Bite: Smoked Pigeon and Other Subnatural Delights

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Hello Hello, and welcome to Gastropod.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And we've got another bite-sized episode for you today.

In which Nikki heads down to Durham, North Carolina to find out what on earth subnatural cuisine is.

The answer is both delicious and weird.

Okay, let's get started.

You went down to North Carolina for a couple days.

What were you heading there for?

It was some kind of food festival, right?

Right, it was like this very peculiar, intriguing, sort of like mishmash of ideas and Greek myths and birds being roasted in a car parking lot.

A car parking lot?

I'll tell.

It was all rolled together into this like day-long event on the Duke University campus.

And it was all put together by this guy named Tom Parker.

He's a professor of French and Francophone Literature at Vassar College.

And he's been a visiting scholar at Duke since last spring.

So as part of his time down at Duke, he's pulled in a bunch of professors from all of these different disciplines into this campus-wide project called Sub-Nature and Culinary Culture.

So this day of talks and dinner that I went to was kind of the culmination of the whole project.

Sub-nature and culinary culture.

I have to say, I've never heard of sub-nature before.

What does that mean?

You don't need to feel bad.

Tom hadn't heard of it either until really recently.

Great.

So bizarrely, this whole story goes back to my blog, Edible Geography.

So what happened is that Tom was reading an interview on the blog about this new wine map that lays out the wine regions of France like a subway line rather than as geographic territories.

And he's working on a book about the historical idea of terroir in France, so this map obviously caught his attention.

And then, as you do, he looked up who made the map and what else that person had done, and that's how he came across David Gisson.

So David happens to be a friend of mine.

He's an architectural historian based at the California College of the Arts, and he wrote this book called Subnature, Architecture's Other Environments.

Subnature was a term that I coined to describe the types of degraded natures found from wastelands, war, environmental collapse, industrialization, pollution, invasive species that were somehow

always examined by architects, architectural historians, urbanists as negative aspects of the urban experience.

So basically, subnature is a word and an idea that David made up.

He's not talking about pretty green trees and white, fluffy clouds.

Instead, he's referring to this other, really underappreciated type of nature in our cities and buildings.

So sub-nature for him means insects and mud and puddles and smoke and all of these things that mostly people think of as nasty or gross or a flaw or unhealthy.

And not, I guess, guess, part of nature, although obviously it all is, you know, like rats and cockroaches.

Right.

Like they are natural, but they're this sort of sub-natural thing.

Rats don't get their own chapter in the book, but pigeons do, and they're basically the same thing, but with wings, right?

Exactly.

So anyway, Tom reads about David's book and he thinks, oh, that's an interesting idea.

And like a man after our own hearts, his mind immediately goes to food.

Wow, you know, this is what a great concept.

And isn't this true with foods, too?

And I started thinking of examples that might apply to foods.

And one of the first ones I thought of were, I do French studies.

And so one of the things I introduced my students to

is

stinky cheeses or fragrant cheeses, to put it another way, cheeses that smell like feet, some would say.

So basically anything a little bit stinky or a little bit rotten, like fermented foods are a little bit subnatural, I think, and awful, you know, liver and tongue and heart and all of those weird parts of the animal.

I can think of others too.

Obviously, a lot of weeds are edible and insects too, and even pigeons, as we just discussed.

Exactly, yeah.

But the thing that David and Tom are doing is not just making a list of like subnatural things.

It's more to point out to us that we all have this kind of unstated hierarchy going on in our minds about how we think about nature.

That's the value.

I think all of a sudden you're realizing

the way you think about foods, the way you frame them, the way societies frame them different societies frame them have different consequences and we associate people with the foods they eat so if we marginalize their foods we marginalize people as well and so this is where it got really interesting to me because then you can trace back the history of how some things and not other things got to be at the bottom of that hierarchy and how that changed over time so for example tom's writing a book about the cultural history of terroir in france like i mentioned and the weird thing is terroir used to to be negative.

Anything that tasted the terroir,

you would say that, that had a taste of the terroir to say that it was impure, that it wasn't refined.

So, terroir was a blemish back then, and it applied not only to foods but to people.

You would say that somebody smelled of the terroir to indicate that they weren't urbane, that they weren't cosmopolitan, that they were rustic, and it usually had to do with their the way they comported themselves or with their speech.

They spoke with an accent.

So, everybody in the 17th century in France, which was the apogee of French power

in the world, wanted to be close to the court of Louis XIV

and blend in.

They didn't want to speak as if they were from the provinces or gravitate towards foods that smelled of the earth.

They wanted to show that they were above that and in every way possible.

So terroir was negative and it was impure.

And then 100 years later, it became known as the way we know it today.

It became a sign of authenticity.

So all of a sudden, terroir is not a blemish, it's what you're seeking in the food.

It's the purity, it's the authenticity.

So, there's a complete reversal of values.

So, this is

a fascinating idea that he put forth, this idea that terroir used to be something bad, and now we think of it as something great.

But

how does that translate to Duke and what he was doing there?

How does that take you to this food festival in North Carolina?

Okay, so this is actually what I love about the project.

So, Tom was like, he came across the idea of sub-nature, found it a really interesting framework to apply to his own research, but he didn't stop there.

He was like, if I find this idea interesting, maybe other people in the food world will.

And he spread the idea all around Duke and all around chefs and foragers and cheesemakers in the local community.

He basically kidnapped a concept from the architectural world and set it loose in the food world to see if anyone else found it intriguing.

And it turns out that a lot of the people Tom spoke to did find this idea of sub-nature in food really interesting.

Even David, he was sort of skeptical at first.

And then an anthropologist named Donna Haraway, a really famous anthropologist, came and gave a lecture at his college.

I can't remember the title of the lecture, but during this lecture, she asked the audience to embrace what she called the bastard species of empire.

And I found this to be a completely subnatural concept.

And what Donna was saying was that things such as pigeons, to cite a great example, were brought to the new world as meat.

And today, we don't look at them as food at all.

In fact, we look at them as a nuisance, as a pest.

And there's something kind of thrilling about the idea that I would walk down the street and, first of all, think of a pigeon as meat, which had never really occurred to me before, but also that I could have some kind of future relationship with this animal that was completely outside of my present one.

So most people may not think about pigeons in terms of food, but

you and I, I think have eaten pigeons before, are usually called squab, right?

They're usually called that to distract you from the idea that it's a pigeon, pigeon, I think.

And it's not like restaurants are just grabbing them off the street, you know.

They're not the same pigeons that are eating trash in the gutter.

I certainly hope not.

But David finally got to eat his pigeon, too.

He went down to Duke to give a talk about subnature a couple of weeks before I was there.

Sitting at the table around this large group of academics and graduate students and undergraduate students was this pigeon sitting on a plate that had been smoked in the Duke Subnatural Smokehouse.

And I thought, wow, Tom has completely brought it together.

He has the pigeons, which are mentioned in the book, not as food, but as

a kind of relationship to architecture.

He brought smoke, which is another thing in the book, but there it was sitting in front of me, begging me to taste it finally and to bridge this unbridgeable gap that Donna Haraway had spoken about.

So I took a fork full of pigeon.

It was delicious.

It was fantastic.

So at that moment, something subnatural, which, you know, by its very nature is like gross and not desirable at all, suddenly now is desirable and delicious.

And that was a thing that really interested me actually about exploring subnature in food, is that it's fluid.

It's not a permanent label.

Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, which is the think tank attached to NOMA, Rennie Red Zeppi's restaurant in Copenhagen, he said for him, subnatural, it's less a category and more of a strategy, a way to identify foods that have been pushed to the periphery and excluded from what we think is good and expand, bring them back in and expand that category of the edible.

And that could be good or bad, right?

I mean,

for a lot of reasons, it's good.

Take, for example, insects.

If we considered insects edible in the U.S., well, that would be great for the environment.

They're a very sustainable source of protein.

And then there's health reasons too, right?

There are all these beneficial microbes in fermented foods.

There are are even cultural reasons like tolerance for people whose diets are different from our own.

But Tom gave me a really interesting example of when this strategy of reappropriating these peripheral, sub-natural foods can actually have a downside.

Since I'm down here at Duke, the question that comes to mind, an example I think of, is

olfal or the parts of the pig, anything that's not high on the hog, chitlins.

These are foods that have been sub-nature for the longest time, but now they're being reappropriated.

Whereas in New York City, when I went to try to find pork cheeks at my local butcher, people said, huh?

You know, why would you want that?

We don't have that.

Down here, they sell them because there's a lot more fascination with pork down here.

And not only do they sell them, the prices tripled in

the last three years because all of a sudden these foods have become a part of how southerners view their culture.

And when they try to consume their culture, so to speak, when they reappropriate what have been sub-natures in the past

the market, the prices of these products go up.

So people who have relied on

these products no longer can afford them.

It's an interesting idea.

I mean, I usually think of encouraging people to eat nose to tail all the parts of an animal.

That's usually seen as a good thing.

It prevents waste and you can get more out of the animal.

But I guess I can see if offal becomes trendy, it's kind of like food gentrification.

I mean, if you think of sub-nature in terms of these hierarchies, foods were cheaper because they're at the bottom.

But then if subnature becomes hot, then the people who've been eating that stuff all along, they can't afford it anymore.

Right, exactly.

And I think for both David Gisson with architecture and Tom Parker with food, they don't want sub-nature to be this like happy clappy, like, let's just celebrate all the overlooked foods things.

They want to make sure that those political and ethical and socio-cultural nuances come with it too.

And make sure that we remember, like, why did we consider these things subnatural in the past?

And what does that say about how we relate to nature and to each other?

I like the idea that it gets at this history and politics behind the food and that these foods have been seen by mainstream America as kind of funky and stinky and even unhygienic, at least if you're talking about something like insects.

And now some of them are becoming really trendy.

But really, I mean, there was food there too, right?

I want to hear, I want to know what you ate.

Right.

I ate a lot.

I can only imagine.

You know, I'm capable of it.

The visual highlight, probably, for me, was this insane setup for roasting birds in the car park outside the venue.

So, Matt Kelly, who's the chef at Van Rouge and Matteo in Durham,

he had built a sort of warm charcoal fire and then this cinder block kind of wall around it.

And then,

you know, hung over the wall was this grate.

And hung from the grate on 200 tiny little strings were these quail just kind of hung off a grate by their claws.

It honestly looked like a post-apocalyptic like car park grill.

I love it.

I love this idea of car park quail.

Tasted delicious of course, but it wasn't my favorite.

My favorite was sturgeon.

And this was Kim Floresca and Daniel Ryan of one restaurant in Chapel Hill.

They served the sturgeon with its roe and its marrow and its collagen.

They even grated the heart over it.

And there were fermented onions and sour cream.

I got to hang out with Kim as she smoked it.

Pumpernickel bread, a little bit of corn smut, mushrooms, a little bit of dried mushrooms in the middle.

And she had coated it with this really weird black crust, which looked gorgeous around the pure white fish.

Sturgeon Row, obviously, is something that everyone typically uses, but its collagen and its marrow, I think, is an underutilized part of the animal, and it's an incredible way to feature the animal in its entirety.

So she used corn fungus and then all these kind of funky parts of the animal, and it had this crust on it and it was also smoked.

Yeah, so that's the other fun thing.

So Tom Parker actually built a smokehouse on the Duke campus.

In the book, David Gisson has this whole chapter on smoke and the smoky industrial cities of the Victorian era.

And you know, Duke is also built on tobacco money, so smoke was this like very potent idea.

And what's funny is that the smokehouse ended up getting built on the smoking part, like the smokers area of campus.

And even while I was hanging out with Kim smoking the sturgeon, these students would come up and just kind of perch on some of the benches at the side and have a cigarette and think about the meaning of smoke.

I'm sure that's what they were doing.

Or fiddle with their phones.

Yeah, that's probably more like it.

Building the smokehouse, unsurprisingly, took a lot of finagling and permits.

It was right next to the vice president's office, so

yeah.

controversial.

But in the end, they built this gorgeous homemade smokehouse.

It was made out of a barrel grill from Home Depot and just plywood.

And it had these herb planters all over the sides so you could season your food with smoked herbs.

How cool.

Delicious.

It was designed to be temporary and like taken down and put up somewhere else.

And I really wanted to bring it home with me, but one of the chefs had already claimed it.

I am having a difficult time imagining it in your little apartment in Brooklyn.

I know, not really practical in New York City, but I can dream.

Anyway, thank you for joining me on my subnatural adventures.

I've posted the menu and a link to some of the talks and to David's book online at gastropod.com.

Check it out and let us know what foods you think of as subnatural and why.

And we'll be back in just a couple of weeks with a brand new episode all about kelp, the kale of the sea.

Charles Darwin, when he was on the Beagle heading to the Galapagos Islands, had kelp and mussels for dinner on Christmas Eve.

The Hawaiian royalty six, seven, eight hundred years ago had seaweed gardens.

To make sure you don't miss it, you can sign up for our email list at gastropod.com.

Or you can subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher.

Till then.

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.