Lunch Poems :: In Conversation with Sam Anderson
As told to Jennifer Green | Photography by Victor Garzon and Kyle Johnson | Illustrations by Carolyn Bull
We caught up with Sam Anderson, beverage director of Wildair and Contra, for a second time during the first week of March 2020, when the pandemic was looming but had not yet shuttered anyone’s doors. We talked about a lot of voluntary choices: plant-based diets, drinking regimens, twenty-two mile morning runs. Now in our seventh week of alcohol-soaked quarantine, we’re wondering if we’d be well-served to spend the next stint in Sam’s shoes. We wouldn’t have a shot in hell of keeping up (his record marathon time is 2:51:00) but it’d be a thrilling chase. In any case, we’ll be giving his salads a taste >>
I was raised expecting the apocalypse. So I’m in my element here. No, I'm kidding.
I do see the deep capacity for natural wine to be a tool for helping to heal the earth. No bullshit in that. We understand that regenerative agriculture is one of the most powerful ways that we can reset the wounded parts of the earth as quickly as they're being destroyed. And so to the extent that winemakers are participating, as are farmers who are raising other crops — that’s an integral part of how we can offset what's going on in the world otherwise.
I was a vegetarian for quite a number of years when I was younger, in my late teens, early 20s. The very first restaurant where I ever worked was a vegetarian restaurant. I kind of feel like I drifted away from that during a period of my life that was self-destructive. So I think my return to and my re-embrace of a plant-based diet has really been an instantiation of my commitment to not only my own health, but to doing the right thing with what I'm eating.
With natural wine and organic farming, minimal intervention in the vineyard and cellar—we talk so much about these as the reasons why we select a certain wine or don't select others. If I can just distill it down, there's this popular saying ‘nothing added, nothing removed’ [concerning] natural wine dogma—I would say yes to all that. But also, by the same token, the wine that you're drinking is only as natural as the food that you're eating it with.
You're making a moral choice every time you eat something. You’re making a political choice. There's a lot of layers there. Where is this pork coming from? How about this animal? Where's it from? How was it raised? What kind of life did it have?
Natural wine creates this moral imperative for us who claim to care about it, right? But I find that it's a lot easier to care about it as long as it's convenient. It’s super convenient to drink biodynamic 0/0 wine. That's so easy. The food that I'm eating should run through the same filter.
The thing about natural wine that I find so fascinating is that if you are getting the real point of it, then it kind of creates this bigger and more meaningful way of existing. I think it's even more meaningful and more important than we ever thought it was at the beginning.
[GG]: If you were to hold everyone else to this standard, everyone in our scene would fail miserably on one point or another, whether it's drug use or, you know, junk food. The person eating responsibly raised poultry once a week — are you going to pass a moral judgment on them versus the person who's eating a bodega sandwich every other day? Or is that not the point?
The point for me is it's not a judgment. It's an opportunity for an expansion of one's own awareness because otherwise, the way I see it is, what's the difference between natural wine being a potentially very powerful movement and it just being an aesthetic? If you have no kind of framework for your diet, if you eat factory farmed food and take cars everywhere and do blow and smoke cigarettes, but then you're like, ‘you shouldn't buy commercial wine and you should only drink 0/0 natural wine’ — I don't know how many people would fit into that category, but at the very least, probably a few. For that person, natural wine is just an aesthetic. It doesn't have any real meaning, And that's my concern with natural wine, is that it's very limited if it doesn’t go deeper into other parts of our lives.
[GG]: How does athleticism—doing good things for your body that don’t necessarily involve consuming—fit into the framework?
By definition, if you drink less, you’re gonna have more mental acuity. Also I run about 80, 85, 90 miles a week. It was a real concern of mine that I was going to struggle to get the nutrients that I needed, or that my energy levels would be lower, or that having a plant-based diet would render me deficient—having a diet such as this and also the weight of a pretty heavy training schedule and then an eleven hour workday after training—getting the proper nutrition to fuel that. But the interesting thing is that having to pay closer attention to it means I have to put that much more effort into it. And so as a result, I eat much better than I ever have because I don't have that lazy option of going and just grabbing some bodega chicken sandwich.
Putting a little bit more effort into it has paid a lot of dividends in my energy level. I don't know if the analogy flows exactly, but in a certain way, we don't really know if there's magic in biodynamic preparations, right? It’s not scientifically proven that there's any sort of relationship, but the people who work that way, who believe strongly in that methodology, as a result are much more involved in their vineyards, in their land, in the cycle of what they’re doing. I’m that much more involved in my nutrition, in taking care of my own health, because I don't have the crutches anymore of conventional animal-based protein. I see the imperative coming from climate change and how much our agricultural system and factory farming is such a huge contributor. Specifically, commercial animal husbandry is one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse emissions. And that’s something I absolutely feel strongly about, so that means I have to work a little harder in my own personal choices.
A Little Travel Diary
The average day I get up around 6. I drink tea in the morning, with ayurvedic ingredients such as ashwaganda, arjuna, with a holy basil chai base and then I add other ingredients to it. I do another one in the evening with a more restorative and calming effect so that I can go to sleep easily. The whole point is inducing a recovery phase.
Out the door by seven o’clock and then I'll train for about two hours. If it’s a long run, twenty-two miles in the morning, I will eat breakfast before that. I’ll make a smoothie when I get back from training, all plant based, with milk in it. I put pea protein, an amino acid blend, kale, fresh fruit, strawberry, banana, blueberry, mango, just whatever I have. I also use MCT (medium chain triglyceride) oil, chlorella, spirulina. I use a little bit of creatine. So I make the smoothie and then maybe a slice of toast and I'm out the door eating that when I'm walking to the train or on my bicycle. Then I usually get a salad for lunch from sweetgreen. I actually think that company is really amazing, what they're doing for mass produce. It's a $12 salad but it is food for the people. You know, you think about what you spend $12 on, those salads are more or less two meals in one.
I'll bring my own rice and beans for family meal at the restaurant, around 4:30. I’ll work with that as a base and then I'll bring an avocado as well. Usually when I get home, I'll make another smoothie with a bunch of peanut butter and cacao and make it taste really, really good. I have a weakness for ice cream.
I understand it's not for everyone to roll the way that I do. It's a lot of effort. But to feel the power of how profoundly nutritious these foods are, it's really hard to not want that all the time, you know? I tend to host a lot of dinner parties on the weekends, having people over to drink and [eat] massive vegetarian spreads, with lots of grilled vegetables. My wife and I like to cook a lot so we’ll make pizza or flatbread. The amount of flavor in fresh herbs that are from the farmers market, especially in the spring or summer—it's just mind-bending, how much flavor is in all of these spicy greens. So we’ll throw in fried sage, toasted nuts, fresh produce. You put this all together in a big salad and it's just crazy how much flavor is in it.
I find meat really boring as a flavor component. People wonder how it is that I work with pairing food at the restaurant and it's actually very easy. What is the flavor of, say, cod? Not any flavor. Why do we have to season beef tartare with, like, fifteen ingredients? Because it doesn't really have much of a flavor. It’s textural. You have to add so much salt, pepper, egg, herbs, all the sauces that go on there. So usually when I'm tasting food that has animal in it, I am just tasting all the components that go around it. And usually that's what’s most important when you're pairing the wines. Working with the acid and the salt and the spice components of the dish rather than the protein part, which is usually what is getting dressed up.
I really like shimmering, bright, light red wine that you see from Catalonia or from the Jura with foods of almost like Moroccan or Israeli extraction: dense spice mixtures like Urfa biber. I think that's usually a really nice contrast.
I'm really concerned about the way that natural wine is going into the future. We're at this moment where it seems like it's cresting. There’s a saturation point. And I think that's one of the reasons why maybe thinking about this stuff right now is of importance.
We're at this point where it's either gonna be potentially regarded as just an aesthetic choice or it's going to really have upward effects on the agriculture establishment as it exists. We need this to happen if our species is going to continue to exist on the planet. We need all of this to change and we're running out of time, you know? And it's hard, always having to confront it. But the closer you get to it, the less scary it is and the more active you are with it.
I feel like there's a purity test that's been going around the natural wine scene of nothing added, nothing taken out, when that purity test needs to be applied to the bigger picture stuff as well—probably trucking wine from California or Washington to New York is a pretty massive carbon footprint relative to the imprint of wine being sent on a boat from Sicily to the United States. The fact of the matter is, we should care about all that shit just as much, if not more so, than ‘is the winemaker adding twenty parts per million of sulfur at bottling?’ That's just silly.
I think that we're at this cusp of: is natural wine an aesthetic or are we going to embrace a fuller and richer and more complex meaning for it—not just in the wines that we're choosing, but in our lifestyle choices around the wines that we’re choosing?
But we kind of undermine our own movement when we are dogmatic about the ‘nothing added, nothing taken away’ purity test, when we’re like, ‘and by the way, I’m going to have a big ass burger with this and I’m going to take a car home, blah, blah, blah.’
I think my perspective might be on the radical, fringe side of things. Natural wine has had this PARTY PARTY vibe for a long time. And I think that's great. But it's also highly undisciplined. This cusp moment is one that will require more discipline and a deeper commitment to the underlying ethos this all has, if we really recognize it for that.
I was hungover for fourteen years. Every day. And now I can really look forward to having some wine at the end of the week. It's not something that weighs me down spiritually anymore.
Below are two of my favorite salads right now. The world of fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs is explosive with technicolors and flavors that just jump up and slap ya — it's amazing! The level of complexity of texture, flavor and aromatics is always astonishing, a fact that has become all the more apparent for me since I stopped eating animals. So much of the flavors in an animal-based dish are coming from the herbs, spices, vegetables, you know?
Sam's Red Cabbage & Cukes Salad
1/2 head of organic red cabbage
3 cucumbers
1 cup raw cashews
1/2 cup peanuts
half a handful of fresh dill
half a handful of fresh mint
dried Nori snack
Dressing ::
1 lemon
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/8 cup sesame oil
1 tablespoon black sesame seeds
1 tablespoon white sesame seeds
1/4 tablespoon red pepper flakes
Maldon salt
Black pepper
Prep ::
- toast peanuts and cashews gently for 5 minutes in oven set at 375 degrees
- slice red cabbage into shivers and place into ice water bath for 20 min
- slice cucumbers and smash gently and place into ice water bath for 20 min
- add the herbs to salty ice-water bath while you're at it
Assemble dressing ::
- zest lemon and squeeze juice, then whisk with all other dressing ingredients
Bring it all together ::
- drain and spin water off cabbage, cucumbers and herbs and toss thoroughly
Mix dressing in ::
- top with toasted nuts and a little more of the herbs and sesame seeds
- lastly, crumple some of the dried nori onto the top at point of service
- you can also add chili oil, a nice finisher if you have any around
Sam’s Bitter Leaves & Seeds
1 head Treviso Radicchio
1 head Belgian endive
1/2 bulb fennel
handful sorrel
handful baby kale
3/4 cup cracked Castelvetrano olives
1/8 cup sunflower seeds
1/8 cup pine nuts
1/8 cup pumpkin seeds
1/4 cup finely shaved Ricotta Salata (optional if you are vegan)
Half handful of herbs: fresh basil, marjoram, dill
Dressing ::
1 lemon
1/2 orange
1/4 cup sherry vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon Maldon salt
1/2 tablespoon black pepper
Prep ::
- toast seeds on stovetop until gently browned with some olive oil and salt
- pull endive and treviso leaves whole off of head; do not tear or cut
- finely shave fennel radially. Include as much of the green tops as possible
- transfer all greens, fennel and fresh herbs to salty ice-water bath for 20 minutes to perk up
Assemble dressing ::
- zest lemon and half orange, juice fresh. Whisk juice with all other dressing ingredients
Bring it all together ::
- drain and spin off greens and fennel and toss with toasted nuts & seeds and olives
Mix dressing in thoroughly ::
- top with shaved Ricotta Salata and add more fresh herbs
Portrait of Sam Anderson by Victor Garzon. All scenic photography by Kyle Johnson. Illustrations by Carolyn Bull.
In case you missed it — Part I: Meditations in an Emergency