My Kind of Kosher

Yesterday, I was at the engagement party of one of my best friends. He's Jewish. So is his fiancée. They aren't religious. There were delicious pork buns. A few old friends heard about my new work as a chef, and naturally started asking me about food. I'm also a teacher, so I was happy to talk. And since we're all nominally Jewish, it's not surprising that the question arose: are you kosher?

The answer is yes. And no. No, as far as almost any other Jew would be concerned. I love pork. A burger is nothing without cheese. Oysters make me really excited. Lobster, mussels, razor clams, and cuttlefish, done right, will make my day. I eat bunnies. I've tried hare, kangaroo, and bear. Bleed out a game bird? No way. Hang 'er up, guts and blood in, for a good week in a cool room. Kosher chefs, like vegetarian chefs, might make some good food, but the cuisine is like jazz with nothing but woodwinds. Sax and clarinet are great. For a while. But thank god there are still trumpets and bass and drums in the world. And get that freaking oboe off my plate.

Judaism is a funny thing. It's a dogmatic religion whose dogma is often dismissed in whole or in large part by many of the people who claim, quite ardently, to be Jews. It is the most rigidly law-based of the world's major religions but has given rise to one of the world's greatest theological traditions of interpretation, reinterpretation, and cherry-picking. It's based on a scripture that is notably harsh and oppressive, even by scriptural standards, yet Jews are widely known for their humor. At least in New York. Let's leave Israelis out of it. They're not funny at all.

So when I was asked if I keep kosher, I said, “no.” But then, “yes.” “In a way.” I made my case. If I feel any kinship with Judaism as a religion, it's because of two words: tikkun olam. “Heal the world.” I know how I understand it. If you know me, you probably know, too. I take it to be the central tenet of Judaism. Not historical Judaism. Not Judaism in its dominant forms. My Judaism. I appreciate that, as a Jew, I can say such a thing and not sound crazy.

Tikkun olam. Apply it to food. It's pretty simple. That food you're eating, it was alive once, hopefully pretty recently. How did it live? Did it suffer? Or was it free to eat in a way that befit its physiology, to live outside in the living world, to live with a healthy community of its comrades-in-species? I am not just talking about cows and chickens and pigs. I am also talking about broccoli, carrots, and potatoes. But let's say you don't hear the voices of plants, don't feel their roots and pollen spreading through your dreams. Let's be “practical.” Did the life of that cow or broccoli hurt the earth or make it better? Is there more topsoil because of her or less? More intact, biodiverse habitat or less? More atmospheric carbon or less? More groundwater or less? These are questions we can answer pretty easily. Tikkun olam. Is your food healing the world or harming it? If it heals, you're keeping kosher, my kind of kosher. If it harms, you're eating treif. And that's so not cool.

Industrial food is never kosher. I don't care what species it is. I don't care if a rabbi said something in Hebrew. I don't care if it was bled out and salted. If it was subjected to a life of unnatural suffering, if it was raised in a way that made this world a little worse, a little poorer, it ain't kosher. It is an affront to God, to spirit, to conscience... whatever you want to call it. It is an affront to the Earth, and therefore to ourselves and our children. It is a failing to manifest tikkun olam. The old kind of kosher is all about how an animal died. What about how it lived? Maybe the question never came up since no one in the ancient world could have imagined the cruel insanity of industrial food. Every Hebrew and every Roman ate nothing but grass-fed and organic food. Bunch of liberal weenies, I 'spose.

Any being who was allowed to live a decent, healthy life and was given a merciful, honorable death, a death that caused no net harm to its species, whose life was, indeed, the blessing it ought to have been for the Earth, is kosher. End of story. That such beings, whether plants, fungi, or animals, are also, invariably, more delicious, more nutrient dense, more healthy, only reaffirms that we are doing the right thing.

All the stuff about not eating pigs or shellfish, that was pretty easy for a tribe of pastoralists. Note that they didn't have to give up beef or mutton. It was the barbarians to the north who ate pigs. The barbarians by the sea who ate clams and lobster. We might say that these all too easy sacrifices for a people who already did not eat these things helped keep them mindful of their faith. Maybe it was about regimentation and social control. Maybe it was about instilling xenophobia. Who knows. I do know this. I do not live in the Middle East. I am not a pastoralist. I live in a land where pigs thrive, by a shore world famous for its lobster and other shellfish. More importantly, I live in an era of global environmental catastrophe. This catastrophe is being greatly intensified by the industrial food system. It can, in part, be mitigated through permaculture, broadly defined as any food system based on a polyculture of plants and animals, intact topsoil, no mining of water or diversion of rivers, and no input of fossil fuel or poison. I see it as a spiritual duty to be mindful of this reality every time I procure food, whether by purchase, gardening, foraging, or hunting.

And I did eat the pork buns (minus the buns). Even though the pigs were probably industrial. I do not blame my friends if they were. Most people are not yet as sensitized as they should be to these issues and it's not fair to expect a sudden mass change in consciousness from all decent people. But we should be working toward that mass change in consciousness and, crucially, also in behavior. Changing hearts and minds is all well and good, but only as a precursor to action. It's not, “think about healing the world,” or “imagine a healed world,” or “write treatises about what a healed world would theoretically look like.” Heal the damn world. Anyhow, I ate the pork. It was already there. I was hungry. It looked and tasted good. And no additional pigs were being raised or killed because I ate it rather than letting it get tossed at the end of the party.

There is room for flexibility. I draw my lines where I choose. Others will draw them a little differently. And that's OK. Just draw them. Live consciously. Find your principles and manifest them. Keep kosher and live in accordance with the law, however you understand it. It all derives from principle. How about this one? Heal the world.

A Tale of Two Butchers

Tuscany, particularly the Chianti region bordered roughly by Florence to the north and Siena to the south, is a place, like so many others, rich in paradox.

On the one hand, it is the cradle of the Renaissance, the home of fashion houses like Ferragamo, Gucci, and Roberto Cavalli, world renowned among epicures for wine and olive oil, a romantic mystery for historians who puzzle over the still obscure Etruscan culture that flourished in the time of Homer. It is celebrated almost ad nauseum for its beauty: the undulent hills, the slender cypresses, the grand villas, the quaint medieval villages, the Apollonian grace of its olive groves, vineyards, and sunflowers, the air fragrant with rosemary, sage, wormwood, mint, and wild fennel, and, above all, the ethereal golden light of its late afternoons.

On the other hand, it is a provincial place where young men blast techno from their tiny Fiats, driving like they were in the Mille Miglia, or just sick of living. Its ballyhooed cuisine is mostly simple grilled or boiled meat. It is a land of stark class divides between the extremely rich (often foreigners) and an overwhelmingly Communist working class struggling against a collapsed Italian economy, all overrun in warm months by every sort of tourist. Its network of winding, tiny, ancient roads can easily turn into an adventure in the Dionysian: vertical dirt roads barely passable by mule, vast forests of chestnut, oak, wolves, pheasant, and wild boar, the occasional shrine to the Holy Mother, a desperate and futile bulwark against a land teeming with far older, more unruly spirits.

It also happens to be home to the world's two most famous butchers, Dario Cecchini and Stefano Bencistá Falorni. Tuscans love meat with a passion. Cooking “sulla braccia,” over fresh, glowing coals, usually in the hearth of some ancient home, evokes the reverence of ritual. Stefano's village of Greve has six independent butchers, in addition to a butcher counter in the Coop (the supermarket) that would put most artisanal markets in the US to shame. Tiny Panzano has two independent butchers, plus another in their Coop. They all know what they are doing. So what sets Dario and Stefano apart?

In the English speaking world, Dario's fame far exceeds that of Stefano or any other butcher, thanks in large part to his ardent, eloquent, and heartfelt admirers, including Bill Buford, Faith Willinger, and Jaime Oliver. Stefano, while lacking such influential advocates in the English speaking world, is, like Dario, a regular on Italian television, and perhaps better known for his salumi than any other butcher in a nation obsessed with salumi, a nation where, moreover, Tuscany is widely considered, at best, a middling region for salumi.

Dario and Stefano are about the same age, on the long side of "middle age," both basking in the golden light of late afternoon, as one might say after too much Chianti and Tuscan sun. Both run butcher shops of which they are the eighth generation inheritors, both dating to the early 1700's. Both of those shops are living homes of the old Tuscan culture, the one that predates highways and industrialization, that was there before the Renaissance, that feels a closer kinship to the Etruscans than to Rome, that is, seemingly, as old as the hills. At both stores, the men and women who work there banter playfully with local regulars and each other, in varying degrees of the local contadino accent. Both Stefano and Dario are large men with large hands in a place where most of the locals are quite small, giving credence to old wisdom about the virtues of meat. Both live in the villages of their births, Stefano in Greve, Dario in Panzano, neighboring villages on the Chiantigiana. Both are fierce defenders of an artisanal Tuscan food tradition both more widely known and celebrated than ever before and perhaps more genuinely threatened. Both are the overwhelmingly dominant personas in their towns, in which people often say, in typical half-derisive awe, that there will soon be statues of them in the main squares (in Stefano's case, he would either join or replace Giovanni da Verrazzano). The similarities, as though there weren't enough, end there.

Oh yes, there is one more commonality, of interest only to me. I worked as a stagista, or unpaid apprentice, for both of them.

Dario is nearly always laughing, beaming, hugging his dear friends (including those he just met), singing, reciting poetry, expounding on the dignity of the artisan and the crime of industrial food, handing out free homemade wine and lardo, holding court in his little shop like a mad and benevolent king, which is, in effect very much what he is to little Panzano. More than king, even, he is almost a patron saint, famous locally for taking in, looking after, and often employing the cast-offs, the troubled, the addicts, the people most in need of help and acceptance, and those typically least likely to get it. On occasion, he bursts with anger, often rooted in indignation at those who question his choice to source beef from Spain (it is pasture raised on a family farm, unlike nearly all Tuscan chianine, the local heirloom bovines, now living miserably on grain in CAFOs), who ask more than once for a Bistecca Fiorentina (thereby ignoring the rest of the animal, and the fact that the Fiorentine all go to his restaurant Officina della Bistecca, where they can certainly get some), who ask for their porchetta sliced thinly (it dries out), and so forth. He always wears red. People often leave his store believing he is a giant, not only because his massive head, hands, and shoulders tower over them as he stands on a not-so-obviously higher level behind the meat case, making him seem a full two meters (that's 6'9" for my fellow Americans... by the way, he's actually about six feet, or 183cm for my non-American friends). Dario is very big, but not too big for Panzano. Herein, perhaps, is the key to his appeal: grand champion of the small.

Stefano, dressed in white like the many other butchers who work for him (his butcher shop is much larger than Dario's and offers a much wider array of fresh and, especially, cured meats), is often seen as aloof. I have known him for virtually all of my thirty-three years and volunteered the autumn of 2010 to work for him, in exchange for his knowledge, which he shared with some initial hesitation but ultimately with great generosity. I think he likes me, though I can never be sure. If I enter the store for the first time in months or years, he may or may not greet me. The greeting may be a smile and nod. If I stand around long enough, he will, maybe, at some point, come over and speak to me with great intensity for a few minutes. Then he will walk away. When I leave, he almost never says goodbye. Stefano inspires more fear than Dario. He is usually quiet, but when he decides to speak up, his booming voice, grand gesticulations, and enormous presence easily dominate almost any situation. His Tuscan accent is so thick that I still usually struggle to understand him, though I've managed to forge close friendships with people speaking only Italian.

Stefano works with all kinds of meat, but mostly pork. He is most famous for his salumi, or cured meat, including salami, prosciutto, lardo, pancetta, capocollo, guanciale, etc. Dario works with no poultry, no rabbit or lamb, the occasional mammalian game, and a steady influx of pork, but mostly beef. His #1 catchphrase is "To beef or not to beef!" (Other catchphrases include, "Senza furia e senza paura," meaning "No rush and no fear" and "Viva la ciccia!" meaning "Long live [the Tuscan dialect word for] meat!") He makes almost no salumi, only guanciale. Both are, for any doubters, truly past masters. I have now seen a lot of career butchers, most of them raised in the proud tradition of Tuscany. Dario and Stefano both combine precision, grace, and speed to a degree I have seen in no one else, with the possible exception of "Maestro" Orlando, the seventy-two year old master butcher who does most of the day-to-day butchering for Dario (after all, Dario's daily duties also include running a busy shop, running three restaurants, and managing the demands of an international foodie media that can't get enough of him).

Where Stefano is proudly “all business,” Dario routinely denies that his business is a business. Both are preturnaturally hard workers, often up before dawn, often working well into the night, often working seven days a week, often doing physically tough and obviously dangerous work, and rarely taking a vacation, which can only be at the instigation of loved ones. Stefano has built, through hard work, talent, and business savvy, a small empire of pork and wine. That empire is already blurring the lines between the artisanal and the industrial. If there is a spiritual or ethical component to Stefano's work, it is manifest only in the quality of his products. Dario has built his little empire of beef and, well, more beef, through hard work, talent, and an unrelenting commitment to honoring the animals, honoring the artisan's dignity and way of life, and resurrecting the dying or lost traditions of Chianti. His empire has little room to grow. It is reaching the upper limits allowed by its fierce artisanality.

On my last day with Stefano, I'm pretty sure I did not see him. Finally, a few days later, after several attempts, I found him in the store, where he gathered some nice products for me as a thank you. I'm not sure he said much of anything. But it was touching. On my last night with Dario, working dinner service at his restaurant above the shop, Officina della Bistecca (Workshop of the Steak), I stepped outside for a breath of air, when I noticed Dario singing in his booming baritone. Then I noticed he was singing to me. I think it was an Italian version of Auld Lang Syne. It's foggy because he quickly threw his (massive) arms around me, catching me a bit off guard. He held me, in Dario fashion, longer than I might have expected, had I expected to be hugged in the first place. Then he pulled back, holding my arms, beaming from ear to ear, and told me that from now on, this was my home, and that whenever I come back, I should always feel that I am home.

I do not know if they are friends, though I am pleased to have found the photo above. I never asked either what he thinks about the other. I do not want to know. I'm afraid that either might color my view of the other in ways I'd rather avoid. I'm afraid of revealing my divided loyalties, if that is not too absurd a notion to express. I figured that by now I would know, but I don't. So be it.

What else is there to say? Actually, a lot. Too much. About the Apollonian order of white-clad butchers, scores of hanging prosciutti, and queued customers in Antica Macelleria Falorni. About the Dionysian spectacle of roaring disco music, fast flowing wine, endless plates of free porchetta bites with pepper jelly, lardo crostini, and fettunte (bread with Dario's very good estate olive oil), booming voices, laughter, and New York City subway-at-rush-hour type crowds in Antica Macelleria Cecchini. About my friends and colleagues, young and old, who populate these fraternal twin temples of meat, for I certainly spent more time with them, and learned at least as much from them as I did from their employers. But I'll leave it at this.

Grazie, Stefano!
Grazie, Dario!
Grazie, Chianti!
E viva la ciccia!

Little Things I Love About Italy

I have been in Tuscany for four weeks. This is my first blog post. This is not because I have not been having interesting or noteworthy experiences. On the contrary, I've had too many, and too little time to reflect. Since I still have not been able to process it all, yet want to share something, however little, I've decided to keep my first post from Tuscany intentionally light. Just the little things I love.

The little burner on the stove designed for your moka pot.

The fridges which are a third of the size of American fridges, but easily accommodate a couple bottles of wine with corks hastily stuck in their tops.

The only real questions about your espresso are whether it will be good or great or superb and where it will fall between eight-five cents and a euro.

People spend so much time laughing, talking, and being together.

Is it silly to say the food?

Everyone gives everyone else shit, and it's expected. No one expects to be taken too seriously.

Everyone has the same handwriting (exactly like my dad's). Huh?

The weeds along the side of the road include fennel, mint, wormwood, and chives, and often abut gigantic, woody bushes of lavender, rosemary, and sage.

Everyone knows exactly when everything is ripe, when everything is harvested, when everything is at its best. There are four more days for artichokes.

All the old harvest festivals enshrined in the big religions are mirrored by actual festivals here, genuinely celebrated by everyone. One for the wine, one for the butchers, one for the chestnuts, one for the truffles, surely one for the olive oil, though I still have to find it.

The absurdly incompetent, buffoonish, lascivious, hyper-corrupt prime minister actually causes few problems outside of Italy (compared to American presidents), while at least giving everyone here something about which to commiserate.

Ordinary supermarkets carry all the same stuff as fancy, luxury markets in the US, but at a third of the price (except Coca-Cola, which is three times more expensive... ha).

The sounds. The gestures.

Eating bunnies, tripe, and lungs is totally normal.

Wines are marked up maybe 10-20% in restaurants, rather than 300-400% as in the US.

Steaks... see above. And gosh, they're good. And always, always rare.

Tips are considered offensive when they're more than a couple coins because it implies that the staff (often the family that owns the place) is underpaid.

No one orders a cappuccino after 10am. And if you get a drink before dinner, it's a spritz (Aperol or Campari with prosecco and a slice of orange). And if you have a drink after dinner, it's grappa. Unless you overate, in which case it's Fernet.

Everyone routinely eats wild mushrooms, and enough people forage them that it's considered normal.

Everyone loves America and hates our government.

Because practically every restaurant is great, people just go where they most like the people.

No one really knows how to use half of the tenses.

Every city in Italy (and many towns) has its own name for practically every cut of meat.

Men talk wistfully of their mother's cooking, with trepidation for the time when it will be gone.

People would rather risk absurdity to look good than be boring to look normal.

Tiny cars.

There are about twenty newspapers.

Tuscany is, along with Emilia-Romagna, the most consistently radical left region in Italy.

If it's not at least 500 years old, it's not old.

Dogs can go just about anywhere, and are warmly welcomed in most restaurants.

Cactuses and mushrooms grow side-by-side.

People constantly offer each other tastes and grab food off each other's plates. People always buy each other coffee.

Delicious wine grapes left to be nabbed after the vendemmia (the harvest).

Figs along the walkways. And that sweet, mushy, red and yellow berry, like a spiky cherry. Oh.

Lots of little dogs for Goldstar to intimidate.

Well, I could probably go on. And, if I were so inclined, I could do a similar list of all the things that frustrate me (and many others) about Tuscany and/or Italy (surely, Berlusconi would be featured more prominently), but why bother.

Cheers,

David