Forage Primeval » Food, stores and stories

After a few days in the back seat of a car on Sri Lanka’s dusty, rib-rattling roads, I was ready to seek divine protection. The idea wasn’t mine. It was Daya’s. He was the driver I had hired to take my wife and me on a three-day tour of his tropical island. First stop after leaving the capital city of Colombo were the white-hot beaches to the south, just a few degrees from the equator. Then we drove north for relief into the cool central highlands around the cities of Nuwara Eliya and Kandy, where Ceylon tea was grown. From there Daya drove us down to the dry northern plains to see the fortress atop a massive fist of stone known as Lion’s Rock, and on to the ancient city of Anuradhapura, a cradle of Lankan civilization.

Not infrequently along the way, elephants tugging logs or other heavy items across the road slowed our progress. Meanwhile, Daya’s lively narrative, delivered in a rich colonial English,  bounced like his little sedan between official tourist soundtrack and personal commentary. He knew everything about Sri Lanka, and seemed to know everyone who lived there, too. At one point he decided that we should see the making of sambal, the fiery condiment eaten everywhere and on just about everything in Sri Lanka. Without further ado, he stopped the car in front of a modest bungalow and led us around to the side. There a woman in a sari squatted in front of a concave slab of rock. She never acknowledged us in any way — possibly because Daya stopped there so frequently with passengers — as she pounded chili peppers and salt into a red and orange lava that looked potent enough to melt her stone age tools.

We were heading back to Colombo when Daya suggested another stop, this one at a temple. It was home to a god who looked after drivers and travelers. Whenever he was near it, he said, he liked to pay homage and ask for protection. The fact that he was a Buddhist and the temple was Hindu could not have been less important. “It’s the same God, Sir,” he said to me matter-of-factly, “just a different dwelling.” He apologized to my wife for the fact that she would not be permitted into the temple precincts, promising to take her to a lovely pottery shop afterwards that was on our route.

We proceeded south along the coast road, windows rolled all the way down. The air that rushed in was hot but it felt good just the same. On occasion we caught glimpses of the blue water of the Gulf of Mannar through breaks in the roadside vegetation. At length Daya brought the car to a halt next to a stone wall. Here, in a tranquil courtyard filled with shade trees, was the temple. On its roof cavorted a mass of brightly painted, elaborately carved figures of gods and goddesses, animals and ornaments. Disney could not have created anything more colorful or animated. “Please come, Sir,” Daya said, holding the car door open.

At a break in the wall that served as the entrance to the courtyard, an old man sat by a cart with a thatched roof. He was selling coconuts. Swiftly stopping my hand as I reached for rupees, Daya purchased two and handed one to me. “This way, Sir,” he directed, his outstretched arm pointing towards what looked like an empty fountain. As we drew closer it turned out to be a square pit with a stone floor surrounded on all sides by a low wall. Scattered everywhere within the pit were pieces of coconut shell.

Daya explained the ritual: I was to grasp the coconut in both hands, raise it over my head and then hurl it into the pit with enough force to break it open. At that point, the large black birds that could be seen sitting in the trees, creatures sacred to the temple, might come and eat the coconut meat as physical manifestations of the gods. “Please, Sir,” Daya said, “go ahead,” giving me the honor of the first sacrifice.

I approached the wall, leaving enough room to get a good step or two. I held the coconut in my hands as Daya had instructed, keeping my arms loose, and I looked for a spot in the pit that was free of debris where I could aim my throw. I glanced at Daya and he nodded: yes, any time you are ready. I took a deep breath, bent my legs athletically, took a step towards the wall, eyes on my spot. I raised the coconut above my head and hurled it with all the strength I could muster. It hit the stone with a loud, clean crack and broke into pieces. The birds shrieked, applauding, I thought, in their shady grove.

Daya’s turn now. Calmly he raised the coconut above his head and threw it into the pit. Instead of breaking open, it bounced off the stone with a hollow thock and rolled, just making it to the far wall. Up to now the visit to the temple had been a lark, but at this point I was a little worried. I was embarrassed, too, to have done better than my host. This whole business was his idea, not mine. Now what? I wondered if Daya were ashamed.

Without any evidence of concern, Daya stepped over the wall. He walked across the debris-strewn pit, sweeping shards to the side with his feet, picked up his coconut and returned to his starting point. All the while I thought a lightning bolt might strike him down. There’s a place in the Old Testament, after all, where Yahweh turns two priests into piles of ash for performing a sloppy ritual.

Daya smiled at me and wagged his head enigmatically from side to side, as people do all over the Indian subcontinent. Now he raised the coconut again. He closed his eyes and mumbled something — a prayer for success, I supposed. Then he threw his offering into the pit again. This time it broke open. He stood silently as the birds descended, as if on a single black wing, to peck at the fresh white meat.

“Thank you, Sir,” Daya said. He held out his hand to shake mine. “Congratulations. You did very well indeed.” I returned the compliment as best I could, but the truth nagged at me: Daya had not done well; he had needed two throws. I walked silently next to him for a few paces. “Daya,” I finally asked, “does it matter if the coconut doesn’t break the first time?”

He looked at me and smiled. “Why would it matter?” he asked.

“Well, you know,” I said: “to show you’re worthy.”

Daya stopped and considered. “Oh Yes, I see,” he said. “What I believe, Sir, is that the gods don’t expect a man to succeed every time. Only another god could do that, anyway. What makes the gods love us,” he said with a sweep of his hand in the direction of the teeming rooftop pantheon, “is that we keep trying to get it right. It’s the effort, Sir, not only the result, you see.” He gave me another smile and a wag of his head. “Now hurry, Sir: we mustn’t keep your wife waiting any longer.”

The last time I saw Daya was when we climbed out of his car at the entrance to the old Galle Face hotel in Colombo. I wanted to stay in touch with him: at my request he wrote his very long Singhalese name on a piece of paper for me, but I lost it. If there is a god of travellers, I hope that deity blessed Daya and protected him. I’ve known for a long time that the journey I took with Daya was my blessing: a lesson from a humble man about the right way to feed a god.

Produce Market on Main Avenue, Norwalk

This tale of discovery begins with a hot pepper on the sidewalk. I was having some work done on my car at the AAMCO on Main Street in Norwalk. What I thought would be a 20 minute job was moving into its second hour. I couldn’t take another minute of the St. Patrick’s Day parade on the waiting room TV so I went off in search of coffee. I hadn’t walked more than half a block when I saw it, lying in the sunshine on the pavement in front of a service station: shiny and bright green and, on closer inspection, definitely not a shamrock.

Road food
By coincidence, I needed a jalapeno pepper for the beans and rice I was planning to make that evening. This one could not have been in better shape. Sure, I wondered how it got there. But you know how easy it is to concoct explanations for even the most implausible circumstances: I just figured this must have dropped out of someone’s shopping bag — leaving aside the fact that I was not exactly in a shopping district, and that gas stations don’t normally carry fresh produce (not in this country, anyway). In any event, ignoring the advice I used to receive on a regular basis growing up in Manhattan about not picking up stuff from the street, I put the pepper into my pocket and continued on my way.

In a featureless strip mall that was only partially occupied, I passed an open doorway. A neat display of oranges caught my eye. An imposing pyramid of very large cans of Bush’s Best white hominy filled the shop window.

I turned around and peeked in the door, thinking that perhaps this was a temporary warehouse.

But it was far too clean and well-lit for that. The first thing I noticed, right under the oranges, was a blue 1 lb. box of Sweet Tamarind. I don’t know about you, but this is not an everyday item in the stores where I shop. I walked down the aisle past a handsome display of produce — broccoli with tight florets, bunches of carrots and celery, shiny eggplants, radish and asparagus, chayote, tomatillo, everything expertly arranged, looking just-picked. Roaming around the small but well-organized store, I saw yuca, jicama, whole fresh coconut, sweet plantain and a stack of aloe vera leaves, ready for juicing.

Forbidden Fruit

But that was only the beginning. In the back of the store I found whole and grated cotija cheese, four or more varieties of packaged tortillas, sweet corn arepas, pure manteca (pork fat), chorizo and other sausages, including several types of salami. Across the aisle were free standing shelves filled with packages, jars and cans of items I had for the most part never seen before. An even more telling indication of their Latino authenticity is that not too many of them came up on page 1 of a Google search.  The discoveries included tender cactus, guava, yucca aloe, mountain papaya, pechiche (a kind of wild cherry eaten in Ecuador), fernaldia (a plant whose flowers and buds are eaten in Guatemala and El Salvador) and an Andean tuber called olluco. One innocent-looking item — the sweetly-named Hawthorn Apple, packed in a jar with syrup

– turns out to have an infamous claim to fame. The key ingredient in a Mexican holiday punch, the tejocote is so indispensable — and it was once so unavailable north of the border — that between 2002 – 2006 it was the raw fruit most frequently seized by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Smuggling, Interdiction and Trade Compliance program, according to the Los Angeles Times (http://bit.ly/aZOTmf). *

The shopkeepers who have assembled this rich and beguiling collection are two cousins, Luis Gabriel and Juan Sanchez. They opened their plainly-named “Produce Market” in November of 2009. Luis and Juan arrived here 9 years ago from Peru. Luis’s mother owns a small produce stand in Lima, so he grew up in the business. He and Juan worked at the Rowayton Market and then at Whole Foods in Greenwich, and the visual appeal of their tidy store shows that they learned their lessons well. Something else they learned is what it’s like to leave home in search of a new life — knowledge they share with more than a few of their customers. According to data collected by the Pew Hispanic Center (http://pewhispanic.org/), there were 47 million Hispanics living in the U.S. in 2008, and of those, 424,000 were in Connecticut.

New Lives
It seems a safe bet that a store so well-stocked will attract a following, but I wanted to know more about where — and who — the

customers might be.  It’s difficult to find statistics that look at Hispanic populations by counties or smaller units, so I turned to my friend Beatriz for insight. She came to the U.S. from Colombia in 1986 following a harrowing incident involving the kidnapping of her father. He was able to return to his family, but only after agreeing to a ransom that comprised most of what he owned, including horses, cows and other animals, fruit trees and a large coffee plantation. Beatriz confirmed that the main concentrations of Latinos live in the larger cities along the coast between Stamford and New Haven, and also in Hartford. In Fairfield County, she says, South Norwalk is heavily Mexican, whereas Peruvians and Ecuadorianos tend to live in Stamford. There is a good-sized Colombian community in South Norwalk, and an even larger one in Stamford (but when Beatriz wants to buy Colombian food she heads to Queens, NY).

Of course there are other Hispanic groups in Fairfield County — no disrespect intended; these are simply the ones Beatriz mentioned (the others tracked by Pew include Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Dominicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans). There are other important urban centers, too, like Danbury. Beatriz told me that a lot of the Latinos who move to Connecticut are coming from other parts of the U.S., and in particular Texas and California. They journey north for a better life style, better jobs and better education for their children, she says. The Pew data do show that between 2000 and 2008, the Hispanic population of Connecticut increased 28%, but it’s not possible to say how much of that increase reflects “new arrivals” and how much reflects “transfers” from other parts of the U.S.

Comfort Food
Superficial as it was, my research changed the way I thought about the items sold at Juan’s and Luis’s store, and taught me something about the power of brands. Case in point: Produce Market stocks Premium Saltine crackers, identical to what I see in my Anglo store but in Spanish (e.g., Galletas de Soda PREMIUM). The package reminded me of the almost absurd rush of relief I felt when, shortly after leaving the U.S. to live in Zurich, Switzerland, I found Bounty paper towel in the supermarket, offering a direct connection to the way of life I thought I had left behind. Indeed, exotic though they may be to me, to Latinos, the fruits, vegetables, biscuits, snacks, sauces and other items on the shelves of the Produce Market are reminders of the ordinary and the everyday; they are familiar friends from home.

To the proprietors of Produce Market, they are something else as well. I asked Luis at one point what had made him decide to leave his native land and come here. He answered with more patience than my naïve question deserved: “Poor people come to this country,” he said simply, “for opportunity.” For these two gentlemen from Peru, owning their own store is a dream come true — and only the beginning, at that. Now that he has a store, I asked Luis, what’s next for you guys? Like a native son, he answered: more stores!

I’m looking forward to learning more about the foods of foodways of Produce Market. All I’ve sampled so far is the Pico de Gallo that Luis and Juan make in the store. I can tell you that it’s wonderfully clean-flavored and fresh-tasting with heat that’s strong but not excessive.

For more information on Hispanic business culture in Fairfield County and particularly in Stamford, consult this article published recently by the Fairfield County Business Journal.

P.S. All those years of inner city brainwashing finally got the best of me. The jalapenos at the Produce Market were every bit the equal of the one I’d found on the pavement, so I bought a nice clean new one and used it instead, saving the pepper I found on the street for the photo at the top of the page.

*The raw fruit is banned in the U.S. not because it has psychotropic properties, but because it often harbors pernicious parasites. In 2006, tejocote in cans and jars was removed from the contraband list.

Produce Market
235 Main Avenue
Norwalk, CT  06851

My friend Arthur Einstein has begun a series on his blog, The Art of Einstein, called “Mad Men Stories.” These are recollections by people who worked in the business of how the “real” agency life might have been a little different from the wildly popular TV show. I have made a modest contribution to this project, which you’ll find if you visit here. My thanks to Arthur for including me in the fun.

Good food and more at the Wilton Organic Gourmet

At 8 a.m., pale sunlight floats through the front window and creeps along the floor to the little kitchen at the back of the store. Suzie Quaranta, who prepares meals here once a week, and Pete Leventhal, the founder, owner, head chef and resident guru of the place, are busy cooking. Specials of the day include Turkey-andouille sausage with vegetables and white beans; turkey shepard’s pie with butternut squash; gluten-free vegetarian lasagna; brown rice and vegetable “burger” with sunflower seeds, and more. “What about the rollatini?” asks Suzie, flattening chicken breasts. “What should we serve with that?”

“Rosemary roast potatoes,” answers Pete without shifting his intense concentration from the chicken and avocado wrap he’s rolling into a tight cylinder.

Time for a cleanser

At that moment the cowbell hanging from the front door rings softly, announcing the first customer: today it’s Antonio Bazar, an electrician who works nearby. He grabs a bottle of organic juice and a sandwich made with tongol tuna, which Pete serves because it’s classified as a “Good Alternative” by Seafood Watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “When I feel like my diet has not been too healthy,” Antonio told me, “I come in here to clean up my act.” He pays up and heads off, the bell jingling as the door closes behind him.

And so begins another day at the Wilton Organic Gourmet, a friendly and sprited one-of-a-kind enterprise that’s partly about food, partly about vitamins and supplements, partly about personal care products and all about a philosophy of health that defies easy categorization. Science is certainly a part of it: Pete has a master’s degree in clinical nutrition, which he puts to work not only in his cooking and in his counseling practice but also in the knowledgeable advice he freely dispenses over the counter. “Did you ever have a fungal infection?” he inquires of a customer who’s looking for a specific remedy. When a shopper came in a few years ago to purchase an expensive skin treatment, Pete questioned her closely about her diet. He convinced her that paying attention to what she ate was likely to do her more good in the long run, though he could have easily made the sale. After losing thirty pounds under Pete’s guidance, that customer has no doubt he was right.

Present at the creation

Indeed, Pete’s dedication to helping people is another factor that sets the Organic Gourmet apart. An unabashed mixture of

missionary and merchant, Pete says “My goal is to put as much organic food into you as I possibly can.” A city kid from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he grew up looking at the trees and green grass of Central Park and longing to be closer to nature. After college he took the obligatory hippie highways and by-ways tour in a VW Camper, learning how to cook along the way. Upon his return, he found work as a hired hand on a few of the very few organic farms in Fairfield County at the time. He also got involved with an organization that did work with disturbed teen-agers. “I noticed that the food these kids were eating was extremely high in sugar and carbohydrates,” he says, “and I thought there was something wrong with that. That’s actually what first got me interested in nutrition.” In 1974, he found a  tiny health food store for sale in Old Greenwich. He loved the work from day one. He opened the Wilton store in 1987, and subsequently closed the one in Old Greenwich.

He recalls that in the mid-70s there was only one other health food store in the area: its name was Leonard’s Eco-Farms. Based in Norwalk, it closed long ago, but not before achieving one small (okay, tiny) cultural distinction for its owner, Leonard Urbanowicz: no one had ever combined the words “eco” and “farm” before.* That’s how new the organic

food movement was at that point. “Even when I was in graduate school in the early 80s,” Pete recalls, “there were professors who insisted that vitamins had no value, despite a mountain of data that said otherwise. I was a radical back then, and I got pretty worked up.” These days, he observes, doctors send their patients to his store to get specific herbs. “Half the time they’re not asking for the right remedy,”he notes, “but it’s a start. Medicine has come a long way.”

Less of a radical now, at least by his own reckoning, Pete is still fastidious about every item he offers. His prepared food has attracted a loyal following, and deservedly so. Recently, a man in business attire told me to order the split pea. I complied and was happy I did: the soup was rich and peppery, loaded with carrots, celery, spinach and other vegetables, all the flavors clean on the one hand and well-married on the other. The tofini salad was also satisfying: a creamy, carroty mixture with just a little whisper of curry in the background. You don’t have to be a health food nut to like this gutsy, flavorful food.

In addition to the popular daily specials, soups, salads, smoothies and sandwiches (the tuna really is outstanding), Pete’s small store offers an impressive variety of hand-picked organic products, ranging from the Swiss company Biotta’s exceptional fruit and vegetable juices and Julie’s addictive, gluten-free ice cream sandwiches to frozen grass-fed beef from Uruguay, frozen wild-caught salmon, a large assortment of grains and cereals, oils and vinegars, local honey and more. The economy has had an effect on his nutritional counseling practice, to be sure, but he still sees clients, recognizing that it sometimes takes years before a person starts to use natural products, vitamins and supplements to achieve a dietary balance.

Rx for a healthy community

This patience appears to be one of Pete’s great virtues. I asked him: As health food transformed itself from a fringe business into a fast-growing billion dollar mainstream category, and as Freshfields gave way to Wild Oats and then to Whole Foods, wasn’t he ever tempted to

cash in? No, he says, never. One reason is that he has no interest in technology, management,  business models and other corporate trappings. In fact, you will look in vain for a single computer in the store, not to mention a website or a Facebook page. More important, though, is his devotion to what he calls “community retail.” This is perhaps the highest and best expression of the health that Pete promotes. “I get to know the people who come into my store, and they get to know me,” he explains. “There’s an attachment that develops, and it grows. In this way we help to hold our community together, rather than tear it down.”

Pete’s holding things together in the kitchen, at the counter or in between six days a week, from 8 to early afternoon, and often later. The store closes at 6.

Wilton Organic Gourmet
Peter Leventhal, Proprietor
33 Danbury Road
Wilton, CT  06897
203 762 9711 T
Hours: Monday – Saturday, 8 to 6

*Fifty years among the new words: a dictionary of neologisms, 1941-1991,
Edited by John Algeo, Cambridge University Press