Brigitte Moran - North Bay Farmers Markets Cookbook

I have been eating for fifty-one years. My story as an eater has had many influences, beginning with my lessons in what to eat from my French parents and their deeply rooted food traditions that blended the north and south of France. My years as a teenage eater in the late 60s and early 70s paralleled the coming of age of overly processed industrialized food in America. Then came my experience as a young nave mother teaching my twin daughters and my son what is good to eat. And finally, my relationship with food has been influenced by twenty years of facilitating farmers markets and cherishing the feeling of being deeply connected to my community, the land, and the people who grow my food. This is just one story, but encompassed in my history as an eater are the stories of thousands of eaters, eaters who feel they have lost their traditions surrounding food, eaters who have felt misled by the industrial food pyramid, and eaters who are hungry for a sense of connection to a local, healthy food system.

If I were just French, this would be simple. I would savor rich pts, fresh butter croissants, crusted baguettes with assorted cheeses, and a daily glass of red wine. I would be guiltless and thin, and you would despise me. If only I were just French.

Fortunately, for the purposes of this book, I have a more layered story to share. I am French/Canadian/American. My family immigrated to Marin County, California, in 1961, drawn by promises of the American Dream. My maman, Annick, was a stunning Gaelic-looking French woman with jet black hair, green eyes, and a taste for fish, crpes, and other light foods typical of northern France. My papa, Charles, with his dark skin and chiseled features resembled James Dean and preferred heavy meats, sausages, and the signature cheeses of southern France. With three children and little to no English-speaking skills, they pursued an uncharted path thousands of miles from our familys roots and brought French food traditions along with them for comfort.

When I started school at age five, I was the chubby French girl with a pixie who didnt speak much English and ate weird French food. My lunch consisted of baguettes with real butter and a French chocolate bar. Afternoon snacks included homemade French fries, charcuterie plates, and Brie cheese. Instead of Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, my mother made homemade crpes with nutella and dished up creative concoctions from yesterdays leftovers. You can imagine my classmates fascination.

My mother, like any decent French woman of her time, had learned to prepare traditional French meals from scratch. She cooked from memory or with guidance from the meticulously handwritten book of recipes she carried with her since her days in Riantec, France, in the Province of Brittany. There she had embarked on her secondary education in cooking and sewing along with other French mademoiselles who were not pursuing professional degrees. Masterfully sharing her cultures food traditions with her family and friends was to be an honorable and celebrated part of her lifes work.

Even with this strong French base, after a few years living in the States, our French food traditions began to evolve and eventually dissolve, acquiescing to the dominant food culture that surrounded us. My mother, who had been steeped in a food tradition based on whole ingredients, fresh produce, and homemade everything, abandoned much of her heritage for the convenience of Ragu, Tang, and Space Sticksthe healthy food for astronauts. Taste was not the appeal of prepackaged foods; rather it was the novelty that something could be so easy and so fast. It was progress. It was, well, American.

We werent the only family allowing our traditions to fall by the wayside. It was a common trend for many reasons. With so many immigrant families coming to the United States, especially postWWII refugees, there were thousands of food cultures bumping up against one anothercross-pollination was inevitable. In the fields, food production in America was becoming much more efficient, as large industrialized farms, armed with the chemical pesticides and fertilizers of the Green Revolution, overtook small family farms. They were cheered on from the sidelines by USDAs secretary Ezra Taft Benson (1953 to 61) and Earl Butz (1971 to 76), shouting get big, or get out, plant commodity crops fence row to fence row, and adapt or die.[] Food manufacturers capitalized on the new abundance of commodity crops by crafting foodlike substances and employing their skilled marketing teams to convince eaters that inside every box was the most innovative new spin on the same list of ingredients: corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, and all their derivatives. At the same time, a growing feminist movement was liberating women from the kitchens. Prepackaged fast food allowed the pace of their lives to keep up with the pace of progress and corporate America, without missing a beat on the home front. This new food culture was a powerful wave; composed of compounding currents that swept us all away, including the newest arrivals to America, like our impressionable French family.

In the late 1970s, that same little girl with a pixie haircut married a sixth-generation Californian. I became a mother of three, kicking it off with a set of twins when I was twenty-one years old. Our meals were a fusion, or rather a collision, of food cultures. I grew up on pt, whereas my husband, Herb, grew up on meatloaf. While I was accustomed to French chocolate and butter, he ate Hersheys milk chocolate and drank Coca-Cola. In our adulthood, we both let go of Space Sticks, thank goodness, but other staples of the culture of convenience had a stronghold on our pantry.

We raised our family at the height of the convenient foodboom, and to be honest, I was thankful for it at the time. Life was busy, and I got lazy when it came to cooking; juggling three young children, working multiple jobs, and going to school left little time for making homemade stews. Frozen ready-to-eat foods were luxurious quick fixes. McDonalds, with their seemingly balanced Happy Meal, complete with a toy that I could use as leverage, didnt seem that bad. I put my trust in the USDA and didnt spend too much time questioning the hormones in our milk or the antibiotics in our beef. The marketing got me. I wanted to believe that the Photoshopped picture of a perfectly ripe red tomato would taste like the tomatoes I remembered from trips to my Grandmeres garden in France. When they didnt, my initial disappointment was followed by the thought, Well, they just dont make them like they used to, not the realization that the system itself was flawed.