Grass Valley Vignette #1

I've been meaning to write about Grass Valley for some time, and I keep getting stuck. Mostly it's because I'm having trouble summarizing the place, even though as small as it is it should be very easy to summarize.

OK, I'll summarize. Grass Valley has 13,000 people in the city limits. It's a very small town. Nevada City is right next door (I can walk to it from my house) and it has another, oh, 8,000 people. You can Google them to see the location - they're in a forest about halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.

Now that the summary is over, I'll drop in some stories about the place here and there. And the first one is:

Vignette #1. The Story of Weston A. Price

Strolling through the Farmer's Market in Nevada City, I saw a slow food booth. The slow food movement, I think, basically promotes the opposite of fast food - I wasn't sure if it meant using crock pots, but it did have something to do with home cooking. I was familiarized to the movement from a huge slow food exhibition in San Francisco's Civic Center Park. In this exhibition, you basically waited 45 minutes in one of many massive lines to buy an apple for $4. Still, the Nevada City branch was hosting a free potluck with a presentation - something about "Fast meals with slow food". Perhaps we could meet other foodies. We cooked a couple quick vegetarian dishes, handed Max off to our babysitter and went to a meeting room in an office park.

There were about 10 people there, mostly elderly. I put my food down next to...some butter, bread, milk, jam, yogurt, oranges...very strange potluck. After some conversation, one of the statelier ladies slowly shoved some handwritten pages together and started talking.

Essentially, she said that you could make soup faster, for example, by making your stock once per week (after killing the chicken for the stock). Her mouth watered as she talked about living off cheese for a month - milk your goat a couple times a week, let it curdle, and store it in your barn. We started realizing slow food meant local and from scratch. From, I believe, ideally, your backyard. Oh. That's why that butter in the potluck was so freaking good. (Our chickpeas were canned in New York. Oops.) Next, she talked about how to make a good stock, the value of the gelatin in the stock, about the wondrous fats in butter and cream. I really wanted her to cook a meal for us. She mentioned Weston Price in passing. I should have paid more attention to the name.

Delia then asked how to make a vegetarian stock. After a bit of uncomfortable silence, the speaker said to avoid it if possible, but to use celery, carrots and onions. She talked more about Weston Price and soon the conversation in the room centered on similarities between slow food and Weston Price.

Figuring it's my turn to generate uncomfortable silence, I asked who Weston Price is. I was told he started a very well known food philosophy. After rudely blurting out that I hadn't heard of him, I was told in no uncertain terms that Weston Price is very famous. I was then given the Weston Price story.

Here's my recollection, in case you are one of the very few people not knowledgeable of Weston Price. As the lady explained, Weston Price was a dentist in the thirties who visited indigenous tribes to examine commonalities in their diets that led to excellent teeth, and hence, excellent health. The healthy diets, he found, consisted of plenty of meat and saturated fats. Unsaturated fat, it turns out, is horrible for you, but a large conspiracy of cooking oil manufacturers have covered this up.

I'm now looking uncomfortably at the two vegetarian dishes I brought - yams in sesame and peanut oil, and garlic chickpeas soaked in olive oil, and, umm...oops again. Still, I'm not sure I'm killing the participants. It's not clear to me that your teeth indicate your health. Doctors don't stare at my teeth during checkups and dentists don't give me nutrition advice. Perhaps that's a conspiracy also. Second, I read in a book "What to Eat" that you can boil a proper diet down to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." From this book, I read people have known for a very long time that animal fats are bad for you but, under pressure from the cattle and pork lobbies, government warnings state that saturated fats (a fat in animals) should be restricted instead. In other words, if there is a conspiracy, it's exactly the opposite of Weston Price's. Also, don't all these indigenous tribes have 35-year lifespans?

By the end of the potluck it's pretty clear that the majority of people there follow Weston Price, so I decided to ask one of them if the Weston Price diet increases lifespan. She said, instantly, that Weston Price followers live 7 years longer. Someone else said their mom moved to India, switched to a vegetarian diet, and died prematurely.

My head still hurts from the cognitive dissonance. Delia wants to go to the next Weston Price potluck. I don't because I'll have a hard time shutting up. But we did leave with a jar of perhaps the best apricot jam we've ever had.

In any case, how is this a Grass Valley vignette? According to the speaker, about 70 people were in the Weston Price club of Grass Valley. Given the size of Grass Valley, that's a really big number. But it doesn't surprise me that much - if it's an alternative movement, it's probably in Grass Valley.