A Hermit-vore's Ramble
Dec. 21st, 2025 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vampyrichamsterIt seems I am fated to be a celery farmer. Mumm-ra I and II (the Ever-living), my celery plants spawned from a dying stump my husband saved one winter, are now clearly joined by Mumm-ra III and IV (probably Ever-living), and if I am not mistaken, Mumm-ra V and VI may also be sprouting in a couple of previously "empty" pots. This is all well and good, if my relationship with celery as a vegetable wasn't quite so tenuous. When I was little, my mum had a soup she cheerfully called ABC soup--celery, carrot and tomato in clear stock--that often showed up for dinner. I don't know why, but my tastebuds registered the boiled tomatoes and celery together as a weird clash. To this day, I can't look at a minestrone straight. My dad, when he tried hard to cook for his kids, often made stir-fried celery. It's a little better than minestrone, but again, something about celery stir-fried in soy sauce wasn't working for me. Stir-fried celery shows up a lot in Asian-American stir-fries too, probably because it's an abundantly cheap vegetable. Any stir-fried celery I encounter in my take-out goes to my spouse. And here I am, growing these ever-living bushels of celery.
But wait, you say. I like Cajun food. The base of Cajun food is the Holy Trinity, their mirepoix of onions, peppers and celery. Mirepoix is where the vast majority of the celery we grow ends up. I can tolerate any amount of mirepoix from whatever cuisine. The celery works with the other ingredients to create a specific flavour profile in a mirepoix. If mirepoix tasted mainly like celery, that's not a mirepoix. I use celery stalks and leaves in my cooking, as the leaves are a fairly common garnish in Malaysia. It's used to bring out the aroma of soups, especially for noodles, everything from simple clear broths to fairly spicy curries. It garnishes chicken soto, one of my favourite clear broths (which is taken with either or both noodles and rice). Also, it's worth noting that while clear broth with tomatoes and celery in it is still repellent, celery as part of a tomato sauce, like a marinara, is just fine. So again, as mirepoix, flavourant or garnish, finely-chopped celery shows up in a good number of our meals.
I do not, by the way, kill any of the plants that decide to survive my garden. Even the celeries I take decent precautions against to prevent spawning. That's honestly what being a local-vore is all about. The core of eating local is eating what grows seasonally where you live, the closer to you the better. (Thereby reducing the carbon footprint of your food.) I think it's also a lot about being creative with the things that will grow locally during the season where you live. Put more bluntly, you're also forced to make do with the plants that will grow for you. Before eating local was trendy, there was a time when most of the world didn't have the immense variety of produce in local markets--or for that matter many markets--than it does today. I'm not even talking about the ancient world yet. This was true even in the 1980s, when I was a child. Malaysia was one of the luckier countries, I think, because the majority of our cuisine combined Malay, Chinese and Indian cuisines in whole or part. That meant basic ingredients of those cuisines were easier to access for a large number of people. I can't, for example, imagine pandan, spring onions and black pepper being out of reach unless you lived very, very off the map. In fact, some of these things might very well have been growing in one's home garden.
I still remember when fresh button mushrooms first started being a common sight in KL (they were tinned for a chunk of my childhood). Even the tinned mushrooms were kind of a treat, as they still had to be imported. My surprise was finding out the mushrooms were originally white. I knew about straw mushrooms as white mushrooms, but who knew these uniformly brown things in tins were white? An American friend told me that when yellow bell peppers were introduced in American supermarkets, they were considered odd in the 1980s. It turns out these varieties were originally Dutch and exported from Holland. Button mushrooms are grown in Malaysia these days (though also substantially imported), the same way candy-coloured bell peppers are grown in the US. The heirloom vegetable revival brought a pile of zany new colours, flavours and shapes to market out in San Francisco, albeit at an heirloom-esque price. California is particularly lucky for local-vores because the state grows the vast majority of America's fresh produce. Farmer's markets in SF, loci for local-vores, have impressive piles of things I'd say we're lucky to get locally. Bok choy and mangoes were not things I thought I'd find in an open-air market in the US. Personally, I wished the variety of kales would expand a little away from the European types (note: tough and bitter). Bok choy is a great start, but explaining to my spouse that kale is from the same family as the delicious, tender green vegetable I got at the Vietnamese market as the intimidating yet clearly built-to-last purple feather-duster I forgot to remove from our produce box isn't convincing. They're all mustard greens! (Also note: Blanching and seasoning with vinegar can make even the latter taste edible to someone whose childhood wasn't an endurance test of mustard greens.)
Here lies the crux of my present ramble: without the influx of tasty produce varietals, eating local would be...a more difficult creative process. We can think big, like how without the Columbine exchange or our ancestors exchanging seeds with neighbours everywhere they moved, we'd be growing a lot less types of food where we are. Just without the Columbine exchange, there'd be no potatoes, squashes, capsicums, tomatoes or corn. Trying to think of my food without garlic (domesticated probably 4000 BCE in Central Asia) or ginger (5000 BCE, Southeast Asia) makes my blood curdle. Don't get me started on chicken eggs (domesticated 8,000 years ago in Thailand). Even for a brain that likes to imagine recipes with historical subtractions and menus proper for the cradles of civilisation, there are possibilities too apocalyptic to consider.
If we think small, the lack of agricultural innovation with the plants people had in place would still be pretty bad, honestly. Remember kale? The reason I somehow managed to still like mustard greens as an adult is because ancestral Asians decided they needed to expand their repertoire of Brassica juncea as far as they could stretch it. In Asia, mustard green flavours go from mild, almost spinach-like varieties to peppery and even somewhat astringent types. There are types for soft leaves, firm leaves, tender stems and crisp stems--or combinations thereof. Some varieties are actually grown primarily for the stems alone. As an adult, I'm fascinated by the varieties of mustard greens I didn't know other parts of Asia had. So in spite of the hillocks of greens I was made to eat as a child (greens were cheap, my mother's a health nut and she's Chinese--which somehow combines to maximise stuffing small children with vegetables), I was able to remember in some corner of my lizard brain that mustard greens taste nice.
There's a great cookbook I have that tries to recreate from an archaeological perspective what ancient Vikings ate. This was primarily cereals and legumes, mostly porridges. Although they had bread, it was pointed out grinding flour takes significant effort for a small amount without large-scale facilities. Women were the primary millers. Female skeletons have been found with torn joints commensurate to the ones used to work a hand quern. It gave me a new respect for liquified cereals, whether porridged or fermented, as a source of nutrition. The book's primary emphasis is imagining how the different regions of Scandinavia ate with the seasons, making do with the last bit of cheese and dried meat in the pantry before harvest season, and flavouring the sameness of everyday staples to stretch what you had. While our ancestors' tolerance for sameness was forced primarily by circumstance, even back then, cooks were clearly faced with the same dilemmas we have in squeezing satisfaction from our meals. People then and now do still eat to fill our bellies, yes, but I can't imagine that, if given the choice, anyone would continuously just fill their bellies. This is as baffling as saying poverty is a choice. Incidentally, the other takeaway from that cookbook was yet again that meat in virtually every culture was once a celebratory food item. Particularly important for anyone trying to eat local is understanding the impact the Green Revolution had in feeding people who once otherwise struggled to obtain a nutritiously balanced diet. One of its offshoots was the increased availability of cheap meat protein, which requires the most intensive inputs to create. Cooked cereals/legumes flavoured with vegetables and occasionally with (usually preserved) animal protein, whether land animal or aquatic, was the daily staple everywhere before the advent of cheap chicken. I guess what I'm trying to say here is the ideal local-vore diet is probably a reflection of that. Before anyone starts yelling at me about nitrates, I do want to point out there are other methods of preservation to stretch our local proteins, outside of eating less meat in general. Which reminds me, it's been a while since I had stockfish. (It's ancient! It's a seriously ancient food!)
But wait, you say. I like Cajun food. The base of Cajun food is the Holy Trinity, their mirepoix of onions, peppers and celery. Mirepoix is where the vast majority of the celery we grow ends up. I can tolerate any amount of mirepoix from whatever cuisine. The celery works with the other ingredients to create a specific flavour profile in a mirepoix. If mirepoix tasted mainly like celery, that's not a mirepoix. I use celery stalks and leaves in my cooking, as the leaves are a fairly common garnish in Malaysia. It's used to bring out the aroma of soups, especially for noodles, everything from simple clear broths to fairly spicy curries. It garnishes chicken soto, one of my favourite clear broths (which is taken with either or both noodles and rice). Also, it's worth noting that while clear broth with tomatoes and celery in it is still repellent, celery as part of a tomato sauce, like a marinara, is just fine. So again, as mirepoix, flavourant or garnish, finely-chopped celery shows up in a good number of our meals.
I do not, by the way, kill any of the plants that decide to survive my garden. Even the celeries I take decent precautions against to prevent spawning. That's honestly what being a local-vore is all about. The core of eating local is eating what grows seasonally where you live, the closer to you the better. (Thereby reducing the carbon footprint of your food.) I think it's also a lot about being creative with the things that will grow locally during the season where you live. Put more bluntly, you're also forced to make do with the plants that will grow for you. Before eating local was trendy, there was a time when most of the world didn't have the immense variety of produce in local markets--or for that matter many markets--than it does today. I'm not even talking about the ancient world yet. This was true even in the 1980s, when I was a child. Malaysia was one of the luckier countries, I think, because the majority of our cuisine combined Malay, Chinese and Indian cuisines in whole or part. That meant basic ingredients of those cuisines were easier to access for a large number of people. I can't, for example, imagine pandan, spring onions and black pepper being out of reach unless you lived very, very off the map. In fact, some of these things might very well have been growing in one's home garden.
I still remember when fresh button mushrooms first started being a common sight in KL (they were tinned for a chunk of my childhood). Even the tinned mushrooms were kind of a treat, as they still had to be imported. My surprise was finding out the mushrooms were originally white. I knew about straw mushrooms as white mushrooms, but who knew these uniformly brown things in tins were white? An American friend told me that when yellow bell peppers were introduced in American supermarkets, they were considered odd in the 1980s. It turns out these varieties were originally Dutch and exported from Holland. Button mushrooms are grown in Malaysia these days (though also substantially imported), the same way candy-coloured bell peppers are grown in the US. The heirloom vegetable revival brought a pile of zany new colours, flavours and shapes to market out in San Francisco, albeit at an heirloom-esque price. California is particularly lucky for local-vores because the state grows the vast majority of America's fresh produce. Farmer's markets in SF, loci for local-vores, have impressive piles of things I'd say we're lucky to get locally. Bok choy and mangoes were not things I thought I'd find in an open-air market in the US. Personally, I wished the variety of kales would expand a little away from the European types (note: tough and bitter). Bok choy is a great start, but explaining to my spouse that kale is from the same family as the delicious, tender green vegetable I got at the Vietnamese market as the intimidating yet clearly built-to-last purple feather-duster I forgot to remove from our produce box isn't convincing. They're all mustard greens! (Also note: Blanching and seasoning with vinegar can make even the latter taste edible to someone whose childhood wasn't an endurance test of mustard greens.)
Here lies the crux of my present ramble: without the influx of tasty produce varietals, eating local would be...a more difficult creative process. We can think big, like how without the Columbine exchange or our ancestors exchanging seeds with neighbours everywhere they moved, we'd be growing a lot less types of food where we are. Just without the Columbine exchange, there'd be no potatoes, squashes, capsicums, tomatoes or corn. Trying to think of my food without garlic (domesticated probably 4000 BCE in Central Asia) or ginger (5000 BCE, Southeast Asia) makes my blood curdle. Don't get me started on chicken eggs (domesticated 8,000 years ago in Thailand). Even for a brain that likes to imagine recipes with historical subtractions and menus proper for the cradles of civilisation, there are possibilities too apocalyptic to consider.
If we think small, the lack of agricultural innovation with the plants people had in place would still be pretty bad, honestly. Remember kale? The reason I somehow managed to still like mustard greens as an adult is because ancestral Asians decided they needed to expand their repertoire of Brassica juncea as far as they could stretch it. In Asia, mustard green flavours go from mild, almost spinach-like varieties to peppery and even somewhat astringent types. There are types for soft leaves, firm leaves, tender stems and crisp stems--or combinations thereof. Some varieties are actually grown primarily for the stems alone. As an adult, I'm fascinated by the varieties of mustard greens I didn't know other parts of Asia had. So in spite of the hillocks of greens I was made to eat as a child (greens were cheap, my mother's a health nut and she's Chinese--which somehow combines to maximise stuffing small children with vegetables), I was able to remember in some corner of my lizard brain that mustard greens taste nice.
There's a great cookbook I have that tries to recreate from an archaeological perspective what ancient Vikings ate. This was primarily cereals and legumes, mostly porridges. Although they had bread, it was pointed out grinding flour takes significant effort for a small amount without large-scale facilities. Women were the primary millers. Female skeletons have been found with torn joints commensurate to the ones used to work a hand quern. It gave me a new respect for liquified cereals, whether porridged or fermented, as a source of nutrition. The book's primary emphasis is imagining how the different regions of Scandinavia ate with the seasons, making do with the last bit of cheese and dried meat in the pantry before harvest season, and flavouring the sameness of everyday staples to stretch what you had. While our ancestors' tolerance for sameness was forced primarily by circumstance, even back then, cooks were clearly faced with the same dilemmas we have in squeezing satisfaction from our meals. People then and now do still eat to fill our bellies, yes, but I can't imagine that, if given the choice, anyone would continuously just fill their bellies. This is as baffling as saying poverty is a choice. Incidentally, the other takeaway from that cookbook was yet again that meat in virtually every culture was once a celebratory food item. Particularly important for anyone trying to eat local is understanding the impact the Green Revolution had in feeding people who once otherwise struggled to obtain a nutritiously balanced diet. One of its offshoots was the increased availability of cheap meat protein, which requires the most intensive inputs to create. Cooked cereals/legumes flavoured with vegetables and occasionally with (usually preserved) animal protein, whether land animal or aquatic, was the daily staple everywhere before the advent of cheap chicken. I guess what I'm trying to say here is the ideal local-vore diet is probably a reflection of that. Before anyone starts yelling at me about nitrates, I do want to point out there are other methods of preservation to stretch our local proteins, outside of eating less meat in general. Which reminds me, it's been a while since I had stockfish. (It's ancient! It's a seriously ancient food!)
