On Grocery Shopping + Beefy French Onion Soup
Don't let a stranger be the one who chooses your avocados
My friend Matt wrote recently about how we truly are what we eat. About how, now, “more than ever, it’s abundantly clear that what we eat affects, among other things, our physical health, our mental health, our energy levels, and our mood.” He writes, in the terrific North Bridger Bison newsletter, about how whole food, real food, is best to nourish the body1.
I won’t rehash his entire argument, which you should read yourself, but I’ll mention his underappreciated point: in order for food to be nourishing, it needs to come from a nourishing environment. There is, as Matt exclaims, a difference between crops grown in healthy soil and those grown on a synthetically fertilized monoculture farm. There’s a difference between meat from animals raised on native grasses and those raised on artificially fortified feed. You might not be able to see the differences under a microscope, might not be able to fully quantify the differences in the lab, but you can certainly taste the differences, feel the effects they have on your body2.
I’ve spent the last couple months feeling like I really got myself on to something with this idea of Radical Eating — with the idea that you need to eat with an awareness of these nebulous things like soil health, regenerative ranching, and the differences between local vs. imported food. But then, the other night, finishing up Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, I come across this, first published seventy-five years ago in 1949:
[There] is value in any experience that reminds us of our dependency on the soil-plant-animal-man food chain, and of the fundamental organization of the biota. Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry. Time was when education moved toward soil, not away from it. The nursery jingle about bringing home a rabbit skin to wrap the baby bunting in is one of many reminders in folk-lore that man once hunted to feed and clothe his family.
And later on:
Your true modern [man] is separated from the land by so many middlemen… [he] has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow.
So much for original thought3.
This isn’t to say that we should forgo the bounties of the modern food system. As much as I’d like to source all our food locally, ourselves whenever possible, that just doesn’t work for the vast majority of people. But what we can do, to reap those nourishing benefits of food, is be a little more conscientious about how we eat. If you can, and it’s available to you, buy locally and organically — or even better, regeneratively grown or raised — food instead of conventionally grown. Instead of industrially produced food “products” — grown with produce from synthetically fertilized soil on a monocrop farm and put together in a food lab — choose whole foods you can process yourself, however you’d like, in your own kitchen.
Even more simply: Do your own grocery shopping. As convenient as it is to load up an order on Amazon Prime or Instacart4, by doing so, you let slip one more link between you and your food. Doing so makes it easier to let the foods you eat become abstractions. When you go to the grocery store, walk down the aisles, it forces you to see what you’re consuming, to see and feel the produce, the meat5, all the different things that get thrown in your cart. This certainly isn’t growing your own food, raising your own animals — but there is a level of accountability, of responsibility when you do so. An Instacart shopper has no real incentive to pick out the best vegetables, the unbruised tomatoes, the ripest avocados — they’re just checking items off a list. But you have a responsibility to yourself and family to get the best ingredients you can. Coming home with moldy berries or an underripe peach means one less snack for Kiddo and the ensuing wails6. Maybe the stakes aren’t as high as a successful harvest or hunt — but they are still stakes.
Radical eating is getting closer to your food, whatever that means to you. For some it might be thinking more about what Matt is talking about and rethinking the types of produce and meat you buy. For others, it might be visiting a nearby farm for the first time; for other, growing your own food. It might be hunting the grocery aisles instead of ordering on Instacart, touching, smelling, recognizing your food before bringing it home. There are hundreds of ways to radically change the way you eat — you just need to commit to making a shift.
So there’s my pontificating for the week. Let’s make something to eat, and let’s make it radical. Spring is about to rear it’s head, where we dip into the first harvests of the year — but for now, we’re still working through the winter larder. Onions galore. Some chuck roast in the freezer. Some locally grown mushrooms.
That’s right: we’re making a heartier spin on French Onion Soup, equal parts New York Times, Six Seasons, and CWD.
Salt a large chuck roast and let come to room temperature. Thinly slice as many onions as you can muster into half-moons7. Place a dollop of butter and a slug of olive oil in a cast-iron pan and bring to medium heat. Cook the onions slowly, stirring occasionally, until they start melting into themselves, but not quite taking on color8. As they begin to brown, cook about a pound of mushrooms in another pan, sauteeing until all their liquid has evaporated and they get fully browned and crispy. Deglaze the mushroom pan with red wine9, and then dump everything in with the onions. Bring this to high heat and let the onions take on some more color, then deglaze with even more red wine and dump into a crock pot/slow cooker.
Add some butter or ghee to the pan the onions were just in and let get hot. Brown the chuck roast on all sides, then add that on top of the onions and mushrooms. Pour into the cast iron pan 3-4 cups of bone broth and deglaze the pan again — scrapping up the browned bit — and pour into the slow cooker. Add some more liquid to cover the meat by at least a third, and then cook on low for 6-8 hours until the beef easily shreds.
Serve with fresh bread topped with broiled gruyere cheese.
So there you go folks, an exceptionally hearty onion soup. We used chuck roast here, but I think it would go well with most large working cuts of red meat. If you have something bone-in, that will only add to the depth of the broth.
With that, I’ll leave you to your weekends. It’s March — act like it. The Family CWD will be belatedly ordering seeds for the garden, taking down remnant Christmas lights, trying to make the most of whatever weather we get.
Whatever your weekend hands you, enjoy it.
If it happens to be regeneratively raised bison, all the better.
Leopold, obviously, opines on Matt’s point as well.
[There] is new evidence that poundage… is no measure of the food-value of farm crops; the products of fertile soil may be qualitatively as well as quantitatively superior. We can bolster poundage from depleted soils by pouring on imported fertility, but we are not necessarily bolstering food-value.
This doesn’t surprise me, since I’ve heard Matt speak and write about Leopold’s influence on him — his recommendation was the final push that shoved me aboard the Aldo-train. No looking back now!
And we’re guilty of doing this too — especially when we’re coming off of our normal routine.
Though maybe don’t start grasping the raw meat behind the butcher counter.
The consequences can be even more dire for meat… not that I have any experience with that!
I used about three pounds, six or seven small-ish onions.
This could take maybe forty-five minutes, but it’s worth it.
You could use sherry or bourbon here for a slightly richer flavor.
Oh...I did not get my dibs in first....Sam, I'm talking to YOU.
OK. I am radical in the grocery store. I touch, feel, search, inspect everything, including canned vegetables, which I will now check to see if any of those are regeneratively grown. Hooray--I am so into radical eating! No one dares to select and deliver my food, even my paper towels are hand-picked.
Remember that elaborate "innovative Hydroponic System" of growing vegetables and fruit without soil at Epcot? They made a ride through the whole "garden," and one of the restaurants claimed its fame by only serving its own hydroponically-grown foods? No soil needed. How does this fit into Matt's theory of the necessity of a nourishing environment? I don't think those tomatoes, peppers, beans, eggplants, lettuce, etc. were ever shown any love.
But you, I love without bounds.
picking your own avocados as a gateway drug to growing your own veggies as a gateway drug to getting goats as a gateway drug to starting a bison ranch in New England with your friend Lou