The Multi-cultural Omnivore (or why Pollan is wrong)

One summer in the U.S. my youngest daughter was taken to the petting area at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle. The petting area is a place at the zoo where small children can touch and hold farm animals - a real treat for city children who may have never seen, much less touched, a chicken, a goat or a rabbit.

According to my daughter when she entered the pen she was greeted by a zoo volunteer who leaned over and asked her, “ So, do you like rabbits, little girl?”

To which my daughter replied, “Yes, my mother serves them with mustard.”

Moral of the story is something you pet in Seattle is something you put in the pot in Paris.

So how does a bi-cultural family (one with at least two food traditions), resolve what Michael Pollan calls The Omnivore’s Dilemma? Or to put it another way, with so many delicious possibilities, how to choose what to eat?

This may be heresy to Mr. Pollan but I honestly think that you can do better by combining traditions.

Standard French food is lovely but home cooked American food from a generation or so back is also quite good. Thinking about my great-grandmother’s buttermilk pancakes, my mother’s baking powder biscuits and my step-father’s fried chicken makes my mouth water.

So what might a Franco-American meal look like? Well, as an example, how about what we had for dinner on Sunday night?

Whole rabbit cut up, slathered with dijon mustard, wrapped in foil with a bay leaf and cooked in the oven for about an hour
Whole wheat buttermilk biscuits with butter and honey from the market
Big green salad with homemade vinaigrette
And because it was Sunday (chocolate night at the Franco-American flophouse) a small chocolate cake from a local bakery.

There now, that wasn’t all that hard, was it?

Could we be any more deluded?

Diverse comments on things I am hearing in the U.S. and French press and in the various EU blogs I frequent about the world financial crisis.

Idiot Idea #1, WE are not that badly impacted. The problem is out THERE somewhere.

This I have been hearing for months from the French press/government and the French public continues to believe it. The message (and the hope) was powerful enough that I actually left my investments where they were. I won’t disclose how much I lost but I can say that in retrospect that was a pretty stupid move. I should have remembered the old line, “Promises engage only those who believe them.”

Idiot Idea #2 WE will pull out of the crisis the fastest.

What I hear is that many people believe that the U.S. will recover more quickly. Maybe. Hard to say and the people who are saying it are generally so ignorant or have such a lousy track record for predictions that I sure as heck wouldn’t bet my money (what is left anyway) on it. The day I truly believe it I may buy a ticket home but we are not there yet.

May I respectfully suggest that no one, not the national governments, not the EU, nor the economists have a clue as to which countries will suffer most (or least) and which countries will recover fastest. What seems likely is that every country will suffer in its own unique way for the time it takes until recovery. In the interim, everyone will find a reason to envy and loathe his neighbors.

It all makes me personally very tired.

Now we can continue to waste our time blaming each other and explaining to the rest of the world (as if anyone was listening or cared) why we are so SPECIAL and DIFFERENT.

Or we can quit arguing about who is is the tallest midget in the room.

Because, let’s face it, sports fans, we are all in a world of hurt right now.