And we ate very, very well together. Each of us has her own journey with food, but this weekend we revelled wholly in the abundance and variety available to us. Saturday morning I went around the corner to the bakery, La Farine. Per my mother, who grew up partly in France, a true French boulangerie would simply never be entitled "the flour;" but this very gauche moniker didn't stop us from heartily enjoying a fine spread of raisin loaf, raspberry-walnut scones, and baguette, plus my first-ever tub of soy margarine (about which I can only advise, don't make the same mistake I did, gentle reader), Straus plain yogurt and organic strawberries. We laughed, our mouths full, as we tried to get most of each morsel into our mouths, despite the drips and the crumbs we lost along the way.
From there we went to the Ferry Building farmer's market. Those of you who have been to San Francisco, or who live here, are smiling knowingly right now; for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of visiting this most beautiful of cities, I'll tell you that the Ferry Building is like an amusement park for foodies. High, rounded ceilings shelter an airy hall filled with light, once surely filled with the shouts and chatter of thousands of travellers, and now lined with tantalizing, gourmet specialty shops. A caviar bar! A wine merchant! A purveyor of local, wild-harvested mushrooms! (When I asked the clear-eyed young man behind the mushroom counter if he had any kombucha mothers available, he told me he didn't but offered to bring me some if we wanted to make an appointment. Can you imagine the calendar entry for that day: "10:00 a.m., meeting; 12:00 noon, lunch with friend; 3:00 p.m., retrieve fungus for effervescent tea beverage." It's a good life.) You can buy extraordinary local cheese, tantalizing local produce, savory local olive oil, and of course, fresh-caught local fish.
My mom and I bounced from store to store, turning cheeses over in our hands, drawing in long, awestruck breaths of fragrance from bars of oatmeal-cinnamon soap, gawking at elaborately-decorated pastries. The salty bayfront air wafted in now and then, tickling our senses and tempting us with thoughts of the sea.
Later we walked through a craft fair, and then onto Union Square where we marvelled at a different kind of array of wares. We paused in one of my favorite hideouts, Cafe Bellini, enjoying its black laquered tables and red walls. We spent some time and some dollars in Sephora, a store I hadn't been into in years but wanted to visit, to spice up my cosmetics collection.
And then we made our way to Millenium. Touted as one of the best vegetarian restaurants in California, if not the U.S., we were both excited to enjoy a fine dinner -- especially my mother, who has been a strict vegetarian for most of my life. (But she has been known to eat an anchovy once or twice a decade. Don't tell her I told you.) So we were a bit surprised, and had to do a double-take or two, when we saw its unassuming yellow awning beneath the Best Western Hotel on Geary Street -- in an area bordering the Tenderloin, no less, which is not the best of neighborhoods.
But all of our bewilderment was put to rest when we entered the restaurant, and even more so when we tasted our meal. Oh, the food at this restaurant. It is the sort of food whose flavor causes each bite to elicit an involuntary groan of pleasure. And those groans traverse a couple of octaves over the course of the meal. My mom had an Ethiopian-inspired dish of teff injera, garbanzo wot, and sauteed green vegetables.
I ate a stuffed, truffled roulade, made of french lentils and black chanterelle ragu, roasted chestnuts, black truffle butter, smoked pimenton cream, and a host of other unimaginably delicious components. And we washed it down with some fine, dry red wine, which was, of course, biodynamically farmed.
For dessert? Fresh lime and strawberry sorbet. A perfect ending to a perfectly delicious, perfectly local, perfectly organic meal.
Oh, how I wish I could end the story here.
How I wish I could just wrap up the story of my mother's visit, her love-filled generosity on Sunday when she helped me clean my apartment and stock my bachelor-pad-esque refrigerator with the best that Whole Foods Market has to offer. How I wish I could describe to you the way we devoured the falafel on Sunday night at Holy Land restaurant, and the way my mom beseeched the sparkling-eyed Israeli owner to take good care of me. (He agreed.) How I wish I could tell you that after our tearful goodbye on Monday morning, I went off to work and all was simply well.
But I can't.
Don't worry -- nothing bad happened. We really did have a wonderful, precious, priceless time together. I really did drop her off Monday morning and she really did make it safely back to LA; I saw the hawk, our totem animal together, making lazy circles over I-880 on my drive back from the airport to my office.
Instead, I have to break the sweet spell of this story with BHT.
(Three little letters! Couldn't be that bad, right?)
BHT is butylated hydroxytoluene. Wikipedia tells us it's commonly used in jet fuels, rubber, and embalming fluid. It has been shown to have carcinogenic, mutagenic, and endocrine-disruptive effects. BHT, in fact, is one of the ingredients in CheckMate, which is the semiochemical that our state and federal governments want to spray on us here in the Bay Area, to combat the supposed threat of the light brown apple moth.
When BHT, along with 10 other so-called "inert" ingredients, plus the two active, pheromone ingredients in CheckMate, were sprayed onto Monterey and Santa Cruz last fall (pursuant to no environmental or toxicological review whatsoever), over 600 people reported illness -- respiratory impairment, skin irritation, loss of energy, digestive trouble -- symptoms which are consonant with classic pesticide poisoning profiles.
Long-term effects of these chemicals haven't been tested by either of the governmental agencies involved in the spraying, but there is an abundance of peer-reviewed scientific literature about each of the spray ingredients suggesting that they are simply not safe for human populations, much less for fetuses, developing children, the elderly, and other sensitive populations.
So many of the studies I've seen and that have been cited show that these chemicals, including BHT, can cause severe damage even in the smallest amounts. 1, 10, 20 parts per billion of some of these substances can throw our exquisitely sensitive hormonal and neurological systems out of balance. Have you noticed that autism has been in the news a lot lately? It's one of the many childhood neurodevelopmental disorders that is on the rise in the past couple of decades. And, with increasing frequency, the medical community is starting to connect the dots between the 80,000 chemicals present in our ambient environment, and the health issues that we are facing as a society.
I have an endocrine disorder. Did my mother or my father, simply by the act of breathing or drinking water, ingest some tiny bit of foreign substance that was somehow transmitted to me, and that sent the wrong information to my rapidly-dividing cells? I will never know.
What's worse, I have no choice, nor do any of us, about the toxic substances that I take into my body on a daily basis, substances that abound in the environment because of the way we have chosen to treat our planet, our home. I breathe city air, I drink city water, I walk through wireless signals. I am part of a food system which involves the use of pesticides, which pays people from other countries very few dollars to apply pesticides on crops in Californian fields. People who become sick, whose babies are sometimes born disfigured.
I also take many actions about which I do have choice. I eat food in restaurants, often meat. I wash my hair and body, I buy and use cookware, I launder my clothing. And I put on makeup.
Disclosure: one of the unfortunate symptoms of my health situation is that I have had acne for most of my life. That's really its own story, one I don't know if I'll share in this space. If you've had skin problems, you know what it's like; the rest of you are fortunate, but you may be able to imagine. Suffice it to say, I'm an avid consumer of foundation and concealer. So at Sephora on Saturday, I purchased a few new products -- one from a cosmetics line called Tarte, and one called Amazing Cosmetics.
I tried the Amazing Cosmetics concealer in the store and was surprised to see how well it worked -- it went on thick but blended in, just like magic. I was excited about it, so much so that I decided just to buy it, without looking at the ingredients list. So as you can imagine, dear reader, I was a bit taken aback on Monday morning when I did finally read the ingredients and discovered BHT featured prominently.
As it turns out, BHT is a common cosmetics ingredient and food additive. In fact, that's one of the ways in which our government justifies its presence in the CheckMate formulation -- it's perfectly safe! We eat it and wear it! But BHT has also been banned by the US as an ingredient in baby food; many European countries have banned its use entirely in consumer products. We know what it is, but we just don't want to admit it.
Maybe I've been putting BHT on my face for years, now, with all my drugstore-bought makeup. But now that I know about it, I can choose whether or not I want to use it, and I choose to reduce my body burden by returning that product to the store. And I'll probably pay a visit to Elephant Pharmacy pretty soon, to pick up some mineral make-up by Zia cosmetics or Dr. Hauschka.
It's true that one way we learn is through our mistakes. That's a good thing. But this is one lesson we can't keep bungling, if we want to keep being alive, to keep tasting delicious food and gasping at the brilliant sunset and walking in the forest and loving each other. If we want seeds to still take root and new life to still grow, inside of our bodies.
I really, really want all of that to keep happening here.
So it might be just a few microns, a few molecules that I'm sparing myself. But I'm coming to learn more and more that even in the most infinitesmal amounts, a toxic chemical is still a toxic chemical. And in a toxic world, it is still my choice to avoid eating chicken of unknown origin from the lunch-rush cafe close to my office, or to stop transporting water in my old hard-plastic bottle, or to get rid of my old Teflon pans even though stainless steel is more difficult to clean. It is still my choice to decide what I put on my face. This is my body; these are my reproductive organs; this is my life.
We have a long way to go, as a polity, towards a sane, sound, coordinated policy around sustainable agriculture, toxic chemicals and public health. Me, I'm trained as a lawyer, and called as a healer, so I'll do what I can to help us move in that direction. But in the meantime I can make tiny choices, and so can you. We just can't underestimate, anymore, the great impacts of the tiniest things.
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For more information on what's in your makeup and other products:
http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/
http://www.safecosmetics.org/
http://www.ewg.org/
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