Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food (25 page)

In-season, local foods have the advantage of typically being fresher than their conventional counterparts, which is especially important for flavor in highly perishable foods such as heirloom tomatoes and fresh seafood. Local isn’t always better, though. For example, if you live in a northern climate, you might find that produce such as radishes from traditional farms located where it gets hotter might taste better.

One suggestion for all of that zucchini: make “fake pasta” using a matchstick blade on a mandolin, then pan sear the resulting pieces in olive oil.

Caterina Fake cofounded the photo-sharing site Flickr
(
http://www.flickr.com
)
and Hunch
(
http://hunch.com
),
a decision-making site. She also serves on the board of directors for both Creative Commons
(
http://creativecommons.org
)
and Etsy
(
http://www.etsy.com
).

Tell me about what role food and cooking play in your life.

I never considered myself to be much of a cook, but at some point I realized that I was a much better cook than I had thought I was. It was a revelation to me. I had mostly been cooking family recipes that had been handed down; I didn’t refer much to cookbooks. I’ve been told by guests to my house that I was a better cook than I thought I was and it took me a while to come around to actually believing that. It came very gradually over time, adding one recipe a year maybe, but over time you get many, many recipes.

Why did you think that you weren’t a good cook?

Just because I cooked such simple things, using such simple ingredients. I would get waxy potatoes and cut them up and put olive oil on them with rosemary and garlic and salt and pepper and grill them and for whatever reason I didn’t think that that qualified. My mother would occasionally do these incredible James Beard and Julia Child recipes, these elaborate recipes that took hours and hours of preparation and special ingredient shopping and that was what qualified as good cooking. It was haute cuisine, whereas the kind of cooking that I always did was just put something yummy on the table for dinner without a lot of effort.

I think so often it’s the very simple dishes that actually can be some of the most special, most significant meals of our lives. What created this interest in learning to cook?

Necessity. I loved having people over and I loved cooking for people. When I was working as a web developer in San Francisco, dinner parties were really my favorite ways of socializing. I would have people over and as a result, I had to learn how to cook. When I lived in New York I actually didn’t cook very much because there are so many restaurants and New York kitchens are so tiny. It’s much more of a dinner party culture here in San Francisco.

Any parting thoughts that you would like to share?

I’m very lucky to live in California, where fresh food is plentiful. I started receiving a box of food from the Eat Well Farms CSA. I learned a bunch of new recipes and ways of cooking from having had that basket of vegetables delivered to my doorstep with a bunch of things that I normally would avoid at the grocery store. I didn’t know what to do with fennel. I didn’t know what to do with sweet potatoes. I didn’t know what to do with parsnips. It got me out of my comfort zone and taught me some new ways to think about food. One of my favorite cookbooks is
The Art of Simple Food
by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter). It would not look down upon my potato recipe. Those are the exact kinds of recipes that it includes. It’s really very intuitive cooking; it gives you a very short list of very simple ingredients from which you can cook a great many things.

Caterina Fake’s Roasted Potatoes with Garlic and Rosemary

Cut in half some waxy potatoes, such as yellow potatoes like Yukon Gold, or red potatoes. Blanch the potatoes in a pot of boiling water for a minute or two. Strain the potatoes out and spread them on a cookie sheet. Mix with a generous amount of olive oil and diced-up garlic and rosemary. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Place the cookie sheet on the top shelf of an oven set to broil. Once the top side is golden brown and crispy on the outside, turn them over, and broil the other side until done.

These are great for breakfast or you can have them as a side dish or snack.

First they say farm-raised salmon is better, then it’s wild salmon. Or the blogs light up with posts about how many metric tons of greenhouse gases or gallons of water are associated with producing an average cheeseburger. Then there’s the whole “local food” movement wanting to help with reducing our collective carbon footprint. What’s an environmentally conscious geek to do?

It depends. How much are you willing to give up?

Let’s start with the good news, with the greenest of the green: your veggies. Locally grown veggies combined with a minimum of transportation and sold unpackaged are about as good as you can get for the environment, and they’re about as good as you can get for yourself. Look for a farmers’ market in the summer (or if you’re lucky enough to live in California, year-round). Farmers’ markets are a great way to really understand where your food is coming from. Plus, your local economy will thank you.

You can also subscribe to a CSA (community-supported agriculture) share, where every week or two you receive a box of local and seasonal produce. It’s a great way to challenge yourself in the kitchen, because invariably something unfamiliar will show up in your CSA share, or you’ll find yourself with 10 pounds of spinach and be looking for something new to do with it. Regardless of anything else, your mother was right: eat your veggies. (On a personal note unrelated to the environment, I believe the typical American diet doesn’t include enough veggies. Eat more veggies! More!)

In the other corner, there are red meats like corn-fed beef. It’s environmentally expensive to produce: the cow has to eat, and if fed corn (instead of grass), the corn has to be grown, harvested, and processed. All this results in a higher carbon footprint per pound of slaughtered meat than that of smaller animals like chickens. Then there’s the fuel expended in transportation, along with the environmental impact of the packaging. By some estimates, producing a pound of red meat creates, on average, four times the greenhouse-gas emissions as a pound of poultry or fish. See Weber and Matthews’ “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States” (
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es702969f
).

Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum between local-shopping vegan and delighting in a ginormous bacon-wrapped slab of corn-fed beef, limiting consumption in general is the best method for helping the environment. Choose foods that have lower impact on the environment, and be mindful of wasted food. See the caveat below, but current data suggests the total impact on the environment of consuming fish is less than the impact of eating chicken and turkey, which likewise is more sustainable than pork, which is in turn better for the environment than beef.

This isn’t to say all red meats are bad. If that steak you’re cutting into came from a locally raised, grass-fed cow, she might actually be playing a positive role in the environment by converting the energy stored in grass into fertilizer (i.e., manure) for other organisms to use. See Michael Pollan’s classic
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
(Penguin) for more on this topic, but as a general rule, the more legs it has, the “less good” it is for the environment. (By this logic, centipedes are pure evil...)

By most analyses, cutting the amount of red meat you consume is the easiest way to make a positive impact on the environment. One friend of mine follows the “no-buy” policy: he happily eats
it, but won’t buy it. I’ve heard of others following variants of Mark Bittman’s “vegan before 6” diet: limiting consumption of meats during the day but pigging out at dinner.

With respect to fish, whether farm raised or wild-caught is better depends upon the species of fish, so there’s no good general rule. There are issues with both types: some methods of farm fishing generate pollutants or allow fish to escape and commingle with wild species, while wild-caught contributes to the depletion of the ocean’s stocks, and the impact of a global collapse in the fisheries from overfishing is a very real threat to the food supply to hundreds of millions. For a good article on fisheries and the global impact of overfishing, see the
New Republic
’s “Aquacalypse Now” (
http://www.tnr.com/article/environment-energy/aquacalypse-now
).

The biggest contribution you can make — at least on the dinner plate — is to avoid wild-caught seafood of species that are overfished. The Monterey Bay Aquarium runs a great service called “Seafood WATCH” that provides a list of “best,” “okay,” and “avoid” species, updated frequently and broken out by geographic region of the country. Search online for “seafood watch” or visit
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx
.