On Lasagna
As part of our HARVEST series, #EatNZKaitaki and Food Writer Joe Flaherty takes us on the time-consuming journey of making lasagna and shares the realities of being an eater in today's world.
Tonight I’m making lasagna. It will take up to three years to get all the ingredients ready. Luckily for me, that part has already been done. On my end, I’m guessing this is gonna take a couple hours.
I start by sauteing onions and carrots in my fat of choice, a random ‘soft, spreadable’ dairy blend I find in the fridge that needs using up. These cook down until I lose patience, then I add in some good old supermarket brand beef and brown it off. I add my tomato paste and cook it down for a couple minutes, then in goes my favourite brand of cheap red wine. I then pour in low-sodium chicken stock to which I’ve added gelatin to increase its viscosity and provide that stick-to-your-lips feeling. Finally, I throw in some basil leaves and stems from one of those living plant pots that I bought just for this dish and that, if the past proves accurate, I will forget about for a week and end up accidentally killing. Oh, and a couple of bay leaves. This is the one ingredient that came from the backyard.
While the ragu simmers away I make my bechamel. My mother is gluten free, so I use a gluten free flour blend. For the fat, I use that dairy blend because I’m trying to finish it. I add my milk. When the sauce has thickened, I add salt, pepper, and nutmeg. After two hours of slow simmering it’s finally time to assemble. I alternate with layers of gluten free lasagne sheets, ragu, bechamel, and actual Italian DOP Parmigiano Reggiano, pound for pound the most expensive ingredient in this dish. I finish with a final layer of parm, then the lasagna goes into the oven for 35 minutes and comes out looking like the most delicious thing I’ve ever seen.Â
I hardly ever think about where my food comes from. I buy free range where possible, and try to support local producers if it’s explicitly advertised to me, but mostly I barely look at the label. The only time I intentionally buy food from certain countries or regions is when these products are considered ‘superior’, hence the legit Italian parm that cost a fortune. The information about where our food comes from is available to find, but it often takes a Google search, and it’s hard to see the point sometimes.
This lasagna was made from 15 ingredients from 4 different countries, with the oldest ingredient being three years old, and the youngest being still alive when I bought it. The dish was invented in Italy in the 1400s, but the recipe I used was developed by an American in 2019. The diversity of these ingredients - and the fact I am even able to make this dish, way down in an island at the bottom of the world - is the result of a centuries-long process of globalisation of food networks.Â
These globalised networks in combination with refrigeration and new methods to preserve food means we can now eat whatever, whenever, with few exceptions. Making lasagna even a couple centuries ago would have involved careful harvesting and preservation on a local scale: making the cheese and wine years before then leaving them to mature, raising and slaughtering the animals, preparing the meat, and slowly simmering the bones into stock, harvesting and carefully storing the vegetables, grinding the wheat to make the fresh lasagne sheets; the culmination of all these things finally resulting in a dish that was rightly reserved for special events and holidays. Today I went to the store and bought all of the ingredients in about ten minutes. The way we interact with food now means we can experiment with and appreciate the rich food history of numerous cultures, without having to start planning these dishes months or years in advance.Â
It also means that it’s easy to forget just how much work goes into food production. All the aforementioned harvesting and preservation still needs to happen for food to end up on our table, but we as consumers are separated from these processes. Since the advent of agriculture humans have been inventing methods to increase the availability of food, and we’re finally at the level where most people can eat like kings of old. When living in the city (as I do), growing one’s own food is almost seen as a novelty; people might have a small vegetable garden or keep chickens as a hobby. And then eggs disappear from supermarkets, and suddenly we remember that our food actually comes from somewhere physical.Â
The wasabi plant takes 15 months to start producing, but once grated it holds its pungency for only fifteen minutes. Walnut trees can take up to fifteen years to start producing. I was barely alive fifteen years ago! Some hard cheeses are aged for up to three years, and some even longer. And judging by its complete lack of flavour, the nutmeg I put into my bechamel was at least a hundred years old. We often forget to step back and look at the big picture, to understand the sheer timescale that goes into a single meal. It’s nice to reflect on these things, to understand that ingredients are a fluid thing, constantly moving through time or place. But it’s not necessary. Today’s food systems remove this need for consumers to look at food pragmatically, and allow a disconnect from the way food is produced and the way we eat. Going to the farmer’s market and meeting local producers is lovely, but it’s a choice nowadays. The supermarket is five minutes away, and it’s open every day.
Yesterday, I made lasagna. Altogether, it took me three years and two hours to make. Tonight, I’m ordering pizza, and if it’s not here within half an hour I’m gonna start getting annoyed.
Words by Joe Flaherty @jozephcooks