From an interview with Tania Elizabeth from the Duhks
Questions:
What are the biggest lessons/tricks you've learned so far about traveling and staying healthy?
I am quite obsessed about this question actually. Not only about when touring but of course around our regular home lives and how it can make for a generally more enriching life. I'm also interested in how this question extends beyond the immediate subject and becomes not only about heath but also about politics and the environment very quickly.
What are some of the basic ideas that you like to try to maintain?
Eat Organically (very difficult on the road but we are blessed here in the Bay Area)
Eat locally grown food (think about how far some of this food travels before it reaches us)
Eat things that are in season. (better flavor and again less distance)
Stop working and sit and have the focus be about the food and the mealtime with friends.
Stopping the day and appreciating the beauty of food can create a kind of meditative solitude and balance to ones life that has got to be good for us.
For me the act of creating a good meal is centered on raising up the ingredients themselves and the people who grew them to a high level of appreciation. When we take the time to make something wonderful and satisfying and beautiful on the plate we are really saying 'look what nature has given us and the farmer has handled so well'. When we stop our work and sit with friends for a brief moment and eat together we are saying. ' I really care about this time with you so let's make it into something special for just a moment'. It's just a beautifully simple way of reconfirming these things to one another and a way of stopping the craziness of the workday and our world.
What about when you are touring?
When you have a long drive, try to plan your trip so that you wait till you get to a good-sized town to eat your big meal of the day. I try to just nibble something really light like nuts or fruit and drink lots of water to get through the freeway experience. That way you can save your appetite for something really nice once you have arrived at a larger town. You can stop and sit down and relax with you band mates with so many more options.
I sometime look in the yellow pages when I arrive at the hotel. Check out the ads. The type font and general look of the ad for a restaurant can tell you a lot about whether it is what you are looking for. Ask advice... but beware, the front desk clerk may generally not tend to be nearly as knowledgeable or care as much about good food as the person that hired you or the person from the great coffee shop or bookstore in town once you located that (no, not Starbucks). Ask the promoter to suggest choices that you are looking for. Try to find the key words that will tip them as to what kind of food you prefer. Spicy, ethnic, local specialties, organic, Vegan, etc.
At least ask for the section of town that has the University. This is generally where the good coffee shops, books stores and ethnic restaurants will tend to be. Once you are there, you can begin asking as well. Cab drivers know a lot or can radio in to other drivers for what you are looking for.
What are your biggest obstacles in achieving ideal health on the road?
Finding the TIME for exercise or a little sunshine is pretty hard to do but soooo essential. Take whatever moments you can grab. That little time before they load up the van can be crucial. Even 10 minutes. You're going to be sitting for a long time so walk around the neighborhood, or around the hotel if you can, just to get some blood flowing to your head and limbs. It's an attitude adjuster.
After sound check and before show is often a little moment where you can find some solitude that can work, too.
We have it in our riders that we appreciate local and ethnic foods and spicy stuff just to tip the promoter as to what we would prefer for a meal before the show. Of course you can get crazy with your demands but there is a way to do it so that they promoter gets what you are inclined towards without you looking like a primadonna.
We like to say 'the best shows usually are preceded by the best meals.'
Have you overcome them, and how?
Going to Europe and seeing how important this stuff is to the Italians and the French has helped tremendously. There is a kind of fanatic almost religious quality to how far these folks will go with food that can really give you some insights. They will wait till the time is there and the quality is there to make the eating experience whole. They will also carve this time into the day somehow with as much importance and zeal as for the gig itself. This can really teach us Americans something.
Do you exercise when on tour? What kind of exercise and how often?
I do a 20-minute yoga stretching series each day and I jog every other day about 25 minutes. I feel like it's saving my life. Oxygen is an amazing thing. This way it's just one shot of espresso to get moving in the morning instead of 5.
Do you warm up before performances (physically, mentally, musically)? How?
I just play slowly and try to find out what my hands are all about and kind of ask them questions for a while before diving right in. I try to think good thoughts about the folks who have come and how easy it is to just give them some nice feelings that will help them forget about their problems for a moment and get through their next day. Music is very helpful to folks. That is what we all bring.
Do you prefer to play on a full or empty stomach?
I like to eat about 3 hours before the show but this is really hard because that is typically when sound check is. I like to have a hot meal there just before the show but I try to ask them if they can keep it around and I would rather have a bit after the show if possible. In the winter, soup before the show is really nice.
Would you be interested in a book about staying healthy on the road?
But of course. These things I've learned the hard way. Pushing myself and getting colds over the last 20 years. Nowadays I know how to protect myself and save my energies so this happens a lot less. I take this fizzy drink Emergen-C and a bit of echinacea right at the slightest hint of a cold and get some really spicy soup like Vietnamese Pho. I make it almost too spicy to eat and this will most times kick a cold out before it goes very deep.
I also wash my hands a lot especially with all the hanging out and signing cds at the table and dealing with airports. I also drink tons and tons of water ALL THE TIME on tour too.
What kind of things would you want a book like this to cover?
It sounds like you are doing it. It would be nice to have a list but of course that would be constantly changing as places go out of business and new ones come up. I could envision being able to google for the type of restaurant you are looking for as you are getting near a town but I haven't yet gotten into the pocket email internet thing yet. When we drive on highways it always feels like we are probably whizzing past some incredible places. And if we were to just know how to pop off the freeway and head into town for something good without losing much time this would be really really hip.
Offhand, what are your favorite books on health, travel and music?
I have over 200 cookbooks so.... I would call myself a bit of a nutcase with regards to all this food stuff.
Saveur is a nice magazine.
The Unprejudiced Palate: Classic Thoughts on Food and the Good Life (Modern Library Food) (Paperback) by Angelo M. Pellegrini
The Foods of Italy by Waverly Root
The book 'Salt' and the book 'Cod' by Mark Kurlansky
The Splendid Table by Lynn Rosetta Kasper (The foods of Emilia Romangia)
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
Kenny Warner's book on music and the mind is really great.
The Cristoph Wolff biography of J.S. Bach The Learned Musician was really thrilling and made J.S. into a regular human being for me.
Yuhudi Menuhen wrote a nice book on yoga and stretching for violin playing and travel that was very enlightening.
Alice Waters is a saint as far as I'm concerned and her thoughts on teaching this stuff in the schools is really the answer to many of our problems. She made the simple art of growing and eating organically and locally and seasonally into a political question that I think really needs to be talked about at a much higher level....(mr. bush)
Onward brave pickers.
mm
Thank you again so much for your valuable time.
Peace
Tania~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The Vegetable-Industrial ComplexBy MICHAEL POLLAN
Published: October 15, 2006Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. "I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe," he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That's exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat -- sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it's easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism -- to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.
We can also expect to hear calls for more regulation and inspection of the produce industry. Already, watchdogs like the Center for Science in the Public Interest have proposed that the government impose the sort of regulatory regime it imposes on the meat industry -- something along the lines of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point system (Haccp, pronounced HASS-ip) developed in response to the E. coli contamination of beef. At the moment, vegetable growers and packers are virtually unregulated. "Farmers can do pretty much as they please," Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, said recently, "as long as they don't make anyone sick."
This sounds like an alarming lapse in governmental oversight until you realize there has never before been much reason to worry about food safety on farms. But these days, the way we farm and the way we process our food, both of which have been industrialized and centralized over the last few decades, are endangering our health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000. The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow's rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can't survive long in cattle living on grass.) Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn't be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.
Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution -- the one where crops feed animals and animals' waste feeds crops -- and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot. Rather than return to that elegant solution, however, industrial agriculture came up with a technological fix for the first problem -- chemical fertilizers on the farm. As yet, there is no good fix for the second problem, unless you count irradiation and Haccp plans and overcooking your burgers and, now, staying away from spinach. All of these solutions treat E. coli 0157:H7 as an unavoidable fact of life rather than what it is: a fact of industrial agriculture.
But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don't yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we're washing the whole nation's salad in one big sink.
It's conceivable the same problem could occur in your own kitchen sink or on a single farm. Food poisoning has always been with us, but not until we started processing all our food in such a small number of "kitchens" did the potential for nationwide outbreaks exist.
Surely this points to one of the great advantages of a decentralized food system: when things go wrong, as they sooner or later will, fewer people are affected and, just as important, the problem can be more easily traced to its source and contained. A long and complicated food chain, in which food from all over the countryside is gathered together in one place to be processed and then distributed all over the country to be eaten, can be impressively efficient, but by its very nature it is a food chain devilishly hard to follow and to fix.
Fortunately, this is not the only food chain we have. The week of the E. coli outbreak, washed spinach was on sale at my local farmers' market, and at the Blue Heron Farms stand, where I usually buy my greens, the spinach appeared to be moving briskly. I tasted a leaf and wondered why I didn't think twice about it. I guess it's because I've just always trusted these guys; I buy from them every week. The spinach was probably cut and washed that morning or the night before -- it hasn't been sitting around in a bag on a truck for a week. And if there ever is any sort of problem, I know exactly who is responsible. Whatever the risk, and I'm sure there is some, it seems manageable.
These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what's going on at the farmers' market -- how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect through these foods and their growers to the natural world. Stack all this up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little...sentimental.
But there's nothing sentimental about local food -- indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental -- and deliberate -- contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do." The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. "The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry" make them "vulnerable to terrorist attack." Today 80 percent of America's beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy -- and at the moment they are thriving -- is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies -- to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef -- is, of all things, the government's own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants -- the ones that local meat producers depend on -- are closing because they can't afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists that all regulations be "scale neutral," so if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing plant that slaughters local farmers' livestock will have to install these facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the farmers' market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.'s perspective, it is much more efficient to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.
So what happens to the spinach grower at my farmers' market when the F.D.A. starts demanding a Haccp plan -- daily testing of the irrigation water, say, or some newfangled veggie-irradiation technology? When we start requiring that all farms be federally inspected? Heavy burdens of regulation always fall heaviest on the smallest operations and invariably wind up benefiting the biggest players in an industry, the ones who can spread the costs over a larger output of goods. A result is that regulating food safety tends to accelerate the sort of industrialization that made food safety a problem in the first place. We end up putting our faith in RadSafe rather than in Blue Heron Farms -- in technologies rather than relationships.
It's easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent much the same sort of pre-problem solution -- elegant, low-tech and redundant. But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.
Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author most recently of "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals."
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In the Kitchen with Mike...
As he does so engagingly in music, Mike also applies his adventurous aesthetic to his two principal hobbies: wine making and food. Already known as one of the best cooks in the music business, he has been trading guitar lessons for cooking lessons from Michael Peternell a chef at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA.
"I just love food. Everything about it. The traditions, memories, culture, history, eating out, cooking with friends cooking for our little family, creating a gigantic event around a holiday or a special dish or just sharing a little snack with an old pal.
All of it just really turns me on. It never seems to amaze me how much there is hidden in this most basic of acts. And the nice thing about it is that you don't have to try very hard to find inspiration, you know? You are going to get hungry.
I grew up in one of those very typical Italian/American households Actually the name Marshall was a 20th Century bastardization of our original family name which was Marchiariello. My father's family was from Caserta, a region just north of Naples. My mother's side came from Abruzzi in the mountains east of Rome and their name was Di Cioccio.
From these two families, I'm sure I acquired my appreciation and passion for these old traditions and the classic Italian way of living and eating. We made homemade wine, sausage, pastas and breads and all the great Italian sweets in the style of the regions that my families came from.
Mom canned and made incredible pies and lots of incredible things to eat. Innumerable in fact. Different aunts and uncles excelled at various dishes that they became famous for within our extended family.
Of course there was always a little battle as to which area had the finest example of a certain dish. Abruzzi or Caserta or Compobasso (my maternal grandmothers region)
It wasn't until I moved away from home at age 19 that I started to develop a real appreciation for food. Living in a place like the Bay Area has provided incredible amounts of inspiration. It seems to be the nearest thing to living in every country in the world at the same time. It is just amazing and a never ending source of inspiration and I feel quite lucky to get to live here.
And I am sure that the first few trips I took on tours of Europe and Japan had profound impacts on my feeling about food and how important and wonderful a role it can play in the quality of life that we live.
I also have quite a nice cookbook collection, but mostly I cook by memory and I love to improvise and just be creative and spontaneous with what is around me. Probably not unlike most folks.
If I am trying to learn a new technique or dish I might peruse my cookbooks and look at several versions of a recipe and I'll usually do a combination of all the things I find interesting.
The Web site Epicurious.com is quite amazing for this kind of thing.
Buying Food
A few years back our family started to buy organic produce whenever we could. We are really fortunate to live here in the Bay Area where we have such amazing access to good things to eat. This feels like a movement that is sweeping the country and as I travel around now days I am beginning to see an amazing selection of foods available almost everywhere I go.
Cutting
Have a great time and yum!
