Home Cooked

My kitchen: an introduction

Today, having your child choose a career in farming has become almost prestigious, as America’s interest in food has reached new heights. But I assure you that back in 1993, when I graduated high school, no one in Palo Alto, California, was dreaming their daughter would grow up to run a meat company. My parents had been charmed by my entrepreneurial spunk when I started a cookie business as a teen and were happy that I was able to cook for them from a fairly young age, but when I announced my plans they were worried about what exactly I would end up doing.

My parents are academics and school is pretty important to them. I went to college mostly to make them happy, but even then I knew my career was going to have a culinary bent. I got a fellowship straight out of college that provided me with the funds to spend a year working in cheese dairies in very rural parts of southern Europe and northern Africa. To get around on the cheap, I bought a folding bicycle and figured out how to use the train system. My budget for the whole year of travel was $25,000: $20,000 from the fellowship and a $5,000 check my grandfather gave me as my college graduation present. The fellowship was for recent college graduates to “expand their horizons” in a field where there was no linear path to further their expertise, and artisan cheese making certainly checked that box.

Most days I woke at the crack of dawn and cycled down some bumpy road to visit a dairy, trying to get there when the milk was still warm. I visited the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Greece, Tunisia, and Italy, stopping in at farms and dairies all along the way. I learned a lot about self-reliance in that year, even spent a night in a county jail in Greece (long story), but above all I learned to eat.

Every time I visited a dairy and spent a few hours hanging around the aging room with one of these rural masters, they would invariably invite me to join them for the main meal of the day, lunch. We would eat for a few hours and talk further, and I would see a meal unfold in traditional fashion: bread set right on the table, salt pinched out of a bowl (and it was different than the salt I was used to), butter spread thickly, and eggs or a big piece of fresh cheese drenched in oil as a main course.

When I think back, a lot of the food I cook today came directly from what I learned from watching farmers eat simple food in their own homes. For example, I saw an animal being killed for the first time—a pig, in a courtyard, with a knife—and learned to make blood sausage and chicharróns that very same day.

I started that year of cheese making as a wannabe gourmet and ended it as a nascent farmer. I’d spent a year talking my way into dozens of dairies in languages I did not really speak and had developed a taste for travel and exploration. I was not ready to move back to the United States.
I had met a fairly well-organized research group—the Consorzio Ricerca Filiera Lattiero-Casearia (CoRFiLaC)—while I was visiting Sicily during my year of cheese making, and I was able to secure a work visa and a job offer from them. Shortly after, I moved to Ragusa, a town in southeastern Sicily, and began two years of work with a team that I affectionately nicknamed the Cheese Mob. At the time, the group was primarily responsible for managing denomination of origin labeling for cheese (these are the DOP or AOC labels you see on many quality European products), an authority that was taken from them in later years thanks to shady dealings.

When I worked there, the Cheese Mob was flush with EU cash, primarily earmarked for projects intended to stimulate the regional food economy in this underdeveloped region of Sicily. I led a business development program, and my work consisted of writing a few financial and marketing plans, attempting to implement them, organizing an export program, and eating a lot of epic dinners. In retrospect, the EU contracts must have stipulated that they hire someone who was not from Sicily, as I was definitely woefully underqualified for the job and can think of little reason that I would have landed it otherwise. But I remember feeling that I was in the right place when my first week of work landed me in a Sicilian village that was hosting a competition that involved rolling giant wheels of sheep’s milk cheese down the mountainside in a sort of race (they boarded the windows and doors of the homes along the route—those cheeses moved fast).

As time went on, my work environment became increasingly operatic, with tears (regularly) and knives (occasionally) appearing during staff meetings, and my boss making the regular accusation that one or another of his core team were “betrayers.” It was colorful and frankly pretty stressful for twenty-three-year-old me, but the life I was living made it worth it. I spent the weekends in the countryside, evenings in the piazza, ate granita with brioche for breakfast, and became fluent in Italian. I joined the town’s marching band and played my oboe at all of the processions that marched through our town and the neighboring villages. The band’s favorite piece to play while marching behind the swaying statue of the Virgin was the theme from The Godfather, which has an awesome oboe solo. I had fun.

One thing that really struck me was how the middle-class families in Ragusa were excited about eating at the new McDonald’s in town. It was a status symbol to eat at this “see and be seen” place, since most of the cheese makers I worked with fed their families from their own small farms and by foraging in the surrounding forests. A meal at McDonald’s meant your family had money to burn. Unlike in America, in Sicily, the poorer you were, the more likely you were to be eating organic, artisan-made foods. It was topsy-turvy: poor people had gardens, rich people were proud not to have gardens, and it was completely opposite to the emerging food scene in the States. Seeing that firsthand ignited a passion in me for social change around food, a passion that really came to life when I moved back home to California a few years later.

In Sicily, I learned how to find wild asparagus, how to crack open sea urchins, how to skin a warm pork belly fresh off the carcass. Depending on the season, poorer families in Ragusa would bake ricotta in the wood-fired oven to make it last through the winter or fill hundreds of empty beer bottles with fresh tomato pulp. For my friends there, these were skills they just grew up possessing and were eager to leave behind (so they could go eat at McDonald’s). For me, a kid raised in the suburbs with easy access to a grocery store, this type of year-round “meal planning” was eye-opening. I had made jam with my mom before, but actually needing to put up a significant amount of food every month, all of it varying with the season, was a different level. There was also an ease of execution and a spontaneity that was impressive, something I later learned the Sicilians are famous for. I’d be chatting with my coworkers by the espresso machine close to lunchtime and someone would mention wanting to eat urchin now that the days were getting colder. Within a few minutes we’d have formed a plan, and within an hour, five of us would be in a little Zodiac boat with diving knives strapped to our legs, while one remained on shore to boil a big pot of water for the spaghetti and peel some garlic. Within the same hour, lunch was served on the rocks: spaghetti ai ricci. The Sicilians had a similar carefree attitude toward preserving the harvest. Faced with a glut of tomatoes or artichokes, they’d transform it, with little fanfare or planning, into something they’d eat all year-round. They all seemed to have a reserve of techniques that allowed them to quickly and spontaneously turn any abundant harvest into preserved food, something that deeply impressed and inspired me.

Some of my discoveries in Sicily were simple—like using a lot more fat than I was used to in cooking—or cooking only vegetables that were in season. But the true secret, if there was one, was preparing food using homemade or hyperlocal base ingredients, as most of the families I ate with did, from the fresh cheese in the lasagna to the home-dried herbs they mixed with salt and rubbed into meat.

After two years in Sicily, I moved to Piedmont to work at the headquarters of Slow Food International. The dysfunctional politics in Sicily had gotten to be a bit too much, and while I was not yet ready to leave Italy, I wanted a job with a more global impact. Slow Food was just that. It was a magical time for the organization: founded by the charismatic Carlo Petrini a decade earlier, it had just broken through internationally from its base in a small Piedmontese town (Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, and Corby Kummer were regular faces in the headquarters in those early, heady days). When I joined, there were about forty of us on the payroll, one of whom was my future husband, Renato Sardo, who was the head of Slow Food International at the time. It was an incredible chapter in my life: we fell in love during a time of growth for a movement we both really believed in while living in Renato’s hometown, which quickly felt like my hometown, too.