ColumnHave we lost our ability to do – and appreciate – the beauty of the simple things in life?

I had walked by the socca stand once before.

All the way in the back of Paris’ popular Marché des Enfants Rouge, full of various food stands and markets, there was a gray-haired man making the traditional street food from Nice, “socca” scribbled in white on a black chalkboard. A crepe made of garbanzo bean flour; it’s a specialty that’s hard to find out of the region. Tracking down garbanzo bean flour a couple of years ago at an ethnic food market, my mother started making them. They became an instant family classic.

In the middle of a very cold day at the height of rush hour, we opted for a pot of Moroccan tea instead, but I made a mental note to come back.

A couple of weeks later, we were in the neighborhood just at the end of lunch hour. The market had mostly cleared out after the midday rush, and the line at the socca stand was only a few people long. Beyond socca, the specialty was obviously galettes – large crepes filled with whatever you wanted – and grilled sandwiches. The gray-haired man working the stand filled ciabatta with a variety of ingredients and put them on his expansive crepe griddles.

“Alors, vous voulez quoi?” What would you like?

“Deux cornets vegetariens… et un socca”

Two galettes stuffed with a handful of vegetables and a socca for good measure. The man, whose name was Alain, went to work. Throwing a pre-made galette on the grill and filling it with grated carrot and fennel, mushrooms, lettuce and a roasted eggplant spread. He opened up a Tupperware filled with goat cheese and threw on more than a few rounds, his fingers covered in bits of cheese. He moved in a meticulous yet artful way; a frantic type of methodical in the way that only someone that has been doing something for many years can do.

He looked up, “et le miel!” he said emphatically, as he brought out a jar of honey and held it high up as he drizzled it over the entire thing. He wrapped the cornets in paper and handed them off. “Tout bio vous savez!” All organic.

Meanwhile the socca had been cooking on the crepe griddle at the edge of the stand. I asked him if it was easy to get socca in Paris. “Non, je suis le seul à le faire.” I have yet to verify whether or not he’s actually the only one in town making socca, but I took his word for it. He sprinkled the garbanzo flour crepe with an herbed salt, broke it into small pieces and threw it into a white bag. It was so warm it was steaming. Comfort street food.

The cornets were huge, more food for 6.50€ than you could probably get anywhere else in Paris, unless you were stuffing yourself on a baguette and a jar of Nutella.

This city, like many other food metropolises, is full of five star restaurants and world-renowned chefs, but it’s moments like these that are a reminder that often, the simplest ones are the best. I asked Alain what the name of his food stand was. “Il n’y en a pas.” There isn’t one. Of course there wasn’t. This was a man cooking food simply for the love of food.

We like to over complicate things with multiple course dinners and fancy drinks. Those all have their place, but in an complex world, simplicity is more and more sought after, be it at a food stand in a market or in the kitchen.

Compare a cookie recipe from the early 1900s to a more modern one. The former will be a single mixture of butter, eggs, sugar, flour and baking powder. Simple ratios. There may not even be a temperature or time indicated. The home cooks of the day were merely supposed to have the knowledge to take care of that on their own and know when the cookies were done.

Take that same recipe from a modern book and it will fill up a page, you will be instructed exactly how to beat your eggs and cream your sugar and you’ll probably even get a complex icing concoction. Not to mention the images that show the cookies sitting on a romantic farm table, lightly dusted with the flour from the baking process and a cozy cup of tea in the corner. It might provide for inspiration, or it might just be a reminder that you’ll never accomplish the same thing.

We have made food for millennia, crafting and concocting and figuring out how to put ingredients together and create something new. From the more caveman methods of roasting a freshly caught animal over a fire, to modern day boiling, whisking, broiling and frying, we have evolved into a species that doesn’t just forage for fruits and berries: we do something with them. Culinary evolution has followed that of mankind, bringing us to the current day and age of the food cart, the five star restaurant and the cookbook shelf with thousands of new titles.

And yet somewhere along the way we reached a moment where we stopped cooking. Where convenience and prepared food became such the norm, that we didn’t have to know what to do with ingredients. Someone else could do it for us.

These days, we don’t know basic ratios. We have never roasted a turkey. Stocking a pantry is beyond us. Eating has nothing to do with the effort of our brains or hands, all we have to do is order, and so in this complex process of culinary evolution, we ourselves have actually devolved, unable to put simple ingredients together and make a meal out of it.

There’s no simple answer to this dilemma. It involves better food education in schools. It requires better access to food for everyone, not just those that live in food capitals. It involves a serious investment in revamping the entire food system. But it does also require a personal re-commitment to simplicity. A re-commitment to buying carrots from the farmers market and washing the dirt off ourselves, to working with the ingredients we have instead of ordering take out, to appreciating good food for good food’s sake, not because a magazine or guidebook said we should care about it.

That’s what people like Alain stand for. The love of food for food’s sake. Food doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be good and made with a little bit of passion. There’s beauty in simplicity after all.

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Photo Credits: Anna Brones

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ColumnA stove, a tent and a sunset is the formula for appreciating simple food.

Mediocre wine is excellent if you have a view, coffee is exponentially more delicious when brewed after a night in a tent, and trail mix can compete with the fanciest hors d’oeuvre when you’re in the middle of a hike. It’s simple: food always tastes better outdoors.

I was thinking of this in the process of drinking a mug of wine, overlooking a horizon of red rock formations last week. Dirtbags, sunsets and merlot do go hand in hand after all.

I was on the tail end of a trip and my father insisted I take a few days off the grid and get outside. Fathers often know best, so I accepted his invitation and was soon in one of my favorite landscapes of North America, the slickrock country of Southeastern Utah, peppered with canyons, arches and beautiful sunrises and sunsets.

Three days of hiking and sleeping under the stars requires fuel, and while for many food is an afterthought, for me it’s the number two priority, second only to water.

There is a certain formula to food when you’re camping. Keep it simple. Invest in good peanut butter. Always have some fresh fruit that can last a few days. This was all instilled in me as a small child, growing up spending summers in a tent across the Pacific Northwest.

The memory of hot chocolate on brisk summer mornings in some far off campground are still clear in my mind. My father would fuel up our old Svea stove, mom would create some fancy one-pot concoction – there is a family standard recipe of couscous with pine nuts and dried apricots that I first remember eating on the Oregon coast – and we would pull out our blue and red checkered tablecloth, intended only for outdoor eating occasions. There was a process; we didn’t leave good food when we left the house, we carried it, and a routine dedicated to appreciating good food, with us.

That process quickly wore off on me, making quesadillas on a kayaking trip at the age of ten that has become another standard family backcountry recipe. Which meant my father was overjoyed when I busted out a new rendition on this recent trip with a sauteed portobello, sweet potato, red pepper combination. But it’s not because I’m a foodie-freak that’s packing a kit of sea salt and fancy spices (although I do believe in always having curry powder and cinnamon along) that food in the outdoors is good. It’s because it’s simple.

Be it on a camping trip or on a picnic, we all have strong attachments to eating outdoors. The second it gets warm we flock to outdoor patios and plan picnics. Think about your favorite moments from last summer and I’ll bet one of them involves an outdoor meal. There is an undeniable connection between food and being outside that not only gives us time to appreciate nature, but makes food taste better in the process. Dig out an apple and peanut butter from your backpack on a hike and it will most certainly taste better than it does when you’re in front of your computer in need of an afternoon snack.

But why does food taste better outdoors? Because in our everyday lives, we are removed from the effort that is involved in food and when we’re outdoors, we’re reminded of what that process looks and feels like.

There was a time when we were responsible for hunting our own food, whittling spearheads out of rock and chasing wild animals in nothing but our bare feet. We foraged for edible plants. Later we industrialized the process, but were still responsible for running farms, waking before dawn to milk the cows and living in rhythm with the seasons as we tilled our own land.

Nowadays, the large majority of us are almost completely detached from that process. Our meat comes on styrofoam beds wrapped in plastic, our milk in cartons and our salad from an aisle that’s doused with refreshing water at regular intervals. Besides the actual preparation of a meal, our most “laborious” moments come from a trip to the grocery story, and if we’re feeling extra lazy, eating can be as simple as picking up the phone, dialing a number and rummaging through your wallet to make sure you have enough cash when the delivery person shows up.

Add a dose of the outdoors into that equation and things immediately change.

If you’re backpacking, you have to haul your food by your own means. If you’re car camping, you have to get creative with what you’re making and do without the usual luxuries of running water and a large stove. Eating outdoors forces us to think more about what we’re eating and truly engage with the process of putting it on the table. We’re still not taking on the labors of working the farm or hunting our own food, but things that are simple and require little thought at home suddenly require more work and attention.

Even boiling water, normally a task we do at home, sleepy-eyed and barely conscious, takes more thought than usual. Because we can’t just open the refrigerator or pantry, instead of mindlessly consuming, in the outdoors, we think about meal times in a different way. We revert to something more fundamental, breathing fresh air and eating food that we put work into making, two activities that are basic, yet essential to our well-being. We’re not texting, we’re not tweeting, we’re not analyzing, we’re just eating.

Food tastes better outdoors because we simplify. We take down all the walls that our everyday routines require us to put up, and we enjoy food for food’s sake.

A worn tablecloth. A spork. A bowl of sauteed vegetables. A group of friends taking the time to reconnect. A view. A sunset. A dinner with no distractions. That’s even better than the best food truck.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: Anna Brones

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