Whats Fa Dinna?

I am off the wagon. I think it’s time I officially come clean about it.

Since spring of 2003 I have considered myself a vegetarian, and have eschewed meat of all sorts, making occasional exceptions for fish. I “cheated” a few times (a bite of salami from an xmas cheese plate, a bite of a corndog at Coney Island, etc.) but have largely maintained a vegetarian, and sometimes vegan, diet. I have lived in four vegetarian/vegan households, worked in two vegetarian kitchens, and collected vegetarian cookbooks.

I have also reamed out countless friends, peers and family members in various ways for eating meat. Well this is it, folks! The moment you’ve all been waiting for.  I’m off the wagon, big time.

I could blame it on reading this book, which reframed my inner dialogue about industrial food consumption in general. Or on my summer spent at a sustainable organic farm enjoying the smells of various manures wafting in from yonder meadow, the squeals of contented piggies fat for the slaughter bringing me back to our collective fantasyland of responsible animal husbandry. Or on the shock and emotional trauma of moving to the city/moving apartments/breakup/discovery of chronic health problem which colored my fall and early winter. Or on continual pressure from loved ones, including my happily ex-vegetarian brother and stepbrother.

But who am I kidding? Bacon is freaking delicious. So is a turkey sandwich. So is pepperoni pizza. So are corndogs, goddammit. And pork roll. (Please, take a moment to educate yourself about my hometown’s signature processed meat product, Pork Roll.)

 And charcuterie, and fried chicken, and sausages, and kielbasa, and oxtail butternut squash gniocci from Swoon. And those slices of roast pork in the ramen.

So, yeah, I’ve eaten all that stuff.  And then some. AndI’m loving it. No burgers or steak or MacDoh for me, but I am totally not a vegetarian anymore.

Sorry to my comrades who might see me as a traitor. I am not all that sorry really.

Sorry to the animals I’ve eaten- I still feel ya.  But I’m only human, after all.

Last week I partook in a rite of passage of the food service industry, when I attended the SYSCO Metro Area Food Expo at the Meadowlands Expo Center in Secacus, NJ.

SYSCO, for those of you outside the biz, is the largest food service distributor in the United States. If you ever eat in a restaurant, cafe, cafeteria, hospital, airplane, catered event, summer camp, or anywhere else for that matter, you have eaten SYSCO food and used SYSCO products. They OWN food.

They have some competition, but they basically win. They sell almost everything you eat, everything it’s made and served in, and everything in between, from the dish soap to the toilet paper to the little stir sticks for your coffee. The company formed in 1969 in Houston Texas through a merger of eight other small-time distributors. Since then they have gobbled up distribution companies in cities across America, employing a warehouse-saturation strategy similar to our lovely all-American Big Box store, contracting wholesalers and manufacturers to work exclusively through their network, and homogenizing the food supply so that anything you want can be brought to your establishment in neat cardboard boxes from a nearby warehouse.

Anyway, this delightful corporate behemoth supplies the cafes I manage with many of our supplies and ingredients. Therefore I was invited by our delightful sales representative to attend the annual Expo, where wholesalers who distribute their products through SYSCO gather to market their newest wares, spend face time with customers, win new establishments for their products, etc.

Imagine, if you will, a huge corporate expo center, wall-to=wall with cubicles bathed in eerie neon light, no windows anywhere, and at each stall is a little restaurant giving away free samples of their yummiest goods, with stacks of packages behind them. Many people are wearing suits, some are wearing silly chef hats. One can consume an egg roll, antipasto sampler, cookie, small cup of the latest all-natural juice, breakfast sausage, pancake, sandwich, fried shrimp, or hunk of fancy cheese every 10 feet. Luckily, I was not very hungry and had eaten breakfast, so I took it easy.

We were given bags to fill with our marketing swag, from pamphlets to business cards to small sample-sized packages of things like Craisins, Goldfish and Gruyere cheese. We were also given a magnetized card, which could be swiped at every expo station into an electronic console. Every swipe would be recorded and sent to our sales rep, who would then follow up with us on the products we were interested in, and presumably continue trying to sell them to us.

We consumed San Pelligrino sodas as we walked the sprawling aisles of corporate food distribution Christmas. Salespeople hocked their ware, pitched their pitches, made eye contact and smiled. They had all sorts of tricks up their sleeve to make you stop and try a bite.

All told, we spent about an hour getting there, and 1.5 hours getting through all the aisles, making sure to try stuff that looked good without pigging out too seriously. By the time I got to the part where all the awesome desserts were, I was too stuffed to care that there was free cheesecake everywhere.

It was sort of fun, this SYSCO expo. It was weird, it was exciting, people were EXCITED and they were doing business. The ectoplasm of commerce was collecting in the nooks and crannies of the expo center, and the smell of magnetized plastic was heavy on the air. People whose lives center on doing business, buying and trading and selling food, were very happy. But the whole experience strikes me as very unreal, totally bizarre and pretty upsetting.

I’ve always known that most consumers experience a disconnect from the reality of the food supply, but the disconnect between what food actually is, where it comes from, and how it transitions from raw plant or animal material to the thousands of commodities it is made into is also experienced by people at higher levels of food service work. Even the people who sell and cook and market food don’t really seem to know or care what that food really is, or where it came from.

One man we spoke with at length was exclusively selling pre-made guacamole, and frozen, peeled, halved avocadoes. Plastic bags of avocado halves, lime green, bearing little resemblance to the fruit with a peel and a pit. They’ve done all the work, i.e. taken all the nature out of it, and what is left can be preserved, packaged, shipped from a warehouse, manipulated and commodified even further before it hits your, the customer’s, plate. Cha-ching.

Per a reader’s request, here is a transcript of the thing I wrote and then read at aforementioned Church last weekend. Feel free to imaginitively apply emphasis and dramatic mannerisms.

It is 7:55 AM, at my opening shift at the MetroWorks Cafe in NoLiTa.

My first morning customer has demanded her “usual” in her usual way, by staring at me and waving money.

This regular’s “usual” is the thing that waits under the stairs for every starry-eyed co-ed lured by the understated glamour of the barista gig. The ones who still believe that serving coffee is somehow cool, who believe in the mystique of the tattooed, birkenstock-wearing barista, you know, the one outside sullenly smoking a cigarette

But nobody really wants to do this. You wake up one day with a $200,000 degree in 1968 studies and the geopolitics of punk music, and find yourself delivering resumes to any and every local dealer of brown swill within the reaches of your bicycle.

Back to the Drink.

I should know by now, The Decaf Skim Latte will appear to torment me every day. The bastard redheaded stepchild of Swiss Water Process Decaffeinating technology, agribusiness milk processing, a diet/fashion/media/medical complex hell bent on selling people “guilt free treats” they dont need. For three dollars or more, you may have a tall foamy glass of nothing. No fat, no sugar, no caffeine, no guilt. For this daily tall glass of notihng you will shell out the cost of a month’s worth of food for a starving third world child to get the fix for your “latte habit” You know, the one you joke about with the girls from the office.

Sometimes you recall with horror how you once got accidentally served whole milk. of course you asked her to throw it out and make a new one for you. It’s gotta be decaf. skim. This latte is purely symbolic.

The crusty rim of the milk jug makes a sick scraping sound as i pull off the pale blue plastic cap. A dribble runs down my hand in the space between thumb and forefinger where I hold the steaming pitcher. As I steam the watery skim milk for this symbolic latte, I contemplate that every coffeshop in every part of the country is using millions of gallons of milk every day to feed their customers these nothings.

Milk created in the bodies of huge animals to feed their stolen young, creatures enslaved somewhere at a dairy carefully concealed miles off the highway in a wasteland near you. Creatures whose excrement fills methane-enshrouded bogs that span acres, whose grain and energy consumption rivals that of many third world nations. The lives of the young heifers are sustained until they are old enough to be impregnated themselves, bear a calf, and spend a few years of hormone-fueled milk production before, at the worn-out old age of 5, the creature from which this latte sprung forth will be sent to the hamburger factory, where, after a traumatic, hard trek through sludge and blood and the defecation of the other inmates, she to be shot with a bolt through her skull.

I wonder if the drinker of this latte has ever seen a living cow.

When was the last time you saw a cow?

Has a cow ever tasted coffee?

I scoop the powdery espresso grounds into the filter.

The bag the coffee comes from has a cute, brightly colored illustration of a Central American woman on it, holding a woven basket of what i assume are coffee beans over her head. The background is lush, tropical foliage, her floral wraparound skirt and braids accent the exotic scene.

Did you know? This happy cartoon woman picked all of these beans JUST FOR YOU. We aren’t exploiting her, we’re giving her a good old fashioned opportunity to earn a living and better her life.

The IWW reports:

“A coffee worker’s wage is extremely low. In Kenya, coffee workers earn about US$12 per month. In Mexico, if lucky, coffee workers are paid a minimum wage of US$2.50 per day. Women are often paid less than men.”

“Child labour is a prevalent problem in the coffee industry. In Kenya’s central province, 60% of the workforce on coffee plantations are children. They may start working when they are tall enough to reach the lower branches and old enough to identify which berries to pick. Children are involved in all aspects of coffee farming and manual processing activities: picking, sorting, pruning, weeding, spraying, fertilizing and transporting. During the planting season and harvesting season in Honduras, children make up 20% and 40% of the labour force.”

As the syrupy brown espresso flows forth, I imagine all the children in Park Slope lined up in a scorching hot coffee plantation, mom and dad cruising by with pesticide sprayers strapped to their hunched backs as the children hurry to pick coffee berries from whatever branches they can reach, hoping to earn in 10 hours of hard labor the amount of money one decaf skim latte will cost one person in New York City.

I wonder if this customer has any children.

Why aren’t children allowed to drink coffee?

“I’m sorry, what?”

I have spaced out. It is, after all, 7:55 AM.

“Oh, Of course I’d be happy to mix in two packets of Splenda for you.” And so I do, making sure to call to mind the people who will develop cancer working in the aspartame factory. In this, the age of obesity, we must cut calories whenever possible, at any cost.

And of course I have double-cupped. People really hate to feel that their hand is too hot from holding a single paper cup full of their drink. Even when you use those little “java jacket” sleeves, some folks will ask you to double cup, just in case.

I hear the groan of old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. I hear the creak and crack of the Amazon rainforest that we’re all so tired of hearing about. I hear the whirring of the paper mills and I smell dead fish floating in the river downstream from the company that makes the bleaches, waxes, dyes for the paper that will become these two nesting cups. The sound of the milk and espresso pouring into these cups is the sound of rainforest clearcuts and pogroms of indiginous tribes to make room for the new industrial cattle ranch, which will farm cheap beef and milk for us, the calorie-counting Americans, in countries where most people starve for want of grain. Of course the cattle will be heartily fed imported grain by the ton, until they are fatter than all of the coffee-picking children of Honduras put together.

I wonder how this customer would react if I served her a pint of blood. Maybe a gallon of petroleum. A gallon of the unprocessed, sickly, blood-streaked milk of an overworked cow with advanced mastitis. Maybe a bag of sawdust from old growth trees, with a child’s brown bony fingers sticking out of it clutching a ripe coffee berry.

I do not do this. I press a plastic lid onto her double-cupped, two-spenda’d decafe skim latte. She hands me a twenty dollar bill, I return 16.75, she drops a quarter into the tip jar. I say thank you.

I have nothing to thank her for. I am very busy thanking the children, and the trees, and the coffee bushes, and the cows and the genetically modified grain, the ozone-hole’s bright sunshine and the acid rain, the methane bogs and the depleted Amazonian topsoil, and all of the people in the world who are driven to work themselves to death so that we can have things like decaf skim lattes, so I can have a job to work away my youth paying for my cigarettes and my student loan.

I tell her to have a nice day.

At this point there is a small line of morning regulars forming behind her.

last night we had dinner at Vegetarian Paradise 2, on W 4th street. It’s right next to Red Bamboo, which I haven’t tried yet, but both are owned by the same people, and they both serve totally yummy fake meat pan-asian/soul food fusion. Or something. It’s kinda junk-foody, definitely heavy on the gluten, but mad delicious. We split a scallion pancake, which was very cakelike and tasty, and an order of General Tso’s “chicken.” I thought the Tso’s was decent, but didn’t really have the punch I expect. It was much tangier and more citrusy than I’m used to for that dish, but my expectactions are based on getting really cheap ghetto Chinese food General Tso’s tofu, corn syrup, peanut oil, MSG and all.

This dish was definitely more lovingly prepared than those usually are, but they could hold some love- like putting cut up celery and cucumbers in a hot dish! WHO DOES THAT?!? Otherwise it was good, and we two did not even finish it all so there are leftovers. Tso-tally awesome.

I’d go back to Veg Paradise- the service was exceptionally friendly and fast, ambiance was unobtrusive and relaxed, except for the drop of water that periodically condensed on the ceiling and fell on my head. They didn’t pressure us to buy drinks or dessert, and didn’t mind that we were splitting an entree. All in all, very cool.

Here’s what is not so cool: Late last night, we discovered cockroaches in the apartment, which almost sent me into a catatonic fugue state. We smashed about 20 very tiny baby roaches that appeared to be hatching before our eyes from the faucet fixture, many more escaped, including a larger, more developed baby that scrambled up behind the cupboards. The roaches must have been feasting on the tiny bits of food stuck in our drain catch.

Sick. more on that later, I’m sure.

So after a fitful night’s sleep of digesting pure wheat gluten, and having nightmares about roaches crawling into my ears, I slept in and grabbed a delicious Polish donut from the bakery for my ride to work. I intend to finish my unremarkable egg salada sandwich, with the health bread and the sundried tomatoes, for lunch.