United States of Arugula

Here's a review I wrote for the Green Prophet on The United States of Arugula, one of my favorite books about food in the States that isn't written by Michael Pollan. You can see the original post here. Green Prophet is an English-language blog about all things environmental in Israel.

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Israel’s fastest-growing supermarket chain is the upscale Tiv Taam, where customers can browse shelves of international beers, pick through extensive cheese selections and even purchase pancetta to include in their gourmet dishes at home. At Hinnawi, a Yafo-based butcher with a branch inside the shopping mall in Ramat Aviv, customers can choose between 17 kinds of salt and pepper grinders. And silicon spatulas, Le Creuset pots, and KitchenAid mixers are fixtures at chefs’ stores around Tel Aviv.

Yet despite all the signs of the Israeli food revolution, the movement has yet to be documented. On the other hand, in his new book ‘The United States of Arugula’ author David Kamp explains the birth of California cuisine, the rise of American celebrity chefs and the movements toward sustainable eating, which are now starting to influence Israeli cuisine, in esoteric and exciting detail.

This fast-paced and engaging 392-page tome examines America’s roots in a Puritan approach to food, which eschewed the French cuisine as too pretentious and instead relied on meat and potatoes, with the occasional monstrosity of fruit salads suspended in Jell-O. Kamp mined Food Network archives, sifted through food-related news reports and interviewed chefs and restaurant critics to find out how the USA went from such unpromising beginnings to become a country suffused with extra-virgin olive oil and truffles.

Kamp’s historical review tackles food as an inseparable part of American politics and counterculture. Kamp notes that the farm-to-table movement in Berkeley took place against a background of seething 1960s political activism that rebelled against the conformist 1940s and 1950s; political theorists were associating white rice with white domination, and marijuana played a supporting role in many restaurant histories.

He starts out with early magazine recipes and restaurant reviews to showcase the drab food and provincial attitudes Americans once had towards innovation in the kitchen. Then he tells of the revelatory moments in several chefs’ lives, mostly when they went to France and tasted things they had never seen at home. Kamp tells the story of Alice Waters going to a stream-side restaurant in France where the chef caught a trout, showed her the still-flapping fish, and then soon after returned with it cooked and surrounded by greens picked from the restaurant’s garden. This, to her, was ideal.

Like many of her contemporaries, Waters returned from France enchanted and began teaching herself to cook. She started hosting dinners for the revolutionary set in Berkeley, and eventually established the Chez Panisse restaurant with the mission of serving local, fresh, organic produce in season. Waters was so eager to serve regional food that she often had local farmers and cheese makers show up unsolicited on the restaurant’s doorstep with boxes of their produce. She patronized the first goat cheese maker in America, and had a standing order with one of the country’s first grass-fed cattle ranchers.

Other food pioneers Kamp notes are James Beard, the first male chef to achieve stardom and help cooking cross the gender divide; Julia Child, who codified French cooking into an easy-to-follow cookbook, and Mollie Katzen, who created vegetarian restaurants with food designed to avoid the “remorse cuisine” of pious non-meat eaters. Katzen’s ‘The Enchanted Broccoli Forest’ is a classic of gourmet vegetarian cooking, and can be found on many cooks shelves.

Above all, Kamp captures the love of food for the sake of food that animated the lives of most of his subjects. Giorgio DeLuca, one half of the gourmet food boutique chain Dean and DeLuca, started an upscale cheese store in Manhattan “in reaction to the processed food that America was starting to live on… Americans were losing their ability to taste. I wanted to show that some things are better than others.”

Kamp renders the talents of celebrity chefs with detail that would wither most people who consider themselves talented in the kitchen, such as a chef at Chez Panisse who would dice twenty pounds of mushrooms in ten minutes with two cleavers. He dabbles in the debate between French and Italian gourmet, then moves on to chronicle the birth of the Cuisinart food processor.

He does however get bogged down by endless name dropping; in a section on the rise of Italian extra-version olive oil and balsamic vinegar, he mentions ten different people or restaurants in one paragraph.

Particularly interesting to me were Kamp’s stories about American farmers’ markets, such as how Seattle’s 101-year-old Pike’s Place Market withstood serious threats in the 1960s in the face of encroaching developers. He also tracks the growth of similar markets in New York and California. As a Tel Aviv resident with only a small, expensive and woefully lacking farmers’ market once a week, I found myself imagining where the ideal place for a real market is - Kikar Rabin. Maybe one day….

This book is best saved for when you are hungry; the pages pop with descriptions of quests for the perfect sun-dried tomatoes or new dishes like lamb chops injected with Madeira, brandy and tangerine juice.

The greatest achievement of Kamp’s book is that he makes the ideas behind a green food industry exciting, charismatic and contagious. He traces how a few determined visionaries transformed the American food experience from one of sustenance to one of savory enjoyment, in the process weaving a closer web between urban diners and the farmers who sustain them, something we here in Israel would do well to study and learn from.

Guest Reviewer Daniella Cheslow is a Tel Aviv based freelance writer & photographer. Check out her witty and erudite blog ‘The Truth Herzl’ for more of her writings about experiencing & engaging with Israeli culture. She specializes in writing about food & environmental issues, with recent articles in the Jerusalem Report.

Where, oh where, was I?

Talk about the "If I knew then" syndrome.
A new Israeli reality TV show is going to be a "Survivor" for new immigrants. In January 2009, eight Americans will touch down in Tel Aviv and duke it out for the chance to win a Tel Aviv beachfront apartment, a good job, a car, a boyfriend, a supportive group of friends and free drinks for life.

Fine, the last three are what I would wish for a new immigrant, but the first three are real. There is actually going to be a reality TV show where the participants have to open an Israeli bank account, file immigration paperwork and take Hebrew lessons.

I would like to recommend to the producers that they mine my experiences dodging the IDF, making many repeat visits to the immigration office, searching for an apartment for a month and waking up at midnight in the suburb of Rishon Letziyon with no way home after falling asleep on a bus.

The show will either be hilarious to watch because of the schadenfreude, or painful in the Larry David way of 'did you really just do that?'

I suppose one could ask why the show focuses on the cushy lives of North American immigrants, rather than on the serious challenges faced by Ethiopians who move from a middle-ages society to one very much in the twenty-first century. But I think that adjustment is much more tragic, where as the travails of American immigrants are frustrating yet ultimately not that bad.

Water

Israel has never been known as a rainforest, but this summer the country is heading into one of the most severe water shortages its had in decades.

Well, at least we're not alone. This New York Times piece on the water shortage in the Middle East was fascinating because it looks at how countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia are exploring outsourcing farming. Saudi Arabia wants to contract land in Pakistan and grow food for import, and Egypt wants to lease land in Sudan. But reporter Andrew Martin made a very stereotypical report on Israeli agriculture: meet Doron Ovits, an Israeli farmer who irrigates his peppers in the Negev desert by pushing buttons on his central computer. He waters the peppers with treated sewage effluents, monitoring every drop that trickles out of his drip irrigation tubes inside his hothouses.

Ovits, who has a deep tan and wears sunglasses over his head, is lauded as an example of Israel's abundant technology that helps make the desert bloom. However, Martin doesn't question the logic of applying all this knowledge - and water - to grow vegetables that Ovits exports to Europe.

I wrote about the water shortage in Israel for the Jerusalem Report in June. Israel is facing its fourth year of drought, coupled with very little reserve water supplies. The water level in Lake Kinneret, which Israel uses as a natural reservoir, is set to dip below the "black line," beyond which the pumps don't reach the water and the lake faces possible irreversible damage.

To deal with the issue, the Water Authority has launched an ad campaign with an intimidating Hebrew font, "Israel is Going from Red to Black," plastering the ads across the country in the hopes that someone will go home and voluntarily cut back water use enough to keep the lake from destruction. There are price increases potentially on the books, but they would only go into effect in January. Financing was also just sealed for a new desalinization plant.

Strangely, Israelis use more water per capita than Germans - a fact the Water Authority spokesman chalks up to our penchant for two or three showers a day. Israeli farmers export cut flowers to Europe and irrigate fields of potatoes in the Negev desert. Probably like many high-economy, low-water regions, Israel seems like it's putting a great deal more effort on increasing the supply of water without any thought for reducing demand.

It's Not Consumerism, It's Education!

One thing I love about Israel is that you can be a graffiti artist, or a consumer of banal commercial garbage, and yet it is colored by the historical contours of Zionism and so it feels educational.

Here's a great analysis of Herzl graffiti. One of Herzl's most famous lines is "Im tirtzu, ein zo agada," or, if you will it [namely, the Jewish state], it's no dream. But this graffiti says "Lo rotzim, lo tzarich" - in other words, "We don't want it, leave us alone." The analysis focuses on the sense of disgust and hopelessness Israelis feel toward their government.


Another case in point: I was watching Super Nanny (Web site, in Hebrew) last night. The nanny visited a family on Kibbutz Hazorea, a formerly communal farm. The parents were having difficulty raising their four daughters. Essentially, the wife was lazy and the husband did everything, and together they were completely ineffective. The girls watched four hours of TV a day.

Well, you might think, that sounds like it could happen anywhere. But this is where you would be wrong. Keren (the mom) and Reshef (the dad) Bisker both grew up on the kibbutz back when it was still a socialist communal experiment. The two of them spent the majority of their childhood in the children's house, spending four hours a day with their parents and the rest of their time, including nights, in the care of communal caretakers with other kibbutz children. Now that their kibbutz has done away with the children's houses, Keren and Reshef don't have an idea of how to put their children to bed, wake them up in the morning or even prepare their meals. Super Nanny had to give them advice on getting the kids to set alarm clocks. She also had to train Reshef not to leave his work (in the cow dairy) in the morning to help Keren get the kids to school.

And the best part - at the end, the family had their neighbors over to see the new and improved Bisker family. My heart melted when one of the neighbors, Mike, told the family in American-accented Hebrew about how far they had come, and then they all sang along as Mike strummed classic rock on his guitar.

Waltz With Bashir

A few years ago, Israeli film producer Ari Folman sat down with a friend for a drink. His friend told him about a dream he had about his service in the First Lebanon War, in 1982. Folman realized then that he barely remembered a thing about being an Israeli soldier in the war, barring one flashback of emerging naked from the sea with several other troops in his unit, watching flares light up the Beirut sky the night of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.

Jarred by his inability to recall his part in the war, Folman saw a therapist and tracked down people who served with him and who reported on the war to jog his memory. He wound up piecing together his role there using other people's recollections.

Waltz With Bashir is an animated documentary about Folman's quest to remember. All the interviews have been converted into animations, and the medium lends itself to the sudden snatches of scenes that he calls up as he rides in cabs, or speaks with friends, or smells patchouli perfume. Here's a trailer:



I found it for the most part a treasure. The animation is rich with detail. In one scene, the young Folman is wandering the destroyed Beirut airport, and the frame shows him passing outdated ads for flights to the United States. Before they are sent to battle, Folman and his friends lounge on the Lebanese shore, then bomb lines of palm trees to the soundtrack of the Hebrew song, "Today I bombed Sidon," a very Israeli take on Apocalypse Now. When one of his army buddies describes the feeling of invincibility he got from driving a tank through the alleyways of Beirut, the scene shows a tank rolling over cars, with the angle of the frame tilting each time the wheels crunch another vehicle. The faces are drawn with such accuracy that I could pick out the expressions, the wrinkles around the mouth and the furrows of the brow, that made the characters uniquely Israeli.

The plot was also a gradual dawn of responsibility as Folman gets closer and closer to the night of Sabra and Shatilla, which was a massacre that Israeli-trained Christian Lebanese Phalangist militiamen executed against Palestinian refugees, while Israel watched and did not intervene until somewhere between 700 and 3500 (the numbers are unclear) people were killed.

The way Folman unwinds his memory, the audience learns with him, in Hebrew, about an awful atrocity committed with Israel's knowledge and by soldiers who had been trained by the IDF. He eventually realizes that on the night of the massacre, he was not in the sea with his fellow soldiers; he was shooting flares into the sky from a tall building nearby to illuminate the refugee camp for the Phalangists. I felt gripped and disgusted, but not attacked. And I was also proud that an Israeli former soldier was able to tell the tale of his service, come to grips with his participation, and work so creatively and beautifully to make a world-class film that has already been received with high accolades in Cannes.

It also was especially exciting for me to see how journalists covered the Lebanon War, because my father was the BBC's news man in Beirut at that time. Watching an animated Israeli reporter walk the streets brought to life some of my father's stories of dodging the craters left by shells in the roads, or deciding when to scuttle across a street when it was the site of a gun battle.

One criticism - the film ends in a gory montage of real news footage of the aftermath of the massacre. After seeing the animated version, I felt I was being squeezed dry. It was as if Folman, by the time the film was finished, had still not processed the experience of being in the war and wanted to make sure we understood how bad it was. He said in an interview that he put the footage there to break the effect of the cartoon and to make sure it was seen as more than just a cool film with nice animation. Yet, perhaps if he had dwelled on the war for another few months or a year, he could have finished the film with some reflections on how it is to realize that he contributed to a brutal butchering, and what he has taken from that knowledge.

Moving Rice

There are a lot of advantages to being dirt-poor, and in Israel, where health care is still socialized and I am getting a living stipend that is enough to live off, I have been enjoying my status. I have become a great cook because I can't afford restaurants, I have learned to enjoy partying on my roof, and I take a cheap, small watermelon to the beach on Saturdays instead of buying ice cream there. The only part of low-class living I find hard to swallow is the status of my apartment. I pay 1400 shekels a month for a place where the ceiling is disintegrating slowly over our bathroom sink, shower and clothes rack. Leave a shirt hanging for more than a day and expect to have to pick the plaster off it.

But this pales in comparison to the now frequent guests we get in the kitchen - maggots, or as I like to call them, moving rice. This morning was the second time when I woke up, went to the kitchen, and saw what looked like dozens of rice grains scattered across the floor, especially near the garbage can.


"Tightrope Warriors," a piece in the Maggot Art project.

I knew from last invasion, two months ago, that these were no rice grains. They were yellowish, and wiggled and pushed dust bunnies across the floor. They emitted a violent odor, at least from closed containers like our trash can.

At least at this point we have the cleaning routine down: take out the garbage, get everything off the floor, sweep it, mop it, and then douse it in high-strength chemicals before leaving the house. Any remaining maggots have to get individually popped like pimples because stepping on them only divides them into two, doubling the infestation.

When I found the maggots this morning I was alone in the house and wound up doing the bulk of the cleanup by myself. By the time I got to work, half an hour behind schedule and still shuddering inside from the disgusting way of opening my day, I decided to own the experience by writing a poem in error-ridden Hebrew in the style of Poe's "The Raven" - rather than "Quoth the raven, nevermore," my repeating line is "Quoth the maggot, I'll return." Hebrew readers, enjoy. And actually, there is a Hebrew translation of the Raven in its entirety here; I found myself one night watching two of the regulars at the cafe I love take shots of booze while reciting the Raven loudly in Hebrew and English to each other.

יום ראשון אחד מוקדם

קמתי מהמיטה וגם

שאלתי את עצמי בקול רם

איזה ארוחה אבחור?

למטבח נכנסתי פנימה

ואז פתאום ראיתי רימה

וכמה עשרות אחיה

זוחלים מכל פינה וחור.

על הרצפה לקראת האור.

"דוחה!" צרחתי. "איזה גועל."

וכבר ידעתי את הנוהל

טיאטאתי את הכל בבוהל

ניסיתי לא שריד לשמור.

אמרה הרימה, "אני אחזור."

הרימה יצור די חזק היא.

ניצולים רבים נשארו לי

מפתים אותי אותם למעוך כי

אחרת ניקיון לא יעזור.

לשווא כי הרימה עוד תחזור.

אז החלטתי לפוצץ

את כל רימה קטנה שיש

עם ריסוס חזק ומרגש

מכה אדירה אלוהים ישמור.

אמרה הרימה, "אני אחזור."

"די!" אמרתי. "די, מספיק.

תפסיקו כבר לי להציק."

הרי אינני מדען מבריק

רק עולה חדשה עדינה בעור.

שבקלות אפשר לשבור.

מאז היום ההוא אני

תוהה כל אחד מהרגלי

למצוא שינוי אפשרי

למנוע מרימות לחזור.

אמרה הרימה, "אני אחזור."

אבל אפילו אם אפסיק

לצבור קצת קומפוסט בשקית

לא נראה לי שיספיק

למנוע מהם לדירה לחדור.

אמרה הרימה, "אני אחזור."

נותרה לי רק ברירה לראות

לשנות את הדעה אם לא העובדות

ללמוד לאהוב במקום לבכות

כי אני כבר יודעת שהיא תחזור.

אמרה הרימה, "אני אחזור."

Turning Boint

The 48 Hour Film Project is an international film competition in which teams of moviemakers have 48 hours to create a short. It's happening in Tel Aviv right now, meaning there are teams of camera crews and actors making films as we speak.

Meanwhile, check out this Israeli short film, courtesy of Meredith. It's called Turning Boint, about a Palestinian would-be terrorist who has 48 hours to improve his Hebrew pronunciation so he can get his explosive-laden car into the parking lot of the Azrieli Towers in Tel Aviv, but winds up falling in love with his Israeli speech therapist.

Knesset and evolving Israeli society

I went to the Knesset, or Israeli Parliament, yesterday for a discussion on the right to health of Bedouin Arab women in unrecognized villages of the Negev. The outside reader may not understand any of those terms, so here is a glossary:

Bedouin: originally nomadic Muslim Arab people who wandered across the Middle East; in Israel, most Bedouins are settled now. A majority live in the Negev, which is the desert that makes up southern Israel.

Unrecognized Villages: About half of the 80,000 Bedouins of the Negev live in communities the government does not recognize. As such, they have no roads, electricity, water, or health services. The discussion focused on what that situation means for Bedouin women, who often have to travel long distances, with kids, to get medical care.

Anyways...I found the meeting fascinating because half the attendees were Bedouin women themselves, who came to the Knesset wearing traditional long dress and head coverings, and spoke to four MPs about their plight, including walking an hour across the desert to the nearest clinic.

The only part of the meeting I found hard to wrap my head around is a new dress code in the Knesset itself. Three years ago I went to the Knesset as a reporting intern at the Jerusalem Post. I was struck then by the aching informality of the place. People wandered the building in jeans. Corpulent politicians waddled the halls. At a small, highly-covered meeting, lawmakers blatantly answered their cell phones. In the main plenary hall, only a handful of the 120 MPs even bothered to attend a hearing.

Therefore I was shocked when I got into my coworker's car in Tel Aviv yesterday and he told me that my jeans could be a problem. Apparently a year and a half ago Knesset speaker Dalia Itzik laid down a dress code outlawing jeans, short pants, skin-baring shirts and other informal attire.

However, when the guard at the door asked my coworker "Who is the princess in jeans?" he seemed satisfied with the answer "She's American," which I guess explained and excused my slobbish appearance.

This is one of a few events that have surprised me in Israel and made me think that perhaps this country is moving behind its roots as a hub of elbowing, loud, demanding and unapologetic people. About two weeks ago I was biking down a main street of Tel Aviv when a car came zooming out of a side street. I braked so hard I nearly fell off my bike. The driver braked as well, and then took responsibility. "It was my fault," he said. "I'm sorry."

I was so flabbergasted, I would have been happy if he had done it again.

Back in Town

The month-long absence stops here - although it was for a good reason. I went to South Africa for a family emergency in mid-June and am only now getting over the jetlag.

I hadn't been to South Africa, where my mother grew up, for six years. Returning as a 23-year-old was interesting because I felt like for the first time I was actually going to remember what I took in as I drove around Cape Town and its surrounding fishing villages and wine estates. It was also the first time I have ever seen my mother with all 3 of her brothers and sisters. It's interesting how different your parents can be when they are around the people they spent their childhoods with.

Anyways, as on the other two trips I have taken this year, I found myself missing Tel Aviv and Israel with a vengeance. Getting the flu from the rain in wintry Cape Town was probably a factor. I also enjoyed the cameraderie on the El Al flights between Tel Aviv and Johannesburg; on the way over, I forgot my phone in the airport and the guy sitting in front of me called it until someone picked it up and brought it to our gate, and on our way back I let my seatmate listen to David Rakoff hilariously describe a traumatic summer as a Canadian Jewish high schooler volunteering on a kibbutz in Israel and discover that he did not like chickens, he liked men. The Israelis on line in passport control in both directions in Johannesburg also helped me cut the line.

And yet, as I stepped out of Ben Gurion Airport at 7 AM last Friday morning, my goodwill evaporated. The hot air was so stifling it was like standing with my face over a pot of boiling soup. The train took its time arriving, ten minutes behind schedule. The bus home from the train station did the same, and by the time I staggered up the 48 steps to my apartment, laden with my bags, I was drenched and exhausted. Our apartment, which was freezing in winter, is so hot and humid my posters are falling off he walls. For the last few nights I have had to decide between sleeping in a sweatbox with the window closed, or being woken up by mosquitoes as they bite me at 5 AM.

I have heard the city is a nonstop party in the summer; if I play my cards right and go out until sunrise on weekends, then sleep during the hottest hours of the day, it could be tolerable. But for now the city is a snarling, humid, tourist-mobbed mess.