The person who started the Farmer's Markets in London was a young American woman, Nina Planck. She is also a friend of ours who now lives in New York City with her cheesemonger husband (Murray's Cheese), and three children.
Several years ago, as a single woman working for the American ambassador to Great Britain, Nina, a farmer's daughter, was appalled by the quality of produce she found in London supermarkets. Ever pro-active, she got together with local farmers and put together the thriving and extremely popular Farmer's Markets that are dotted around London on weekends.
Our local market in Marylebone is packed on Sunday mornings with shoppers looking for fresh eggs, pork, chicken, vegetables, jams, plants, flowers, pies, cakes, cheese, butter. We try to get there early or things sell out.
Nina's philosophy on food is to eat locally, know the source of your food, and eat things in season. She is a passionate believer in eating traditional foods like beef, butter and eggs, cheese, and raw milk. Her two meticulously researched and well-reviewed books, Real Food and Real Food for Mother and Baby, explain why those foods are good for us while debunking the myths surrounding them. We actually need fats, she writes, as long as they are the right kinds of fat.
We met Nina seventeen years ago when she arrived on our doorstep in Vienna, a visit arranged by a mutual friend. At that time she was a vegetarian and consumed large quantities of homemade bread (I was on a bread making kick). She ran every morning and was a pleasant guest in what was then a houseful of guests. She describes herself as overweight during that period but I can assure you she was not.
Vegetarianism didn't work for her. She says she felt moody, out-of-sorts, and was often ill. That was the beginning of her search for healthier eating. Now, all these years later, and as an avowed meat and dairy eater, she is a lean, fit, lovely woman with energy that makes me sleepy to write about.
So where am I going with this? Nina is not a fan of carbs. As in baguettes. As in warm, fragrant homemade loaves. As in crispy French fries and creamy mashed potatoes. As in, dare I say it, the world's most popular food, the ultimate comfort dish, the delectable and versatile pasta.
Though Nina does not push her ideas for eating on her friends, I once gave her then year old son Julian a piece of wholewheat bread to chew on. Out of my sight (or thought she was), Nina snatched it from him and threw it out.
I am mindful of Nina's guidelines for real food, but pasta is off her table and we live a part of the year in Italy. No matter where we are, pasta is my default answer to "what's for dinner?" Nina's three kids have their own ideas about what they want to eat now, so I asked if she ever fed them pasta, the perennial kids favorite. Did she eat it herself? Had she grown up eating it?
She answered, "I never eat the stuff, but ate plenty as a child and feed my children plenty. They also get brown rice. My mother made lots, always white as I recall (red sauce, and mac and cheese, and tuna in white sauce!), though she was a whole wheat fiend for bread, cookies, etc. I believe she stopped making pasta completely when we left.
"Young children need not merely fat and protein but plenty of carbs so they don't spend all their energy just to move around and stay warm; the carbs spare the protein and fat for growth and development.
"Good bread serves a similar purpose in our house (e.g., morning toast and 'dessert' after meals).
"As for whole wheat pasta, it is now so much better than it was that I make it 8/10 times; white is now a treat."
We are not children and probably don't need as many carbs, but if whole wheat pasta is better for us, there is a middle ground solution to the pasta dilemma. Serve whole wheat when it works with the sauce, and save the white for things like fettucine alfredo, lasagna, spaghetti carbonara, linguine alle vongole, fettucine al limone.
No matter how I serve it, I like to remind myself of Sophia Loren's line, "All you see I owe to spaghetti."
