“Food is sex.”
The modern world is obsessed with convenience. Drive-thru death snacks and microwaved goo gobs have replaced the family supper crafted by loving hands. The practice of keeping a vegetable garden, ubiquitous 50 years ago, has been categorized as deviant behavior by some home owners associations and planning boards. For many, the act of preparing a home cooked meal is something done only during the holidays. Even then, prepackaged mixes and cans are opened when the actual scratch preparations take no more time. For example, cranberry sauce is cranberries and sugar. Boil it until they burst. That’s it. The texture-less can of slop that always seems to show up on the Thanksgiving table has four ingredients: cranberries, high fructose corn syrup, water, and corn syrup (yes, again). The genuine article takes ten minutes to make (about as long as it would take me to find a can opener, in my kitchen) and tastes like autumn in Maine, not a bisphenol-a lined aluminum can. Then there is that “stuffing”…
Quality is not the only victim of the obsession with convenience. By outsourcing our food production and preparation to multi-national corporations we loose sight of the true costs. By outsourcing our due diligence as consumers to government bureaucracies we close our eyes to ammonia-washed hamburger and chlorine-dunked chickens to avoid getting blood on our hands. With the “green revolution” of agriculture, government intervention in farm management, and the processed food industry, came spikes in every nutritionally linked disease, obesity, and something far worse. We have lost our culture. Drive through any American city and you will see strip malls leased out to the same 20 or so franchise operations. You can have the same re-heated “craft beer cheese burger on a pretzel bun” in Nashville that you’ll find in Sacramento. Finding an independently owned eatery is increasingly rare, and most that remain are opening those cans and mixes anyway. How can a people have a culture if they have no local cuisine? This “food” offered to the American market is missing the most important ingredient… a story!
That is the purpose of Radical Gastronomy: to tell the story of food and our relationship to it. My name is Robert Baxley, and I am a farmer, a chef, and a radical voluntarist. In my youth, I spent 22 years cooking in fancy restaurants, and running my own high-end dinner house. After leaving the business, and taking up the construction trade, I continued to cook at home and educate myself on things culinary. The more I learned about how food is being produced, the stronger my desire to shorten my personal food-shed became. I started farming primarily out of gourmet fetishism, honestly. What I want to eat is not on the shelves of the super market. Much of what I eat is so good it’s illegal, in fact.
Take raw brie, for example. By law, commercial milk must be pasteurized. It is this way not because raw milk is inherently dangerous (as evidenced by all of the not dead calves wandering around the country side), but because of shady practices in the dairy industry that led to outbreaks of food born illness. The raw milk political battle is its own subject, but the point here is that pasteurized, homogenized milk sucks for making cheese. One must add calcium chloride to it just to form a curd. Additionally, heating milk to pasteurization temperatures destroys enzymes that aid in digestibility, and compromises protein structures in a way that is nutritionally detrimental, some say dangerous. So, raw milk is best for cheese. What the dairy industry calls “Whole milk” is a joke, too. The industry translation for “whole” is 4% fat. The milk that comes off a Grass feed Jersey cow is about 30% cream. 4% milk is what I feed the pigs, after I skim cream for butter. If you go by Brie at the store, you will see “double”, or “triple” cream on the package. So, does that mean 8%, or 12%? I don’t know, but I do know that 30% is AWESOME! According to the FDA, one can sell raw milk cheese, but only if it has been aged over 60 days. The sharpness of aged cheese is the result of an ongoing bacteriological action taking place that lowers pH (increases acidity) to a point that is inhospitable to most pathogens after 60 days. Or you could just practice good milking hygiene, but whatever. Here’s the problem: A brie would turn to a puddle of French snot if aged 60 days. It’s ready at 30, pretty loose at 45, and could not be lifted with a fork at 60. Raw brie is illegal, at any price, and I love it. The only way to have it, is to make it. The best way to make it is to culture the milk when it is exactly cow degrees Fahrenheit (that’s cow degrees Celsius, for everyone not in the Sates, of Liberia, BTW). For that, it is best the cow be really close to the kitchen.
For most people, that’s inconvenient. So is killing, gutting, and hanging a whole hog in the back yard. If you want leaf lard for your piecrust, however, you kind of have to do that. That creamy fat that lives between the sausage casings and the bacon is unparalleled for making pastries, and not the same as that stuff in the dusty blue tub on the bottom shelf of the Mexican food section of the super market. Maybe you can still find a lone butcher that could source it for you, but those are a dying breed.
So, that’s what we are going to dig into, at Radical Gastronomy. We are going to explore food from the soil up. Chicken soup doesn’t start with a can opener. It starts with an egg… or a chicken… or an egg… It’s not convenient to raise a chicken in the sunshine, on grass, eating soy free non-GMO organic feed, bugs, and worms. It’s not convenient to slaughter and process that bird yourself. But, if you do, it won’t be electrocuted to death, eviscerated by a mechanical claw (rupturing bile sacks and intestines) and dunked in the same bleach bath as 100,000 other dirty birds. Its fat will be bright yellow from the chlorophyll in the living grasses it ate. Its skin will be pink from fresh air and sunshine, not clammy white from a short life shoulder to shoulder with other birds in a Quonset hut, chest deep in shit.
I certainly don’t expect to inspire anyone to flee the city and start farming. My aim is only to document and share my agro-culinary adventure in hope of preserving a vanishing culture. If witnessing these things makes you question what you’re eating, seek out my brothers and sisters out there farming with intention, in your area. You’ll find us smashed between GMO corn and soybean farms, trying to duck the sprayer planes engaged in chemical warfare with nature. We’re out here, doing it right. Buy from them, even though it will cost more. Cook from scratch, even though it’s inconvenient. Gather your loved ones. Break bread. Tell a story!