Accept No Substitutions

Breakfast.

Nutritionists consider it the most important meal of the day.

According to WebMD (which cites many scientifically based resources), breakfast not only gives you the calories to function throughout the day, but helps with weight control, focus, and the endurance to deal with even the most recalcitrant of students.

But to Damien and me, breakfast means more. You see, we live largely separate lives. I frequently leave before he is even awake in the morning. Between grading, planning, and 9:30 pm ‘emergency’ calls from Damien’s Left Coast boss, our evenings are shot. Since he works for a multinational company with accounts (and therefore crises) that span five continents and a multitude of time zones, and I work for a high school scheduled to start before many cubicle grunts have their first cup of coffee, we rarely even go to bed at the same time.

That is why Saturday morning breakfast is so important to us. Every Saturday we frequent one of several local diners and have a leisurely meal, just the two of us. This is a time when cell phones and email go unanswered; papers go ungraded. In short, we unplug from the rest of our lives in order to reestablish ourselves as a couple.

Weekend breakfast has been ever thus in my life. Growing up I remember both my parents (but especially my mom) making hot breakfast on Saturday mornings and eating together as a family. Pancakes, eggs, French toast - complicated dishes that our over-stretched schedule couldn’t manage during the work week - weighed down our kitchen table, slowing down our day.

As we grew up, and necessarily apart, the weekend breakfasts still brought my family together. We each began to develop our own dishes. Cody learned the recipe for Grandma’s Swedish roll up pancakes and developed his own magic one for French toast. Papa Bear and I spent about a month tweaking scrambled egg recipes, adding our own delicious supplements, including a plethora of leftovers.

Family breakfast was so important to me that the morning of my wedding, my mom scrambled up a breakfast for me and my bridesmaids - a symbolic farewell to my childhood before the whole white dress and long aisle event.

Breakfast is a respite, a sheltered calm in our ordinarily chaotic lives. With all this going for it, it seems like we would try to have breakfast more often. Yet throughout the week, time slips away. I know that personally I hit the snooze for another nine minutes of pillow time rather than nudging Damien and sitting down for a brief breakfast.

Instead, I toss cereal and a bottle of OJ in my bag, or I hit the congregation of fast food places right outside my neighborhood. The offerings at these places make me think about weekend breakfasts. Each advertises its wares using images of uncracked eggs, hunks of cheese, and real bacon. They also show families enjoying their food together. It seems to me that the manufacturers of these poor, prefabricated concoctions are trying to create the big box version of what Damien and I experience on Saturday mornings. In our super-charged, hyper-fast society these breakfasts are being marketed as portion controlled interpersonal connections. The message is that in lieu of actually being able to take a time out, people can experience a facsimile of the slow food – trying to cram leisure and connection into their already overloaded PDAs.

The problem is, you can’t manufacture connection. Mass-produced leisure is not leisurely. And facsimiles of breakfast will only leave you fat yet unsated. Our society of quick-fix satisfaction leaves us unsatisfied. Breakfast is only one example. The salty substitutes concocted to imitate something genuine permeate every aspect of our culture.

I, for one, choose to reject the plastic. What Damien and I have on the weekends is precious. It is something that, like my mom’s scrambled eggs and Cody’s French toast, deserves to be honored; preserved – not disrespectfully imitated. If, by some miracle, my husband and I wake up together during the week, I will gladly sacrifice those few moments of pillow time for a brief breakfast with him. Furthermore, I will be infinitely more satisfied with that stolen moment of joy than with 100 re-warmed egg and cheese sandwiches.

This quest for the genuine should stretch beyond just the morning. We should have a war on every front against the notion that something that has been mass-produced in the most cost efficient way and consumed as quickly as possible can stand as a suitable substitute for the individual experience of a ‘made from scratch’ meal, enjoyed slowly across the table from a loved one. This notion is a crime against food, families, and flavor, and I won’t stand for it.

I am going to begin a personal food revolution, and I will start with breakfast.

It is, after all, the most important meal of the day.

You Are Where You Eat

Allow me to introduce myself (although if you are reading this, you probably know me already and find the pretense of a pseudonym beyond ridiculous). I am a 27-year-old high school English teacher living in a former industrial hub of the Northeast. I was born and raised in the Midwest, however, and went to college in Maryland.

Food featured prominently throughout my formative years, and I began to notice a difference between the cuisines served by my WASPy maternal grandparents and my father’s Keillor-esque relatives. As I ventured further afield, I discovered even greater variation such as Maryland Crab Cakes and Yankee Pot Roast. While engaged in this personal discovery, I simultaneously became aware of the ‘eat humane’ and ‘eat local’ food movements that have gained popularity in the last decade or so. This came to a head in late 2008 when my family began to prepare for our first truly ‘blended’ Christmas Dinner.

In 2008 both my older brother and I each got married. While each of our spouses had visited my parents’ house for prior holiday feasts, this was the first where they would be expected to transcend that intangible yet frequently insurmountable barrier between ‘guest,’ and ‘family.’ As we began to plan this theoretically blissful joint celebration, it turned out that there were questions beyond simply how to prepare the turkey (roasted or deep-fried) and what stuffing is appropriate (cornbread? Sage? Oyster? Stovetop?). The most interesting question was raised by an email that my older brother Karl sent out in mid December. Along with ideas about turkey, stuffing and dessert, he added this input:

“We West Coasters are striving to eat seasonally, so to the extent we can jive that with Christmas and our other dinners, I'd certainly like to. Therefore, any good winter veggies or starches would be a good starting point for other dishes.”

I suppose it should be noted that Karl, his wife Allie, and my younger brother Cody live in the heart of San Francisco and would be flying in several days prior to Christmas.

What ensued was a debate over exactly what was ‘seasonal’ in Michigan in December. While our forefathers (and mothers) ate squash, potatoes, and rutabaga during the winter, they did not harvest them in December but rather spend the greater part of the fall preparing them for long-term storage. I shot back a snarky (read ‘bitchy’) email that questioned the seasonal nature of any winter crop in Michigan. Allie, with her trademark good naturedness, replied with a t-chart of food seasonally available in Michigan and California. On the California side, she listed a plethora of delicious treats available nearly year round in that welcoming clime; on the Michigan side she listed one item: Christmas trees. She then suggested the possibility of deep-frying a Christmas tree as the seasonal Michigan contribution to our festivities - hence the name of this blog.

To me, this incident underscores the difference between the principles of the west coast locavore movement and the reality of living in the Midwest, the Northeast, or any other region subjected to more climate variations than the Bay Area.

In this project, I propose to explore food and its relationship to place, income, time of life, and family. Barbara Kingsolver suggested that, as a nation, we are lacking a food culture. I don’t believe that, but perhaps with seasonal and occasional food that is now available year round and formerly fresh food that has been processed within in an inch of its life, we have lost our way. Part of my goal, therefore, is to rediscover a healthy American food culture. Short of that, I would like to create an Eggleston family food culture that incorporates my Midwestern upbringing, my husband Damien’s Maryland heritage, and the place in which we currently reside. So grab a plate and a micro brew and come along. Let the questing begin.