Starting yesterday, I began to
make this cake from scratch for you fine people to share. Unfortunately, before
we eat it, I am going to first subject you to a screed. I beg forgiveness on
the grounds John specifically asked me to write one a few days ago, and this came
along in my head. And since a good screed also requires an accompanying performance,
and I have a fitting topic, captive audience and it is his birthday, John, this
is for you.
What I want to talk about is
cake, and the circumstances by which this cake came to be. Back in the day
people baked cakes, from scratch, in their homes, and this was my minimum standard
of success for John’s cake. Also, I wanted it to look like planet Earth.
However, this made blue and green food coloring important and having recently
read an article criticizing synthetic dyes, it gave me pause. Wanting to push
myself to my most sustainable limits for a group of environmentalists, I asked
myself, could I make an Earth cake for John with only natural coloring?
I
started with blue, boiling red cabbage off into a thick liquid. Then to make
blue, one must add baking soda, but only a little, and very gradually,
otherwise the batch will turn into an unappetizing greenish brown mess. I know
this because that is what happened the first time I tried to make natural blue
food coloring. So I went back to the market and bought another half cabbage.
This time the process worked better. I set aside half the batch as purple dye,
with the idea of coloring the cake, and then slowly added baking soda to the other
half without going too far. I set this blue aside for frosting.
Again,
it was more bad planning. Because of the baking soda element, you can have blue
cake with purple frosting made out of red cabbage coloring, but never purple
cake and blue frosting; note to self. Finally, a sustainability obstacle for
making blue food coloring in this manner is the matter of reusing all that cabbage.
While my husband indulges me my eccentricities for the most part, he will not
eat 4 pounds of cabbage in support of them. Spicy red cabbage and bean soup at
my place all this week!
For
natural green food coloring, spinach is an option, and the process seemed
pretty straight forward – liquefy the spinach and add to the food you are
coloring. Except I don’t have a liquefying blender or cheesecloth, used in the
classic boiling method of plant liquefaction. I put a little water combined
with spinach in my ordinary, run of a mill blender. I added the resulting
mixture to a simple syrup mix on the stove top. With a few hours to go until
the cake cutting, I am not certain my green frosting will firm up in time to
decorate the cake. Looks like I might have run out of time.
The
overall point of this being, it is often not easy to be strictly natural and sustainable.
And if we are honest, we cannot expect a sustainable future to perfectly mirror
our present reality in terms of convenience and options. We will have to make
choices. As John reminded us at our last meeting, regarding the next wave of
transportation, there are limits to existing sustainable alternatives. I admire
John’s bold choice to buy a 100% electric car knowing full well the
difficulties it would involve. In terms of being sustainable, stubbornness is a
virtue, if not a necessity. It is easier to buy a small bottle of food
coloring, not ask any questions and assume you need bright-blue frosting in
order to enjoy an otherwise delicious dessert. This cake, absent of artificial
dyes, is for John, and stands for the harder choice, freely made out of honor,
guts, plain hard work, and/or stubbornness.
Inside the cake there are peaches,
a product which is currently having a tough time in terms of local PR. And
rightly they should. The knowledge you can go into an ordinary store and buy
supposedly fresh fruit and catch a deadly disease merits negative commentary. I
just don’t know why people are not more alarmed.
The
sliced peaches inside this cake are not peaches bought from who knows what farm
and handled by we have no idea who. The peaches at the center of this cake were
picked from my backyard within the last 48 hours, and if they were problematic
the five to six a day I have been eating for the last few weeks should have
wiped me out by now. The trees on which these peaches grow have not been
treated with pesticides for at least the 20 odd years. Except for the one mile
drive from my house, these peaches from farm to table are zero emission.
This
is radical: no gas for the car for the worker who goes to the field to pick fruit;
no gas for the truck which hauls the fruit from sorting, to distribution, to
store; and none for me to drive to the store to get the fruit to make the cake.
It is of course not feasible to grow all things in all places, but I honestly
believe the local food movement is a powerful tool to combat global warming. There
are obstacles for sustainability, but ultimately it is the choices we make
daily in terms of what we eat and the basic standards we set for our lifestyle
which will determine the end game for our Earth.
Thank
you for fighting the good fight John, and Happy Birthday.
