This is another one of those “what’s different about Italy that I like” posts. I hope you can stand just one more this year.
You see, I’m currently visiting family near the town of Aledo in Illinois. Aledo is a fine town of the type you’d expect to encounter in the heart of farm country. All around the soil is rich and black. Fields of corn and soy beans stretch for further than the eye can see. Stout-hearted farmers raise pigs and cattle. Things can’t help but grow strong here.
The central district of Aledo, with its fine Courthouse as centerpiece, is built around a grassy park. There is a bandstand in one corner. On summer weekends bands like the River City 6 play to local folks sitting comfortably in lawn chairs they’ve brought from home. At the end of the concerts, toe-headed boys with plastic buckets weave through the crowds to collect donations for the bandstand, which isn’t fully paid for yet but undoubtedly will be soon.
Aledo represents the idylic small town and good wholesome life we think we remember, even if we’ve never lived in a farm town in the center of America. It’s the kind of place that city dwellers imagine they’d like to live in after reading the story of a a drug deal gone bad in the neighborhood.
Not only that, but Aledo seems on the cusp of an economic revival. You can see it’s a spiffed-up town.
This year someone has even opened a fine dining restaurant in Aledo.
So, being foodies, we went. I ordered the ham, thinking that we were in the heart of a place that grows and nurtures pigs. I had formed one of those odd, mental pictures of a smiling 4H kid beside his prized hog, the two of them looking ever so happy. The menu said the ham was hand carved and came topped with a cherry-whiskey sauce.
But what I got was a very think hunk of industrial ham. You know, the kind they put inside of a rectangular plastic enclosure, a colorless sock that you seem to be able to eat but wonder if the stuff you’re putting in your mouth actually digests. They put the ham and some random pieces of ham-like material in the sock so that the pressure “glues” all the bits together that might be lost during “manufacturing of the product”, squeezing it so much that it loses its unctuous juices. I believed it’s called “flaked and formed” or some such.
What I can’t understand is why the folks in charge of the restaurant didn’t go to one of the local farmers and say, “Listen Hank, we need to have the tastiest darn ham in Mercer county for our fine restaurant. You got good hams, Hank. Why don’t you set aside the best ones and we’ll buy them so that our customers will be enlightened by what a smoked pork product can taste like when it doesn’t come from a big ol’ factory in the middle of a polluted city.”
Well, I suppose you wouldn’t want those darn Chicagoans to come a callin’ to your restaurant for a slice of Hank’s ham. They’d overrun the place for sure.
But here’s the thing. In the Lunigiana region of Tuscany I can go to most any of my local restaurants and ask about the provenience of the lamb and get the name of the shepherd that has the dog that watches the sheep. I can order trout from specific streams. People know where things come from, even in a restaurant located in a tiny village. Most of the time, it hasn’t spent time in a freezer awaiting the train that will take it hundreds of miles to a market where “chefs” gather.
In some ways, I hope I live long enough to witness the revolution that should take place when the devil gas gets to 15 dollars a gallon. Food should get local again. People in fertile lands like central Illinois should be able to eat tasty pork once again—where the hog hasn’t been bred and processed to taste like the combination of chicken breast and shoe leather.
And by that time Hank and his hogs should have a field day in Aledo. Good for them.