the structures that make that the case.

Bittman did acknowledge food deserts, but he implied that most people are lazy and opt to watch T.V. rather than cook. I think there’s some truth to these skewed values, but I also know there are many poor people who want to eat better but don’t because they’re pressed for time and are surrounded by fast food.

If we pretend that food is a democracy, you have to acknowledge that for a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods, there are no polling stations and there’s only one candidate, and it’s the incumbent. And just saying “Well, if you just voted differently, we’d have a different food system,” verges on pathologizing poor people for bearing the traits of poverty. We can’t do that. We do have to talk about, “Hey, everyone needs to learn how to cook.” This should be something we value and the time should be valued, as well. Everyone should be engaged in building a world where it’s not easier to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Whether that’s a matter of price, access, or knowledge.

Before you became the president of Slow Food USA, you were the co-director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project. Tell me a little about that project.

I was hired by Yale to get local, sustainable food into the dining halls and to build a farm on campus. And also to build curriculum and extra-curricular programs for undergraduates. It was a great adventure.

The idea was, “Let’s intervene with this incredibly intelligent—and for the most part very privileged—group of young people right before they catapult into the world.” Since ’72, every single presidential election at that time had a Yale graduate as one of the top two candidates. If you can intervene in that population you can create incredible change in the world.

At the same time, I was feeling a need to tap into the energy that was growing all over the country—particularly post-Omnivore’s Dilemma. I was seeing a lot of people—not just college students—either really angry or really inspired about food. They needed a place to put that energy. After Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, you saw the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations take readers of the book—people who would be engaged in pushing for social change. So I thought, “Slow Food should be the vessel for all that energy.” I got asked to join the board and eventually got asked to take it over.

So was that your charge as president—to engage in movement building?

Exactly. Which takes organizational change. But we turned ourselves into an organization that’s built to do that work.

Every mom who drops her kid off at school for the first day and realizes, “My child may be eating something that’s going to make her sick”—that mom needs a path to do something about that concern. Everyone who reads Michael Pollan and complains about corn subsidies with a friend over a cup of Fair Trade coffee—they need something to do about it! And our job is to give them something to do about it. That’s what gets me up in the morning. I think it’s what gets all of our staff and volunteers up in the morning—how do we make sure that we take that energy and turn it into power to make change?

I noticed the shift in Slow Food’s mission right around Slow Food Nation, in August of 2008. After that, the popular perception started to change from the notion that Slow Food was a club for foodies (whether or not it was) to a social justice organization.

It wasn’t just me. It was a mood—a tone and tenor and culture of the movement that needed to change. We realized we needed to move in that direction.

But social justice has always been embedded in Slow Food’s overall mission, no?

Absolutely—and globally. Right now we have members in 150 countries. Slow Food has nothing to do with being a gourmet club in these countries. It has to do with changing the world, preserving traditions and maintaining the sovereignty of the people who are growing and eating in their countries. It has a lot to do with corporate power and the way globalization plays out.

Slow Food’s tag line has always been about making food good, clean, and fair.

At the very beginning it was a protest against McDonald’s on the Spanish Steps. And so it started with that sense of anti-corporate protest—it’s in its DNA. And I think some people forgot and thought it was good, clean, or fair. But the “and” is really important.

The latest e-mail I got expands on that: “Food that is good for those who eat it, good for the farmers and workers, and good for the planet.”

And that’s basically how I describe what Slow Food is. It’s the opposite of fast food—it’s all those things.

Do you still get remarks from people who think Slow Food is elitist?

I’ve always been clear that I don’t want to spend any time in an argument about whether we’re elitist or not. I want to do work that makes it completely apparent that we’re not. I’m committed to doing work that is relevant to the people who are most hurt by these problems. If we can do that, I think the argument will fade away.

I think it is clear from all the “campaigns” you’ve engaged in—from the $5 challenge to the fight to ensure that taking photographs of farms is legal.

Our first campaign, in 2009, was about school lunch. It was called “Time for Lunch.”

We had over 300 potluck protests all over the country and yet no one talked about that as a social justice campaign or a campaign that was about social change. It was talked about as fixing school lunch. But school lunch is a program that feeds 31 million of America’s poorest children every day. It’s a program that disproportionately impacts low-income people and people of color. Time for Lunch was not just about this lesson: everyone should cook. It was about “What makes it more challenging to feed our kids real fruit rather than Froot Loops?”

The 2012 Farm Bill is right around the corner. Is Slow Food planning a campaign around it?

Food and farm policy is completely against our nutrition and environment policy. It’s a really interesting political climate right now—it’s a budget-driven climate. So we see huge opportunities to take away some of the incentives that allow corn and corn syrup to be so cheap. At the same time there is a huge risk that some of the programs that feed people or support ranchers and farmers will also get taken away.

We’re not sophisticated lobbyists, but what we are are really good organizers. The $5 challenge is essentially a way of helping us find anyone who is concerned about these issues and setting them up to be advocates on the Farm Bill.

We’ll have a policy platform that we’ll be pushing and we’ll be asking Congress to do the right thing by it. The timing of it remains to be seen. But we know that with or without Congress, we’re organizing people around good, clean, fair food policy. The $5 challenge is the launching pad for that.

So what will the organizing on this issue look like?  Will you ask members to call their Senators and Representatives or will there be more of a MoveOn house party model?

The face-to-face engagement—whether it’s political or not—is vital. The kind of relationships we build when we have a meal together is the foundation for doing good work to change the world. What you’ll see are small groups meeting all over the country for meals and taking the $5 challenge over and over again. And pushing legislators by phone and meeting them in their home states.

A lot of the really effective advocacy that’s happening right now is happening not in Washington D.C., but back at home. That’s where legislators are listening. I actually think that’s a healthy trend. We’re set up to do that kind of advocacy because we have 225 chapters, members in every state, and this great volunteer corps.

What is the membership of Slow Food USA these days?

We have about 25,000 active members. We reach a network of about 250,000 people via e-mail. Through Oct. 15^th, membership is pay what you can. So instead of it being $25 for membership, even $1 will make you a member. It’s part of trying to make sure everyone can be involved in this work and be part of the organization.

We also have a really big Twitter and Facebook following. I think we’re at 179,000 Twitter followers now and have 85,000 “likes” on Facebook. What’s great about that community is they’re all over the country and they’re sharing stories of the work they’re doing on the ground but then they’re also talking about food all the time. It’s a nice mix.

We beat McDonalds by a couple thousand Twitter followers—we’re pretty proud.

Does Slow Food do some kind of outreach to low-income communities or food deserts? I would guess that people in most of these communities are not familiar with Slow Food, but I could be wrong.

Our chapters have over 500 local partnerships in the communities where they work, with other organizations. They range from churches to nonprofit organizations and direct service organizations. And a pretty substantial percentage of those local organizations are doing work in low-income communities. For us the key is to do work that is relevant in those communities and let the Slow Food identity and membership follow. So we’re actually not that focused on aggressively diversifying our membership but we are really focused on making sure that the work of Slow Food is relevant to diverse constituents. And if diverse membership follows—and particularly if diverse volunteer leadership follows, whether that’s socioeconomic or racial diversity—that, we think, is a really good thing.

I think Slow Food’s New York chapter gave money for the garden at Automotive high school in Greenpoint.

That’s a great example. Almost all of our tangible on-the-ground work happens at the local chapters. Our hope is that the local chapter will be better at doing local work—whether it’s gaining local press or raising local money than we ever could be at the national level. Our work at the national level is to build up the leadership of those chapters and support them so that they can be effective at their work but then bring us all together around national campaigns.

Bryan Walsh, in his article about the food movement, was tallying up the membership of Slow Food as if it were the main sign of this being a viable social movement.

But you know, another way to look at it is that it’s about potential. The Tea Party at its outset had a much smaller membership than Slow Food has now.  If you look at the early Civil Rights movement—the assets both in organized people and in dollars—it’s much smaller than the food movement.

I think the question now is how do you tap into the passionate concerns of people who want to change things and give them pathways to do it?  For me, I look much less at our current membership than to our potential membership, which is enormous. And then what you do with those folks is incredible as well. We have a set of three Slow Food chapter leaders in Denver: Andy, Gigia, and Krista. They started a garden in their kids’ school and soon parents at other schools were saying, “We wanna see gardens in our school. Would you help us do it?” So they did.

Finally, the three of them were running twelve different gardens in twelve different schools. And they thought, “We can’t do this any more!” The next parent who came up and said, “We want to do this, would you start a garden in our kids’ school?”  They said—“Go find twelve parents and teachers that get together regularly and we’ll train you how to do it yourself.”

A few years later, they’ve got gardens in over 60% of the public schools in Denver and they’ve organized a network of 500 parents and teachers to get this whole thing off the ground. So for me, show me, 50 Andy, Gigias, and Kristas—and we’ve got a Tea Party for the food movement.

Were you pleased with how many people turned out for the $5 challenge?

Over 30,000 people took the challenge and there were over 5,500 events on that day. We thought we’d have 500 events and maybe a few thousand people taking part. We never could’ve anticipated this turnout. I think this speaks to the potential power that’s out there and the drive and desire to share food and knowledge and get together in our communities.

There’s a section of our web site where we posted the tips, tricks, and recipes people sent us. It ranges from videos, pictures, and recipes to a theory of cooking beans. The underlying idea is our communities collectively have a lot of the solutions we need. Whether it’s how to cook real food on a budget or it’s how to effectively drive our legislators for meaningful change for federal policy. We own those solutions ourselves, so let’s begin using them and sharing them with each other.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Everyone can eat every day food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it. That food is a universal right and not a privilege. That’s the short definition.

I used to be a vegetable grower and I would sell very expensive produce at a farmers’ market in an affluent neighborhood. There were some low-income people who would come to that market and they couldn’t afford the produce I had. So I would give it away. My partner and I were making maybe $12,000 between the two of us.

So there’s this paradox. To even stay at the poverty line as a farmer, selling directly to consumers, you have to charge prices which means that your food—which is real food—is completely unavailable to low-income people. And you are a low-income person! So we have this false choice. My only option would’ve been making zero—losing money. When you have those kinds of paradoxical situations, I think it doesn’t call on farmers to lower their prices. And it doesn’t call on poor people to spend more money on food. It calls on all of us to change the way that we grow and share food in this country, so that we don’t have those kinds of choices anymore.

Lo and behold, a scientist said it. “The problem of hunger in the world does not have anything to do with production.” Farmers can grow more food―but that doesn’t mean everyone will eat.

Those were not new ideas when Miguel Altieri, a UC Berkeley professor in agroecology, spoke at the University of Montana a few days ago. But they were statements seldom heard in academic circles.

More often, experts point to a population nearing 9 billion and the need for a 70-percent increase in agricultural production to achieve global “food security” in the coming years. International agencies seek technological solutions to problems of human need. But scientific advancement doesn’t erase hunger, Altieri said. People don’t starve because there isn’t enough food. Peasants don’t profit from agricultural modernization; big companies and powerful countries do.

He spoke of chinampas, early Mesoamerican croplands often called “floating gardens” that were carved from lake beds. They fed local populations extremely well. (I saw chinampas on the ground, at an organic farm in Thailand that was trying to revive the age-old method. In 1950, Altieri said, Mexican chinampas maize fields produced 3.5-6.3 tons per hectare. US corn fields, at the same time, produced only 2.3-4.0 tons per hectare.

Yet industrial agriculture won. American agronomists took the Iowa method to Latin America. It spread. Fewer than 20 percent of peasants adopted it. But large-scale farmers with access to large plots of land (and large loans) profited. Today, Altieri said, corporations determine what people eat and what people pay for their food. Even the organic and Fair Trade movements have fundamental flaws, he said, because not all small-scale farmers can afford to certify their foods. Most of the organic crops grown in developing countries are harvested for export―not local consumption. “The rules of the game are dictated by the system that is intrinsically socially unjust.”

Altieri said those things.

But over the years, I have seen them. I have seen them in developing societies across Asia, where farmers live in urban shacks with tarps for walls. They didn’t choose the city life. They got sick, they had to sell their land, or someone stole it from them. “If we had land, we would go back,” a young Cambodian man named Thon told me, while standing in the hot stench of his village on the edge of Phnom Penh. Flies buzzed the nearby garbage heaps and sewage stained the dirt road. Many years and many stories lay between his family’s retreat from their countryside rice paddies and his hand-to-mouth existence hauling firewood across the city. He was one of thousands who no longer grew rice, but struggled to buy their daily food in the market.

I remember, years ago, a man in East Timor who sat on the roadside with an array of coffee beans spread across a tarp. He said his beans weren’t certified organic, so he couldn’t sell to “Mr. Tony,” who worked with a USAID-funded coffee cooperative. Instead, he sold to the Chinese for 30 percent less than the USAID rate. When my husband, Jerry, told the man how much Americans typically pay for a bag of coffee in the supermarket, he smacked his head in astonishment.

Food security is not the same as food sovereignty, Altieri said. In order to achieve the latter, the world needs different economic and agricultural systems. “You cannot solve a problem with the same mentality that created it.” Academics have “a huge responsibility” to work for the people with the smallest voices.

“My knowledge should serve the most impoverished, marginalized people,” he said.

Photo of a Kelabit rice farm by Jerry Redfern. To see more photos related to this story, check Rambling Spoon.

Umami is recognized as the ‘fifth taste’; sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Just as it is difficult to describe bitter or sour, umami is not easily explained, but here goes… Umami is a depth of flavor, it is savoriness (but not necessarily salty), it makes flavors more flavorful– like a flavor bomb.

Chemically speaking, umami is a glutamate. It occurs naturally in certain foods, and is found often in Asian and Italian cuisines. Some foods rich in umami are: Cured meats (Hello? Bacon!), beef, mushrooms (shiitake, porcini), ripe tomatoes (and sundried tomatoes), kombu (a Japanese sea algae that is SUPER high in umami), and most notably, aged or fermented foods, like Parmesan, shrimp paste, soy sauce and fish sauce.

This explains why some of our most beloved foods came to be so popular: Pizza? Forget about it– loaded with umami. Bacon-mushroom-cheeseburgers? Oh, sing it sister! Tapenade? I got your tapenade right ‘ere! There is a synergy between the ingredients of these favored dishes. A hamburger is good, but stack a burger with sautéed mushrooms and salty bacon, and it’s mind-blowing.

So, here’s my recipe for an Umami Burger Bomb. This burger is the sum of its parts. It tastes nothing like the umami ass-kicking additives that I combine with the beef, no one will detect that you’ve added fish sauce to their burger, all they will know if that it is the best burger they have ever had. Ever.

Umami Burger Bomb

2 and 1/2 pounds ground beef (I used equal parts chuck, sirloin and brisket)

2 tablespoons fish sauce (don’t think, just do it)

1/4 oz dried porcini mushrooms, pulverized to a powder in a clean coffee grinder

1) Mix all ingredients together. Try not to over-mix or the burger will become meatloaf consistency, which isn’t bad, not just not optimal.

2) Cover and rest in the fridge for at least 1 hour, but up to 24 hours.

3) Shape into burgers and cook any way you like. I prefer the caramelization that occurs when cooking indoors on a griddle. Serve on a good quality bun (toasted is a nice touch).

For an even bigger explosion of umami, top with Parmesan and oven roasted tomatoes.

Makes six, 6 and 1/2 ounce burgers