Transcription of Savor, #73
Announcer: You’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland Maine. The summaries of all our past shows can be found at Dr.lisa.org. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on ITunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.
Announcer: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at RE/Max Heritage, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Booth Maine, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary by Design, and The Body Architect.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, show #73, Savor, airing for the first time on February 3, 2013. Life is meant to be savored and what better way to do so than through food. In his book, Taste, Memory, author David Buchanan traces the experiences of modern-day explorers who rediscover culturally rich, forgotten foods and return them to our tables for all to experience and savor. We enjoy his insights as a farmer, gardener, and Slow Foods advocate. Hear about Maine’s best savor spots from Eat Maine writer, Amy Anderson, and have a conversation with Karina Napier of Sea Change about her work in the sea salt industry here in Maine.
As a physician with training in Chinese Medicine and acupuncture, I spend a lot of time talking with my patients about food. Many people come to me wanting to lose weight or change their body in some way. What I like to focus on though is how it is that we can enjoy foods and really bring the joy of cooking and eating and cultivating into our lives. How can we savor what we have in front of us so that it’s not a constant struggle? This I found is the most successful way to approach weight loss, but it’s also the most successful way to approach eating as learning how to cook what you truly enjoy in a healthy way. We believe that our conversations with David Buchanan, Amy Anderson, and Karina Napier will enable you to find ways to savor your own life. Thank you for joining us.
Recently at The Body Architect I gave a talk on strengthening the immune system and offered a variety of different foods and other natural ways to keep people’s immune systems strong in the winter. One tip that I remember from my mother way back was gargling with salt water. This was a very simple way to deal with a sore throat and there is some science behind it. More and more of us are realizing that we need to go back to the things that our parents talked to us about to keep ourselves healthy. It’s not anybody else’s job but ours. For more thoughts on how to keep ourselves healthy, join me on our monthly wellness series at The Body Architect or become a patient by calling The Body Architect at 207-774-2196.
Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast has been a way for me to bring some of my thoughts and also the thoughts of area guest and thought leaders, I know I’m saying though a lot… thoughts, feelings, emotions, passions, but things like food to the airways and the individual who’s sitting across from me now certainly has a lot of thoughts and passion, emotion about food. We have with us today David Buchanan who’s the author of Taste, Memory. Thanks for coming in.
David: Thank you Lisa, wonderful to be here.
Lisa: Well it’s wonderful to meet you because I always enjoy reading a book, which I did. I got your book. I read through it and really kind of getting to know you that way but then it’s funny to see how people actually progress over the course of their life after they finish writing the book to where they are now, but first let’s go back. What caused you to write this book?
David: I felt that I’d been reading so much about the local … hearing so much about the local food movement over the past 5 or 6 years and to me there was another message that I wanted to bring out into the world about heritage foods and diversity and the idea that local food isn’t the same as food that’s brought in from other parts of the world that we can really establish our own distinct cuisine specific to this place.
Lisa: It’s interesting because in Chinese Medicine we talk a lot … I practice Chinese Medicine. I don’t really talk a lot about sort of eating the foods that have the essence of the place where you actually live and how that ends up being more healthy for you and we’ve talked about this before on air that Maine seems to provide the foods that we need to live. Apples, that’s one of the things that you’re passionate about. Why apples?
David: There are a lot of reasons why I get excited about apples and it’s partly because as a plant collector I can still go out into the fields around Maine into abandoned homesteads or even in urban settings and find old apple trees to collect and so it’s a piece of history that’s still very much alive. We’re all probably familiar with ancient apple trees that could be up to 200 years old growing by the side of the road or behind someone’s home. There’s a real vibrancy to collecting apples, but also because there’s so much diversity in the apple, in apple history, and in apple growing in New England, historically. It’s estimated that in Maine, farmers, gardeners, and home growers grew an estimated 400-plus varieties of apples so there’s an incredible richness there and apples for so many different uses. Maybe it was for fresh eating or for making cider or for hard cider or for pies. Every apple can have its own particular ecological niche and culinary use.
Lisa: And apples, they … over winter we can actually … some of them can be stored. Is that true?
David: Sure. There are some apples that are best eaten and typically don’t store at all that are best eaten right off the tree or baked in August and then there are apples that really don’t reach their full potential until they’ve been stored for a month or two in root cellar and should be eaten from February onwards.
Lisa: I was struck when you were talking about different varieties of apples. I think you mentioned Honey Crisp as one that you kind of gave a little bit of background on …
David: That I’ve read about, mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa: It’s interesting because you go into Hannaford or any grocery store and you see, here’s Honey Crisp and here’s Macintosh and that’s Red Delicious, Green Delicious, that’s about it but you’re talking lots and lots of different varieties with lots of different taste.
David: Yes, thousands of varieties. I read about going out to the National germplasm collection, the USDA’s apple collection in Geneva, New York and wandering through their 50-acre orchard and sampling from hundreds and thousands of varieties of apples, apples alone, and that same diversity is maybe not to quite that extent, but it is available on all kinds of crops. If you go to the supermarket you see just a handful of varieties. That’s partly a function of the difficulty of marketing more than a thousand or so varieties, people just can’t recognize them.
Lisa: Also because a lot of them are not even from Maine.
David: A lot of the fruit that we’re eating isn’t from Maine. It’s really tough for Maine orchards to compete right now with higher volume production in other parts of the world and we don’t … in some ways our climate is challenged for growing fruits and so we’re competing against Washington State or New Zealand or … and now China.
Lisa: Although Maine has been a farming state for centuries, so somehow we’ve made this work prior to the time that we were shipping things in from China and Washington State.
David: We can and do. We’ve got a scrappy group of farmers in Maine and a very vibrant agricultural community.
Lisa: Talk to me about biodiversity. We just talked about apples and how there are certain things that we as consumers just get used to. We want certain tastes. Why is it important ecologically for us to consider biodiversity?
David: It’s important to match a plant or an animal to a particular place. Let’s say you’re trying to grow an apple in central Maine and you have a certain set of conditions. You’ve got some rocky soil. You’ve got cold winters, maybe wet springs and a little bit of a dry period in the summer. It’s a very different set of conditions from what a grower encounters out in Washington State, in central Washington State, which I also read about because I used to live there. I used to live close to apple country in north central Washington and there the land is in the shadow of the North Cascade Mountains and it’s very dry. The winters are cold. The pest pastures are very different.
When we’re thinking about, let’s say, the pressure from a fungal disease or a particular pest, it’s going to differ radically from place to place and some apples will respond more … will have some natural defenses against some of those pests or have a better adaption to drought, maybe have a deeper root system. Some might thrive better in cold or warm weather. There are apples that are more regionally adapted to the south or the Mid-Atlantic or to northern Maine. There aren’t that many apples that can survive up in Aroostook County but there are a handful of apples, like Duchess, that are renowned for thriving in that difficult environment.
Lisa: So we’re always depending on a sort of apple. Let’s just say it’s Golden Delicious from Hannaford and something comes along that destroys that crop, some sort of weather situation, then that’s it.
David: Sure. Look at corn in the summer with the drought that spreads so intensely across the south and the mid-west and we have hundreds of thousands of acres of … or millions of acres in any one state planted entirely to corn and typically to just one strain, one line of corn and so something comes along, say a heat wave, while that corn is trying to pollinate or maybe a pest at the wrong moment or a disease has the potential to spread like wildfire. In contrast if you can diversify what you’re planting, even if you’re planting several different kinds of corn, you may have pollination occur in a different moment, one week to the next, and have a better chance getting a crop.
Lisa: Which maybe now isn’t quite as important but if we think back to Ireland and the potato famine, it certainly was very important …
David: Absolutely, yes. It’s important today too. Diversity matters and adaptation to local environment matters in terms of the amount of spray we have to use, the health of the crop, the success of the farm.
Lisa: Well that also seems to matter from a health standpoint. I mean we have to get used to eating different types of foods. We have to be able to expose ourselves different types of environments because when we don’t do that we get ill.
David: It’s dull too. It’s boring to eat the same thing day after day. I like to experiment with different apples and to me there’s a tremendous cultural richness just to go back to apples in that diversity. If you think about all the uses and the subtleties of it, when Mainers historically knew that one apple made the best apple butter and one, let’s say a Northern Spy or Baldwin made the best pie and then another was perfect for cider or perfect for eating at a particular time. To think that we can substitute all those uses and take just … and try to get all of that out of one apple, just to take Honey Crisp. Does that replace everything? Can you …? It’s a great apple. I really enjoy eating Honey Crisp but can it …? Is the only fruit? Can it substitute for all that richness?
Lisa: Is this one of the reasons why you were involved with Slow Foods?
David: There are a lot of reasons I’ve been involved with Slow Foods, yes, but the emphasis on regionality and tradition and pleasures of the table really resonates with me as well as its embrace of ecology. It’s understanding that to be … that a thriving, successful, healthy agriculture has to be rooted in place with an environmental awareness.
Lisa: Also this idea of taste and the name of your book, obviously, is Taste, Memory, so there is this taste aspect, this joy, this pleasure, this savoring.
David: When you grow your own food and you experiment with a range of vegetables and fruits, you come to realize that so much of what we have in the supermarket just isn’t nearly as lively. It just doesn’t taste as good and it’s not just the freshness, it’s also that the variety … anytime you set up to grown something, you have to balance certain compromises. You have to choose between emphasizing yield or pest resistance or flavor or any number of other factors and the commercial grower probably won’t come down the same place on that spectrum that the home grower will or the small farmer and so when you really emphasize taste and you care about that, begin to elevate it above some of the other concerns, realize that there’s a level of richness there that we’ve often forgotten.
Lisa: Do you think that we might be able to convince people to have a more diverse and healthy diet by introducing them to things that taste more interesting and perhaps even better?
David: I hope so. For me, getting involved with Slow Food has been an education. I don’t think that I had the most refined taste. I still don’t. I’m pretty humble about that but my pallet has developed and I have an appreciation for flavor that adds a lot to my life personally.
Lisa: You also have an appreciation for actually getting your hands in the dirt, getting yourself exposed to the soil and really see during that aspect of bringing the food to your table.
David: There’s something really satisfying about being a gardener and I consider myself a gardener first and foremost. Although my gardens are growing year to year, I find there’s a lot of pleasure to harvesting something and bringing it to the table.
Lisa: How did somebody like you get into what could some people would say could be pretty hard work, this gardening and heritage foods? Reading through your book, you are originally from Massachusetts?
David: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa: And you have a pretty nice degree, a pretty good institution and you could’ve done really anything you wanted to but one of the first things that sounds like you did was go out to Washington State and look around in irrigation fields where you could’ve been electrocuted by …
David: Well I ask myself that all the time. I’m realistic about the challenges. Farming isn’t glamorous in a lot of ways. I find it satisfying on a lot of levels. I think I’m driven by strong feelings for the environment, strong feelings about biodiversity, a concern for saving these foods. To me there’s a mission there that’s really important and exciting and worth giving myself to and I enjoy working with my hands a lot. I can’t imagine sitting in an office, it just doesn’t … it’s just not me. I need a lot of stimulation and diversity and this offers that. Every day it’s different.
Lisa: Here on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial.
Tom: From David Buchanan’s book, Taste, Memory, we run across a quote, “You must eat it to save it,” and yet just because you ate it doesn’t mean it didn’t go to waste. Money is like that too. You must work to save all the money you didn’t spend, but then it becomes someone’s job that give it another purpose. So what, then, is this relationship with money we call the saver? You feel a very acute desire to save because cash is accumulating. You save into a 401K you save for education. On paper, financial growth is happening and yet, it feels like you have nothing for today, nothing to savor. You may feel burdened and disconnected with the money set aside for tomorrow. You may take risks because you have money but missed opportunities because you can’t access it. You feel split between 2 realities. You have one foot in your financial past and the other; at best it’s in the future.
To explore this more send an email to [email protected]. Security is offered through LPL Financial, Member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through Flagship Harbor Advisors, a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisors and Shepard Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial. There was a time when the apothecary was a place where you could get safe, reliable medicines carefully prepared by experienced professionals coupled with care and attention, focused on you and your unique health concerns. Apothecary by Design is built around the forgotten notion that you don’t just need your prescriptions filled. You need attention, advice, and individualized care. Visit their website, apothecarybydesign.com or drop by the store at 84 Marginal Way in Portland and experience pharmacy care the way it was meant to be.
Lisa: What has it been like to go from really this very hands on gardening and growing and you also spend time in the farmer’s market selling and to writing and doing something that’s very cerebral and also going out and talking to people on NPN and hear about your book. I mean that’s a very interesting sort of back and forth in your life.
David: It’s a strange balance, and again, it’s my nature that I like diversity, so I might spend a few hours mucking around in the dirt and then come home to the computer. I wrote a lot of the book over the winters, over the past 3 years and certainly getting out and publicizing it now has been a new experience. It’s very different from my day-to-day life. I’m a pretty private person so that’s been odd. But again, I like the balance, and the book feeds into everything else I wanted to because as I said, I don’t really consider myself a farmer. I think of myself as a gardener. I’m a plant collector and the book will enable me to build on that side of the growing.
Lisa: What are some of the challenges that you’ve experienced with this path that you’ve taken? You’ve been doing this for now, 20 years?
David: No, not exactly. I did it part time when I was in Washington State and I was bitten by the bug of collecting heritage foods and so I had my own gardens and collected all kinds of grains and vegetables and fruit trees and then I stopped and moved back to the East Coast. I moved to Boston. I took an office job. I worked for a few years there. I did design work up in Maine after that and in Massachusetts. So it was really only when I got involved with Slow Food, I helped found them and then led the Portland chapter for 3 years that I started feeling myself pulled back into this world of food, borrowed some space at a friend’s farm, started growing vegetables, and couldn’t help myself and it’s just extended from there.
Lisa: Have there been challenges? I mean you’ve had a … I think I was saying too one of my favorite quotes is, “All who wander are not lost,” this is the Tolkien quote. Certainly you’ve done some wandering in your career path. Have there been challenges associated with that?
David: There are all kinds of challenges. For one thing, we live in downtown Portland and I’ve never really been exactly a country person. I’ve lived out in rural Washington State and didn’t want to just go out and be on a real farm so we’ve leased … I’ve leased land. My partner Carla, my fiancée Carla, works up in Augusta and in Portland so she’s not really involved in the growing so it’s really my project. I’ve leased land in and around Portland and it’s a real challenge. We no longer have a range for agricultural production largely. If you go back a couple of generations, 50 years, Cape Elizabeth was a farming community producing strawberries, lettuce, other crops for markets down in Massachusetts and farther and that’s no longer the case.
There’s still some wonderful farms there but a lot of the land has gone to residential development as is much of the suburban landscape around Portland and most American cities. It’s not like going to Europe where zoning and land use has been very carefully restricted to preserve agricultural land. Simply finding a place to grow, finding a place to do my project was probably the most difficult thing I had to face. Just getting started in ours was the hardest thing and, as you know, someone like Dr. Rodney Voisine in Cape Elizabeth has been wonderful in opening up his door to me and letting me grow there and I’ve had some wonderful experiences with landowners around Portland letting me beg and borrow space from them.
Lisa: It’s important to get that side of Portland to some extent. In fact, you talked about … I was very struck when you were talking about rooftop gardening in urban settings and the challenges associated with clean soil …
David: And the market inspiration.
Lisa: Yeah, right, so I mean, there are some very … I mean soil isn’t soil uniformly. I mean there are some soils that are healthier than others. Is that also been part of the issue is you need to find …?
David: Sure. Finding the right soil is definitely a part of it. You can’t grow fruit trees. I’m increasingly fascinated by all the nuances of all kinds of fruit trees. You need good drainage. You don’t want to plant them in a heavy, clay soil, good sunlight, ideally some elevation to get away from springtime frost and that’s a challenge finding within a half an hour of Portland. So yes, there are all kinds of considerations, chemical contaminations, another thing I read about that’s invisible and often really hard to assess.
Lisa: Another thing that I … again, going back to your time. I think it was in Washington State that I was just so struck by was this sense that choosing to be a small gardener and really have your livelihood depend upon that or to be a farmer and to do that for a living, I mean it’s not without its risks. I mean you talk about having gotten quite ill, I believe, from dehydration and you went to the emergency room and they treated you and you had spent all wages for some …
David: And I wasn’t dependent on those wages at the time. It wasn’t … that was something … I was working part time irrigating a ranch, partly maybe for the romance of it and so I worked 3 hours in the morning, 3 hours in the evening and I was doing other things as well and the money, it was negligible as it is for so many farmworkers about. That was $4.50 an hour. It was nothing, and it’s so much higher for a lot of agricultural workers today but I write about that to help give a sense of what the world looks like from a producer’s perspective, from a farmworker’s perspective.
I was doing it also because I knew a lot of farmworkers in that part of the world. I spent a lot of time with some wonderful friends from the highlands of Oaxaca who were farmworkers and I saw what their lives were like and I thought, “Well let me see if I can do a bit of this.” It was really brutal. It was really difficult. I worked as fast as I could and it was never fast enough and I got very dehydrated and sick and wound up in the emergency room and went on an IV and that swallowed a month’s wages right there. I can’t even imagine trying to live that way to really try to make a living doing that. I don’t … and raise a family and what a challenge it is.
Lisa: What are things that people who are listening right now could be doing? I know it’s wintertime and there’s not a lot growing outside, but what types of things do gardeners do in the winter to prepare for the spring or the summer or are there things that can be grown inside?
David: Well for the home gardeners you can certainly extend your season a lot with a small [who palace 28:10] or a cold frame. You can grow greens well into the winter even on small cold frame and then they’ll often start again depending on the severity of the winter and the spring. Our farmers are really pushing the boundaries of the season. We really do have a creative and energetic farming scene around Portland and throughout Maine and so it’s possible to buy winter shares of community supported agriculture CSA Operations or local food is now available year around. With a hoop house, the grower, a plastic-covered hoop house, a grower can raise foods through the winter even in Maine. It’s amazing really, keep the snow off and the temperatures get up during the day and most … a lot of hardy greens will survive through the winter and can be picked and of course for the root cellar you can keep root vegetables going all year long. I store root crops in a basement very well into June.
Lisa: What have you learned as an individual through this journey that you’ve taken whether it’s working out in Washington State or coming back here and looking at Cape Elizabeth?
David: I think I’ve learned that you have to be persistent. If you have something that you really care about you really have to dig your heels in and keep at it. If we follow something that we really feel passionate about, the reason we succeed in the end is sheer persistence and stubbornness.
Lisa: Where are you going from here?
David: We have recently purchased land in Pownal just a few minutes from Freeport and my goal there is to create a kind of conservation center for these foods and some ways it’s compromised the … it’s not exactly apple-growing country but I want to make it work for my passion right now, which is hard cider, but for other production as well, have all kinds of fruits and vegetables and maybe we’ll have some animals too and a building. I’m turning one of the out buildings into a small commercial kitchen and cider house so I can do some hard cider and I have now probably about 150 varieties of apples, a couple of those varieties are pears, all kinds of peaches and plum, apricots, cherries, small fruits.
I want to expand that collection. The dream is to create a kind of cornucopia of a big garden out here and to find ways to bring the public in and get people out there and find avenues to distribute the plant material and share it. I believe that these historic foods aren’t really alive unless they’re being grown and eaten. That is not enough to just keep them in a Gene bank so I really want to find their hidden potential, help bring them back into the market, help get them into the hands of gardeners, make them live on our tables and our gardens.
Lisa: Come spring you’ll be back at the farmer’s market in Portland?
David: Yes. I just do the Saturday market with my smoothie cart and I sell some nursery plants too.
Lisa: So if people want to find you there in the spring they can find you there?
David: They can find me during Oak Spark, yes.
Lisa: And if people would like to buy your book, what’s the best way of going about doing that?
David: They can go directly to Chelsea Green, my publisher’s website and they can buy it there. They can also buy it through online retailers or through local book stores. It’s distributed nationally and so they should be able to find it, or they could go to my website, originsfruit.com and see some photos of places in the book and find some contact information there too.
Lisa: Your book has been called one of the top small food books from Amazon. You sent me this and I was …
David: And Amazon ranked it … You know, I’m on their top-10 food literary books of the year. I was very … a little shocked and very pleased. It just came out back in early November. It’s a new book and I didn’t … hadn’t occurred to me that anyone had even had time to read it over there, yeah.
Lisa: Well I was impressed with it and I would encourage people that are listening to us right now to go out and take some time reading it, especially it’s a good book to read, I think, in the winter. It’s very thought provoking, it’s wide ranging …
David: It’ll make you dream of spring.
Lisa: Yes, it does make you dream of spring. So we’ve been talking with David Buchanan, author of Taste, Memory, Forgotten Foods, Lost Flavors and Why they Matter. We appreciate your spending time with us today.
David: Well thank you so much. It was a pleasure for me.
Announcer: We’ll return to our program after acknowledging the following generous sponsors. The Body Architect was founded on the belief that mindful exercise improves the health of the mind, body, and spirit. Housed in an open, light-filled space in Portland, Maine, The Body Architect offers a cutting-edge fitness center, expert personal trainers, nutrition counseling and a full class schedule. Visit thebodyarchitect.com or call 207-774-2196 and get started with The Body Architect today, and by Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth Maine. At Orthopedic Specialists, ultrasound technology is taken to the highest degree with state-of-the-art ultrasound equipment. Small areas of tendonitis, muscle and ligament tears, instability and arthritic conditions can be easily found during examination, for more information visit orthocareme.com or call 207-781-9077.
Lisa: One of my favorite things in the world is eat really good food and in Maine we’re pretty fortunate because there’s really good food in a lot of places up and down the coast of Portland, Camden/Rockport, Kennebunkport. And one person who knows all about good food is Amy Anderson, who is now your point person for Maine Magazine and also a Food Eat Maine Blogger. Thanks for coming in and talking to me Amy.
Amy: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
Lisa: Now I can’t wait to pick your brain about all the wonderful places that Maine has to offer the eaters of the state.
Amy: There are so many great places in the state to eat. It’s difficult to pin down the best and I think that’s what’s so nice about Maine is you can go to an array of different areas and check out a bistro or fine dining place or a diner and find something really spectacular all over the place. I’m really comfortable with Portland restaurants, you know, waiting tables at Hugo’s and Eventide. This is my home base too so I know about this area and, you know, writing for Maine Magazine and being able to write the blog, I’ve been able to travel a little bit and see what else is out there and there’s some wonderful things out there.
Lisa: Well you have an interesting background because the first time you and I met, you were actually working for a different local publication and I had just put together the book, Our Daily Tread for Safe Passage, and you interviewed me so that kind of … we’re turning the table …
Amy: Role reversal …
Lisa: Exactly, right. So you have this background not only as a writer and a writer within the community, but also in the food world and now you’re bringing them both together so that must be really interesting for you.
Amy: It is very interesting I think. My whole life I’ve really been on the parallel track of writing and journalism on one side and being in the restaurant business on the other hand. I’ve always wanted to combine the two and it’s always been, you know, a passion of mine to write about food. I love writing and I love food so it seemed to make sense to bring them together and finally with Maine Magazine this has happened and it’s so exciting that I get to do the writing part of it and the eating part and I still get to wait tables so I’m completely involved in all aspects of things I love. So right, coming from a journalism background is nice because I get to maybe look at the people who work in the restaurants and ask
Lisa: And the 2 places that you are waiting tables at are known for really good food in very different and interesting ways. You are at Hugo’s Restaurant and also at Eventide and they’re right next to each other. One has been around for a long time and well known within the community, in fact, probably nationally and possibly internationally. One is within the last year or so …
Amy: Oh yeah, 6 months.
Lisa: But they’re both known for being real food destinations.
Amy: That’s a good thing.
Lisa: What has that been like to work with people who are in that sort of higher level of food love, let’s say.
Amy: Right well I think my progression in my career in restaurants is going in that direction. You know, starting at something like The Lobster Cooker in Freeport in high school and then moving to North Carolina and then getting more into fine dining and being introduced to places that cook at the James Beard House and then moving back home and then realizing that Hugo’s was hiring and they actually wanted me to work there and it was this kind of being around people who just revere food and who really take it seriously and more than that want customers to enjoy something a little bit different or a little bit unusual and that’s just exciting to be around.
I learn every day and what’s more exciting is getting people to feel that excitement and appreciate it and somebody who comes in and is nervous about eating, you know, something like a blind tasting. They’re not in control and they don’t know what it is. To take those first couple of bites and get comfortable and enjoy it and realize it’s fun and it’s food and it’s not that big of a deal. It’s a good time, you know, like enjoy it and eat it and share it with friends and talk about it and I think that’s the mentality of Hugo’s, you know, take this food and enjoy it and it’s elevated, but it’s fun. That fun definitely translates to Eventide. It is a light, bright, happy, just wonderful place to be. The food is unreal and it’s really satisfying for me as a server to say, you know, I can recommend anything and I know that they’ll like it. I really do. I know that they’ll enjoy it. I don’t know, I really enjoy working in both places and I think if I can share that passion that I have about the food in those 2 places and share that with the readership of Maine Magazine, you know, this will be a great partnership.
Lisa: Tell me about some of the other places that you visited and blogged about. One of my favorites I think was one of your first and that was the Green Elephant. That’s one of my favorites because I tend to eat more plant-based foods. Was that a challenge for you considering that you don’t consider yourself a vegetarian?
Amy: No, it wasn’t a challenge. It was a fun learning experience. I hadn’t seen some of those foods before and I was just blown away at how beautiful they were presented and how delicious they tasted and there was no meat and I love that and I think that moving forward in all the restaurants that I’ve been going to I try really hard to put in a vegetarian order or a gluten-free order just to see. For as much, you know, I’m learning, people who enjoy those types of diets might want to read about those instead of the meat-focused writing. So we’ll see, we’ll see what happens with me going forward and ordering more vegetarian items but Green Elephant was for sure fun and it’s special because it was my first blog for the Maine Magazine so yeah, that one was fun to do for sure.
Lisa: On the other side of it, I believe you went off to Primo and they have a reputation of basically doing what, nose to tail? Is that what I understand?
Amy: Every fall they slaughter their animals and have like a big celebration of respect for their life and thanks for the animals themselves. Again, I went up and tried a nose-to-tail tasting and that was very meat-centric. It was delicious and fun and yeah, I’m experiencing a lot of different things and hopefully sharing this information with the readers.
Lisa: What do you have on the docket coming up? I know you just did Sea Glass not too long ago out at … in by the sea …?
Amy: I visited from Camden and what an amazing place. The chefs there had worked at Five Fifty-Five and traveled and opened their new place in Camden. It is French-peasant food, elevated and amazing, but I think I say that about every place that I go, you think?
Lisa: I know, you seem very enthusiastic about all of these places.
Amy: Because they are, they are, they …
Lisa: Yeah.
Amy: Even if they’re not new to me, you know, going in with a different set of eyes and going in from a different perspective is all very new and exciting so I’m really having a good time.
Lisa: Amy, it’s clear from your enthusiasm that you’re doing something that you love, whether it’s being a part of Hugo’s or Eventide or blogging online or writing for Maine Magazine, you’ve surrounded yourself with things that you love to do and places you love to be, food you love to eat. How did you get to that place? So many people don’t.
Amy: That is true. That is very true. I am, I think by combining my love of food and my love of writing I’ve always had jobs that I’ve really enjoyed and when I found that I no longer enjoyed them or I’m not learning or I’m not happy, I seek something else out. That’s happened in the progression of restaurants. It’s happened in the progression of writing jobs, you know, I can really pinpoint what it is that I search for. I do know that I like to be around inspiring people. I like to be around fun people. Laughter is really important and a learning environment is really important too and I feel like with food and with writing you can just continue to grow. You can learn new things, you can teach new things, share new things with people and I really feel like I found that in Hugo’s. From that point things have branched off. You know, connections were made with Maine Magazine and that new restaurant, Eventide opened up and I was able to have a part in all of that. You know, it’s really important to me just to be surrounded by friends and family and that’s what all of these places have become for me.
Lisa: So you’ve opened yourself to doing the things that you love to do and being with people that you love to be with.
Amy: Absolutely.
Lisa: I would say that having spent time at both Hugo’s and Eventide and the food community, there is a sense of family that seems to emerge and the sense of community and I know that we interviewed Smith last year and I spent time with him and with Roxanne also from Hugo’s. It’s more than just the food and the taste of things. It’s how things sort of fit together in life, how you savor, what’s going on around you whether it’s going into your mouth or whether it’s the energy of people.
Amy: It’s so true. It’s a community. It’s more than a community. It is a family. We all play off of each other’s strengths and help each other with each other’s weaknesses and you know, there’s a … in a restaurant there’s so much happening all the time that you have to learn how to click and you have to learn how to interact with each other and I think once that magic happens then that can be portrayed to the customers and they get it and they feel it. I think that’s similar to the blog and writing for the Maine Mag is … I think I really enjoy the food aspect of that and I want people to read and enjoy what I’m writing because maybe they can take that information and check out a few places that they might not have wanted to before. They might not be vegetarians but they might love to go to The Green Elephant because it’s delicious and it’s fun and they read it and who knows …
Lisa: Where can people read about these wonderful restaurants and these experiences that you’re having, Amy?
Amy: Definitely on the Maine Magazine’s website. There is a blog section and I want to say every 2 weeks or so there’s a brand-new restaurant listed up there so you can get a whole plethora of restaurants and ideas, places to eat all in Maine. Facebook, obviously, there’s an Eat Maine page on Facebook and they Tweet as well and I do too.
Lisa: There’s also an Eat Maine Guide, I believe, that’s coming up pretty soon.
Amy: Absolutely, absolutely.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Amy Anderson who is a blogger with Eat Maine and a contributing editor to Maine Magazine. She’s been speaking with us about savoring not only food, but life and relationships and community. We’ve been really privileged to have you spend time with us today and we thank you.
Amy: Thank you so much.
Announcer: This segment of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is brought to you by the following generous sponsors: Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/Max Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With RE/Max Heritage it’s your home. Learn more at rheritage.com and by Booth, accounting and business-management services, payroll, and bookkeeping. Business is done better with Booth. Go to boothmaine.com for more information.
Lisa: The title of this show is Savor and when we think about savoring things, we can’t escape the fact that adding a little bit of salt actually helps make things more savory so we thought it might be a good chance to interview somebody who deals directly with salt and in fact, salt from the coast of Maine and this is Karina Napier, and she is the founder of Sea Change, which brings salts to the masses from the coast of Maine. Thank you for coming in and talking to us today.
Karina: Yes, hi. Thank you for having me.
Lisa: So Karina, you’re a young woman and you’ve done other things besides this work. How did you come to be interested in salt?
Karina: I have to say it was actually a bit of a fluke. A lot of things I’ve made up to this point. I was living in New York City and going to school there and I tactfully planned my escape route via the Peace Corp. I went to West Africa and I lived in Benin for two and a half years. Although I had come with a pretty strong background in my passion for the environment and for food, it was there that I really dealt with a lot of it firsthand and really in my face. There were a lot of people dealing with malnutrition, in access to healthy food generally. I experienced it myself. I noticed that my health greatly degraded in that period of time and really, two and a half years isn’t very long so to understand people who were living there their entire lives and to see how it affect them really gave me a lot to think about.
Coincidentally when I got back to the United States, nutrition and food and where we’re getting it is a huge topic for us. I mean, it’s everywhere we look, in our media, talking with our neighbors and our friends and so it’s still on my mind and it’s still a part of me, very much so and so I went out to California to work on a farm. Before I left I had a very wonderful encounter with a gentleman here in Maine who wanted to hire me to work on his farm and didn’t work out for timing, bad season arrangements and that kind of thing but when I returned we kept in touch. He wanted me to grow tomatoes on his land and it was also again like the wrong timing. It just didn’t work out.
We kept talking and he wanted to harvest sea salt. I, coming back from California, had learned so much about the popularity of sea weed and how valuable it is to our health so that was my idea, like let’s harvest sea weed. We’ve got a massive supply here in Maine and a wonderful opportunity that hasn’t really been explored one hundred percent. We started to do that and with perseverance and patience we found a sea salt supplier in Lubec, Maine and while we explored sea weed very thoroughly, our leads weren’t taking us where we wanted them to go and so we dropped that, which I hope is temporary, hopefully we’ll pick that back up again. Also by the time it was ready to go on the shelves, this old Mainer was bored with salt. He was like, “You know what, I’m good. I don’t need to do this anymore. You take over from here.” I have since then and so I’ve kept the company going and the idea going and here I am today.
Lisa: We know that salt as a mineral is very important for our health and there has been some controversy about salt. In fact, a lot of people have been put on salt-restrictive diets over the last, say, 40 years because of blood pressure issues, but we’re coming back around to understanding that not everybody is salt sensitive and in fact, the right kinds of salt are very important to health. Did that lead into your decision to work on getting this product out there?
Karina: Yeah, very much so. When we first started exploring this idea, I knew that I’d have to care about it. I learned very early on from my father when he was a salesman when he was a teenager making money for school. The key ingredient is you have to care about what it is that you’re selling and learning about salt gave me so much information to absorb and that is definitely one of them, that salt, sea salt in particular, is a key ingredient that we all consume every single day and if we are eating the right kind of salt it doesn’t have to affect us negatively. Informing ourselves about what it is that we are putting into our bodies, sea salt is definitely one of those ingredients that can help us feel better.
Lisa: What are the differences between the right kind of salt and salt that really isn’t that beneficial for us?
Karina: Let’s see, so table salt, which is what most of us are familiar with, it’s typically mined inland and to get rid of impurity or to make it look cleaner, the salt is bleached, it is also filled with anti-caking agents so that the salt doesn’t clump and any of those chemicals that are used in that process are bad for our bodies and it also is removing the minerals that we need that are natural in that salt. With sea salt, at least with mine, I can say for mine at least, is it doesn’t go through a bleaching process. It does not have any anti-caking agents and since it is coming from the ocean it has more minerals. Mine has magnesium, potassium, and calcium, for examples. Although these are in small quantities, considering we’re using it every day, this is going to help to create balance in our body.
Lisa: Which is different from regular table salt, which is typically a sodium chloride, is that correct?
Karina: That’s correct. Once the salt has been bleached all of the impurities, as they’re called by industry standards, have been removed so that means all the minerals have been taken out to so you are left with strictly sodium and strictly chloride.
Lisa: Briefly talk to me about how does one harvest sea salt.
Karina: Yeah, it’s an interesting process. I would imagine that there is multiple ways to have it harvested. We use … when I say we, it’s really the gentleman who lives up in Lubec, who’s supplying me with my salt, but he used the pumping and filtering method. The salt goes through a 10-micron filter where rocks, seaweed, particles are left out and only the salt is brought in. It goes through a couple of processes from there bringing it down to a brine and then it’s laid out on tables to dry for a certain period of time and then rakes and then laid out again for the drying process into a crystal. This takes about a week and depending on what kind of grain you’re looking for then it’s broken down even more. There’s also … apparently you can have it much drier so if it goes into a shaker … I mean, there’s so many different ways to create salt that I never would have even imagined.
Lisa: All of this reminds me that … Traditionally, salt was considered a treasure. It was something that people traded, that you didn’t use a lot of because, as you described, the process that was once used, I think universally, was quite expensive. The salt that you’re selling now is like that too. It’s in the little package that I went and bought from Whole Foods. I mean, you really do treasure it. It’s not just in commodity.
Karina: Yeah. I think it’s become … the value has certainly decreased. We used to use it as a form of money once upon a time and now I see it more as an opportunity for people to take one little ounce of health into their hands and be conscious of that. Ideally it’d be wonderful if everybody knew that this is something for them, whether they care about cooking or not, or whether or not they have time for cooking. It is, it’s a special item that we need to be paying attention to.
Lisa: So does picking up some Sea Change Sea Salt from Whole Foods or Lois’s Natural Marketplace or one of the many places that you’re going to tell us about, does this help people savor their lives and savor the food that they’re cooking?
Karina: That’s the passion behind it and certainly the idea. I know that not everybody’s going to have the same stance as I do when it comes to something like this. I mean, felt a lot of us aren’t paying attention to it. I get that, but to know that that’s the position behind the company, I hope so. I hope that’s what people can get.
Lisa: So where can people find it?
Karina: Mostly in local stores here in Maine so far. Whole Foods does carry it and sells out really well. Lois Foods in Scarborough and Micucci’s, Morning Glory out in Brunswick, Bath Natural Foods all the way up to Camden also. French and Brawn carries it as well. Belfast Food Co-op, they seem to be carrying very well and my uncle has a store in Keene, New Hampshire called Your Kitchen Store and he carries it for me there.
Lisa: Karina, do you have a website or a Facebook page?
Karina: Yeah, we have both, seachangework.com for the website and facebook/seachangemaine … I believe … .com but you can just type in Sea Change in Facebook and you’ll find us really easily.
Lisa: Well Karina you’ve taken a very interesting product and brought it to market in an interesting way so thank you for sharing your story with us.
Karina: Thank you. It’s been great.
Lisa: Sharing yourself with us.
Karina: Oh yeah.
Lisa: I urge our listeners to go out and find some Sea Change Sea Salt and perhaps experiment with their own cooking.
Karina: Yeah, I hope so. That would be wonderful. Thank you.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, Show #73, Savor. Our guests have included author David Buchanan, Amy Anderson of Eat Maine, and Karina Napier of Sea Change. For more information on our guests, visit Dr. Lisa, doctorlisa.org. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on ITunes. For a preview of each week’s shows, sign up for our enewsletter and like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. You can also follow me on Twitter and Pinterest, doctorlisa and read my personal take on health and well-being on the bountiful blog, bountiful-blog.org. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle hoping that our show inspires you to savor your world. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Announcer: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin at RE/Max Heritage, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth, Maine, Booth Maine, Tom Shepard of Shepard Financial, Apothecary by Design, and The Body Architect. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Courtney Thebarge. Summaries of all our past shows can be found at doctorlisa.org. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on ITunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details.