As I once learned from a fellow homebrewer, every good homebrewing session involves cheese. Cheese, and some crackers or bread, and something savory like summer sausage or salami. Snacking during the multi-hour homebrew process is almost as enjoyable as throwing hops into a boiling pot of wort.
Yesterday’s homebrew session followed an earlier-in-the-week stop at Taste cheese shop, and the snacking lined up included a mild, creamy Appenzeller, a stunning goat cheese from France (Bucheron), and my all-time favorite, Stilton. It also included many a slice of Knight Salumi Co’s Pepperone, and if there is one recommendation I have for all you readers it is this: go out and get some Stilton and some Knight Pepperone (usually, although not always, at North Park, Hillcrest, Little Italy farmers’ markets), put a slice of cheese on a slice of meat, and relish bite after bite of delicious complexity.
But this tale isn’t merely about food’s pleasures. It’s about their effects. Mostly, Stilton’s effects, which just happen to be crazy dreams. Not only has this been observed in an experiment conducted by the British Cheese Board a few years back (in the aptly named Cheese and Dreams study); I can personally attest to the dream powers of Stilton (last time I ingested the stuff, I dreamt my cat died while choking on a landjager. now that I think of it, maybe I need to stop pairing Stilton with salumi…).
I woke up this morning recalling a dream that seems not only to have stemmed from the bewitching effects of Stilton, but from the bewitching arguments of one Michael Pollan. Pollan’s latest article, published in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, explores the politics of food production in the form of an open letter to the future President of the United States. Like every Pollan piece, he distills an incredibly complex, wide-reaching issue into a very simple, easy to understand and easy to remember sentiment: “we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” (If you aren’t aware of his other hyper-simple mantra–”Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”–you probably ought to look it up.)
If there are any of you out there who have become enamored with This American Life’s explanation of financial issues, I encourage you to approach this piece with the same amount of curiosity. Michael Pollan is a wonderful interpreter of food issues, and I guarantee that if even if the politics underlying food have never crossed your mind, if you can devote the time to the admittedly long piece you’ll have a much better understanding of the issues that plague our food system when you reach the end.
That said, you might also have some bizarre dreams. The combination of Pollan and Stilton for me meant vivid dreams of being dragged into fast food restaurants only to discover I wasn’t going to be forced to stare at a sandwich of feedlot meat because right there, on the menu, was a glorious option of unprecedented fast food: a sandwich of thick, juicy slices of sauteed wild mushrooms covered in a blanket of warm, melted fontina, all sandwiched between two bulging halves of a crispy, airy Sadie Rose roll.
Okay, so maybe it’s just a dream for now, but I look forward to the day when our food system gravitates away from ubiquitious, sub-par burgers and embraces ubiquitous, gourmet-worthy vegetable-and-cheese sandwiches. And while it didn’t make it into my dream this time, it probably can’t hurt to throw a bit of artisanal cured meat in there as well.
Now what are you waiting for? Go read Pollan!
Tags: michael pollan, stilton