Elemental Fire

The campfire, the barbecue, the fireplace, the hearth, a tandoori oven, the wood burning stove, the gas light, all of which use the first gift from the gods, fire. The heaven rocked when the news got back that man knew fire. The chef, the pit master, the smokehouse, the luau, are all fire.

There is nothing more primal than fire. A gift and a curse, and a blessing and destroying all consuming elemental thing. Fire has a life of its own and the mastery of fire is a essential bit of what it is to be human. The link between food and nature, nutrition and humanity, simple yet powerful, basic and complex all at the same time.

Fire is transformitive, changing a raw meat into a new thing, charred and sweetened, concentrated rich and flavorful. The fire is the element that created cuisine out of simple items combining with the magic of flame and power. In this age of microwave options we are moving further and further away from nature. We are not spending time in the wilderness exploring, sleeping in tents, finding the unknown stream, hunting and gathering, or even studying about food. Americans spent more money in restaurants last year than in the grocery stores. What is amazing is that, for one thing, that has never happened before, and two it is putting even more distance between the diner and their food source.

As a chef instructor, I spend a good portion of my time familiarizing my students with information about nature and nutrition because they simply don't have any idea where the food comes from other than the grocery store. They are often amazed to learn where on a hog is the ham, that carrots are a root vegetable, that cheese is a fermented milk product, heck I am sure they couldn't tell me where the garbage dump is in their community.

I learned to cook, initially, in my grandmothers kitchen. I come from a long line of great female cooks in the family, both for the families needs and to serve others for a wage. A few of the men in the family could cook as well, but generally it was the mothers that did the majority of the chore. Unlike our white counterparts in America, the women in my family were working outside of the house well before the 1950's and 1960's so the revolution of the working woman was already our reality. Yet, the women in our lineage were cooking at home as well and maintaining the household chores. Food culture and recipe development has been co-opted by corporations.

World War II was the first time large numbers of women worked in factories to supply goods and munitions to our men overseas fighting. Once the men came home, a large number of women did not return to working just in home for the benefit of their families alone. My grandmother worked a full-time job at a discount department store less than 5 miles from our house. She would come home everyday for lunch and either start working on our dinner for the evening or check on what she had begun cooking that morning. She did all the grocery shopping and nearly all the house cleaning as well. She always had a backyard garden much like our neighbors and the family just to the West of our place would plan their garden with her so that we would plant some items and they planted other things so we could trade across the fence.

If you have ever planted vegetables you will find that in a good summer's growth, you will end up growing more than your family can consume so trading harvests was to the benefit of both our families. We probably were the only yard in our area that had corn and strawberries growing.

Weather or not you even roast something on a barbecue grill yourself, once the fire is lit, your nose instantly tells you that something special is happening. We first dine with our nose, then with our eyes and ears, then with our mouth, then lastly with our brain. Fire is the beginning of all of that. A grill, a stove, a smoker, a dehydrator, all started with fire.

Microwaving is something very different. Microwaves excite the molecules within the food starting at the middle of the item whereas fire begins to change the outer layers of the food then the heat is transformed toward the inner parts of the item, so in many ways microwaves are the exact opposite of the natural cooking experience of fire cooking. Microwaving food is creating yet another bit of distance between the food and the cook and dinner.

Food is life. Food gathering and hunting takes a life from an animal or plant that then gives life sustaining essence to those who eat it. It is the food chain, it is primal and essential. When you create barriers between yourself and your food, you leave yourself very vulnerable to a host of problems of health and spirit. Food is ritualistic. It has a rhythm, a constant, a variable, a language that is universally understood beyond any barrier of culture and geography. Welcoming guests into your home always has an offering of food from the host, this is a gift of life, a wish that you strive beyond the visit, an honoring the guest, and this is why it is often considered very rude to refuse the gift of food. The gift of food or drink has the element of careful preparation, expense, and culture transmission.

Fire can be essential to survival in the wilderness, it can warm you in times of cold weather, it can transform foods into cuisine, it's were we began to transmit history through storytelling, and it's where we gathered for safety. All of society began around a fire and continued to grow with cooking. Cooking is as human as language and protection of offspring. Without the skill of creating fires there would not be society, we would still be nomadic, we still be small groups of people, hunting and gathering. It is through fire and agriculture that society is formed. We are no longer a herd of humans but a society with universal truths, no matter the language spoken, mathematics and food need not be explained in order to be understood. Food can be simply about satisfying a need or it can be the catalysis for communion with others or elevated into art.

Food is medicine, food is art, food is humanity, food is society, and food is life giving need. I tell my students all the time that whenever you begin to rely upon a corporation to feed you, you are in trouble. The corporation is a faceless entity that haves laws that treat it like a type of person, but this pseudo 'person' only has one propose, to gain profit. Real people produce food for sustaining life, nourishing the body, transmitting emotions, warding off illness, creating links between generations, a ritual, a communion between people, a humility as all people need to eat, from kings to peasants, it levels all of us to the same place as we all eat.

Enjoy your meals instead of just consuming. Begin to gain understanding of what food really is to us humans and seek out how it can be transformed, into art, or into profit. When profit is the only purpose, when a corporation begins its life, the art isn't for the goodness of the corporation, it is solely for the benefit of humanity, therefore, I contend, that the corporations of food kill the art that is at the heart of the chef, turning them into scientists and machines of profit. Corporations have continuously made food changes to create more an more profit, more and more consumers, more and more addictive people hooked on their products, depended people upon purchasing their products, instead of creators of quality products. Industrialization of food has created many societal problems, illness, addiction. Like any created factory, once turned on, it wants to continue its work. A machine, when it stops, essentially dies once it is turned off, and death isn't preferred, by anyone or anything. Stop bowing to the gods of profit and seek the nutrients that will sustain and enrich your life.    

Fibromyalgia and diet

Well, my fibromyalgia anyway. As fibromyalgia is a combined group of neurological responses, not everyone has the exact same experience. There are 18 conditions that in combination confirm a diagnosis of the syndrome, a patient must have a majority of them in order to be classified under this disorder.

Where does diet play a role in this disease?  Like so many other disorders, what you eat can be helpful or harmful. One of the effects of my disease is irritable bowel syndrome. I have been dealing with this aspect for about 20 years now. When this first was diagnosed, there was no treatment, and understanding what causes it is still not know but now there's medications to help regulate the movement and actions of the stomach and bowels. A blood panel revealed that along with the respiratory allergies that I have been dealing with since high school there's several food allergies including gluten sensitivity.

I am still learning all about what I am experiencing with my condition after spending a little over a year working with doctors to get at the root of what was going on. The full diagnosis is fibromyalgia, and a chronic knee pain syndrome.

It's a little more than 3 months since the fibromyalgia and knee pain syndrome diagnosis and I am struggling with getting to some sort of comfortable stasis. I changed my diet almost a year ago, gave up gluten, began to intake more veggie packed smoothies, and got regimented on the pill taking. I even had to change my career focus because being a professional production pastry chef is just too hard on me physically. I have always wanted to mentor and teach the next generation of cooks, but I believed it would have been under different circumstances.

I love what I do and I believe that I do it well. I am refusing to be undone by my aliments. I am too young to give up yet. Teaching, while often far more mentally taxing, is less physically demanding. Having trained all these years, I am reluctant to stop working, so I just re-purposed my skills.

These days I dream of eating toast and jam. The reason being is that I would rather do without than eat awful gluten-free bread at 6 times the price of regular. I have been very careful of my intake and modified my amount of activity. I need to add a good exercise routine soon. I have created a couple of great gluten-free desserts and plan on working on a few more. My stomach is at greater ease without gluten but I find it hard to avoid it if I find myself hungry away from home.

As the demand increases for gluten-free options the grocery selections are growing, but this is both good and bad. There are lots of people that are eating a gluten free diet that are not required to do so. It has become somewhat of a fad diet. I, on the other hand, don't have a choice.

I will continue to post on this subject from time to time.

NAACP ACT-SO

Today is the day of our NAACP ACT-SO Image Awards Viewing party. This is a new fundraiser for the branch. We decided to host this viewing party after the lack of African Americans nominated for the Oscar's this year. The racial divide doesn't appear to be closing. 

As the board Secretary, for the Chicago South side branch, I have been lending a hand, preparing and grooming our competitors for regional and national competition. Our esteemed journalist, Vernon Jarrett presented his concept for an Olympics of the mind in 1976 and in 1977 the NAACP Board of Directors adopted his resolution and became the national sponsor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Jarrett 

ACT-SO sustains approximately 200 programs nationally. Over the past thirty years, over 300,000 have participated in the program. Our mission is to reward and recognize African American young men and woman for their scholastic and artistic excellence. We strive to honor, prepare, recognize, and develop the talents in our under-served community. http://www.naacpconnect.org/pages/act-so-history

Every year we do a lot of fundraising because this is a golden opportunity for our young people that they may never get to experience otherwise and we do not charge the participants, or their families, the expense of travel and accommodations to compete nationally. All of our efforts throughout the year is focused upon getting our kids ready to win prizes and scholarships and usher them into a illustrious college career. Thirty two categories covering categories of STEM, Business, Visual Arts, Humanities, Performing arts, Dance, and my personal favorite, Culinary Arts.

I began my involvement two years ago when my oldest child, Jacqueline Alexander, competed in the photography category. She worked during her Junior and Senior years in high school and went to national competition both years. The work we did with her did prepare her very well, not only for ACT-SO but for the other work she did in school and for the other avenues she explored for scholarships. This year my other daughter, Victoria Alexander, is competing in a music performance category, a visual arts category and a short story category.

Eligible students are 9th - 12th grade, they can compete in up to 3 categories and can compete every year until they have graduated high school. Jacqueline is still involved with the program as an alumni, mentor, and youth ambassador in her Freshman year of college. 

I am proud to sit on the board, and I am a proud parent as well. If you are interested in supporting our good cause, our young upcoming leaders, please come join us tonight and/or send a donation by way of purchasing a ticket to our event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/naacp-chicago-southside-act-so-presentsimage-awards-viewing-party-tickets-20877805077

We do lots of events, both online and in real life, to raise the funding needed to take our gold medalists on the South side of Chicago, to our national conference. We hope to send a larger contingency this year than last year, we hope to recruit more and more of our young people into competition, and we hope to be the lightening rod that electrifies their futures.

  

Art is....

Art is many things, takes many forms, expressing itself throughout every realm. Perhaps it is easier to say what isn't art than to try and define it. For me, in many cases, art stops being art when it gets co-opted and turned into advertising for mass media consumption.

Agree or disagree, I am okay with how you see things. I'm not okay with not being respected because when someone's art isn't valued very often neither is the person respected.  Ever since the Oscar nominations were announced this year the conversations have sprung up everywhere about why there's a lack of minority actors and other filmmakers on the list.

While you might not be invested emotionally in this conversation, or can understand the protesters views, it does effect much more in our culture than you may think. A person's art, painting, music, sculpting, dance, and food, will outlive the artist and may even become an immortal part of them. Cave paintings, unearthed pottery and artifacts, Escoffier's legendary cooking methods, Michelangelo's art, invention, and poetry have stood the test of time.

But what of the art, science, invention, and music of the non-Anglo-Saxon? Art is universal, it transcends language and cultural norms, it is the best of ourselves manifested, a monument to our existence. I find it so valuable of an expression that my life revolves around it and is filled with it. My husband is an illustrator, myself a pastry chef, my friends all create some type of art, architecture, and science. I am an active board member for the NAACP ACT-SO Southside of Chicago Scholarship competition, my two youngest children are musicians, I have three professional musicians in the family, and two professional comedians. To me, a life without art is like living in a all white room with too much light and no sight, color, or sound, unbearable.

As the board Secretary, I assist our all volunteer board and staff prepare are high school age kids for competition. We conduct a regional competition and our gold medalist are then taken to nationals, free of charge, to compete amongst more than 700 kids from across the nation for college scholarships. My job, well one of my jobs, with C-Cap (Careers through Culinary Arts Program) also has a high school scholarship competition specifically for upcoming chefs.

Culinary arts is the combination of applied chemistry and art. The higher the level of the artistry the more it is considered fine dinning. Many people watch culinary television but don't really understand what it is that we chef's actually do. There still seems to be some elitist thinking from other professions that makes them look down upon the work that we create, while at the same time they seek out our work to consume. Cutting the art from cooking kills the lifeblood of the work, stifles the chef, kills their expressionism and creativity. Not all food is elevated to artistic levels but almost all of cooking has a creative spirit, some chefs dance with their spices and food combinations like a jazz musician on ice skates while others play it safer.

Art is a simple and pure expression of humanity and ignoring one type while prizing another is damaging the souls of the artists that created the ignored art. Not everyone likes the same type of art or the same artists but what I am referring to is the systematic exclusions that happen in some art circles. No each his own but know that my art has a value just like your art does without question.