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Cesar Chavez Memorial mural, courtesy of Flickr user Salina Canizales

According to proponents of local, organic and/or humane foods, we all “vote with our forks” three (give or take) times a day. It’s true that consumers have a certain amount of power to influence food producers to change their ways. This idea predates the locavore movement; some of its most effective applications were the grape boycotts of the 1960s and 1970s. The man behind those protests was Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and a lifelong activist on behalf of the people who toil in the fields to bring our food to the table.

March 31, Chavez’s birthday, is a state holiday in California and seven other states, and there have been efforts to make it a national holiday. In 1994, Bill Clinton awarded Chavez posthumously with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Before Chavez became a leader of the farm labor movement, he was a farm laborer himself. He was born in Yuma, Arizona, in 1927. His family turned to migrant farm work in California during the Great Depression, after losing their farm in 1937. He attended dozens of schools and received only an eighth-grade education before dropping out to work full-time in the fields, where he experienced firsthand the injustices he would later devote his life to fighting.

Following service in the U.S. Navy after World War II, Chavez worked with the Community Service Organization, a Latino civil rights group that focused mostly on urban issues. After ten years with the CSO, by which time he had become its national director, Chavez left to found his own group to help farm laborers. Based in Delano, California, and originally called the National Farm Workers Organization, it merged with a Filipino-American farm workers’ group in 1966 to form the UFW. This was around the time of the organization’s first major victory: the signing of the first genuine contract negotiated between growers and a farm workers’ union. This followed a strike, a four-month grape boycott and a pilgrimage to the state capitol in Sacramento. Although the National Labor Relations Act had gone into effect in 1936, giving most workers the right to join a union and bargain collectively with employers, farm workers were excluded.

Throughout his career, Chavez modeled his tactics on the nonviolent resistance of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., including fasts, marches, strikes and boycotts. He and others fighting for what they came to call La Causa (the cause) reached out to church groups and student activists, many of whom had also been involved in the civil rights struggle. They also focused their energy on educating American consumers about the conditions of farm workers. In additional boycotts in the late 1960s and 1970s, they convinced tens of millions of Americans to stop buying table grapes, helping to pressure growers to renegotiate a contract with the UFW. They were also influential in the passage of the California Agricultural Relations Act of 1975, which finally guaranteed farm workers in that state the right to organize and negotiate their own contracts.

A later boycott in the 1980s and ’90s, in protest against the exposure of farm workers to pesticides, didn’t catch on as successfully, in part because it dragged on for more than a decade, until after Chavez died in 1993. According to the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation, started in the year of his death, Chavez never earned more than $6,000 a year, and died without any savings to leave his family. But, although farm laborers still have, for the most part, a hard lot, Chavez’s legacy of accomplishments on their behalf—including fairer wages, benefits, safer conditions and the right to organize—had a significant impact on countless lives.

Sources: Cesar E. Chavez Foundation; Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Struggle; The United Farm Workers.

Maxwell House haggadahs for Passover seder. Courtesy of Flickr user baristaj9

Six years ago I moved to the Northeast from Southern California, where I grew up and where my family still lives. There are only two times of year that make me homesick, and sometimes they overlap: the waning days of winter, when it seems like the sleet and snow and dreariness—and lack of good fresh produce—will never end, and Passover (which began at sundown yesterday).

Although my family was not observant, my paternal grandmother—and when she became elderly, my aunt—always hosted a big Passover seder. Each year we took turns reading from the same Maxwell House haggadahs, obtained by my uncle when he worked in their marketing department in the 1970s and still bearing the names my late grandfather had written in the margins to indicate our reading assignments. Year after year, we stumbled over the same Biblical names and unfamiliar words. My other uncle would crack the same jokes as the year before. My father, at the head of the table, would drink from the red wine tumbler brought to this country from Poland by my great-grandfather.

Then there was the food, as unchanging as the Passover story itself: chopped liver, gefilte fish and charoset, each served with matzo; matzo ball soup; fatty beef brisket; a carrot kugel; asparagus; and coconut macaroons for dessert. It wasn’t gourmet, and by the time I was a teenager I had gone vegetarian and sworn off half of the menu (my grandmother dutifully put aside a few beloved matzo balls for me before putting them in the chicken soup, and it never occurred to me that she might be “forgetting” to tell me that they contained schmaltz, or chicken fat). But these traditions are what tie me to my Jewish heritage in the same way that Thanksgiving pumpkin pie and Fourth of July barbecues make me feel American.

This year I tried to quell my homesickness a bit by inviting a couple of friends over for a seder-lite. No haggadahs—just a brief summary of the Passover story highlights, and an explanation of the symbolism of the various foods—and none of the more polarizing parts of my family’s traditional menu, namely chopped liver and gefilte fish. A couple of years ago my (gentile) fiancé experienced his first seder, and he still hasn’t recovered from the liver’s mineral-ish flavor and odd, almost chalky texture—or his embarrassment over being unable to hide his displeasure. In any case, I don’t like it either.

However, in my opinion gefilte fish gets a bad rap, mostly because it looks so disgusting packed in those Manischewitz jars full of fishy slime, and because its name doesn’t sound very appealing. I think someone at the Jewish Food Promotion Board (if such a thing existed) should embark on a rebranding campaign for gefilte fish, similar to how prunes are now marketed as “dried plums.” How about poisson à la juive, or “fish in the Jewish style,” as it’s called in French?

Still, this being an introduction to Jewish cuisine for at least one of my guests (two if you count the 2-year-old), I didn’t want to scare them off with the first course. I stuck with charoset, the chopped fruit and nut mixture soaked in wine that is usually a hit even among the uninitiated. Although I now eat chicken, in deference to the diet of one of my guests I made vegetarian matzo balls from a recipe I found on Epicurious that uses butter instead of schmaltz. They were a little eggier and fluffier than the ever-so-slightly chewy ones my grandma used to make, but still good. (The proper density of matzo balls is a subject of great debate among Jewish cooks; I’m in the “substantial but not leaden” camp.) The two-year-old, in particular, seemed to enjoy them.

For the main course, instead of brisket I substituted salmon and horseradish sauce—satisfying the “bitter herb” portion of the meal—and made a vegetable kugel and salad on the side. For dessert, I made some chewy amaretti cookies I found on the Smitten Kitchen blog, minus about half the sugar—they were still plenty sweet.

It wasn’t quite like going home for Passover, but it was fun to share a meal with friends and introduce them to some new foods. Maybe it will even become a tradition.

Dyed Easter eggs, courtesy of Flickr user DarkFokus

Nothing says Easter quite like the smell of vinegar and hard-boiled eggs. In my house growing up, we dyed the eggs a few days before Easter morning. We displayed them in baskets for a few days before my parents hid them around the house the night before Easter.

We were never allowed to eat our Easter eggs that morning. If we wanted eggs, my mother insisted, she would make new ones. But I have heard plenty of stories of people eating hard-boiled eggs that sat out for hours, or even days, at room temperature and never had any problems. Now obviously, anecdotal evidence is nothing to base a theory on. The FDA suggests not eating hard-boiled eggs that have sat out for more than two hours and to eat refrigerated hard-boiled eggs within one week. Good Housekeeping agrees with the two-hour rule. Looks like my mother was right.

Decorated Easter eggs are popular in many cultures and range from the simple one-colored American classic to the elaborately detailed pysanka of Ukraine. Some eggs are so meticulously crafted that they aren’t meant for eating at all. Although members of my family never ate the eggs, many Americans do. Here are a few suggestions for ingredients to naturally dye your Easter eggs this year:

• Beets: Boil the eggs with canned beets and juice for a light pink color. For a richer hue, soak cooked eggs in the beet water overnight. This same method works with carrots for a light orange color.
• Blueberries: Add a few cups of blueberry to boiling water for a light purple color. For a richer hue, let eggs sit in the blueberry-infused water after cooling for a few hours or overnight. The pigment comes from the skin of the fruit, so there’s no reason to mash the berries before adding them to the water.
• Cranberry juice: Boil eggs in full-strength cranberry juice for a light pink color.
• Onion Skins: Boil raw eggs with plenty of yellow onion skins for a golden color. Edhat magazine out of Santa Barbara has some amazing photos of eggs dyed with onion skins and decorated using flowers from a garden. All you need are eggs, flowers, boiling water and stockings. For a pinkish color, try using red onion skins.
• Paprika: Adding a few tablespoons of paprika to boiling water will result in a reddish hue.
• Purple grape juice: Dilute the grape juice by up to 50 percent and boil raw eggs in the mixture. The color will be a light blue.
• Red Cabbage: Boil cabbage and let hard-boiled eggs soak in the liquid overnight.
• Red Wine: Boil raw eggs in red wine for a deep purple color. (This same method is used to create a rich purple-hued pasta.)
• Spinach: Boil raw eggs with spinach or boil spinach in water and let already-cooked eggs soak in the liquid overnight.
• Turmeric: I wrote about turmeric a few months ago. It is a strong dye and usually turns my utensils and plates yellow. Add a few tablespoons to a pot of boiling water and eggs. This method would also work with the more expensive saffron, which adds the yellow color to Spanish rice and paella.

What natural dyes have you tried? Did they work?
(Thanks to Reader’s Digest and the Charleston Gazette)

Cinnamon sticks, courtesy of Flickr user FotoosVanRobin

A few months ago I wrote about the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham, which claimed that eating cooked food was the central factor that allowed us to evolve into Homo sapiens. I recently finished another book, An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage, that essentially picks up where Catching Fire left off. In it, Standage explains how food has shaped civilization from the invention of farming, about 11,000 years ago in its most rudimentary form, to the present-day “paradox of plenty,” in which we have the technology to feed the world but it comes at a price to the environment.

As one of our most basic needs, it makes sense that food has had such a powerful influence on world history. Early agrarian societies formed around the production of food; they developed social structures that allowed some people to focus on farming and others to work outside of agriculture and which eventually led to stratification of classes and the concentration of power around those who controlled access to food. I’m simplifying here; these changes were obviously far more complex than I have room for here, and even Standage’s book just touches the surface. As a survey, though, it offers an insightful look at food’s impact on civilization.

Things really get interesting when food moves beyond mere sustenance. The use of spices as flavoring was the next great gastronomically motivated game-changer, according to Standage. Because spices often came from other lands than the ones in which they were enjoyed, whole mythologies formed around their source. In the fifth century B.C., Herodotus (“the father of history”) wrote that cassia, a form of cinnamon, could only be obtained by wearing a full-body suit that protected the wearer from “winged creatures like bats, which screech horribly and are very fierce.” He also wrote that no one knew where the cinnamon actually grew, but that the sticks were “brought to Arabia by large birds, which carry them to their nests, made of mud, on mountain precipices which no man can climb.” The only way to collect the sticks was to cut up the bodies of dead oxen and leave them on the ground near the birds’ nests. The birds would come get the large hunks of meat and bring them to their nests, which couldn’t bear the weight and would tumble to the ground, where the harvesters could gather the fallen cinnamon sticks.

With such wild stories about the origins of spices, it was no wonder that they were so expensive and sought-after. Europeans’ taste for spices led them to begin exploring the planet in search of direct access to the sources. This, of course, led to the discovery of new lands, as well as vast international trade networks through which knowledge and cultures spread. Unfortunately, it also helped spread diseases, like the Black Death in the 14th century.

Food has also played a pivotal role in wars from ancient times to the last century. The most effective weapon in the history of warfare, Standage writes, isn’t a sword, a gun or even the atom bomb; it’s starvation. As Napoleon, famously, was reported to have said, “An army marches on its stomach.” The outcome of conflicts, including the American Revolution, often hinged on which side had the better food supply. The importance of food supply to warfare led to the invention of canned food; France offered a prize in 1795 to anyone who could develop a better method of food preservation. The prize was claimed by Nicolas Appert, who experimented with a technique of putting food in airtight bottles and boiling them in water for a period of time. It wasn’t understood how or why this worked until Louis Pasteur’s explanation of pasteurization in the 1860s.

Starvation has also been used as a weapon against whole populations, from Josef Stalin to Robert Mugabe—who, in 2008, Standage writes, was accused of offering food to people in opposition areas only if they gave up the documents they needed to vote.

Food continues to be one of the driving forces of politics around the world. The “green revolution” of the 1960s, which introduced modern farming methods to the developing world, helped lift many nations out of extreme poverty and perpetual famine. But the use of chemicals and the loss of crop diversity comes at a price to the environment. In the future, Standage writes, we will have to find a balance between “organic fundamentalism on the one hand and blind faith in biotechnology on the other. The future of food production, and of mankind, surely lies in the wide and fertile middle ground in between.”

Marshmallow Peeps Diorama made by Sarah Zielinski, Jamie Simon and Amanda Bensen.

Marshmallow Peeps are a funny thing. They’re technically edible, but that’s not their main appeal for most of us (although I do confess an embarrassing fondness for stale Peeps—it’s a texture thing; almost like meringues). Would you buy a normal-shaped marshmallow rolled in neon sugar? Probably not. But Peeps are cute, there’s a cartoon-like charm to their simple features.

Peeps remind me of childhood, when I’d hunt for their soft, sugary shapes amid the plastic grass in my Easter basket, then hold them in my open palm like a pet for a while before finally, guiltily, biting off their heads. I liked the way the sugar crunched between my teeth and the artificial coloring turned my tongue yellow…but the same qualities now make me cringe. Memories often taste better than reality.

I bought a lot of Peeps again this year, though. My friend and fellow Smithsonian blogger, Sarah Zielinski, had the idea to enter the Washington Post’s annual Peeps Diorama contest. She suggested “Peeps jousting” as our theme, since apparently that’s what it’s called when you microwave two Peeps wielding toothpick swords and see who ends up skewered. We went with a more traditional, medieval jousting scene, hoping the judges would get the double meaning. An artistic colleague, Jamie Simon, completed our three-woman team.

The winners won’t be announced until next week, but we don’t expect to be among them, after catching a glimpse of entries like this “Washington National Peep-Thedral” (that’s right, they even have a Facebook fan page already!). Compared to that level of artistry and detail, our diorama looks like a Peep next to a real chick. But that’s okay—we had fun!