A Madison food crash course for Michael Pollan
Ken Light
Don't act so smart, mister--we've much to teach you about sausage and frugality!
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While author and journalist Michael Pollan's been schooling the world on how to eat, so have the people of the Madison area. Indeed, Pollan's a kindred spirit to many locals, from those who toil on small organic farms to those who luxuriate in meals made of local ingredients at L'Etoile. That doesn't mean Pollan's celebrated appearances Thursday at the Kohl Center and Saturday at the Food For Thought Festival should just be big fuzzy agree-arounds. In fact, there's no reason why his visit to Madison can't be as healthily challenging as Pollan's ideas. The A.V. Club scoured some stellar local menus and talked to some Madison foodie gurus to assemble an itinerary that might help Pollan keep his investigation of American eating Wisconsin-fresh.
Heritage in our arteries
When Pollan speaks at the Food For Thought Festival this Saturday, he’ll be talking to one of Madison’s most vibrant and passionate subcultures, but let’s face it, he won’t be getting a totally accurate view of what it means to eat and drink in Wisconsin. Luckily, at the exact same time his FFTF event is taking place, an ocean of Badgers fans will be gathering a couple miles away, representing our great state in all of its artery-clogged glory. And while there’s certainly much about that experience he might find appalling, it’s not all bad. For instance, in his latest book In Defense Of Food, Pollan says that how we eat—often alone—is not really eating. Granted, he’d probably consider 80,000 people jamming mass-processed sausages into their mouths a bit disgusting, but he certainly won’t find a bigger cluster-brunch than that one.
And if that’s not enough Wisconsin for him, after the game he could consider stop-ins at The Old Fashioned, Weary Traveler, Ian’s Pizza, or Fromagination. These are all restaurants that have a tendency to play up their sconnie-ness to obscenely indulgent levels (nobody really needs a fried egg on hamburger, even if said egg comes from a farm down the road), yet their unyielding commitment to supporting local purveyors is something he could surely get on board with—even when the end result is a meal only a native could appreciate. If that's not enough to make Pollan look at Madison sideways, he need only wait around a few days for the beginning of the annual World Dairy Expo, running from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3 at the Alliant Energy Center. Say, how many food miles are on that industrial-sized vat of bull semen?
All in a day's budget
Pollan wants us to spend more money for our food. Sure, Americans may now spend less than 10 percent of our household income on food but fortunately, here in Madison, you can get food that’s fairly affordable as well as local and fresh. All the things Michael Pollan wants for us. Using The Economist magazine’s Big Mac Index (really, it exists), for the same price of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal in the U.S. ($4.95), you can buy one pound of vegan gumbo (made with local sweet potatoes) at the Willy Street Co-op, or two slices of cheese or pepperoni pizza, or one specialty slice covered with local ingredients and a Sprecher Root Beer at Ian’s.
For breakfast, Pollan might consider assembling his own croissant’wich at Café Soleil from a selection of local meats, cheeses, produce, and eggs, trying an egg and bacon sandwich at Mermaid Café, or getting a crepe filled with raspberries from Blue Skies Berry Farm and housemade lemon curd at Bradbury’s Coffee. Not to mention its locally roasted coffee. If he's feeling a bit more mellow, he might spoon up a bowl of homemade granola studded with Door County cherries and mixed with Sugar River Dairy yogurt at the Washington Hotel Coffee Room.
Heading into lunch, Pollan should have an easy time stretching that bestselling-author paycheck with a slice of seasonal quiche at Manna Café, a bowl of Wisconsin beer-cheese soup garnished with popcorn at the Old Fashioned plus a spicy pickled egg, or an individual size Greek salad topped with local feta, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and lettuce at Pizza Brutta. And if all of that just sounds too healthy, he can lapse into a cone of “last meal”-worthy Belgian frites made from local potatoes and an aioli dipping sauce at Brasserie V.
The legwork
Tory Miller, executive chef and co-owner of L'Etoile, and Prentice Berge, owner of Nattspil and general manager at Restaurant Magnus, not only agree with the thrust of Pollan's work, but also bring some dimension to how those ideas play out on a practical level. When Magnus recently converted to a Scandinavian menu, the preparation techniques changed with the style of cuisine. “What we are doing is restoring the complexity that everyone dealt with before Julia Child, before even the post-World War II canned food technology that she was reacting to," Berge says. "With Magnus and the new Scandinavian cuisines, we abandoned modern technology for older techniques: brining, curing, salting, and smoking, most of which are pretty low-energy.” Pollan's critics can point to upscale joints like Magnus and L'Etoile as evidence that sustainable food is too much of a luxury item, but for Miller, the problem seems to be one of growing but untapped potential: “Wisconsin can show the world how to truly be sustainable by supporting our small family farms and local farmers' markets, putting money back into our local economy."
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