Where Food Is More Than Only Something to Eat

[Note: This post, prepared originally for the NC Folklife Institute's NCFood blog, is hosted on the institute’s website, with excerpts and a link to the website posted here.]

Food is more than simply sustenance. Kitchens are more than places to prepare and eat meals. No place is better for demonstrating the value in society of food and kitchens than The King’s Kitchen in Charlotte, NC. As its customers enjoy the menu of the day, the unemployed, underemployed, difficult to employ, and recently released prison inmates learn culinary and food service skills.

Chef-in-training Horace Pressley spreads
a big smile when someone raves about
his mac and cheese.

Customers enter because the food is excellent and the service is top-notch. The Southern meat and three sides (with bread) seems the most popular order. The entrees of braised pot roast, fried or baked chicken, fried catfish, and grilled meatloaf rival any superior Southern restaurant. Customers may also be satisfied because the restaurant has a huge heart and social conscience. When I ate recently at The King’s Kitchen, the food was so good and the service so professional, I couldn’t image that the staff could include someone once homeless, a former drug addict, or convicted felon.

Continue reading at the NCFood blog ...

Simmering Stew Brings a Community Together

[Note: This post, prepared originally for the NC Folklife Institute's NCFood blog, is hosted on the institute’s website, with excerpts and a link to the website posted here.] 

The center of small town is not always a town hall, courthouse, or church. Sometimes it’s a pot of bubbling stew as it is each fall in Mount Gilead, a community of slightly more than 1,000 residents in Montgomery County. Although the community is small, just about everyone knows about the Brunswick stew served when Brown’s Hardware has its open house.

A tasty pot of Brunswick stew
creates a lot of interest.

Incorporated in 1899, Mount Gilead boasts a downtown historic district listed in the National Register of Historic Places.  The heart of historic downtown is a hardware store that has been open continuously for more than 100 years, and the floor creaks like it is even older. Known now as Brown’s Hardware, the business presents itself as an “old timey general store and mercantile,” and it is.

Continue reading at the NCFood blog ...

Local Food: A Preferred Choice in the South

Peaches sold by local farmer:
$20 for 23-pound basket ($1.15 a pound)

One of the worst cultural changes in the American South is how many residents neglect the availability of local fresh fruits and vegetables when once local produce was a mainstay of the Southern diet. Such produce today is easy to find and buy, particularly because farmers’ markets where local farms sell their crops have experienced a resurgence as well as community-supported agriculture programs have gained in popularity.

The following video illustrates how the buy local effort has even spread to college campuses:

The local produce available throughout the year is amazing, and my home state of North Carolina is one of several states in the South that provides a quick reference guide about the availability of fresh fruits and vegetables. In the summer months, one of the favorites where I live is peaches, which are available from May through September.

Farmer stand at state farmers' market

I occasionally visit the N.C. State Farmers’ Market in Raleigh, which is impressive with its selection and availability of peaches in season. In addition, because I live in the peach-growing Sandhills area of the state, I also have the opportunity to go to a you-pick-it farm as well as get local peaches through a community-supported agriculture program.

In fact, imagine the additional ways in this area for buying fresh peaches:

• Local farmers’ market
• Roadside stand operated by a local farm
• Neighborhood grocery store that promotes local produce

However, the shock for me recently was a neighborhood grocery store that was promoting peaches – not locally picked but shipped from California – in the middle of the local peach season. How much expense is involved in transporting peaches from one side of the country completely across to the other side? It’s like “carrying coal to Newcastle” and is a complete waste of energy as well as a detriment to the local food economy (and the out-of-state peaches were 10 cents a pound more than local peaches being sold by a local farmer at a roadside stand about 2/10ths of a mile from the store).

Regional food chain has window display
that advertises fresh peaches ...

... but the small print indicates
that the peaches are out-of-state
(and cost 10 cents a pound more than local ones)

Several businesses, schools, and local communities have joined in an effort – known as the 10% campaign – to buy at least 10% of their food budgets from farmers in their local areas. The campaign, an effort to rebuild a local food economy, also helps to educate the public about food choices. Eating fresh fruits and vegetables as a regular part of a diet provides many long-term health benefits. Although the increasing obesity rates are a national problem, they are particularly troubling for the American South. Most states in the South exceed the national average for both adult and childhood obesity. 

Roadside stand with fresher, cheaper
peaches (less than 2/10ths of a mile
from regional grocery chain)

Even with the example of peaches being shipped across the country, the effort to buy locally is gaining support as many across the South are recruited to become a “locavore,” a word used increasingly by local food advocates. It was the word of the year in 2007 for the Oxford American Dictionary, even though it had only been coined in 2005 when residents on the West Coast were encouraged to eat only food grown or produced within a 100-mile radius. Although later in 2008 Congress defined “local food” much broader -- food marketed in the same state where produced or less than 400 miles from origin -- the “buy local” effort focuses on growers much closer.

What a shame that a regional grocery chain in the South (owned by a Belgium corporation), where peaches are grown with so much success, sees fit to ship them completely across the county and that local shoppers buy them. Be more selective, and enjoy produce that your area grows. Become a locavore.

Okra: Worthy of a Strut

Is any plant as disrespected, insulted, or maligned as the okra? In a survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, adults named okra as one of the three vegetables they liked least. So many people underappreciate this gem of nature and treasure of beauty. A major campaign is needed to restore this fascinating vegetable to its rightful place in the food chain. Yes, it is beautiful, versatile, and nutritious as many around the world know much better than Americans.

The first opportunity to appreciate okra is in warm weather when its blossoms reach skyward in many home gardens and decorate properties along a highway. The flowers of the okra are as beautiful as those of the hibiscus, which the okra is related to. The flowers of an okra are up to 3 inches in diameter and consist of five petals (white to yellow) with usually a dot (red to purple) at the base of each petal. However, in contrast to the beautiful blossoms is the sticky, mucilaginous juice inside the resulting pods.

Some newcomers are turned off by okra’s characteristic gooey substance when its green seed pods with numerous white, round seeds are cut and fried. As a result, they avoid the “goo” by keeping the pods intact, cooking briefly (such as stir frying), or cooking with an acidic ingredient (such as tomatoes, vinegar, or lemon juice). But why avoid a major benefit of okra?

Need a thickening agent for a soup or stew? What works better than okra? The name gumbo derives from a west Africa term (the Bantu word ki ngombo) that means okra, which is used as a principal ingredient in gumbo because the mucilage released when okra slices are fried is an excellent thickening agent. In addition to being a main ingredient in gumbo, okra is a tasty delight that can be fried, boiled, blanched, sautéed, baked, grilled, steamed, blanched, and prepared in other ways – even freeze dried into okra chips.

The seed pod, a fruit in the botanical sense, is harvested immature and eaten as a vegetable. What can be healthier? Okra is low in calories with practically no fat and high in fiber, provides vitamins A and C, and has minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and potassium. In addition to protein, okra seeds possess qualities like those of olive oil, the standard of excellence. Because its high soluble fiber may cut the pace that sugars are absorbed from the intestine, okra is often recommended for diabetics to stabilize their blood sugar.

Okra is also an accomplished traveler. Of all the native food crops of Africa, it is among the most widespread within the continent. Early records indicate that it was cultivated in Egypt as early as 1216. The plant likely spread throughout the Mediterranean region and later was first recorded in the Americas in 1658 where the Portuguese probably bought it from west Africa. By the early 1700s okra had arrived in the area of the U.S. South, and Thomas Jefferson had recorded its cultivation in Virginia by 1781.

Around the world the benefits of okra have been proven. West Africans slice, sun dry, and grind pods into a powder as a way to satisfy their hunger before the next harvest. Turks string out pods to dry for winter use. Asian counties use the leaves and immature fruit in ointments to relieve pain. Mature pods can even be ground and roasted as coffee substitutes, as they have been in Central America as well as in the American South during the Civil War.

With such a legacy as an extensive traveler, a beneficial culinary ingredient with pervasive kitchen uses, and a purveyor of good health, no wonder many aficionados appreciate this plant. However, few do so with the enthusiasm as the citizens of Irmo, S.C., who conduct an Okra Strut each September to celebrate this magnificent vegetable. A small town of 12,000 residents, Irmo claims “the nation’s original celebration of okra” as it brings Okra Man to life and expands to 55,000 with visitors during the two-day festival it has conducted since 1973. In addition to a parade, the Strut includes arts and crafts, rides and amusements, and obviously festival food that includes okra prepared in several ways.

Is okra the Rodney Dangerfield – who got “no respect” – of the botanical world? Not really. Although some adults superficially dislike this vegetable, other have discovered its value to enhance flavor and nutrition. Talk a walk on the wild side with okra like the folks of Irmo, S.C., do. You may find more benefits that the citizens of Central America, Africa, and Asia have found.


Note: Click here to see pictures taken during the Okra Strut in Irmo, S.C.