Badmouthing a Saint: We Find Fault with Brown Rice

Dinner Night 5: Aloo Gobi, Dal, Flatbread, Raita and...brown rice!

Dinner Night 6: We were riced-out so we had this roasted tofu and butternut squash with soy drizzle and a cilantro shower on its own. It's great that way.

As Dan and I round the bend into our final four meals, and mercifully, last evening without alcohol, which, as we've discussed, has been our greatest challenge, there have been a few notes and impressions thus far worthy of sharing. 

We ran out of butter. I roughly calculated butter under the $3 I budgeted for olive oil (which we still have lots of), but we only had about a stick of it going into the week, and there is about 3/4" of it being carefully maintained for tomorrow's breakfast. Why did we miscalculate butter? Partly because I always think we have it (file this under the assumptions of a person with a well-stocked pantry that need to be rethought to live on food stamps). Partly because when you are eating plain, low-calorie foods like plain oatmeal, brown rice, and bread with one egg, butter is a way of making the meal taste better, satisfy more, and get you to lunch/the next meal. When I have two eggs, I hardly need butter, but with just one, that second piece of toast is dry and the calorie content of the whole breakfast is down, so it comes in to the rescue. And the days when I work, I simply cannot make it from 7 am to almost 2 pm on a half a cup of oatmeal. I become homicidal in the lifeguard chair. I had thought I would be using a little pat of butter here and there to enrich pastas, soup, and dal this week, but I realized shortly in that we would run out, and my have we missed having as much of it as we want. In a week of circumscribed food, you notice the importance of things you took for granted before.

Cooking on food stamps is not as much fun. You may have noticed I am not against planning meals. In regular life, I rather obsess over it, and it's one of my favorite topics for contemplation when I'm up in my lifeguard chair making the big money. I have a rough idea of several meals I want to make over the course of a week, but I change it continually based on what we get from the farm share, what I have a craving for, and if I am inspired by a recipe I happen upon in my endless cooking-oriented procrastinations. Needless to say, when you live on this budget you struggle to come up with a plan to feed everyone for this amount of money, and there is nothing left over. At the beginning I noticed there were no sweets or tea. On day 2 I noticed there was no snack food (unless you want to eat an extra bowl of rice [see below]), and by day 3 I was painfully aware that the spontaneity had gone out of cooking, where I was compelled to execute the simple meals I had planned with the limited ingredients I could afford. I couldn't make an impromptu dessert or appetizer of spring rolls: I simply didn't have the ingredients or couldn't spare them. I couldn't change my mind and make something on a whim. The only wiggle room I had this week was a giant cauliflower I hadn't planned out which became aloo gobi on Indian night. Everything else was a limited-joy execution. Cooking seemed more like work to me this week than it ever has before.

"Fancy" or "fun" foods seem less appealing when I know I have to eat them with water. Dan articulated this first, and he is really right: there's been a sort of reversal in what foods we find it nicest to eat based on the fact that we can't have a glass of wine with them. The foods we see as the least celebratory (last night's roasted tofu and butternut squash being among them, although not because it isn't delicious!) are more pleasant to eat because we notice the absence of a glass of wine (or beer) less. We both agree that our last meal, sardine pasta, is bumming us out because it really deserves a glass of white wine. Normally, the meals we look forward to most are ones that have meat in them, because we eat it rarely. Typically, sausage or sardines at dinner would be a celebrated and special meal for us, but we've found they're sort of depressing when you can't complete the meal with a nice drink. For the record, I did consider buying sparkling water, but it wasn't in the budget, and it probably would have been even more disappointing than just leaning into the tap.

Thank you Asia, for all your wonderful, affordable dishes, but we have arsenic poisoning. It's no news flash that so-called "ethnic" cuisines (it would take not another post but a whole other blog to exhaust my problems with this term) are low in meat and make the most out of grains, vegetables, soy and a perilously-balanced egg on top. And while I think the notion of a "pantry" as a universal concept hides huge disparities in real people's kitchens (one bottle of maple syrup can be worth two or three families' worth of ketchup, mustard, mayo and margarine, to say nothing of the health differences in what people buy: pancake syrup versus maple, olive oil versus corn, etc.), Asian pantry items tend to be eminently affordable. Fish sauce, that old pubic sock juice I can't live without, is practically free. Soy sauce, sriracha, curry paste and even miso paste can generally be gotten for three dollars or so. The better the quality, the higher the price, but that's true even of things there are no cheap versions of. And that's just East Asian cuisines. Once you create an Indian spice cabinet (and if you can find an Indian store you can get massive quantities of spices for very cheap; Wegmans also carries some under the "Lakshmi" brand) you can make any legume or month-old vegetable amazing for a tablespoon of vegetable oil and some time. Any vegetable with garlic in yogurt makes fabulous raita. We've eaten almost exclusively Asian food this week (well I forgot the black beans, which you could call Latin American, I suppose, but which still fit, conveniently, into the "ethnic" category, which I guess means, "not French, not awful" or "may contain cilantro") and there's been lots of variety, terrific tastes, and all of it healthy. What's the catch?

Rice has too much damn arsenic. It's an exceptionally absorbent grass, and is often planted to clean up toxic sites where it absorbs whatever is in the soil. The problem of high arsenic levels in rice has been known long enough that the FDA has considered issuing recommendations on upper limits for rice consumption. Brown rice, which has the highest ratio of healthfulness-to-price of any food widely available, may be even worse than white rice because it has the outer shell of the grain intact. Growing rice organically doesn't address soil absorption, (check out the FDA's circumlocutions on the subject here) and at any rate, organic rice isn't affordable on the SNAP budget. This week, we've eaten almost two pounds of brown rice between us, and even if it weren't getting a little monotonous, it seems that's simply too frequent to eat rice to avoid dangerous levels of arsenic exposure. What this means is that one of the few ways we've found to eat whole grains on a SNAP budget exposes us frequently to a known carcinogen, which, if prolonged indefinitely, could have serious consequences. 

Only one more night of forced smiles ahead.