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My Organic Life

How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today

by Nora Pouillon and Laura Fraser

Hardcover, 261 pages | purchase

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TitleMy Organic LifeSubtitleHow a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat TodayAuthorNora Pouillon and Laura Fraser

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When restaurateur Nora Pouillon moved to the United States from Austria in the 1960s, she was surprised by how hard it was to get really fresh food. Everything was packaged and processed. Pouillon set out to find the find the best ingredients possible to cook for her family and friends. She brought that same sensibility to her Restaurant Nora, which eventually became the first certified organic restaurant in the country.

Pouillon writes about her lifelong devotion to food in a new memoir, My Organic Life: How A Pioneering Chef Helped Shape The Way We Eat Today.

Restaurant Nora is tucked into an old brick building on a busy corner in the nation's capital. An herb garden takes up part of the sidewalk outside the restaurant.

Pouillon traces her interest in food back to her earliest years when she lived on a farm in the Alps during World War II.

"This time showed me how food is like a treasure and how difficult it is to grow and raise food enough to feed you and your family all year round," she says. "And it gave me a big respect for food."

Today Pouillon channels her passion for food into her restaurant, which has been a fixture in the Washington, D.C., food scene since 1979. When Pouillon was getting ready to open the restaurant, she was introduced to then reigning power couple of that era, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, journalist Sally Quinn. They agreed to invest in the restaurant, but Pouillon says Quinn offered a word of warning:

"I told them ... that I really wanted to do natural food and she said, 'Just don't tell them that it's health food because people hate health food; they think it's bad.' So anyway, I just called it 'additive-free food," Pouillon says.

Natural food, Pouillon says, was the norm when she was living in Europe. But when she moved to this country as a young wife, she had to search for fresh ingredients wherever she could find them, mostly in small ethnic markets. And when she got started in the restaurant business, she tracked down local farmers who could supply the ingredients she needed.

"It was hard, I mean I had to drive out to Virginia to scout around to find farmers and you know then there was no Google," she recalls. "So you couldn't just Google organic farm or natural farm. So I had to go through the Yellow Pages, and through the Yellow Pages, I found farmers."

Pouillon's approach attracted legions of fans including politicians, journalists, even presidents.

Pouillon is still at the restaurant every day, which begins when she meets with her chefs to discuss what is needed for that day's service.

Restaurant Nora was certified as an organic restaurant in 1999, meaning 95 percent of all ingredients including seasonings and condiments have to be organic. Sometimes, says Pouillon, that can be challenging.

"It's a big problem that I run often out of things because the farmer didn't deliver what he said he would because the beetles ate [it] or the frost came or it was too wet ... and because of my upbringing I understand that. But it drives my chefs nuts," she says.

As the kitchen staff is prepping food for the day, Chef James Martin and Pouillon go over food orders.

"Pretty much the farm rules this kitchen, especially when you are getting organic stuff ... it takes patience, it takes time, it takes love, it takes a lot of care, it takes a lot of work," says Martin.

The food scene in this country has changed radically since Pouillon first moved here: Farmers markets have sprung up all over, supermarkets now carry fresh vegetables and organic meats and the farm-to-table movement is increasingly popular. In fact, Pouillon says sometimes differing approaches to natural foods seem to compete with each other.

"People always ask me: What is better, organic or local? And I say, well there's nothing wrong with being local and organic," she says.

Now in her early 70s, Pouillon says she feels her life has come full-circle since those early childhood days when she first learned to respect food, and the work it takes to raise it, cook it and serve it.

Correction May 12, 2015

In a previous Web version of this story, the headline called Restaurant Nora "America's first organic restaurant." The headline should have specified the first certified as organic. The earlier story misspelled Nora Pouillon's last name.

Nora Pouillon

organic food

"My dad was going to play banjo and he never got into it, so he advertised in the Palo Alto newspaper: 'Banjo for sale,' " Kreutzmann says. "One night there's a knock on the door. I open the door and Jerry Garcia was standing there."

A number of years later, Kreutzmann saw Garcia again, playing with Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, and was "completely taken away." That night, he swore to follow Garcia everywhere. Two weeks later, Kreutzmann got a phone call from Garcia asking if he'd like to be in a band.

"I thought that was a very good idea," Kreutzmann says. "Turned out to be a pretty great idea, don't you think?"

'It Can Be Like Fractals'

In the band's beginnings, altered states of consciousness fueled the Grateful Dead's creativity.

"Well, acid was the most beneficial drug," Kreutzmann says. "I jokingly refer to it as my college education, my graduate school, whatever. If I hadn't taken acid, I just would not be here talking to you today. It opens you up; it lets you see that what you're taught in school or what your parents have taught you, or society lays on you, isn't necessarily all there is to see. Your art can flourish and flourish and flourish. It can be like fractals, your art; it can just keep growing. That's what LSD did for me."

But drugs ate away at the band, even as the Grateful Dead grew into the biggest touring attraction in America.

"When cocaine came into the Grateful Dead, it really hurt us," Kreutzmann says.

Kreutzmann says that 1995, when Jerry Garcia died, "was a terrible year for me. I moved to Hawaii to get healing. I was in a really bad way —"

After a moment, Kreutzmann composed himself.

'He Was My Best Music Teacher'

The drummer and the bandleader had once made a pact: If the Grateful Dead ever came to an end, Bill Kreutzmann and Jerry Garcia would move to the Hawaiian island of Kauai, clean up and go diving. In the end, Kreutzmann moved there alone.

"I thank him. He was my best music teacher," Kreutzmann says of Garcia. "He taught me more about music than anybody else. And not necessarily just in words, but how he played. The way he played, you can learn so much from it. Doesn't matter what instrument you play.

"I [was] a senior in high school when he asked me to join the band, when that phone call came in. I knew how to play the drums just a little bit. I had the desire. The thing he said was, 'Bill, play full value. Make four beats be a really full four beats. Don't rush to the end of the bar.' "

Even though it's crept up in the past couple of months, the price of a gallon of gasoline is still about $1 less than it was a year ago. That's saving drivers $15 to $20 every time they fill up.

Economists were quite convinced late last year that would boost growth because consumers would go out and spend that extra money. But things have not unfolded exactly as forecast.

There's no doubt the plunge in oil prices and the lower costs for gasoline, heating oil and natural gas gave consumers a big windfall.

"They saved about $116 billion," says John Canally, chief economist at LPL Financial. He figures that means a savings of about $83 per month per household on average — or about $1,000 a year. Lots of economists predicted Americans would go out a spend most of that, but Canally says they didn't.

"Consumers, since oil prices peaked back in June, have done what they've been doing this entire recovery, which is essentially they've spent a little, they've saved a little and they've paid down some debt," he says.

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Seasonally adjusted annual rates Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis hide caption

itoggle caption Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Seasonally adjusted annual rates

Avie Schneider/NPR/Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

Canally says he thinks many Americans learned a lesson during the financial crisis and are now being more prudent with their money. But in the short run, that's meant less consumption and less economic growth. So the growth dividend from lower energy prices has been elusive.

"I don't think it's completely materialized," says Laura Rosner, U.S. economist at BNP Paribas. For one thing, she says, the negative effects of the energy bust came faster than expected, with quick cutbacks in exploration and drilling and big job losses. That was a drag on the economy. And wicked winter weather from Virginia to Maine kept the energy windfall cash in people's pockets.

"Actually, 20 percent of all U.S. households live in either the Mid-Atlantic or the Northeast," Rosner says.

That meant tens of millions of shoppers stayed at home and contributed to a near stall-out of growth in the first quarter — far underperforming hopes that the oil price windfall would fuel faster growth.

Rosner says she thinks there's another reason the benefits of the windfall have been muted: Americans have been skeptical that the low energy prices will be lasting.

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Higher Wages, Lower Prices Give Consumers A Break

"We're seeing evidence that consumers actually expect gasoline prices to rebound ... almost back to their prior levels within a year or two," she says. "So that's an important reason why they may not be spending more of the windfall, today."

While Rosner believes consumers have reacted cautiously up to now, she's seeing signs that they are ready to start spending more of the windfall.

"You know, really the consumer sentiment data show that consumers are feeling better about the outlook," she says "They're feeling more secure in their jobs and they're relatively optimistic."

Their added spending will help lift the U.S. growth rate this year, she says. Canally agrees, and he believes with more prudent U.S. consumers the current expansion will be longer-lasting.

gasoline

consumer spending

This is National Infrastructure Week in Washington, D.C. That's when serious policy wonks, along with the construction, labor groups and other related industries, hold conferences, raise awareness and maybe most important, lobby Congress on behalf of road, bridge and other brick and mortar and concrete improvements.

There is added urgency to their efforts this year, as federal highway building money is set to run out, probably sometime this summer, and so is the government's authority to spend what little money it has left.

At a kickoff speech, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the challenge the government faces "is actually worse than last summer," when Congress provided a temporary boost to highways using money from general revenues.

That's because the authorization bill that actually gives the government the green light to spend those funds is set to expire on May 31 after which, Foxx warned, "we will not have the ability to spend the dollars we do have to support this nation's infrastructure. It is that serious."

Foxx noted there have been 32 short-term extensions of the highway bill over the past six years. This, he said, has led to "so much uncertainty at the federal level that it is crippling our system."

Lawmakers from both parties generally agree on the need to do something, but as usual these days in Washington, are unable to agree on the details. The federal gas tax is no longer keeping up with the demand for highway dollars. As The Hill newspaper points out:

"The gas tax, which is currently 18.4 cents-per-gallon, typically brings in about $34 billion. But the federal government typically spends about $50 billion on transportation projects.

"The gas tax has not been increased since 1993, and improvements in the fuel efficien[cy] of U.S. autos has sapped much of its purchasing power."

The Obama administration's preferred approach for transportation funding would tax U.S. companies' overseas profits. But it hasn't gained much traction either. How about Build America Bonds? That's a proposal in a new paper from The Hamilton Project, which suggests the bonds could be a short-term solution to the nation's infrastructure funding needs. More likely, Congress will come up with another short-term fix, kicking the proverbial can down the road.

Meanwhile, Transportation Secretary Foxx is taking Infrastructure Week out for a spin, with stops planned over the next several days in Tennessee, Iowa and California to push for highway and bridge funding.