Eco-gastronomy at Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio

After reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (that I have already discussed here and promoted repeatedly to all my friends), the idea of eating locally really struck me. In Boston, this was a more challenging thing to do in the early spring but in Italy it doesn’t really cause any extra caution especially during summer. Local food production is generous and diverse and if you extend the concept of local to the whole of Italy, there’s not much you can’t find. Connected to the idea of Slow Food movement, local food traditions are very important in Italy; it is not just a hippie thing but rather an extremely conservative way of thinking (for once, I adhere to a slight conservatism here). However, the main philosophy of the movement is to counteract fast food and preserve biodiversity by sustainable local production with good quality. “Eco-gastronomy” is the main mission of Slow Food. The 0 km project (I’m not sure if it’s even a semi-official project or just restaurants’ own initiative) is also very popular in Italy; some restaurants mark their food with “0 km” sign, meaning that the ingredients come, for example, from producers in a range of 50 km. This means that food hasn’t been travelling for days in trucks but comes often from a small local farmer strengthening the life of the local community and focusing on seasonal local products (expect to eat some zucchini at the moment).

Image from Slow Food web page.

Planning my own menus, I don’t need to live with potatoes and root vegetables only (that could very likely be the case in Finland), but I can usually get pretty much everything that I want from the mercato di Sant’ Ambrogio. The market is one of my favourite things in Florence and just a few blocs away from where I live. Each time I return home with my shopping bags, I feel like updating my Facebook status to “loves Sant’Amborgio”. Most cities have their own markets but somehow they haven’t made me happy the way Sant’Ambrogio does. In Tampere, I love buying strawberries or ice cream in Tammelan tori where a live band is every now and then playing Finnish tango evergreens and people are dancing in their tracking suits or hideous flower dresses (yes, it’s pretty much like in Kaurismäki films). However, only in Florence I have got the habit of doing my grocery shopping at the market.

Not only can I practise my Italian but the sellers are so friendly that they make me want to speak it better (some might be inspired by Mastroianni or Sophia Loren, I am by the friendly farmers). The veggies, cheese and pasta are not only cheap but they are of extremely good quality (oh, the pomodori di pachino from Sicily must be the best tomatoes I’ve ever tasted), and apart from some exotic fruits (and out-of-season porcini from Romania) it’s all Italian.

A few days ago I needed to buy sage, salvia, for a pasta sauce. After a little stroll, I finally found it on a old woman’s stall. She was selling mostly herbs and some beans and she was wearing a white apron and looked like she had just come out of her kitchen. I was embarrassed to buy only two brunches of sage. “Solo questi, é niente…” She needed to add some more items into my basket so that she could ask any money from me. I was looking at the red and white fagolini, some kind of beans that look tasty but that I have never tried. I asked the old lady how they should be cooked. She explained and added a few handfuls in the paper bag with one tomato (I refused to take any garlic but I had to accept the other produces – well, she didn't really ask me). Finally she had a price for the bag of veggies: one euro. She was very happy of my (or her, actually) shopping even though I got so much and paid so little. Another day, planning to do a soup, we got our vegetables from a nice man. We told we are doing a fish soup and without much indication he knew what we should get. Still at home, we discovered parsley that we had actually forgotten, luckily our market man was a step ahead of us, selling us ingredients we didn’t even ask for but urgently needed.

I haven’t created any loyalties in the market (expect now for this nice man who has also the excellent tomatoes), I go to the stall with nicest vegetables and the things I need. However, there is one shop, Bottega dell’Augusto, inside the market hall selling pasta, cheese and prosciutto, that is an obligatory stop in my market itinerary. The people working at the shop are the friendliest Italians I have met, they greet me with “ciao cara” and I have already forgotten the earthly worries. I usually plan the next days’ meals around the pasta I buy. They sell fresh handmade tortellini filled with ricotta, porcini mushrooms, pumpkin, lemon or other seasonal products. What ever I choose is good, but the best product is probably gnocchi, the potato flour balls that you cook only for one minute. I always feel like buying more than I need and normally end up leaving with a bag full of food. Oh, I miss the market already!

Oil, Coal, Wind and Food

In 1969, an offshore oil drilling platform close to Santa Barbara’s white sand beaches exploded and spilled 100 000 barrels (16 million litres) of oil into the sea. This ecological catastrophe led to new environmental laws and changes in oil industry. One can wish that the similar catastrophe facing the Gulf of Mexico at the moment would produce these kinds of positive side effects as well. However, there are no signs that the American dependency on oil is decreasing; in fact, Gulf of Mexico represents an increasingly important domestic source of oil (one third of American oil production).

Boston Globe cartoonist Dan Wasserman.

Energy issues have hit the headlines often this year. In West Virginia, 29 workers died in a mining accident recently. Then came the oil spill in the coast of Louisiana. In the clean energy side, there was the approval to build the country’s first offshore wind farm in Nantucket, close to Cape Cod, the beautiful peninsula that I visited in March. There were many protests in the island of Nantucket about this development of a windpark size of Manhattan, for aesthetic reasons. The worry of destroying the views is of course understandable and often employed in the windmill debates. But pondering the issue in the actual energy context, we must set new priorities. Do we want to spoil the oceanic view from the summerhouses of privileged people (for example the late senator Ted Kennedy was opposing the windmill park as his family has a holiday house on the seaside there) or are we more concerned about the ecological system of the seas and the global warming? Boston Globe’s cartoonist Dan Wasserman got the point a few days ago:

Politics are often coming far behind the civil society in fighting against social or ecological problems. The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who is often pleading for clean energy policies, saw an opportunity in the current oil spill to change the American energy production patterns. While I totally agree with him, I think that for now the only hope (even if it's not very realistic either) is that people would themselves start thinking of the consequences of their car-centred life styles. If climate change hasn’t provoked any tangible phenomena in the USA (except for the droughts in California maybe) and is thus relatively easy to ignore, the oil slicks washing to your beach might cause some concrete worry and perhaps even an acknowledgement of its connection to the life you’re leading.

In her excellent and inspiring non-fictional book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (2007) Barbara Kingsolver tells how her family decided to live a more environment-friendly and healthier life. They moved from Arizona to their summerhouse in greener Virginia to cultivate their own food. In desert-surrounded Arizona, all the food was produced far away or irrigated with the water coming through a canal connected to Colorado river that now gets drier and drier when approaching the border with Mexico (not even reaching the ocean anymore). Their idea was to avoid products that are transported from Europe or South America or even just from another state in the USA. Instead they would consume only locally produced food that is gasoline-free and also better quality – and who needs strawberries in January anyways.

The book is a wonderful melange of scientific facts, tales of family life in a farm, horrific stories how huge agri-business corporations work and how local food from small farmers is not only healthier, more ecological, tastier, but also supports life in small communities. Unfortunately, I will leave Boston before the farmers’ market season really begins, but I’ve already left bananas or other exotic fruits from faraway countries in the shop (and for health reasons I always prefer organic products here). For sure, I will write about this book again here and I truly recommend it to everybody even not living in the USA. But I also hope to find a similar book written from a European perspective, so widely it has opened my eyes about the lobbying that affects what we eat and the problems, consequences and solutions that an individual consumer should be aware of.

"Recipes for Disaster" (or Katastrofin aineksia, 2008) provides another example of civic action in order to save the planet. In the docu-film Englishman John Webster and his Finnish family in Espoo are going for an 'oil-diet' for one year, oil meaning often plastic that is in all the simple things we daily use (therefore the Websters are making their own toothpaste and shampoo for example). The film is tragi-comic but the ecological idealism wonderfully crazy.

Following Webster, Planet Green website challenges us to join the oil detox reminding that gasoline is where only half of the barrel of oil goes to! The website also tells us that "Plastic production continues to increase at a rate of nine percent per year. Scientists estimate that more plastic will be manufactured in the first ten years of this century than in all of the previous one." Below an example where all this non-degradable plastic is ending up (see more photos by clicking here).