City Picklers: Reviving local food, one pickle at a time
Citypicklers.com: Reviving local food, one pickle at a time
April 2008, multimedia story
Driven by the local food movement, pickling is making a comeback on home countertops and in gourmet grocery aisles. The website, citypicklers.com, crunches on the pickle’s impact on New York culture, health and community.
I produced this multimedia story with Lizzie Stark.
From Homeland to New York, Pickles Keep Culture Alive
The produce inside the 72nd Street Fairway market in Manhattan never changes. Cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes fill the vegetable aisle, and the smell of strawberries and fresh herbs waft through the air. Once thought of as summer treats, these fresh vegetables are available to New Yorkers year-round courtesy of food corporations that ship food to wherever it is wanted from wherever it is in season.
In the face of such bounty, the traditional method of preserving local, seasonal vegetables through the winter – pickling – seems nearly obsolete. In New York City, why go to the trouble of jarring cucumbers? And furthermore, in an age where much food is pre-packaged and ready-to-microwave, who even knows how to make a pickle?
But driven by the local food movement, pickling is making a comeback - at home, in pickling classes offered around the city and at locally-conscious restaurants.
Heritage
Executive chef Matt Weingarten calls his wife’s hometown of Litmanova, Slovakia, “a place lost in time.” Villagers from this town near the Polish border drink sauerkraut juice - not orange juice - for Vitamin C during winter months. Oranges must be shipped to Litmanova, while sauerkraut, made from fermented local cabbage, is cheap, readily available and traditional.
In fact, like sauerkraut in Eastern Europe, most cultures have their own pickles, and pickles such as Korean kimchi or Indian green mango pickles, are often emblematic of a culture’s cuisine. For decades, immigrants have carried their cuisines’ defining pickles to New York, where their culinary traditions continue, reminding new Americans of their old homes. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan wrote, “the immigrant’s refrigerator is the very last place to look for signs of assimilation.”
But in two or three generations, this knowledge is lost. CityPicklers.com interviewed 20 Indian and Pakistani immigrants on the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens, and while nearly everyone remembered homemade green mango pickles, only a handful of first-generation immigrants kept home-pickling alive, and no second-generation immigrants pickled at all.
According to fermentation expert Sandor Ellix Katz, the mere memory of homemade pickles lingers. “I meet lots of people, particularly old people, that have a memory – annual wine making, annual pickle making, sourdough they kept baking every week,” Katz said, noting that in many cases, immigrant grandparents do not pass the customs and traditions of the old world on to the next generation.
Loss
Pickling “connects you to your place,” said Eugenia Bone, author of the forthcoming cookbook Urban Preservation. In an effort to eat seasonally, the local food movement has rediscovered pickling as a method of preserving the summer’s bounty for the winter. In 2007 the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of year was “locavore,” someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within a certain distance, such as 100 miles.
Members of the local food movement believe that eating local food in season reduces a person’s carbon footprint, avoiding the resources expended as produce travels hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles by plane, train or truck to reach supermarkets.
Health is another pressing concern. Bone said that the end product of the corporate food chain is diabetes and obesity. Katz noted that boxed, irradiated and pasteurized foods lack beneficial bacteria, and are, in fact, dead. He said that those who consume only factory-made food become “microbial blank slates,” with weak immune systems susceptible to disease. Pickles and other traditional fermented foods can help replenish the intestinal bacteria that aid in digestion.
New York University food historian Gabriella Petrick pointed out that corporate food isn’t all bad, connecting supermarket chains to lower food prices, which translate into affordable meals for the poor.
Still, Robert LaValva, director of New Amsterdam Market, a nonprofit organization dedicated to establishing a year-round public market on the site of the old Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan, romanticizes about a time when local farms fed city neighborhoods. LaValva holds the relationship between farm and city on par with cultural institutions like the Sistine Chapel in Rome. “It’s part of our humanity, it’s part of our society,” he said. “You should treasure and preserve it.”
Revival
Home pickling is making a comeback - whether it’s fermentation revivalists like Katz, who travels the country speaking about fermented food; pickling classes at the Natural Gourmet Institute, a culinary school; or the monthly pickling and fermentation parties Taylor Cocalis, 24, educational coordinator for Murray’s Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village, plans for friends in her Park Slope apartment.
The pickle complements the New York City lifestyle, according to Nancy Ralph, founder of the New York Food Museum, whose annual Pickle Day in July draws crowds of up to 20,000. “If you make food every night, pickling won’t work,” Ralph said. “Living in New York City, you may not cook every night – all the reason to pickle.” A jar in the refrigerator can perk up last night’s leftovers or provide tasty late-night snacks.
Home pickling is also an alternative for New Yorkers who have little room to tend a garden. “For most people in an apartment in New York City, it’s a lot easier to imagine having a half gallon of sauerkraut fermenting on a countertop than it is to have a garden,” said Katz. “That’s a direct connection to the source of food that anybody – no matter how cramped their living space is – can integrate into their lives.”
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