Donuts (Ντόνατς)

Friday is usually souvlaki night in our house. I know that sounds very western, having a 'junk food night'; I like to refer to it in this way because it sounds very trendy, at the same time as restrictive: you can't have a souvlaki unless it's Friday. It's the end of the week, the weekly routine has worn us out, and we want something 'easy', 'cheap', 'tasty', 'able to be eaten with the fingers' (but we still sit at the table to eat it) and 'not requiring cleaning up' (and we still bring out a plate to place it on), and above all 'uplifting'. Souvlaki has all these things. It's kind of like a McDonalds happy meal, only that it contains 'real food' which is likened to junk food because it is cooked and served quickly. So when I go to pick up the kids from their sports clubs, I buy the souvlaki on the way.

"Mum, I was wondering... Can we try that new donuts place?... You said we'd try them some time... We could have donuts instead of souvlaki..." My daughter was in the car with me. She had been talking about this new donuts parlour for a while now. According to her daily descriptions of what goes on at school, kids bring these donuts with them as part of their school meals. I am not surprised to hear this: most kids eat a heap of mass-produced junk as part of their school meals every day, and I am witness to this happening when I take my kids to school and see what the other kids are carrying in their hands. My daughter is still at primary school, so she still sees lunchboxes (at high school, lunchboxes are not 'cool'). It sounds like a nightmare scenario: mass-produced donuts are going into Cretan kids' lunchboxes...

I found it difficult to say no, because I had indeed 'promised' to do this one day, and anyway, I wanted to see what the big fuss was all about with these donuts. They are made by a well-known Greek company, and a branch had opened up in Hania only about a month or so ago. I had only ever seen them once before, when my daughter was given one of these donuts by someone celebrating their birthday at her sports club. I had had a tiny little bite, and yes, I am delighted to say that they tasted quite good, and they had that donut aroma that I remembered from New Zealand, which is probably the last time I had an American-style donut. Greek bakeries do in fact sell large round donuts (which we call λουκουμά - lou-kou-MA) with a hole in the middle, and they taste OK, but they don't taste like American-style donuts. Never having been to America, I can't say I really know what an American-style donut really tastes like, but New Zealand had always followed on from the trending global food of the modern world throughout the late 20th century, so that I can probably say I have a fair idea of what an American-style donut tastes like. We were also exposed to the branded food stores very early on, which are still a novelty in places like Hania, where any item in the store tastes the same no matter where you find yourself in the world. 

Donuts are something like a snack; I didn't like the idea of replacing the souvlaki with this sweet spongy thing, which I somehow knew my husband would not be enarmoured by. Neither did I really want a donut myself at that moment. But there are some things you do for your kids, and living in the real world is very important, especially during this difficult time for Greece, as Greeks are being forced to accept that the world beyond thier borders is invading the world within their borders, at a faster pace than most Greeks can handle. I left the western world over two decades ago and embraced the idiosyncratic disconnected world of Greece because I preferred the lifestyle, but this can no longer continue. It's an anytime, anywhere world now, everywhere, and through the www, which is basically acessible to anyone, everyone knows what everyone else is doing and eating. The donuts shop is the latest food trend in town. It's an experience; for the novice, it's a bit like going to a McDonalds or a Starbucks for the first time in your life, when a new one opens in your neighbourhood. You don't necessarily go for the hamburger or the coffee - you go for the experience.

So we drive to the donuts store, park the car and enter the store. The first thing I noticed was how busy it was, with customers coming in and out. The store is only a small outlet; there is a row of freezers against the wall behind the small counter, a woman at the cash register, and a man who simply takes your order (there is a limited product range), takes the donuts out of the freezer and wraps them up for you in a little parcel (which reminded me of a packet of fish and chips) and places them in a plastic bag. Yes, the donuts - all of them - are in the freezer. Nothing is sold 'fresh', only 'fresh frozen'. The donuts are made in the company's Athens headquarters and frozen immediately, they are then transported frozen throughout the country, and customers buy frozen donuts in various sizes, falvours and packaging. So the donut is not an on-the-go snack - you buy the donut to eat it later (that's not what I recall about the donuts I ate in New Zealand)

Post by Organically Cooked.

More information on the Greek donuts company can be found on this post from my facebook site.

For me, the donut store felt like a deja vu experience. It reminded me of the late 1970s when, in my young teens, I entered the doors of a McDonalds restaurant for the first time, and ate my first McDonalds hamburger at Courtenay Place. Back then, mass-produced hamburgers and fries were regarded not so much as a global food trend, but a significant part of western culture. Having a McDonalds in your town was a sign of progress. We even ate at McDonalds as a family, as a break from routine, about twice a month. What was different back then was that there was no backlash against junk food, mass-produced food, technologically-produced food, hi-carb, hi-fat and hi-sugar food/drink. A McDonalds meal was seen as a perfect way to find something to eat when you were on the go the whole day and you didn't have time to cook. Large portions of fries and drinks were seen as 'value for money', not excess calorie agents. McDonalds was cheap and affordable, it had a dining area, and it also acted as a pick-me-up centre, somewhere you could grab a coffee, use the bathroom and continue on your way. They were not an eating experience; they carried a functional purpose.

Mega corporations and fast food chains are now being chastised for various reasons. Now that we live in a better informed and more transparent society, where companies have websites which tell you what ingredients your choice of mass- and technologically-produced, hi-carb, hi-fat, hi-sugar food/drink contains (the donuts under discussion are all made with margarine), and we hear stories every day about the dangers of mass- and technologically-produced, hi-carb, hi-fat, hi-sugar food/drink, you'd think that people would choose a healthier product over a margarine-based donut. You'd think that they'd prefer a local snack (like dakos) instead of a donut that has travelled 300 kilometres to reach the customer. You'd think that this mass-producing food operation would be snubbed over some eaterie that produces fresh food snacks.

But that isn't happening. Despite knowing what is good for us, we want what is not so good for us, adn we are all entitled to our choice. It's kind of scary seeing how people queue up to pick up junk. But that's just the company's policy: their branches only open 2-3 hours in the evening, and no time else, fooling people into believing that the queues show how popular their product is (a very clever marketing ploy). Not only that, but these donuts are cheap, so cheap (and filling, with all those fatty sugary carbs) that conceivably, you could eat them every day, especially in a crisis. 70 cents for - how many calories? Those donuts are larger than the average-sized American-style donut I remember. Dunkin Donuts seems to average them at 300 calories each, but these ones must have at least 400-500 calories... What's more, they don't taste so bad. Why eat something good for you when you can eat cheap'n'tasty junk? More importantly, this business is doing well in the crisis. It's got a winning formula. For the long-term worrier, though, it probably doesn't intend to expand beyond the Greek border (the level of English on the website is shocking, it doesn't accept online orders and it doesn't have outlets abroad), so growth stops here, I guess.

But for now, the donuts business is a sure winner. It also gives us a taste of the future - food will be cheap, full of carbs and mass-produced. This has already happened in the world, but don't forget, I am talking about Greece; we were a bit slow to catch on. Somewhere in my reading, I recall a story about how human beings were born to evolve into carb-eaters - evolution is not about chewing your food slowly, but gulping it down quickly. And in another story, I recall reading about how the human brain is actually very lazy - if it doesn't need to work hard, it won't. It seems our apathy is just a sign of human nature...

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Ready food (Έτοιμα φαγητά)

The more Westernised/globalised people become, the more animal-loving they become, the fewer animals species they eat, the more animal species they treat as pets, and the less they want to see any animal staring at them on their plate. But the more Westernised/globalised people become, the more meat they also eat, especially people who come from non-Western countries; meat on your plate is a sign of wealth. Even vegetarians want to eat meat, which is why fake meat is a top seller, hence the sale of vegetarian sausages and hamburgers. The Chinese are classics in this art, preparing a gluten dough made from flour, and disguising it in the shape of an animal. This kind of food is favoured by vegetarians who want the illusion of eating meat without actually eating meat. But it's also possible to use it in a 'meat' dish that has been falsely labelled, leading to food fraud.

Genuine fake chicken

Westerners find the idea of eating food that looks like animals repugnant. They want to eat meat that doesn't look like the animal it came from. It's difficult to know how they became so fussy; one reason may be linked to the fact that nowadays, more and more people around the world are used to seeing their meat in the form of packaged parcels, which hide the provenance of those processed parcels - where they came from and how they got into the plastic packaging is not their concern, and the less often we can see the origin in our food, the more we become detached to it. The bones of the meat are removed wherever possible from packaged meat, which again gives the illusion of not eating an animal, but some kind of 'natural' food item; it makes the meat feel like a soft tasty edible commodity that grew in the same way as a fruit or vegetable.

Unmentionables

Westerners don't expect to see heads and testicles on their plate unless they've ordered them. But they would also be quite naive if they believed that the meat from the head or testicle of an animal is not getting into their food if they eat any form of processed meat. You really have no idea what salami, sausages, ready-minced meat (fresh or frozen), prepared meals containing mince (lasagne, moussaka, pastitsio, frozen meatballs and burger patties, etc) contains, apart from looking at the labeling  and now with the horsemeat scandal, we have clear proof that the modern food chain was never trustworthy because trust is fluid concept. Food labels  were never really reliable.

Travel broadens the mind, and ones taste buds. The best Greek sausages come from Karpenisi in Central Greece, as we found out during a summer holiday. Last Christmas, I got a friend to send me sausages made by local small producers in the area - for the size of the town (1000 town residents, not including outlying regions), they produce a lot. 

The minced meat and sausage industries must be the two most controversial processed meat works in the world. The ingredients are so finely chopped/minced/processed, that there is no way the average human being can have any idea about the contents of the final product, except to read the label, which can only be believed by trusting it, not be testing it. Mechanically recovered meat is a highly controversial process, and its final product is often called desinewed meat, slime and slurry. It sounds disgusting, which is where its controversy is derived; it is not approved for use in all food production or even in all countries, but it is still being used in the making of minced meat products. This goes by largely undetected; even DNA tests cannot tell you if meat is mechanically recovered (they can only tell you if it is horse, beef or chicken). Once you mix your slurry with other ingredients in items such as sausages, it is virtually impossible to separate them.

I made these meatballs yesterday - apart from cornmeal, onion, leek, parsley, cumin, salt and pepper, they contain all the meat obtained from a goat's head (including the brain, eyes and  tongue). And they were incredibly tasty.

Westerners have an uptight belief in the power of the wording of a label, and they see it as their right to know what they are eating. Their uncompromising reliance on the label is mainly due to the fact that Westerners are the least likely to live and/or work in rural areas of their countries, and to be involved directly or indirectly with their food chain, which is very long and very complicated. But few of them have any involvement in their food chain. As an example, internet figures reveal that in the UK, 80% of the population live in urban settings; in the US, it's 85%; in Australia, it's 90%. In  Greece, it's been 35-45% for the last 50 years, which means that there is at least 1 person working in the food industry and/or agriculture for every 3 people in the country. The food chain in Greece can therefore afford to be shorter.

Ready meals in Greece: they're generally not of the heat and eat variety (you still have to cook them) - and they are definitely not cheap, as ready foods are in Northern Europe.

The truth is that we all want to spend less time pissing around in the kitchen, because of the more interesting diversions that exist in our world. We are all more sedentary these days, because nearly everyone in the world now has some kind of access to computers or smart phones which take out the hassle of the most basic transaction, costing us less personal energy spent. This takes time away from cooking from scratch. Some form of ready meal is our future: it suits the developed world. The kinds of ready meals that are eaten by different cultures can differ vastly, but they do the same job. Ready meals are also undoubtedly cheaper, mainly because, at present, it's hard to question their contents, so really, anything could go into them, and it probably does, at the lowest cost:

 "There isn't cheap beef to be found anywhere," he says. "But we still believe that ready meals can be made as cheaply as they always have been."

Wait till you can print food in the same way that you can do 3D-printing these days - you'll be standing at a machine watching your food get printed. Personally, I don't think food can get cheaper for me where I am at the moment, than making it myself at home, using the fresh food we grow ourselves, and supplementing it with local sourcing of whatever we don't, together with a few staples like flour, rice, pasta and bread. No ready meals can beat the quality of my own cooking. Except perhaps a good sausage from Karpenisi, and Boxerchips crisps, but they are special cases of ready meals.

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Pitch dark (Πίσα σκοτάδι)

As I left the house with my daughter last night to take her to basketball training, I noticed how eerily dark the streets looked without any street lighting. Random strikes by the public power corporation were taking place all over the town, due to action taken by employees over salary cuts and loss of privileges. The basketball coaching session was taking place in the school gymnasium of a semi-urban semi-rural area, with low housing and large open fields with short olive trees. The only lights came from the few cars that passed through the blackness, and a fire that was lit by the side of a large empty square by a convoy of travelling people (to use the euphemism for politically correct reasons - τσιγγάνοι describes them as they would know themselves). 

It was pitch dark when we got there. Driving on rural roads in the dark is quite unnerving, especially now that more cyclists are on the road. They use tiny lights that make them stand out on a reasonably lit road - but barely visible on an unlit one. The school, being part of the public grid, was enveloped in darkness. There were no emergency lights in the gym, only the school buildings next to it. The coach got the girls together near the doorway. It was a very warm night. She gave them a pep talk and held a discussion about the hows and whys of being part of a team, playing competitively and fairly, and making a good impression wherever they played. This continued for 40 minutes, until the coach finally called off the training session. She had done her best, but I could tell that even she had felt beaten that evening. The girls didn't notice - they were too busy watching the loiterers outside the gym, who were chanting 'Δεύτε λάβετε φως' while shining their mobile phone torch lights at the gym entrance.  

Arriving back home, I found my husband fumbling in the dark trying to find candles. Then I heard him swearing as he tried to find a lighter. Not being smokers, we couldn't remember the last time we needed to use one ourselves. He'd been varnishing shutters all day in 30C heat - despite it being mid-autumn - while he too was on strike - and he really wanted to take a shower, but found the darkness overwhelming.

My mother never used her silver. It was purely for decorative purposes. I inherited this candelabra with the original candles (red) she had placed in it when it sat on one of the nestled tables in our New Zealand living room. In Greece, it found its calling.

The family gathered in the living room, the only room that I allowed them to use candles, out of fear that the children would see them as a toy and set fire to the house. I brought out some potato chips to life their spirits, as junk food usually has that effect.

"Bloody bastards," my husband fumed, "couldn't they at least warn us where and when the power will be disconnected, so that we could at least plan to do something else?"

"You expected to be warned?" I laughed sarcastically. "This is Greece, and you expect to be given a schedule?!" I remember doing evening lessons in both Athens and Hania, teaching children by the flame of a gas light. Lessons were never cancelled - in the private sector in Greece, the show always goes on.

It's at times like this, when he acts like he doesn't know his own country, that I feel like telling him that if he doesn't like the country, he has only two choices: either he helps it to change, to he leaves it: 'Να η πόρτα! Harsh words, especially coming from someone who wasn't born here. But he is not alone in losing patience with Greece:

"It is not possible every time you make a privatization in Greece to go on strike. It is not possible that public transport cannot collect fares and services will not be able to collect revenue... If we cannot say these things in Europe in a friendly way to each other, and instead, when we do say them, we are regarded as Martians, it will be impossible to make progress."

This comes from a woman who showed patience with the Greeks on a number of occasions. Perhaps she's had enough too. But she really ought to know better - those Greeks never stop surprising people with their resilience, even if seems misguided to others.

By 7.30pm, the lights had all come back on. We had our showers, I cooked the next day's meal - μακαρονάδα - and the television began playing, so the disconnection was completely forgotten, and it will stay forgotten until the next disconnection takes place. And there will definitely be another one, and this cat-and-mouse game will continue for as long as it takes. And we won't get any warning, either. Remember: this is Greece, and Greeks are pretty predictable. They don't need a hurricane to destroy the country; they're pretty good at getting the job done all by themselves. But even a hurricane has its good side: after total destruction, you can only start from ground zero, and what you build will be better than what was there before.

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Greek statistics

The title of the e-newspaper report I read yesterday sounded rather shocking:

"Δύο στους δέκα έλληνες σε διατροφικό κίνδυνο! Στην Ελλάδα 439.000 παιδιά ζουν πλέον κάτω από το όριο της φτώχειας"

which translates to: "Two in ten Greeks in nutritional danger! In Greece 439,000 children now live below the poverty line." The figures have been taken from the latest report by the Greek committee of the United Nations in combination with figures released by another study conducted by the Hellenic Nutritionists Society, during June-September 2012, in Athens, Thessaloniki, Katerini, Ioannina, Corinthia, Crete and Cephallonia.

The article starts off with a discussion of Greeks' recent adoption of fast food which damaged their health, especially that of their children; this is nothing new of course, since it is also a common trait in Western/developed nations. A return to the classic Greek diet has been proposed as a solution, but this is viewed as "prohibitive" for most Greeks, given the "present circumstances". The latter phrase is not explained, but I take it to mean that we are all too busy to cook bean stews, or that it may be too expensive to do so.

An attempt was made to measure how "Greekly" people ate. From a sample of 798 adults aged 18-73, it was found that half the group showed relatively good nutritional habits, whole the other half that didn't admitted that they did know better but did not follow a healthy diet. Women were better at keeping to a healthy diet, but at the same time, half the sample did not adopt the Mediterranean diet and lifestyle. The report also states that more than 1.5 million Greeks suffer from high blood pressure, while 40% of the Greek population also suffer from high cholesterol, and 15-16,000 Greeks per year have a heart attack. Diabetes in Greece is as common as in other European countries (4%) while the risk of obesity has increased to 40%.

The figures are quite damning, but they should also be viewed with caution. If Greece has a high rate of unemployment, then there should be more time available to people to cook a Mediterranean meal, something like bean stew.  It is also reported in the popular press that fresh products are being sold at very competitive prices at the street stalls (λαϊκή), while discount supermarkets sell pantry staples at low prices; the cost of food isn't always as expensive as the cost of living is made to sound in the mass media. To my mind, the research sounds counter-intuitive.

The figure of 439,000 children living below the poverty line is a worrying one; the number was presumably calculated from statistics for income and household size including number of children. Such figures do not take into account the stories that come to light every day about people who declare an extremely low annual income to the state while at the same holding Swiss (or other) bank accounts with more than half a million euros.

According to Greek statistics, there is poverty and hunger in Greece. But poverty levels are often cited according to international standards, always using mainly income as the basis. Different lifestyles are not always taken into account, eg the high reliance on one own's food resources, something Greeks revere and take on like a national sport. I'm sorry but I don't buy those figures.

There's a fasolada lying in my fridge today, leftover from Monday because I didn't have time to prepare a meal last night for the next day's lunch. There are also some tomatoes and peppers from the garden, and there's a 2kg-block of some of the best graviera I have ever tasted, which was given to us (as is done every year) as payment in kind, by a farmer who uses some of our land for grazing his flock. My children's lunch box today contains the last pieces of turkey meat, another gift from a relative, supplemented by some pasta. Poor man's food? Give me a break. Even our pet dog and cat eat home-cooked food: there's some leftover pilafi rice for both of them from Sunday's lunch that no one wants to touch now.

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Barbie (Μπάρμπη)

The invention of Barbie is a double-edged sword: although she is a bimbo, even a girl who never had a Barbie doll will still act like one at some point in her life. It can't be helped because if a woman doesn't go through some bimbo stage in her life, she can never really create her own feminine style.

I never had a Barbie doll when I was young because my mother never bought me one, and she never had one either naturally, being a Greek villager born a few years before WW2. Nor did I ever get one as a present, since most of our family friends were Greek people of similar backgrounds to our parents. Barbie dolls were expensive in my youth; these days, there are cheap facsimile versions available to poorer pockets, so most girls own some kind of dress-up doll. Hence I never really found it necessary for my daughter to have one, but she got them anyway from her godmother, who bought them for her own daughter too. By the time she was nine, half a dozen Barbies and Barbie-lookalikes adorned her shelves.

She never really enjoyed playing with them in the way that I would expect girls to enjoy them, but she did regard them as girls' toys, due to traditional sex orientation trends. Obviously, there would be Barbie talk at school, which she could join into because she owned a Barbie herself; no doubt this gave her some security and self-confidence among her peers.

Barbies picking fruit during a gap year on a working vacation: "Pity we forgot the suntan lotion, eh? The sun's good from this height."

Barbie was also something she could play with without her brother. Of course, he regarded Barbie as a girls-only toy, but he also viewed Barbie as a way to tease his sister: at least, this is the person we would often blame when we found a Barbie with a broken leg or Barbie's accessories went missing. Although this would upset both me and my daughter because it was an invasion of private space and she was not really the vengeful type that would destroy his toys (she'd ask me to do it), I could also see that my daughter wasn't really into keeping Barbie intact. She cut a Barbie's hair and painted her nails, both of which are generally irreversible procedure on dolls. And since I couldn't really stand Barbie myself, I was hoping that her Barbies would eventually die in some way without my needing to do the dirty deed myself.

"This is a palm tree, right?"

This summer, my daughter surprised me by giving all her Barbie dolls away to a neighbour's granddaughter that she often plays with. I was thrilled to bits - the bimbos had left the house without any help from me. Her brother was relieved too: "So it doesn't really matter that I broke that Barbie bike when we were young because if you still had it, you would have given that away too, right?" For me, this is a sign that they have both developed their own different playtime interests; it is the point that they have started to show their independence away from each other when searching for leisure activities.

"Just let me know if anyone's coming so they don't see me with my pants down, LOL."

Even though I was glad to see the end of Barbie in our house, I was also intrigued as to what made her take the decision to get rid of what I thought might have been regarded by her as a precious toy. Never having a Barbie myself, I really couldn't work this one out. But I know what might have pointed her towards giving something away that had outlived its use in our own home. We have two bags in our house that are always being filled with things we don't need any more - one for clothes, and one for toys; when the bags fill up, we take them to a church or give things away to friends (in the same way that we were given most of the contents of those bags). Instead of passing on the responsibility to me to recycle those things, she took the initiative herself.

"This is a good site for the end-of-holiday party - we can do pole dancing here."

When I asked her why she gave away her Barbie dolls, she told me she wanted to clear some space from her shelves for her new toys; her shelves are now cluttered with nail polish, hair bands and her own self-styled bead jewellery. She is simply moving on to the next stage of creating her own identity, one that Barbie helped her develop in her own mysterious girlie way.

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Garlic breath (Σκορδίλα)

Every now and then, my daughter comes home from school, complaining about her lunchbox. "All you give us to eat at break is home-made cake and fruit and an orange instead of juice!" she whined. Yeah, that's all I give them to eat. I'm a bad mother. Other kids at school bring packeted treats like potato crisps, tetrapak orange juice and bake rolls. "Now everyone's calling me stingy because I never bring anything to school and everyone else does and they treat each other except me!"

"You know how unhealthy that junk is," I remind her, "and anyway, we eat crisps and we drink soda at home every now and then." She whined a bit more before things calmed down and we forgot about the incident.

The other day when I picked her up from school, she mentioned her lunchbox contents again, but this time she was smiling. "You were right, Mum," she beamed at me (and of course, I beamed back), "bake rolls really are bad for you." She proceeded to tell me that one of her classmates had opened a packet and passed it round in the class during morning break, and when the teacher came back to the classroom after interval, she complained that the whole room stunk of a greasy garlic smell, so she opened the windows to get rid of the stench, but everyone who ate some of those bake rolls still smelt of it because it's very hard to get rid of garlic breath when you don't bring anything else to eat at school, not even an orange, which the school is surrounded by in the neighbouring fields.

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Cake icing with natural food colours and flavours (Γλάσο με φυσικά χρώματα και φυσικές γεύσεις)

For my daughter's birthday, I made some cupcakes for her to take to school and share out to her classmates. To make them more festive, I decided to ice them, having gained some confidence since my first cake icing venture. With the help of some youtube videos, I got acquainted with the basics, which included vanilla frostings and food colourings.

After a few visits to a few supermarkets, I realised that I wasn't going to find any bottles containing food colourings - not at INKA (local level), nor Carrefour (multi-national) or Vasilopoulos (high-end). Not only that, but the only kind of ready icing sold was chocolate glaze. In Hania, you will be hard pressed to find royal icing and frosting. This says a lot about the society that I live in; I leave it to my readers to make their own assumptions. Greek zaharoplasteia, which I have often reprimanded on my blog for selling cakes made with fake cream, do not seem to use fake colours either: a quick look at their window displays reveals that, in general, they do not sell fake-coloured food. These may be added to made-to-order children's birthday cakes; μέτρον ἄριστον, as the Greeks say.

Left: a zaharoplasteio in Hania. Right: a zaharoplasteio in Athens. Apart from cherries and strawberry/cherry jam glazes, the colours of the sweets seem to represent natural food colours.

Most of the time, if not all the time, the food I prepare in my house does not lend itself well to the addition of artificial flavours and colours in order to create an impression. Most (again, if not all) of the time, my food, though simple and unpretentious, is highly aromatic and colourful, at any rate. This is the first year that I have felt 'obliged' to take a more liberal approach to food preparation. But it did not detract me from seeking out more natural approaches to icing cupcakes. And all because the artificial stuff simply doesn't exist on our supermarket shelves.

These artificial food colours from NZ have been sitting in my cupboard for a long time. The blue and green bottles are unopened. I keep them for sentimental reasons. Using a Martha Stewart recipe for frosting, I experimented with the red bottle to create some deep pink icing that would suit my daughter's Barbie interests. She really liked its look, but was hesitant about the taste. I can't blame her: the ingredients listed for each bottle state 'water', 'colour' and a number.

Another problem I found with making frosting is the high cost of butter in Hania. Forget the locally produced stuff; it smells like a sheep station (we don't have locally made cow's butter). Good quality butter is very expensive in a non-producing region like Crete. From experience, I've found that most recipes which call for butter can be made with olive oil instead. I decided to replace the butter with olive oil, which flows like water in our house. I don't expect my readers to take up this idea (unless they live in Crete or have ample supplies of olive oil). It did turn out to be successful though!

I started off by beating a mixture of olive oil and icing (confectioner's) sugar. The pale yellow mixture (I could not get a white colour) came out very smooth and glossy, able to hold stiff peaks - but it tasted of olive oil. I added some vanilla sugar to mask the taste, but that wasn't enough; the taste improved when I added a very small amount of peach jam (it did not affect the colour). By adding cocoa powder to the same mixture, I got a classic chocolate (ie brown) icing. 

The icing was easy to apply on a cupcake (the one above was made with frozen grated summer zucchini). It even gave good results when used in a piping tube. My main worry was that it would melt if left out at room temperature for a long time - but it didn't. The icing remained set, it did not run, it didn't go crusty in the fridge, and, above all, it tasted good.

The results of my experimentations with natural colours and flavours were all conducted during a test session with my children in my kitchen. They tasted everything and I adjusted the ingredients accordingly. My first test session looked into achieving good texture, while my second session looked into natural colourings, which necessitated adding the dimension of taste when I added natural ingredients.

 Brown (chocolate flavour with cocoa powder), dark pink (strawberry jam flavour with beetroot dye), creamy white (peach jam flavour) and light pink (dried crushed blueberry flavour - I was hoping for a blue-purple tinge, but this didn't work). You will see some olive oil floating on the top of some icings; as I added liquids to adjust colour and taste, I found that the oil began to separate from the mixture. This was able to be drained away completely and it did not affect the taste or texture of the icing. In fact, the removal of the excess oil improved both taste and texture.

The cream and brown coloured icing didn't present any problems, which encouraged me to continue with my experiments. The pink icing was achieved with a drop of strained beetroot liquid and some strawberry jam to mask the taste of the vegetables (strawberry jam alone was not enough to colour my frosting).

With the help of a piping set, my daughter decorated the beetroot-walnut-cocoa cupcakes above; my creations are below. My natural icing colours reminded me of the colours found in the sepia tones of old-fashioned photography. They were all able to be used with a piping tube, and they set without running.

For a white coloured icing, I made some simple glaze using icing sugar mixed with water, which I later discovered could be substituted with lemon juice for a tangy flavour. Orange juice also makes a tasty pale yellow-orange glaze, but don't expect a bright orange colour!

The finished cupcakes, to be taken to school in honour of my daughter's ninth birthday

Green is a difficult colour: would avocado (with lemon juice) work? How about nettles, which give a deep green colour? But what about the taste? Sometimes, it's just so much more convenient to use the easy option...



*I finally found a packet of food colours containing three vials of red, blue and yellow food colouring at a larger brnach of Carrefour at a cost of 2.40 euro.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Pikilia (Ποικιλία)

One of the most popular taverna dishes all over Greece is the ποικιλία (pikilia), a variety mix of grilled or fried mezedakia (appetisers). You usually choose between fish or meat, or a mixture of both fish and meat cuts on the same platter. A meat-based pikilia will include: ribs, small lamb or pork chops, souvlaki skewers, sausages, breaded chicken, and meatballs; a fish pikilia contains: kalamari rings, shrimps, octopus chunks, freshly cooked anchovies and sardines, and fish croquettes. A pikilia is always accompanied by fried potatoes, vegetable fritters such as kolokithokeftedes, freshly cut salad vegetables like tomato and cucumber, and the well-known Greek piquant dips, tzatziki (for meat pikilia) or taramosalata (for fish).

Meat-based pikilia - the patties don't look hand-made, while small frankfurters are the cheapest sausage on the market

Pikilia is probably sounding unhealthy to you already, a bit like the Greek version of the triple burger and fries, but it really depends on how and where you eat it. Some tavernas use ready-to-cook mass-produced food to serve in a pikilia, while others cook everything from scratch; always remember that you get what you pay for. Pikilia is usually eaten in the evening among a παρέα, so everyone in the group is probably having a titbit here or there rather than wolfing down a whole pikilia to themselves. In fact, the menu card will state 'pikilia for 2 (or 4)'. Pikilia is usually the meal of choice for serving with ouzo (or tsikoudia, as we do in Crete), and there's always something for everyone in a pikilia, making it a good taverna choice for children.

This pikilia was as cheap as it looks - apart from the meat cuts on the top of the dish, everything else looked mass-produced; chicken nuggets and tomato sauce give it away.

The last time I enjoyed a pikilia at a taverna with my family was last year. Due to the annus horribilis that most people around the world are facing at the moment, I didn't get the chance to do this this summer.  I thought it would be fun to cook up a pikilia at home for a Sunday lunch when we had guests coming. Keeping yourself busy makes you forget about the economic crisis, not to mention saving money.

This pikilia was slightly better - most of the items resembled freshly cooked home-made food.

Compiling a pikilia involves cooking a large number of dishes, which isn't really feasible for the home cook. Most of these dishes have to be served as they are cooked, so again, it's not a meal you'll want to cook regularly because you won't be able to enjoy it with everyone eating at the same time. It takes a certain amount of organisation to be able to do this successfully, so that you can have your cake and eat it, too.

My pikilia contains some old favorites together with some more novel ideas:

• chicken and pork souvlaki (old favorite)
• spicy buffalo chicken wings (novel idea)
• zucchini patties (old favorite) and tomato fritters (novel idea - they are a specialty of Santorini, and aren't usually served in tavernas in Hania)
• aubergine dip and beetroot dip (novel idea, instead of tzatziki; melitzanosalata is often found in taverna menus, but batsarosalata has still not made into mainstream taverna food)
• courgette and aubergine chips (old favorite - because I made a lot of them, I didn't do any french fries, which are always served with pikilia)
• Greek salad (you usually find a few slices of cucumber and tomato in a pikilia)
• any other condiments on hand: roasted peppers, feta cheese, olives, and of course, bread!

 

 Because I was serving this at home, I decided not to pile all the different bits and pieces onto one platter, as pikilia is traditionally served.

Here's the time plan so that you can enjoy this fiddly meal at the same time as your guests:

1. The night before: skewer your souvlakia (I bought ready-prepared ones this time) and marinate them; prepare the chicken wings and cover them in the spice-and-flour mixture, allowing them to marinate till the next day (this way, the flour mixture will stick to the meat and create less mess when you fry them); have the sauce ready to finish off the chicken wings; make the beetroot and/or aubergine dips (and put them in the fridge in the same bowl that you'll be serving them in); prepare the mixtures for the tomato and/or zucchini patties (they need to be drained of excess liquids, which is why it's better to start them overnight). Now is a good time to put the drinks in the fridge - you will be too busy to remember to do this the next day: lukewarm beer tastes like piss.
2. In the morning, slice your bread and place all the slices in a plastic bag (you won't be serving pre-sliced bread with this meal, will you?), slice some zucchini and/or aubergine (for the chips: calculate 1 zucchini/aubergine per guest) very thinly (I used a vegetable slicer). Salt them well, then place all the slices in a colander, and cover them with a plate. Now place a heavy object on the plate (I used a small melon that I'd left on the kitchen worktop to ripen) and allow their excess fluids to drain away.
3. Fry the zuchhini and/or tomato patties. Don't worry that they will go cold; they can even be made the night before and placed in the fridge when cool (and reheated later) if you are pressed for time. This is what I did; the patties I served were our main meal from the day before, and they tasted just as good the next day when I heated them up and served them with the pikilia.
4. An hour before serving time, turn on the grill and cook the souvlakia (I used the grill in my oven). While they are cooking, fry the chicken wings, heat up the sauce while the chicken is draining on absorbent paper, place the wings on the serving dish and pour the sauce over them. To keep them warm, I placed the chicken wings under the baking tray where the souvlaki were being grilled. At this point, put the zucchini and/or tomato patties on another baking tray (preferably in the serving dish) and place them underneath the chicken wings so that everything will cook/warm up at the same time. Most ovens allow up to three trays to be loaded.
5. Drain the oil that was used to cook the chicken. Heat it up in the same pan that you used to cook the chicken (you don't need to clean it, just wipe away any crumbs). Place a few tablespoons of flour in a plastic bag and put the vegetable slices in it. Shake the bag so that all the slices get coated in flour. Then take them out of the bag and fry them in the hot oil (don't add too many slices, otherwise the oil will cool down and the chips will come out soggy - I cooked three batches to make sure that they remained crisp). 
6. While you're doing all this, don't forget to check on the souvlakia in the oven - they will need turning to cook evenly on all sides!
7. Drain the fried vegetable slices on absorbent paper. As each batch cooks, pile it on top of the previous batch (on the serving dish) to keep everything warm.
8. Wash and chop the salad ingredients. Prepare the salad in its serving dish. Place any extra condiments on an appropriate serving plate/bowl. The souvlakia should now be ready, too.
9. Shout "SOUVLAKI!" loud enough so your kids (or spouse or partner - I like to call mine 'husband') can hear, and tell them to lay the table if they want to eat any. If you don't have any kids/spouse/partner, you'll have to lay the table yourself.
10. Sit down and enjoy the meal you just served - if anyone asks for cold drinks, remind them that they are in the fridge, and they can help themselves.

My guests loved this meal. They practically licked the plates clean, and there were few leftovers. They did complain that there were no fried potatoes (as every taverna pikilia includes them), but I reminded them that I only have two hands, and not enough frying pans.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Fast food is good food (Το γρήγορο φαγητό είναι καλό φαγητό)

My husband and I were recently talking about moving house and building a new one a few kilometres away from where we currently live now, in a countryside setting.

Left: The view we have now. Right: The view we want in the future.

It may sound like we have suddenly come into a windfall. Fortunately or unfortunately - depending on the way one views the saying 'money can't buy happiness' - this isn't the case. One day, we'd like to be able to move house for a change of lifestyle: we'd like to live on a large tract of (family-owned) land, closer to our orange orchards and olive grove, giving us more flexibility to grow more of our own produce, including the possibility of raising animals (something we aren't doing now) for our own use.

Our closest neighbours at the moment near the olive grove live 1.5 kilometres away - they are retired Germans! We often see them foraging along the road heading towards our grove. Living in the countryside is not as difficult as it seems in modern times, since the roads are now tarmacked, and basic services (water, phone, electricity) are more readily available.

Keeping animals carries with it a huge responsibility - it means that you can't leave your home without making arrangements for someone else to carry on your work while you are away. (This way of life is not much different from how we live now - living with an elderly person who has lost her mobility means we still do pretty much the same thing.) Since we'd both be closer to retirement, we would have more time on our hands to do this. And as I look out from the window of our new house that looks down onto our olive trees and up to the Lefka Ori, I would then be inspired to type up that novel that I've been writing in my head for the last year or so...

Another view of Lefka Ori from the olive grove

But it seems that I am coming in too late to the game. Food from the earth is old hat; according to Rachel Laudan, I'm a Culinary Luddite!

The article presented in the above reader was written almost a decade ago, and was recently revised for publication in the Utne Reader, which provides a number of links to other food-related debates. It received some attention in the NY times blog; the comments there share similarities in their misunderstanding about modern food with some of Rachel's ideas about slow food. In essence, one could say that humans now all eat processed food, whether they like it or not, but the notion of 'processed (ie fast) food' needs to be distinguished among categories of food and not confused with 'junk food'.

One of the recurrent themes in the article is that "Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror, something to which only the uncivilised, the poor, and the starving resorted."* If this has some measure of truth, it is only because refrigeration wasn't invented until relatively recently, and even then, most people (in the case of Greece, as recently as less than 40 years) wouldn't have had a refrigerator in their house, so they would have spent a lot of time foraging fresh ingredients and eating what they could there and then before finding other ways to preserve or store it before that fresh food - both raw and cooked - went bad.

 

It is difficult to understand the feeling of euphoria that a farmer has when he plants a successful garden...

The availability of refrigeration ("egalitarian, available more or less equally to all, without demanding disproportionate amount of resources of time and money") has obliterated any revulsion against eating fresh food; it's helped many of the still "uncivilised" and "poor" to be able to preserve their own fresh produce easily and make it available to them in less abundant times - so long as there is regular power supply in their area. We don't usually starve in this day and age due to lack of food; it's usually war, politics and mismanagement that keep food away from the needy. How many times have we heard about supermarkets and the ordinary public that throw away edible food?

The evolution of mankind has constantly improved living conditions for people and animals, and even for plants. Through evolution, we went from milk to yoghurt, from dry crackers to soft raised bread, from freshly caught fish to salted cod. Through evolution, we went from being primitive nomads foraging their food daily to civilised settlers with "a securely-locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods."

Some people buy their processed food; some others process their own produce. We generally live in abundant times, with the luxury to do both at whatever cost we can afford.

But these ample supplies of preserved food were not actually enough. As Rachel admits: "the rich, in search of a varied diet, bought, stole, wheedled, robbed, taxed, and ran off with appealing plants and animals, foodstuffs, and culinary techniques from wherever they could find them." In other words, fresh food really was the key to the tastiest meal for both the rich and the poor, but for the former, it put them out of their routine in their quest to procure it, while for the latter, it was all they had. Food rationing during WW2 in Britain put the lack of fresh food (with a heavy reliance on preserved imported food) in the spotlight:

We all think and talk about food eternally, not because we are hungry but because our meals are boring and expensive and difficult to come by... what I wouldn't give for orange juice or steak and onions or chocolate or apples or cream. (1941 diary extract, quote from the Ministry of Food exhibition)

Boring. That's how they regarded the "modern, fast, homogeneous and international" food that was being imported into the country during the period the UK was subjected to food rationing.

I spend a lot of my time preserving fresh produce, especially in the summer. Two of the most important products in our Cretan kitchen are tomatoes and olives.

"Traditional societies," Rachel reminds us, "were aristocratic, made up of the many who toiled to produce, process, preserve and prepare food, and the few who, supported by the limited surplus, could do other things." Throughout the world, there was, is, and always will be, a divide between the rich and the poor. The world survives on this kind of separation of the people. The rich will always have access to better quality food in a greater variety than the poor, while the poor will constantly be working to provide food and other services for the rich. Some people will continue to "get on with their lives", while others will continue to provide the basic services the former group needs to continue with their lives.

Despised products like corn syrup and GMOs will continue to be hated while, at the same time, be considered more acceptable elements of the food chain for certain elements of society (the poor is an obvious one), besides bringing in great profits for their makers. Discount supermarkets will probably always sell the cheapest canned tomatoes, while placing an organic label on the packaging will always give added value; you buy the quality that you pay for. The range in prices for food is there to remind us that we all have different pockets and different priorities. No matter how the world changes, people will always need to be fed, and the food people generally want to eat still comes from freshly grown produce that is processed, preserved and prepared into an edible form, not from chemicals or glass tubes. Fresh food will continue to form the basis of fast food.

We were recently invited to dinner at the country house of some friends who spend their summers on the island. When it was time to serve the meal, the first thing the hostess did was to tell us what each dish was, and the origins of the ingredients: "The chicken is from the village, the rabbit is from my mother's farm, and the artichokes (in the tart) were freshly picked and refrigerated by my mother in the spring." None of the food was processed by the hosts, and some of meal wasn't what I'd call traditional Greek cuisine, but they took pride in knowing the origin of the fresh ingredients.   

"City dwellers, above all, relied on fast food." No surprise, and they still do, since they are the ones most likely to live in small dwellings with tiny kitchens and no gardens; they are also the ones who are most likely to work not just outside the home, but for long hours away from home and quite a distance from home, so they need to have easy-to-store (or -buy) food that can be cooked or reheated quickly. There are times when these townies differ little from mountain dwellers who need to have a bit of salt cod in their pantries (or frozen fish in their deep freeze) if they want a taste of fish every now and then without putting themselves to the trouble of procuring it the day they want to cook it. That's what evolution has given us: time-saving technology and the ability to store safely preserved fresh food that doesn't go off quickly.

Boureki in 15 minutes, with the help of a mandolin slicer, then into the freezer it goes, with a note attached: "Just add oil"; 'fast food' that my grandmother would have recognised. The aspect of "servitude" is now performed by technology.

That's why I can send my kids away to study without worrying what they'll be eating**, because no matter how 'bad' the food is wherever they are, no matter how much of that notorious 'bad food' they pour into their bodies, food safety can generally be relied upon by keeping in mind a few general rules. And that's the idea that I have about that village house: while my kids are away eating 'bad food', I'll be growing fresh produce and turning it into 'good food' (just like I do now), so that when my brood comes home for the holidays and we want to spend quality time together as a family, I won't need to slave away in the kitchen preparing their favorite pastitsio or boureki or order take-out food because I had gotten used to having more me-time and don't want to give it up. I'll just pop a tin of freshly preserved food out of the fridge and get on with life, and my kids won't even know it wasn't prepared on the same day - they are eating the same food cooked in the same way now.

Apart from the refrigerator and deep freeze, my right-hand man in the kitchen when I preserve/prepare fresh produce is my instant mixer/cutter - can you see it? It's a tireless servant, cheap to buy and lasts for ages. 

I take exception to the idea that slow food is just a notion of bygone times: "... it is easy to wax nostalgic about a time when families and friends met to relax over delicious food, and to forget that, far from being an invention of the late twentieth century, fast food has become a mainstay of every society." My experience of eating in Crete goes wildly against this: people take great pride in the food they grow, cook and eat, and they always share it among family and friends. It is unthinkable to do otherwise. It is also difficult to believe (for a Greek islander like myself) that most people do not partake of a delicious meal in a relaxing environment with their family; they are missing out on one of the greatest moments in life. A common prejudice is that people who are very involved in food production live a simple isolated life and do not have a good grasp of modern life; in short, they show signs of a lack of progress. How far away from the truth that is in Crete.  

Vegetarians aside, I pity those who cannot savour the taste from the tapsi in the photograph below. Everything (literally, including the salt) was harvested/raised/produced by the man (he's my age) in the top left photo, while his wife (sitting next to him, 10 years younger) cooked everything shown on the table in the top right photograph. You might be wondering if they live a peasant lifestyle: he's a carpenter, she's a school cleaner, and they live in the town in a semi-detached suburban house. Their land and their food is very important to them. Their 3 children go to school in the town, and take part in urban activities. They are no different to the teacher and the taxi driver who visited them.

The idea that home-cooked food is 'slow' will never have occurred to some Cretans, since they often assume that this is the only kind of food that can be called 'φαγητό'. When they eat 'fast food' (don't confuse this term with its modern meaning of 'junk food'), they'll tell you that they didn't cook any 'φαγητό' (food) today, because they didn't have time, eg during the olive harvest, but even though it wouldn't be as appetising or appealing as their slow food, it would still have been somewhat tasty and delicious, maybe a boiled farm-fresh egg and a potato, served with whatever fresh seasonable salad vegetables are on hand, all doused with olive oil, and a few slices of bakery bread, with maybe some tinned tuna or luncheon meat for extra protein.

This kind of meal is touted as Cretan breakfast - it is what tourists look out for on a tourist menu. Most of the food in the photo involves requires a minimal amount of processing; it can also be said to be 'fast food' as it is very quick to prepare.

This kind of meal is called 'πρόχειρο φαγητο' (Google translates this phrase as 'snack'), nearly always made with slow food, not a supermarket TV dinner or a can of baked beans. Fast food to those people is a boiled potato without the horta, a salad without the roast meat, the ubiquitous slice of bread and hunk of cheese that children carried to school with them for 'κολατσιό' reminiscent of the post-WW2 era when Greece was rebuilding herself from the ravages of war.

 
As I was writing this post, I went about on my normal daily food-preparation duties: cooking the Sunday roast (using granny's recipe), watering the garden, and harvesting fresh produce. My daughter made me a (classy) glass of orange juice using oranges from our own trees, and at the end of the day, I ate some of my home-prepared 'fast food' on a slice of bakery bread and thought about the different ways I was going to prepare/preserve my produce (the eggplants were turned into moussaka (frozen in portions), while the zucchini were made into boureki for the next day's meal.

One thing I particularly like about the food customs in Crete is that they haven't quite yet reached the completely globalised point as they have in other cultures. Nearly all global foods are available on the island, but you will have to visit  the high-end supermarkets to find (to put it more politely) acquired tastes. For instance, don't look too hard to find chili-flavoured strawberry jam in Crete. Not that people shouldn't eat chili-flavoured strawberry jam, but here, they don't need to, nor do they demand it, and if it were available, given that people's tastebuds are culturally attuned, it probably wouldn't be popular. Again, only the high-end supermarkets make the effort to sell outlandish food, eg, of all things, Mexican blackberries! Of course, outlandish food calls for outlandish prices: imported Dutch strawberries (off-season) are now available for over 11 euro a kilo!

Peruvian asparagus spears are available in the local supermarket (at absurd prices), but it's highly unlikely a local will buy them. This kind of food is generally bought by tourist residents, ie Northern Europeans who have retired here. 

In Crete, people can still find a great variety of good quality affordable locally produced food. In the prefecture of Hania alone, I counted at least 15 varieties of locally produced cheeses (the French would relish in the sight!), each made in a different village of Western Crete, less than 100 kilometres from the main town, ranging from 10 to 18 euro a kilo, in the local supermarket. This range does not include the imported cheeses which are also available, eg Edam, Cheddar and Gouda, to name a few of the well-known mass-produced global cheeses. Local, national and imported cheeses are eaten with a different purpose in mind; convenience and choice are available for all.

Cretans generally demand a high degree of traceability in their food. Origin and degree of processing are just as important as price and taste in their decision to buy fresh produce. The range of graviera cheeses (starting from the white block where the woman is standing, right up to the green round on the other side) available at the local supermarket shows just how much variety there is in a small town like Hania - these cheeses are all made in villages within less than 100 kilometres of the main town; they all have their own distinct taste and cannot be confused with each other. These cheeses are rarely available outside Hania, and each region in Crete has its own local cheesemakers. In the summer, Athenians holidaying in Crete buy cheese rounds in their hordes, as variety in Cretan cheese isn't easily available there - transport costs make it unfeasible to send such products even to the mainland...

The food industry is a profitable one in Crete; people still look for quality and ask about origin. Does this make us culinary Luddites? Are we eating in an unsustainable or old-fashioned manner that does not bode well for our future progress? Is it just a waste of time to teach the next generation about this old-fashioned food chain, because in the hi-tech, wireless world that they'll be living in, they won't have the time to cook and eat in this way? I really don't think so. From my own family's experience, where I try to ply them with non-Greek favorites, I have come to the conclusion that people will continue to eat the way their culture has brought them up to eat:

An American needs food but wants a hamburger, French fries, and a soft drink. A person in Mauritius needs food but wants a mango, rice, lentils, and beans. Clearly, wants are shaped by one’s society. (A Framework for Marketing Management, by Philip Kotler, 2001).

*** *** ***

Just like the average Greek, fast food (of the type referred to in the article) is everywhere in my own life - but not necessarily in the form that we normally associate with fast food. Fast food allows me, the person who cooks for the whole family, to get on with my own life: I usually buy our daily bread from the bakery; I buy fresh meat ready chopped in the way I want it to cook a meal; I keep a small piece of ham to slice for sandwiches; I buy fruit and vegetables that I don't grow from the supermarket; we always buy our cheese. They are my fast foods - but they were prepared/grown/raised in appropriate facilities with the latest technology that the producer can afford (this is especially the case with bread), using as many locally sourced ingredients as possible. When we process our own food, this shows 'choice', not a lack of progress. But there is also a lot of fast food in my house that I have prepared myself. For a start, there are tins of boureki, pastitsio, moussaka, papoutsakia, home-made pizza and spinach pasties in my deep freeze throughout the year, made with the fresh produce from our garden, which I processed, prepared and preserved. That's how I can have a 'fresh' meal on the table every day even though I didn't have time to cook.

Aubergine cubes, bell pepper shells, tins of prepared Greek meals (the one you can see is moussaka), all waiting in my deep freeze for their turn to be eaten in less abundant (and busier) times.

A (foreign) friend of mine once asked me if I had a once-a-week takeaways night in our house. I admitted that I didn't. This is not because we don't like takeout pizzas or souvlaki - they are both regarded as treats, not 'πρόχειρο φαγητο'. I can produce my own version of fast food in the same time that it takes to order it over the phone and wait for it to arrive to my house: a slice of bread or some bakery rusks, topped with a piece of cheese, cured olives from our fields, a piece of roasted pepper preserved in its own marinade, a freshly marinated anchovy, et voilά, I've got myself a pizza (albeit in deconstructed form). When we eat food that wasn't prepared by ourselves, it usually feels like our own because there is traceability in the ingredients used. Having access to a variety of nutritious safe fast food shows 'progress'. It isn't necessary to resort to the masses of verified junk loaded with sugar or fat. 

When I met up with Kalofagas recently on his first visit to Hania, we (his friends in the area) decided that the best meal Peter could eat was a home-cooked one, because that is what truly represents the taste of Crete, not a standard uniformly Greek tourist restaurant meal. My "ethnic" dishes of "peasant origin" may have been "invented" for the "urban aristocrats" but they probably never tasted as good as when they were cooked in a farm kitchen!
The menu was as follows: ορεκτικά - marinated sardines, roasted peppers, eggplant dip; κύρια πιάτα - pilafi, boureki, eggplant imam, yiahni green beans, pork steaks; επιδόρπια - orange pie, kalitsounia with honey. 

A question often asked of school pupils to discuss in the classroom is what technological innovations they would like to see in the future that haven't yet been invented. When they've all finished telling me about aeroplane cars and cleaner-robots, I then tell them what I'd like to see invented some time: an oven which will automatically prepare my choice of meal where my only input is the provision of the raw ingredients. Now that's what I call tasty freshly prepared fast food, made with as much fuss as the way the dishwasher gets my plates spanking clean.

*** *** ***

Rachel insists that, as a historian, she can't accept the sharp divide between good and bad food, in the way that the Culinary Luddites claim. She makes a plea instead for Culinary Modernism:

"We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos, As far as good food goes, they [the Culinary Luddites] have done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty of delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy. Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialised food, not one that dismissed it, an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labour, and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time."

In other words, food in this day and age has to come fast, otherwise we won't be able to cope with the other demands made on us by modern life. There is an assumption in the article that most people are (or should be) living urban lives, even though some of us have made a conscious choice not to be urban. It all depends on priorities. For rural people however, it is anathema to suggest that the emphasis on fresh food produced on a small scale is a misconceived notion; it can be equated with removing the very means that allow them to survive. In order to use 'fast food' instead of producing/preparing their own 'slow food', not only will they have to buy their food, but they'll have to be in paid employment to achieve this, and that's just not going to happen for at least 12% of the Greek population in the coming winter; Fraser and Rimas are probably correct to a certain extent when they advocate that we learn to store surplus food, live locally, farm organically and diversify our crops.

As a linguist, I'd argue that Rachel didn't really mean we should be eating modern fast food at all - just faster (and safer) food than what it was in the past.

*The inverted commas " have been used to denote quotes (in bold) from the article.
**Some Greek mothers never stop worrying about what their kids are eating when they are studying as far away as the UK. They will send them food parcels to their children, containing meals they cooked at home the previous day, froze solid, then sent to the UK by courier! (But that story is for another post.)

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