Transcription of David Levi for the show Summer Fare #45
Dr. Lisa: Today on the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast, we’re talking about summer fare. With us we have Chef David Levi of Vinland. David’s been out teaching classes. He’s doing locally-sourced food. There’s so many exciting things that he’s doing and you’re going to actually tell us that right now, Vinland is a concept but it’s an exciting concept and is related to summer fare. Welcome to the show.
David: Thank you. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Gen. Vinland is my upcoming restaurant and it does not exist yet although hopefully will exist here in Portland by around the middle of this coming fall and it’s a restaurant where I’m going to be using all local ingredients and a lot of wild ingredients. That’s actually a major passion of mine foraging wild food especially mushrooms and herbs.
Actually, we have delicious and nourishing wild things all around us and I find that incredibly exciting that you go into the supermarket and so many of the things are coming from California or Mexico or God knows where but right on the side of your building here is purslane and it’s popping up through the bricks. Purslane is the richest plant source of Omega-3 fats. It’s absolutely delicious.
It was Gandhi’s favorite food. Purslane is one of my favorite summer greens for salad or to cook with, incredibly nutrient dense, a little bit mucilaginous and it’s a little bit slippery in the mouth. It’s a succulent plant. If you have a garden, you probably seen it. Chances are good you’ve weeded it out so nice to know it’s safe when you pluck it and put in your salad.
Some of the other wild plant you’ll just see growing everywhere would be lamb’s quarters close relative of beets and spinach, more nutrient dense than either of those two. Chickweed is absolutely everywhere at this time of the year, wood sorrel with very, very bright acidity. Sheep sorrel as well, unrelated plants but both called sorrel. Both are high in oxalic acid, also high in vitamin C and so they have a very bright citrusy flavor and that’s really just the tip of the iceberg.
We have all these exciting plants growing all around us that are just coming up. We don’t have to actually do anything to bring them forth and they’re often much more exciting than what we can find in the supermarket. See nothing in the fact they’re growing with no inputs, with no fertilizer, no pesticides. In fact, you don’t even have the carbon footprint of transporting or packaging the goods.
Dr. Lisa: How did you get interested in doing this type of cooking, cooking with foraged foods and wild foods?
David: When I was a kid, I lived in Upstate New York, the New York side of the Berkshires. My folks still live there today and my mom would take me and my little sister out to pick strawberries and black berries, blackcaps, red raspberries and so I really love doing that from the time I was a little kid. There was always something kind of special about finding something sweet and delicious out there in nature.
My sister and I also loved picking what I later find out was wood sorrel. I think they called it lemon clover but we would just eat tons of it and our mom would say that we would get a belly ache. We never did actually. I was drawn to the way I think a lot of little kids are drawn to it but I didn’t actually start foraging in a serious way until my mid-20s when I start coming to Maine and went on to Deer Isle and was invited to go out to the woods to pick some chanterelles for dinner which kind of blew me away.
I was not working professionally as a chef yet but I was very serious about my cooking and the fact that chanterelles were just there we need to be taking in the woods was a real eye opener. Something that you might pay $40 a pound for it in DeLuca if you’re lucky enough to find it and here were far superior ones. It hadn’t been like riding on a store shelf or in a truck for a week or two, incredibly delicious, such intense flavor. It was right there and so I thought, “All right, I need to find every chanterelle in this island.”
Thankfully for the chanterelles and the wild life, I didn’t but found plenty and then really started getting into learning mushrooms so I’ve now very confidently harvested probably two to three dozen species of mushrooms, none of which have poisonous look-alikes by the way. There are only a small handful of wild mushrooms that look anything like dangerous so we have a bit of mycophobia, fear of mushrooms in this culture which is a little fascinating. We inherit it from the English. You go to Europe and all the Europeans love the foraged mushrooms except the English. You go to Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, France, Czechoslovakia, everywhere, the woods are just full of foragers at every time of the year that you could possibly find mushrooms.
Generally, it’s a pretty fundamentally safe thing to do once you take that basic step of learning what you’re looking at and again, this opens you up to a whole range of flavors and textures. Even the physical beauty of some of these mushrooms like black trumpets or chanterelle is really pretty astonishing and it can totally transform a dish.
Dr. Lisa: Where did you get your training? Where did you learn about mushrooms and foraging and is this something that’s standard to chef training in the United States?
David: Absolutely not standard, and that’s unfortunate. That’s something I’d like to be changed. I think that culinary schools, which are so valuable in so many ways for so many people, are like many institutions of education relatively conservative and so they haven’t for the most part really caught up with this raging new interest in wild food. I mean now you’re seeing Rene Redzepi from Noma and Magnus Nilsson from Faviken. I see nothing of Thomas Keller here in the States who have been such proponents of using wild food. You see him on the cover of all the culinary magazines.
That’s really where the attention has been these last few years in fine dining moving on from molecular gastronomy that previous movement which was very focused in really scientific techniques, a valuable movement but this is kind of a reaction against it looking back towards nature now.
In terms of my own education in foraging, it’s never really true to say that you self-educated because you’re always learning from others but I was learning a lot from books, from the internet, from my friend Giles who is not a professional chef. He’s an abstract painter but he and I got fascinated with foraging at the same time and just started tearing through books and teaching each other and foraging together. I learned from Wildman Steve Brill, this incredible forager down in New York and then took it a step or two further when I did my stage, my culinary apprenticeship at Noma, which I then followed up with stage at Faviken in Northern Sweden.
Both of those restaurants are using such an incredible array of wild foods and these have just such great effects too. It’s not just they’re there on the plate but they’re incorporated into these magnificent dishes so that was an incredible experience in so many ways but one of them was broadening and deepening my own knowledge of wild foods and how to use them.
Genevieve: Also, I think in those cultures in particular, the growing seasons are very short so you have a very particular idea about agriculture and how it’s come to play in our evolution of nutrition. Do you want to speak to that for a little bit?
David: Yeah. That’s a big one. Agriculture is a tricky word. I love small farms and I have some great friends in this area who have small farms and are really doing right by their plants and their animals and the lands. That said, I think the agriculture as such is defined from say horticulture or pastoralism is generally not good for the land and that’s a tough thing for us because our a whole society, Western civilization is founded on agriculture which I would define as the monocropping of the annual grains in the West primarily wheat but there are the other grains too, barley, rye, millet, whatever and certainly corn and rice would fit into that model as well.
When you take a piece of land and you clear every living thing and then plant rows of identical monocrops, that’s bad for the soil. It’s obviously bad for biodiversity. It leads to erosion. It’s why the Fertile Crescent is now old desert and it’s not like historians just have the weird sense of humor and they decided to call Iraq and Egypt and Syria the Fertile Crescent. That land used to be incredibly rich and abundant.
We live in a land where agriculture as such in terms of extractive, large scale monocropping of grains is a little pretty recent thing and yet there’s already been very serious toll on the Great Plains plus two thirds of its original topsoil. What’s left is denuded of many of its nutrients. The Ogallala Aquifer which is the world’s largest aquifer beneath the Great Plains is now at least half empty, maybe 60% empty nothing the fact it’s becoming polluted and it’s replenishing microscopic array. We’re talking about water that now it goes back to the last Ice Age actually. It goes back quite a bit further and replenishes over the span of millions of years. We expected more than half dying in a hundred years and are accelerating.
All of that is kind of a long way of saying that it’s not a sustainable model and nor is it particularly good for us because these grains are calorie dense but nutrient poor and also often loaded with what is called what’s in price circles or some circles anti-nutrients. This is a chemical defense mechanism from the seeds that can block mineral absorption and do other things to basically convince the animals to not eat them which is obviously in the plant’s synthesis.
I think that we really need to look at ways that we can live in balance with the land as the indigenous cultures of this continent did since time immemorial which might involve growing a certain number of plants in a horticultural setting which is to say a polyculture of plants and not all annual plants, perennial plants are better because it disturb the topsoil but some annual plants grown at small scale, you can do that and not destroy the land. The Abenaki did it. A plenty of others did it and they also hunted.
Dr. Lisa: You mentioned Noma and Dario Cecchini. Where is that and who are they?
David: These are two places where I staged last year and so Dario Cecchini is by many people’s estimation the world’s greatest butcher. He’s an incredible butcher, no doubt about that but there are a lot of great butchers in the world so what really sets Dario apart is his enormous personality and also his fears, love of the artisanal way of life and opposition to industrial food.
He’s an eighth generation butcher in the small town of Panzano and Chianti, this little village right between Florence and Sienna. It’s an incredibly beautiful place and he loves what he does maybe more than anyone I’ve ever met and he does it with nothing else. He works seven days a week. He works every single day usually 14, 15 hours a day but he never tires and that’s such a labor of love and he truly loves meat and he takes great responsibility for the need as well seeing if that’s coming from really good small farms and that he’s doing the absolute best that he possibly can with it that he’s turning into extraordinary food.
He now has a couple of restaurants in that town of Panzano so I worked with him doing the butchering then also in the restaurants and it was just incredible experience learning a little bit of his craft and even more so, kind of threw us in Mozza’s from being in the presence of his tremendous love for his way of life, I come to love it myself and see the enormous value in that.
I actually moved from there to Copenhagen where I did my two-month long stage at Noma. Noma is maybe the world’s best restaurant on San Pellegrino list which is the big and prestigious list out there for avant-garde restaurants. It’s been number one for the last three years. Noma is a restaurant that has redefined fine dining. It pushed it away from the old molecular gastronomy movement and moved it towards wild nature which is something that is very beautiful in my estimation.
The other great thing about Noma from my point of view is that they’ve done this all with Nordic ingredients. While it was amazing working with Dario in Tuscany and we certainly have access to great beef here and that’s primarily what Dario works with, beef, I think if I stayed in Tuscany and really immerse myself more in the Tuscan cuisine, that would be pretty tough to do with local ingredients because we’re never going to have olive oil or lemons or so many of the things that are just quintessential to Tuscan cuisine.
Our bioregion is actually very, very much like Denmark’s so pretty much everything that grows there grows here. In fact the difference is that we have somewhat greater bio diversity so there are things that we have that they don’t have. Really, we have of course a broader palette to work with but already Rene Redzepi from Noma, the head chef at Noma has shown that what you can do with that Nordic palette is almost limitless and so incredibly refined and so I look forward to bring back just a little bit of that to Maine.
Genevieve: The trend these days is again Forks Over Knives. There’s a bit real bent again towards cutting meat and meat products out of people’s diets to consider it healthier but you really have a different take going back even further which has to do with eating meat.
David: Yeah, that’s absolutely true and it’s a tricky subject to get into. People care very deeply about what they eat and when you’re talking about vegans or most vegetarians or people on the flip side following the Weston Price style diet or a Paleo diet, something like that, these are people who have put a lot of thought into what they’re eating. They generally have strong nutritional grounds for what they’re doing.
Often also there’s a moral imperative based on their understanding of what the ecological consequences are of their food choices so I think it’s absolutely essential to begin any kind of investigation that kind of thing by acknowledging that people have these positive motivations. They’re trying to make the right choices and to not pretend that I or anybody else has the absolute correct answer so I could just say that my way of thinking about how we should eat, how we can best nourish ourselves while also protecting the lands, we can start by looking at cultures that have lived in equilibrium with the land for eons, for many thousands of years.
When you look at indigenous cultures, I’m defining indigenous as opposed to societies based on cities which is really … if you look at the etymology of civilization, it’s all about cities so we’re looking at non-urban societies, non-agricultural societies, societies based on hunting, foraging, pastoralism, small scale horticulture. You see that no matter where these people were in the world, most of their calories were coming from fat and mostly highly saturated fat and it’s generally animal sources. The one being exception would be people who had accessed to coconuts so you look at the coconut in cultures and often, coconut oil accounts for 50% or even more of the total calories and then much of the rest is fish.
You can look at the Maasai or the Samburu in East Africa living near the equator on their traditional diet getting virtually all of their calories from cattle. They’re semi-nomadic cattle herders. They do drink the dairy from the cows and also they drink blood from the cows. They keep the cows alive and they tap them for blood like the human being giving blood. It’s not particularly painful or traumatic or anything and they do also of course eat meat of the animals and these people have extraordinary health. They have virtually no incidence of heart disease or stroke. They have unbelievable strength. Some of the greatest distance runners in the world are from these tribes.
Then in different of climate as you could possibly find, you go to Greenland and you see the Inuit before colonization, before being switched to a Western diet were getting over 80% of their total calories from fat and virtually 100% of their total calories from animals and they certainly ate and to a large extent still eat a lot of fish although really the staple are marine mammals and they had no incidence of cancer.
Danish doctors who live there for the better part of their lives never saw a single case of cancer until they started finding Greenlandic Inuit who had been switched to a Weston diet who are starting to eat flour and sugar and bingo, just like that, they started getting cancer and heart disease and stroke, none which have been present before.
I think when we look at the diets of indigenous people and it’s true also for the Abenaki, also for the Lakota, well, for most of the indigenous people of what’s now the United States, you see a diet based heavily in animals and when you look at the exceptions, you look at the more agricultural society to the desert Southwest, very beautiful societies in so many ways but you actually do find obesity there whereas you don’t find it in the other cultures. You do find tooth decay and evidence of cancer in the remains of these agricultural people.
Again, again, again, I think that we can see that indigenous people having an animal based diet, a diet very high in fat and very nutrient dense tend to be taller and stronger, much more cancer free, much more cavity free as well, larger bone mass and I personally have found it since I switched to that kind of diet. My health has improved enormously. In fact, when I went off grain three years ago, I was able to tackle asthma. I had had severe asthma for 30 years. I was on three daily medications and it was a huge encumbrance in my life and just getting off grain wound up solving it for me.
Dr. Lisa: For people who are interested in foraging, interested in finding the purslane along the building and getting out into the woods for the chanterelles, what steps can they take? How can they learn more about foraging? How can they learn more about the type of eating that you’re describing?
David: There are a lot of great resources out there. It’s well worth getting at least one guide really preferably a couple of books you can use as a reference point so when you see a mushroom, you’re wondering what it is, you look it up in one book. Once you’re pretty sure that you can … and preferably get a book with really good pictures, with not just the Latin names but also the common names and then cross reference it. Look it up in a few other places. See if it has any dangerous analogues. That’s the word that’s often used for look-alikes or you can just type in to Google dangerous look-alikes.
If you type into Google dangerous look-alikes for chanterelles, you’ll probably find Jack-O-Lantern but the Jack-O-Lantern really does not look very much like a chanterelle at all. If you’ve ever really seen a chanterelle, you’re not going to mistake them. If you’ve never seen a chanterelle before, then based on description, you might wonder if a Jack-O-Lantern is the right thing so you need to look at the pictures closely. You need to be sure about what you’re picking. Jack-O-Lantern by the way is a bioluminescent mushroom so take it into a dark closet.
There are so many wonderful things that you can harvest where there’s just no confusing them. There’s just no way to confuse a hen of the woods or an oyster mushroom or a black trumpet or anything that’s going to do you any harm at all.
Dr. Lisa: Do you teach that in your class as well?
David: I do. Actually one place that you could learn these things would be to come to my classes and so I guess I’d like to make a little plug and my website is vinland.me for Maine and I have this ongoing series of classes, Portland Food and Cooking Class. I say food and cooking because while I do love to actually cook, so much of the food that I eat and that I promote is not cooked so that’s away from the idea that food is something that is inherently cooked or 99% of the time cooked. Actually, I love raw food, fermented foods.
I’ve already taught one foraging class. I’ve often incorporate wild ingredients in my cooking classes. I’ll be doing another foraging class before too long. Now that we’re getting into summer, we’re starting to get into primetime for mushrooms, chanterelles, black trumpets, boletes, Porcini will be one of those bolete mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, shaggy mane, all kinds of great things.
Then the array of wild greens is far greater and again, many of them are really pretty easy to ID. The internet is a great tool. Wildman Steve Brill, he’s a legend in the foraging community so I’d recommend going to his website and it’s very, very user friendly and look around for foraging tours. David Spahr is a wonderful mycologist, mushroom specialist here in Maine and I believe he gets tours.
Dr. Lisa: Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us today. We’ve been talking with Chef David Levi of Vinland and we hope that you’ll come back and talk to us more about some of the exciting work you’re doing with your upcoming restaurant and all of the things that I think our listeners are eager to hear about.
David: I’d be really happy to do that. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you, Gen.