‘It was the best of days, it was the worst of days,’ that day in my early teens when I cooked my own breakfast for the first time, much to my mother’s surprise and joy. I was ecstatic, but I paid heavily for her oh-so-visible approval, having to make my own breakfast most days from that point onward…the price of culinary freedom.
Having been raised in a home one generation removed from Ellis Island, a home that included the last “from scratch” generation, I have seen a great deal of change occur in how food is produced, packaged, sold, stored, prepared, and eaten. My point of reference is not measured against some idyllic or over romanticized past from which we were driven, but a past, which we consciously left behind by decisions freely made, one after another.
Trained as a chef and pastry chef in Chicago and here in Seattle, I have met with much culinary success over the last two decades in the kitchen, in the market, and at the keyboard. My experiences as a chef, researcher and copywriter, newsletter writer, website manager, online retail buyer and merchandiser, and artisan food consultant have all served to heighten my passion for real food. Part historian, part investigative reporter, part satirist, part home economist, part forager, part cook, part nutritionist, part hedonist, I hope to inform as well as to entertain, to move my readers to act as much as move them to smile. While we can’t turn the clock back or put the imported, double-concentrated tomato paste back into its tube, even if we really wanted to, questions of our culinary heritage remain and these are the questions to be raised and answered herein. Unfortunately, with Big Ag, Big Food, and the often indifferent John Q. Public, the deck seems stacked against this culinary evangelist.
Jakob’s Bowl chronicles the sale of our birthright - for a bowl of lentils, or was it a can of soup and a box of frozen pizza rolls - and the current condition of our culinary age. Most importantly, Jakob’s Bowl is about taking back our birthright, our culinary independence…yes, taking it back, since they are not about to give it back willingly. Wendell Berry has written that “eating is agricultural act”, the completion of the cycle that “begins with planting and birth.” Eating is also a cultural act, and this blog promotes the revitalization of the pasture, the plate, and the palate by returning the food cycle to a central focus in our culture.
Michael Janiszewski
