food – Page 2 – The Inquisitive Eater

Think Tank June 5, 2013

Growing Food Justice in School Gardens

By Pauline Zaldonis

Upon launching New York City’s citywide school garden initiative, Grow to Learn, Mayor Bloomberg declared, “nothing is more important than the health and wellbeing of our children. That’s why our Administration is committed to helping young New Yorkers understand how eating fresh food and preparing their own meals can help them lead longer, healthier lives.”[1] In New York City and across the country, government agencies and nonprofit organizations are framing school gardens as a tool for improving the health and wellbeing of schoolchildren. In California, the Department of Education started its Garden in Every School initiative in 1995, identifying gardening as a way to increase student preference for fresh fruits and vegetables.[2] Nationally, school gardens have received the support of First Lady Michelle Obama through her Let’s Move campaign, which promotes gardening as a way for children to get physical activity while learning how healthy food is produced.^{^[3]}

While it is clear that school gardens seek to address health and educational issues in schools, it is less clear whether school gardens can be used to address social justice issues in the school food arena. The food justice framework, which recognizes the importance of structural inequalities and patterns of oppression that characterize the food system, calls for solutions to food system problems that go beyond food access and education.^{^[4]} The increasing popularity of school gardens begs the question, how can we use gardens to promote greater justice in school cafeterias?

In the literature on the impact of school gardens, researchers and program evaluators typically praise school gardens for their educational and health benefits. Questions of food justice rarely arise, despite the fact that the nutritional quality of school food is generally poor and unquestionably a food justice issue. With an estimated 32% of youth between the ages of 2 and 19 considered overweight or obese,[5] an interest in the effect school meals on childhood obesity has been growing over the last decade. School food plays a large role in the development of children’s eating habits. What is on the menu in school cafeterias can lead to positive or negative health outcomes.

Fresh fruits and vegetables are hard to come by in many cafeterias across the United States today. Since processed foods tend to be cheaper and require less preparation than fresh fruits and vegetables, most school cafeterias in the United States are dominated by processed foods.[6] Students who participate in the free and reduced meals program are typically low-income students who rely on school meals to provide them with one and sometimes two meals each day. Consequently, the abundance of processed foods served in school cafeterias disproportionately harms low-income students. The West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (or, WE ACT for Environmental Justice), a community-based organization working towards racial and environmental justice in New York City, calls the lack of healthy school food options an issue of structural racism, claiming that the quality, safety, and nutrition of school meals has an especially large impact on students of color who are more likely to participate in the program.[7]

Despite the social justice issues surrounding school food, school garden advocates tend to focus on the educational and health outcomes associated with gardening, as if growing food and the consumption of food are unrelated. Indeed, school gardens have been linked to a variety of educational and health outcomes, for example, improved performance on standardized tests in reading, writing, math, social studies, and science.[8] They also provide children with greater exposure to complex natural experiences, which many believe to be important to childhood development.[9] Furthermore, student school gardening activities have been linked to higher nutritional knowledge, more positive attitudes about food and the environment, and an increase in the consumption of fruits and vegetables.[10]

Programs like New York City’s Grow to Learn program or California’s Garden in Every School initiative share the ambitious goal of providing every student with the opportunity to participate in school gardening. While the academic and certain health benefits associated with school gardens are documented, such outcomes are not necessarily synonymous with the promotion of food justice and they do not inherently address the root causes of problems like the rising childhood obesity or the proliferation of processed foods in school cafeterias. Even the few school gardens that address food access by providing enough produce to be incorporated into school meals do not necessarily address the systemic problems in the food system. By suggesting that food system inequalities can be addressed simply by educating people about how to make better dietary choices, the deeper problems that create inequalities in the food system are overlooked and obscured.[11]

A school’s ability to maintain a garden large enough to generate produce to be used in the cafeteria is contingent on its ability to access both financial and human resources, which is typically more of a challenge for schools in low-income areas. Many schools find it daunting to start and sustain even a small-scale educational garden, citing a limited staff time and lack of funds as the primary barriers. Students’ access to garden-based learning opportunities in their schools is dependent on the ability of their school administration’s ability to gain the necessary resources to build and maintain their garden.

Despite the goals of school garden organizations to create “a sustainable school garden in every public school,” realistically some schools will not get the benefits of a garden.^{^[12]}Simply addressing nutrition or incorporating gardening into traditional academic subjects does not increase food justice. Rather, school gardening initiatives seeking to increase social justice in the food system must extend their focus beyond nutrition and academics and perhaps focus on what is actually being served to students in their very own cafeterias.

The New York City-based nonprofit organization, Harlem Grown, is an example of a school garden initiative that goes beyond classroom-based nutrition. Harlem Grown works with local public schools to create greater access to nature and green spaces, engages community members in nutritional and outdoor activities, and increases access to healthy foods while focusing on issues of food justice.[13] Currently Harlem Grown works with PS 197 in Harlem, where it has developed a school garden and has created a vegetable-based diet in the school its cafeteria. Local restaurants purchase a portion of the produce from the garden while the rest of it is given to the school and made available for community members.^{^[14]} Harlem Grown uses school gardens to revitalize abandoned community spaces and to create sites that provide both educational opportunities and fresh produce. By taking food justice issues into consideration, the needs of the wider community are met as well.

With the increasing popularity and governmental support of school gardens, there is an opportunity for schools to engage their students in projects that both provide nutritional education while addressing food justice issues. In their essay on farm-to-school programs, Patricia Allen and Julie Guthman recognize the potential for schools to be the site for challenging the structural inequalities in the food system. They argue that the public school system has the potential to be a platform for innovative school food programs that combine the practical value of universal access to fresh food combined with educational and nutritional knowledge.[15] While most school gardens do not currently address issues of food justice, there is a huge potential for advocates to use school gardens as a platform for promoting food justice alongside the nutritional and educational benefits that are already widely recognized.

Pauline Zaldonis is a graduate student at The New School where she is pursuing her Master’s degree in Urban Policy and Management with a focus on food and the environment.

[1] “Message from the Mayor.” Grow to Learn. n.d. 13 May 2013. http://www.growtolearn.org/view/messagesfromnyc.

[2] “School Garden Program Overview.” California Department of Education. n.d. Web. 18 April 2013.http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/he/gardenoverview.asp.

^{^[3]} “School Garden Checklist.” Let’s Move. n.d. Web. 18 April 2013.http://www.letsmove.gov/school-garden-checklist.

^{^[4]} Allen, Patricia. “Mining for justice in the food system: perceptions, practices, and possibilities.” Agriculture and Human Values 25:157-161, 158.

[5] Perlman, Sharon E. et al. “A Menu for Health: Changes to New York City School Food, 2001-2011.” Journal of School Health; October 2012, Vol. 82, No. 10., 484-485, 484.

[6] “Why Processed Food is Cheaper than Healthier Options.” NPR. 1 March 2013. Web. http://www.npr.org/2013/03/01/173217143/why-process-food-is-cheaper-than-healthier-options.

[7] “Northern Manhattan Food Justice Initiative,” WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Accessed 3 May 2013, http://www.weact.org/Programs/EnvironmentalHealthCBPR/NorthernManhattanFoodJusticeInitiative/tabid/206/Default.aspx.

[8] Lieberman, Gerald A. and Linda L. Hoody. “Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning.” State Education and Environment Roundtable, 1998.

[9] Blair, Dorothy. “The Child in the Garden: An Evaluative Review of the Benefits of School Gardening.” The Journal of Environmental Education. Winter 2009, Vol. 40, No. 2, 15-38, 17.

[10] Atkins, Dr. Robert and Veronica. “An Evaluation of the School Lunch Initiative.” Center for Weight and Health, University of California. Berkeley, September 2010, 26-32.

[11] Allen, Patricia and Julie Guthman. “Farm-to-School”: Neoliberalization from the Ground Up.” Agriculture and Human Values (2006) 23:401–415, 412.

^{^[12]} “Mission Statement.” Grow to Learn. n.d. 18 April 2013.http://www.growtolearn.org/view/mission_statement.

[13] “About Us.” Harlem Grown. n.d. 13 May 2013. http://www.harlemgrown.org/about-us/.

^{^[14]} Laperruque, Emma “Kids Yield Crops: In the Garden with Harlem Grown,” Marcus Samuelsson, 12 July 2012. Web. 16 April 2013.http://www.marcussamuelsson.com/food-stories-2/kids-yield-crops-in-the-garden-with-harlem-grown.

[15] Allen, Patricia and Julie Guthman. “Farm-to-School”: Neoliberalization from the Ground Up.” Agriculture and Human Values (2006) 23:401–415, 412.

Non-Fiction February 11, 2013

Rocky’s Manicotti

by Sheila Squillante

For the Batter
6 eggs
Pinch salt
6 heaping tbsp flour
1 ½ cup milk

For the Filling
1 lb ricotta cheese
½ lb mozzarella cheese, shredded
Fresh parsley or 1 tsp dried
3 or 4 eggs
Salt & pepper to taste
¼ cup grated parmesan cheese

Start with the recipe—a dingy yellowed index card transcribed in your own hand at some point in the last—what?—fifteen years, probably. Place it on the counter, read it over, and realize that what you have is only the ingredient list, not the instructions for putting the dish together. Tell yourself you watched your grandfather stand at the stove and make these enough times that you can easily improvise. Remember, though, that he had your grandmother as his “wingman,” so call your husband in and ask him to stand by.

First, make the batter. Beat the eggs in a gleaming silver bowl with your mother’s red silicone whisk. Add milk and wonder if it’s too much—it’s not. It’s supposed to be loose and thin. Add salt and flour, a little at a time, so as to avoid making a mess of lumps.

Or, dump in all the flour at once and curse when you see tiny islands of white floating on an eggy-milk sea. Whisk and whisk and whisk. Decide islands are nice and make the filling. Combine all the filling ingredients and stop yourself from adding dried oregano and garlic powder, even though you are certain it would complement the cheese. Stop yourself because you want to honor your grandfather to the letter even though you are certain he wouldn’t give a hoot, darlin’. He’d just be happy you’re having fun in the kitchen.

Think now, about the kitchen. This one belongs to your mom, who lives on the east coast of Florida, three hours straight across from your grandparents’ home in Port Charlotte, on the west coast. This one is white and red and bright with new appliances. That one is seventies-yellow with worn linoleum and butterfly dishtowels, pilled from years of use.

Or, it was.

The kitchen is still there, of course, but your grandparents are gone two years now and you are making this most iconic dish of theirs in tribute, through some tears and some shame. Tears are easy to come by—you are an easy cry. Shame, though, is new. Shame came unexpectedly a few days ago when you and your husband drove past the abandoned rambler on Quesada Ave. You needed to see it, you told him, and he understood. The only home that had been in your life for your whole life, mortgaged beyond its value in a terrible market, no one to take it on, gone now back to the bank that is too busy to deal with it.

Shame came when you got out of your rental car and walked through the scraggy grass to the screen porch and peered in to find the walls still adorned with your grandparents’ things: a portion of the rubber inner tube your son used as a baby near the now-drained and scummy spa; a wooden sculpture of the California Raisin someone made for them in the 80s (which you always hated); the Pennsylvania Dutch Hex signs you gave them for their sixtieth wedding anniversary—one says their names and wedding date, one says “God Bless This House.”

In the Fantasy of What Could Have Happened Next, maybe you felt a proprietary impulse rise like spa bubbles from the hollow of your chest and you pressed the button on the flimsy door handle and pulled. Locked. Rage and need. Maybe you pulled again and this time maybe it opened. This time maybe you forgot yourself, forgot you were not coming in to your grandparents’ home like you had for thirty years, but were instead trespassing on bank property. In the Fantasy of What Could Have Happened Next, maybe you found yourself standing on the porch, stumbling past the spa and yanking on the kitchen slider. Open. In.

Maybe you stood in your grandparents’ kitchen—empty and moldy now—and tried to remember everything that ever happened there. The phone call you took from the financial aid office about your college scholarship. Your mother making coffee. Your grandmother lifting her skirt up to her knee to show off her “great gams” to your husband while the video camera recorded. Your grandfather standing at the stove making crepe after crepe after crepe, filling them with cheese, layering them with tomato sauce in Pyrex pans. Hours on end.

And that last November: holding his soft, weak hands at the Formica dinette (in the kitchen he swears your father still visits him), while your mother talks to hospice. Telling him his love of sixty-six years is gone.

In the Fantasy of What Could Have Happened Next, maybe you grabbed one of their juice glasses—the red, blue and yellow striped ones they used to take their pills every morning—off the counter and fled back to your rental car, hoping that anyone who saw also saw your sobbing, remembered your grandparents, put two and two together and forgave you your trespasses, even in your shame.

Leave the screen porch, the scraggy grass, Quesada Ave, your grandparents’ and father’s graves just up the road at Restlawn.

Leave the Fantasy and go back to your mother’s kitchen.

Be sure to let the crepe batter come to room temperature before you attempt to cook. Pour a cup of tomato sauce into the bottom of a square baking dish. Heat an 8-inch non-stick pan over medium high heat and brush generously with olive or vegetable oil.

Ladle ½ cup of batter (possibly less) into the bottom of the pan and swirl to coat. Cook until the wet top looks dry-ish. Carefully flip (they shouldn’t be browned) and cook five or so seconds on the other side. Remove to a plate or clean prep surface.

Understand that you are probably going to ruin several of these at the start. The pan will either be not hot enough or not oiled enough or you will rip them upon lifting and will have to fling them, cursing like your grandfather—Yer sister’s got a big one!—into the sink.

Now it’s a dance: put a tablespoon or slightly more of the filling in a line down the middle of the crepe and roll it up. While you are doing this, ladle some more batter, oiling the pan as necessary—which will likely be often– as you go. Place the manicotti into the baking dish as you make them. Resolve that you will be standing at the stove, thinking of your grandparents, Rocky and Jo, for a long time.

When all the manicotti are made and snug in their pan, pour some good red sauce over them and top with some shredded mozzarella. Cover pan with aluminum foil and bake at 350 for 30 minutes, removing the foil in the last ten minutes so the cheese can get all melty and nice.

Let stand on the counter for fifteen minutes before serving to your mother, who cared for your grandparents in the eighteen years of their life between your father’s—their son’s—death and their own, and to your husband, who is very glad you are not in Fantasy Jail.

This essay is part of a book-length memoir, Dead Dad Day: A Memoir of Food and My Father. Sheila’s essays and poems have appeared most recently in places like Brevity, Barrelhouse, The Rumpus, Thrush Poetry Journal, Superstition Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Penn State.

Books & Media March 21, 2012

The Hunger Games and the Politics of Food

from Huffington Post

by Fabio Parasecoli

The media, and fans all over the world, are abuzz with excitement about The Hunger Games, the movie based on Suzanne Collins’ novel, the first within a trilogy with the same name. No need for a spoiler alert: It is the story of a young woman, Katniss Everdeen, who has grown up struggling to provide food for herself and her family in a future, war-torn and battered United States. The events unfold in a nightmarish future in which a tyrannical Capital has imposed its dominion over the rest of the country. Katniss is constantly faced with scarcity of food: The provisions allotted by the Capital are far from sufficient, and many families opt to buy rations of food in exchange to increase their chances to get picked to participate in the sadistic fight-to-the-death Hunger Games, sponsored by the Capital. The competition takes place in an artificial arena dotted with forests and meadows, lakes, streams, and hills, and only one contestant is allowed to come out alive. Katniss finds herself forced to fight for survival, hunting, scavenging, gathering roots and berries, destroying her opponents’ food reserves and, yes, killing.

As any powerful literary dystopia, the book is a reflection not on the future, but on our present. Good science fiction, after all, reminds us that the world we inhabit could have been different, and could still be different. It manages to bring us to temporarily suspend our disbelief, creating worlds that are credible enough to grant us a sense of uncomfortable familiarity. To achieve these effects, sci-fi has often employed food and eating, forcing us to reflect on their relevance for the stability of political and social structures. In the post-disaster America that Katniss inhabits, food is a source of power, the oil that allows the administrative machine to function. Individuals have limited choices: All is decided somewhere else. That is, unless citizens decide to break the rules: Katniss poaches for game in places where she’s not supposed to roam, strategically uses provisions to secure her victory in the arena, and even manages to use food to force her will on the omnipotent authorities.

Katniss’ epic adventures remind us of another great dystopian novel, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which I discuss in my book, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture. Also in Butler’s novel, society collapses on itself because of greed and social unrest. America breaks down into independent gated communities under constant siege from those less fortunate, trying to get their share of wealth and, of course, food. The story is narrated by Lauren Olamina, a young woman who, like the other families in the compound where she lives, tries to make up for the lack of food by growing fruit and vegetables. It is a difficult task for suburbanites, used to buying products from supermarkets; they need to learn from scratch what can be grown in orchards or backyards, and the fruit of their labor is under constant threat from thieves and hungry marauders. With the political body crumbling down, extreme consumerism and the free market show their ugly side, hitting the weakest portions of society while causing scarcity of food and, later, hunger. Food is the only hope for survival and seeds are the promise of future crops. When Lauren’s community is finally invaded, the young girl is as equally affected by the sight of the destroyed crops as by the dead people. She starts traveling, facing the dangers of a land without rules and principles, where all that counts is survival and, consequently, securing the next meal. In Butler’s dim future, the social fabric is frayed, one against another.

In The Hunger Games, Katniss makes her mark in a world where the downtrodden devise tactics to survive in a land controlled by others. We are reminded that when we enter a supermarket, or decide instead to go to a farmers’ market, or join a Community Sustained Project, we enjoy the illusion that we are making choices for ourselves, expressing our own taste and personality. In reality, all available options are pre-determined and pre-packaged by production constraints, political choices, and structural dynamics. In a consumer society where alternative food networks and associations have been built on the premise that we can change the food system one meal at the time and that eating is an agricultural act, Katniss’ adventures remind us that, after all, we are poachers in somebody else’s territory. We cannot always win by fighting in the limited arena we are familiar with; we need to figure out ways to change the whole system outside the arena.

People February 21, 2012

Heritage Radio Network: A Taste of the Past Hosted by Linda Pelaccio, Interview with Fabio Parasecoli

(As seen on the Heritage Radio Network Website)

A Taste of the Past – Episode 89 – Fabio Parasecoli

First Aired – 02/16/2012 12:00PM
Download MP3 (Full Episode)

From food culture in 800BCE to the present day, this week’s episode of A Taste of the Past will take you there. With the help of New School professor of food studies, Fabio Parasecoli, host Linda Pelaccio takes you on a world tour of food globalization throughout major world time periods. Parasecoli, who has also edited an encyclopedic 6-volume tome on the subject– A Cultural History of Food— discusses the rise of food scholarship in major learning institutes around the world as well how food, not just eating, is taking an ever-expanding presence in every aspect of daily life. This episode is sponsored by Fairway Market

“Food has become very important in social and political debates. So my question is were those debates already there at the Roman times, what happened in the middle ages? For example, is the family meal really an institution or did we create it 100 years ago and we just pretend its been there forever?”

–Fabio Parasecoli on A Taste of the Past

Hosted By

Flood Food: How I Discovered a Community Through Gastronomy in the Wake of a Disaster

By Christine Mitchell

When I moved to the seaside Italian village of Monterosso al Mare, I was ready for a lot of things. I was prepared for the buttery summer sun, heaps of pesto coating trofie, and shimmering silvery anchovies topping soft foccacia. I was ready to stretch out on the beach in the morning, splashing in the clear as glass water. My afternoons would be spent learning to cook with the fresh ingredients available at the market as I pursued my quest to discover authentic Ligurian cuisine. I would spend my evenings serving food in a local restaurant to blissful tourists, clinking glasses over a vivid orange sunset. Days off would be happy afternoons on the beach, and long, extravagant dinners with friends at the little restaurants dotting the main street of town, eating under the stars. My first summer in paradise went exactly as planned in my little slice of the Italian Riviera, light on the glitz that covers nearby towns like Portofino, but heavy on the charm.

Monterosso al Mare sits in the Cinque Terre, an Italian National Park and UNESCO world heritage site, nestled in the hills of the Riviera that spill down to the aqua Ligurian Sea. The five isolated fishing villages of the Cinque Terre are all within sight of each other, but maintain their own unique spirit. Pastel colored houses lean on each other in the shadows of hills terraced by vineyards, battered softly by sea spray and summer sun. They sit precariously over the rocky seashore, where instead of falling in, they gently slope to meet cobblestone streets full of lovingly worn fishing boats and friendly cats reaching for scraps. Lemon trees, full of fruit, brush the tops of tourists’ heads as they swarm into the towns all summer snapping pictures, laying on the beach, and in a second, disappearing on the next train.

On October 25^th, 2011, the heaviest flash flooding in the history of Liguria devastated parts of the region. Monterosso was one of the worst hit. The mountains melted into mud, and flowed with the incredible current into town, filling the winding streets with over 10 feet of solid earth. The damage Monterosso sustained was worse than all previous disasters combined, including the devastations of World War II. I looked out the window and saw my street turn into a deadly torrent of mud and water as I saw all the cars, parked helplessly, swept into the sea. The day was spent without water, electricity, and phones, as was the next week. The isolation that makes this touristy region so incredibly special becomes apparent in a dangerous, petrifying way when you need help, and there is no way in or out. Nothing prepared me for the sudden, drastic change of my Italian dream into my Italian nightmare as the “red mountains by the sea,” that gave Monterosso al Mare it’s name, became the very thing that almost destroyed it.

The next day revealed a tentative, apologetic sun, as stunned residents left their houses, digging out their front doors and realizing the scope of the damage. The ground underneath us was debris and twisted pieces of street atop of an unforgiving tower of mud, in some places over 10 feet high. We cautiously walked eye level with the second story of the houses and buildings in town. Lives were lost- both in the sense of livelihoods and investments, as well as in the literal sense – the community lost a beloved volunteer in the current who was trying to clear drainage. That day was a miserable haze that faded into night, and I met up with friends in the destroyed streets of the town center. Muddy, exhausted, with flashlights and haunted faces, we hugged each other shakily, mute in our feeling of loss.

We could do little, waiting for the train tunnel to be cleared and the road to be dug out so simple supplies like shovels could arrive. What we could do, at that moment, was the most important thing.

Eat.

With a tank almost empty of kerosene, we found a burner and a huge pot. Pasta was hunted down, and as a community, Monterosso dined by flashlight in the mud, for the first of what would be many times. When it seemed like we had so little left, the idea of a hot meal gained monumental importance. “Breaking bread with friends” took on a new meaning for me that night.

Emergency crews arrived a few days later, and by the end of the week, Monterosso was supplied with two huge tents for the west and the east sides of town, as we continued to struggle without water and electricity. The act of eating together, crammed on picnic benches, with plastic cups of local wine, became our escape from the hard work of digging the town out, literally, with our bare hands. The seats in the tent became seats to the best (and only) meal in town. Next to that deceptively still Ligurian sea, there were no relaxed sunset dinners, but plenty of relieved smiles. Grandmothers ate at long tables with their hyper grandchildren. The exhausted town priest, sleeves rolled up just like the rest of us, sat down to inhale warm food. Volunteers from all over Italy, staying with us as we rebuilt, happily joined the residents. They might have been unfamiliar with the local dishes, but the warm sentiment of sharing a meal is international. Jokes were shared, plates were passed – over dinner, these strangers became our brothers in the mud.

Restaurants that still had doors opened them, becoming warehouses for donated food and water, and staging areas for the hot meals served in the tents. With a nod to the long history of the cuisine of the mountains and the sea, it was here I was able to truly taste the flavors of Liguria through the food of the flood. Cima, a meatloaf of sorts, sliced thin, or pansotti served with a wild boar ragu, caught in the woods a short hike away. Salted anchovies, that had held this region together through lean winter times for centuries, and warming minestrone, a medley of vegetables and dried beans cooked thoroughly to make a filling soup. The Italian food philosophy of eating what was seasonal and local served Monterosso well, and there was nowhere more evident then in these tents that the food history of the region was, in fact, a simple and hearty peasant food.

Long before the hordes of tourists, Liguria was a poor region that could sustain itself only on what it could produce. Again, isolated and alone after the flood, Monterosso never forgot its culinary heritage. It had been present all along on the tables of family meals, and here again, it was what people turned to for sustenance and something familiar, something comforting, in a time where the whole world seemed to have turned upside-down. In sparse times, when a town is stubbornly unwilling to disappear into the disaster submerging it, the idea of a satisfying meal takes on a whole new meaning. People, like their ancestors before them, provided food as a means of fuel for the hard work ahead, and these simple, traditional dishes provided a shared history that helped everyone remember what we were trying to save.

The tents remained up for months. They served as a Church for Christmas, a concert hall for musicians from around Italy who came to play, a meeting hall as residents started trying to sort out insurance policies, a dance club on New Year’s Eve and still, where we all came together to eat. For this small community, a meal served as a reminder of what we were lucky to still have. The beach was no longer full of colorful umbrellas, but covered in villagers waterlogged possessions and shattered pieces of homes. The lemon trees sagged into the weight of the flood. The pastel houses now seemed to lean a little closer to each other, no longer gently sloping into the lively streets below. They were now holding on to each other for support, grieving, but still staying strong, like the Monterossini.

In the battered white tents we ate the food of the flood, but also the food of a region that had to deal with rocky soil and a sometimes-harsh sea, and now a disaster of unimagined severity. In searching for the best restaurant and that perfect Italian culinary experience, I instead saw, in the midst of a muddy field of broken lives, a community pick itself up from the rubble while passing plates. It’s through this flood food that I saw the heritage of Monterosso, and I felt incredibly proud to have those people around me. It’s true that “tutto il male non va per nuocere” (“every cloud has a silver lining”) and I learned how food and community go hand in hand, especially in my little slice of the Italian Riviera.

Having traveled to Italy almost every year since she was 15 years old, Christine Mitchell one of the many who fall hopelessly in love with the country. She packed up her life in New York City and New Jersey, after completing her Masters Degree in Food Studies/Culture at New York University, and moved to the village of Monterosso al Mare in the Cinque Terre.