A rooster in every pot

Sometimes, before I’ve even decided what to make for supper, I chop up a couple onions and throw them in a hot frying pan. Within a few minutes, people start showing up in the kitchen. “Mmm, smells great!” they say. “What are we having?”

“Don’t know yet,” is my reply. “How about you leave me alone for a while, and we’ll see what happens.”

This is an opportune moment to delegate some non-kitchen chores. Then I turn up the radio, and start rifling around in the fridge and the pantry to see what ingredients are available – with an eye to using any that appear to be past their best-before date (or approaching their feed-to-the-chickens date). Just need something kinda veggie, something kinda carbie, something proteinesque – and we’re good to go. That aroma of the frying onions gets the creative juices flowing.

“It is hard to imagine a civilization without onions,” wrote Julia Child – or possibly it was Simone Beck or Louisette Bertholle, who were her co-authors on Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Sure enough, onions seem to have played a role in just about every civilization, going back thousands of years. They’re eminently storable and portable, they offer redemption for all kinds of sketchy or unappetizing foodstuffs, and they have also been widely used for medicinal purposes. Even today, people put chopped onions on their back or chest, in their socks, in their ears, and God knows where else, to alleviate various ailments.

An onion is like an egg farm; it has many layers. (Sorry!) More to the point, it is complex – so pungent when first chopped, releasing those volatile compounds that bring on the tears, but sweeter as it cooks. In our household, there is great enthusiasm for French onion soup (or soupe à l’oignon, as it is called in our yellowed first edition of that 1961 classic by Child et al.). Wonderful stuff, if you have the patience to do it right, but it’s a major time commitment for something that is really just an appetizer. Like many of those recipes, it’s kind of ritualistic. I lean more toward the one-pot meal.

Julia would be appalled by what passes for coq au vin in our house. This past winter (it is finally past, right?), we enjoyed half a dozen roosters that were culled from our layer flock in the fall. Sometimes I would just pull one of those muscly birds out of the freezer, put it in a stock pot while still frozen solid, add enough water to cover it, put the heat on low, and walk away for several hours. Shocking, right?

Then later, when I had a few minutes, I would pull it out and de-bone it, while frying onions and garlic. Maybe add some wine for deglazing if there was some on hand – but this dish is mostly coq, and not much vin. I would bulk it up with some root vegetables, season with rosemary, and maybe thicken it with some flour. What we’re talking about here is a pretty darn good rooster stew. With all due respect for the traditions of fine European cuisine, my approach is more in keeping with the tradition of not having a lot of spare time on your hands. Maybe Julia would approve if she knew that the roosters were derived from some combination of heritage breeds, and that their brief lives were richly bohemian.

MUSEUM OF AGRICULTURE

I was struck by the tone of an op-ed by Robert Wood Johnson, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., published recently in the Daily Telegraph. (He is the namesake and great-grandson to the founder of Johnson & Johnson, which is now among the world’s largest multinational pharmaceutical and health care products companies – though Woody IV’s interests run more toward foreign affairs and professional football.) Johnson takes a swipe at EU farm policies, which he characterizes as being based on a “Museum of Agriculture” model. He doesn’t mean that as a compliment. The remark fairly drips with contempt, and exemplifies the chasm between European and American approaches to regulating food production.

This is suddenly important because the UK, upon Brexiting on unfriendly terms, is likely to find itself on the losing end of a trade war with the EU, which would throw the British food system into turmoil. The UK simply cannot feed itself. (Except for proud and glorious France, neither can any of the EU countries – but they have each other.) The U.S., recognizing new export opportunities, is gunning for a trade deal with Britain, and has started laying out the terms. The list of American demands includes loosening restrictions on certain industrial food production practices used in the U.S., such as dunking chicken carcasses in a chlorine solution, and the use of hormone implants in beef cattle (both allowed in Canada, incidentally).

Johnson’s op-ed claims that British opposition to such practices amounts to nothing more than “a smear campaign from people with their own protectionist agenda.” He says the European approach to farming “prizes history and tradition over innovation and science.” He urges Brits to let go of the past, and instead harmonize their regulations with U.S. standards. “Together we could shape the agricultural revolution of the future,” he proposes, sounding like a creepy pickup artist in an agri-business night club.

British agricultural organizations have warned that UK producers would not be able to compete against a flood of cheaper U.S. food imports, and that the resulting loss of farms would further erode British food self-sufficiency. (The massive American lobbying effort currently underway is aimed at increasing market access not only for agri-business, but also for the drug industry, raising concerns about potential ill effects on Britain’s cherished National Health Service.)

Minette Batters, president of the UK’s National Farmers’ Union, has acknowledged that bans on certain intensive practices are not based purely on food safety; these policies also reflect British consumers’ other priorities, including respectful treatment of farm animals and protection of the rural landscapes for which the nation is famous. “The difference is welfare standards and environmental protection standards,” she told BBC Radio.

This is the reality of European agricultural policy. By assigning some value to place and process, it resists the commodification of food, and aims to achieve food-safety objectives more by traceability than by technology. Another of the objectives is to maintain functioning farm communities that tourists actually want to visit, which is a perfectly legitimate agenda. But in this age when trade is deemed to be sacrosanct – a more fundamental part of the natural order than mere democracy – “protectionist” has become an ideological slur. Maybe “conservationist” would be more apt. In any case, we should get our guard up when ideas or practices are dismissed on the basis of being old-fashioned, and when “science” is invoked in the name of expanded commerce.

We should also be skeptical when anyone claims that their economic interests just happen to coincide with some grand altruistic project. In his hymn to manifest destiny, Johnson really pulls out all the stops. “We take our responsibility to produce safe, affordable food for the rest of the world incredibly seriously,” he writes. “We cannot overlook the fact that the world population is expected to reach almost 10 billion by 2050. Global food security is absolutely critical.”

This is a bit rich – a bit greasy, actually – when spoken on behalf of an administration that came to power on the explicit promise of not giving a fig or a feather about the rest of the world. It’s enough to make you long for some wildly archaic and ritualistic food regs. DL