Food you can believe in

by SFUSA President, Josh Viertel

Jonathan Safran Foer and I hold nearly the same beliefs about eating meat. That said, I have a freezer full of goat necks, marrow bones, and pork belly, and he decidedly does not. You see, I eat meat and Jonathan doesn’t.

There is a simple and true notion underlying Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals: people should eat according to their values. Foer’s argument basically goes like this: Everyone has values. Apply your values to the choices you make about food. Sure, everyone’s values are different, but the truth is anyone’s values will do. The problems with food and farming—in particular farming and eating meat—aren’t caused by people holding the wrong values; they are caused by people not applying the values they hold. I agree with him.

[to read the rest of this article, please go to the Huffington Post, where it was first posted]

Preserving American food traditions: the food of a younger land

by intern Catherine King

I am constantly curious about what other people are eating. After friends return from traveling, I want to hear about their favorite meal of the trip. If I call my mom at dinnertime, I want to know what she’s cooking. When I ran into a good friend shortly after she crossed the finish-line of the New York Marathon, I couldn’t resist asking for details on her pre-race meal, even as she stood doubled-over nursing a cramp. My friends and co-workers know that any mention of an interesting meal could illicit a number of follow-up questions from my end. I just can’t help myself… When it comes to food, I have a curious mind.

So when I came across Mark Kurlansky’s The Food of a Younger Land, based on the food traditions of the America my grandmothers grew up in, I felt I was the perfect audience. The collection of essays aims to be a portrait of American eating before our highways, chain restaurants and industrial farming made many of our dining habits homogeneous. And while I would disagree with Kurlansky’s perspective that our food traditions have all but disappeared, I won’t dispute the point that regional food is now something to be sought out; often buried under generic strip malls filled with Panera Bread, Chili’s and Chipotle. The many traditions that make up American eating have unquestionably evolved, and The Food of a Younger Land is an interesting reflection on where we’ve been.

Following his earlier food explorations, Salt and Cod, Kurlansky’s newest came together by chance. While doing research on another book, he stumbled across hundreds of unpublished essays by the Federal Writer’s Project (FWP), a depression-era employment agency created by the Works Progress Administration. The essays were meant to be published as a collective guide to regional American food, America Eats. But just as writers were sending in finished (or unfinished) pieces in December 1941, bombs rained on Pearl Harbor and the country went to war. Funding for the FWP dried up and the project dissolved before the America Eats essays could be edited or published.

More after the jump

A Young Omnivore’s Dilemma

by Daniel Lewis

The Young Reader’s Edition of Michael Pollan’s bestselling exposé, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is a lot like the original. Both books contain most of the same information, but the way in which this information is presented changes the book radically. The main difference is that the writing style (and I won’t say it has been dumbed-down) in the Young Reader’s Edition is a lot more blunt about Pollan’s ideas.  The whole thing only took a few hours to read, whereas the original took a couple of weeks.

Dozens of pictures, graphs, charts, and side notes with cute names like “You’re eating what?” strategically placed throughout the book comprise the second change, and these make a big difference. It was worth reading the book just for the pictures; they don’t overwhelm the book, but they helped me visualize the scenes Pollan describes as he describes them. There’s a picture of Steer 534, the calf Pollan bought and tried to follow to Poky Feeders (spoiler alert: he’s not as adorable as I imagined he was) and an advertisement from the Corn Refiners Association, for instance.

To parallel Pollan’s style, this book “begs an unavoidable question:” Is it better? Better for what?Being the all important corollary here, I will say I think this book is better for a lot of people, and not just young readers. If you’re between the ages of 10 and 15, you’ll definitely find the book easy to digest (pardon the pun), but it’s also a great choice for more mature readers who don’t have a lot of extra time or just want a fast read..

However, if you’re able to read and enjoy The Omnivore’s Dilemma, its Young Readers Edition quickly begins to feel like fast food. It doesn’t have the philosophical depth, subtleties in language, and vivid descriptions of the adult version, which will leave the reader burning to get to the nearest farmer’s market. It has the macronutrients but not the flavonoids and anti-oxidants. Nevertheless, if you want to teach your middle school aged child much more about where her food comes from, this is the best way to do it.  If she doesn’t like it, there’s always Food Inc.

A lover of food among other things, Daniel Lewis spends much of his free time cooking and reading cookbooks or articles about agriculture. He is 17, and lives in Saratoga, CA.
 

Vegetable Love, even in late October

by intern Grace Mitchell

In July, I befriended a twelve-year-old boy, Jackson, who proclaimed to me his fierce love for vegetables of all kinds and his disappointment in his peers who, unlike him, were not raised on farms and had yet to find such love.  He told me he had trouble making friends because “they just didn’t understand.”  Lucky for our friendship, I too have an undying vegetable passion and appreciate like-minded souls, so Jackson and I became fast friends.

That soft-skied evening I ventured to the garden with Jackson’s grandfather where we admired his gargantuan squash plants that would provide bountiful and opulent meals come fall.  I tucked full my mouth with the exquisite fruits of his raspberry patch, a fine deal of which would become wine to warm their bodies through the wet winter.  Jackson introduced me to his hog, whom he was fattening up for the state fair competition, and who would, with or without prize, give Jackson and his family bacon and the like with the passing of October.  After harvesting far too many sugar peas from their vines and eating plenty more, we moved inside where Jackson’s grandmother set aside the spare sugar peas for freezing and pickling, and we sat down to enjoy a glass of last summer’s raspberry wine and the past autumn’s dried pears.  A meal followed, comprised solely of pickings from our evening garden stroll.  What luxurious ease it was to dine so gloriously!  And Jackson and his family would be eating in like manner all winter, thanks to their voluptuous garden and seasoned foresight.

Then one day I picked up and moved to New York City, where I still have yet to secure a dresser and other useful items of furniture, where I live in fear of lighting my antique oven, and where when the L train ceases to run (mm, going on four Saturdays?)I fail to make the one-and-a-half hour trek to the farmers’ market and too frequently find myself subsisting on spelt berries and a gifted and rapidly dwindling jar of apple butter. 

Alas!  How easy were those summer days of backyard vegetable bounty!  If I lived like Jackson, my vegetable love could be fed not only all summer and into fall harvest season, but also through the winter by the overabundance of summer produce preserved through canning, drying, and freezing.  It makes my heart prickle to know that while so many others committed to eating locally have been putting up their autumn harvest for coming months, I am preparing myself for a winter of vegetable doldrums and…more spelt berries.

More after the jump

No Impact Man and the Pursuit of Happiness

In dieting, I learned early on, exercises in extremes do not yield good results.  Starve yourself of chocolate, and you can be sure the first thing you’ll do when no one is looking is dive into a kiddie pool of chocolate, roll around in it and then lick your own arms.  I once even tried to give up bread.  After two weeks I sat down and ate an entire baguette, crusty end-to-end. Walk the middle ground, I decided, in food and all things.

Maybe it was this hard-earned (and hard-learned) lesson that led me initially to avoid Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me.”  It reeked of gimmick, and seemed on the outside to offer no takeaway lessons.  Nobody eats fast food all three meals (right?) so what could be the point?

I did see the movie later and had to admit that I was wrong.  It turned out that the parameters of his experiment were more rigorous than I expected, and it also turned out that setting an extreme goal yielded behavioral and biological results that could be extrapolated for meaning in the not-so-extreme.  And it turned out that, in truth, the way many Americans were/are eating is extreme.  And I was forced to confront that extremity.

Similarly, I was wary of “No Impact Man.”  I admired the gesture, and appreciated its Thoreauvian allusions (did I just make up a word?), but I wondered if there was anything of merit for me in there.  Again, similarly, I had to admit I as wrong.

More after the jump

Urban Bounty: Veggies, Fowl, Pork and Tumbleweaves

“What the hay is an urban farmer?!” It’s a question both Farm City author cum Oakland’s “Ghost Town Farm”(er) Novella Carpenter and myself have wrestled with, and heck, had to come to terms with. Even while the word – like locavore before it – seems to have finally been uploaded to the American lexicon, the term still perplexes a great many, which only goes to show how much more work we have to do collectively to turn the tide in favor of sustainable cities and foodbelts.

I remember my own days in Rochester, NY as an urban farmer growing on school grounds and on borrowed backyard land across the city when I’d be approached with the eternal question of “what are you doin’ over there?!” You can even imagine the looks of disbelief (and sometimes horror) when I’d tell a handsome gentleman in a bar that I was a farmer. They’d take one look at (cleaned-up) me and say “You?!”

Often times, when my kitchen floor was covered with dirt and produce awaiting delivery, my countertops lined with foul-smelling jars of moldy tomato pulp, and entire rows of Brussel’s sprouts thought to be collards were uprooted and sold on the street for crack money, I’d stop and say to myself: “I should keep a diary and turn this experience into a book.” Well, Novella beat me to it. So you can only imagine my great interest in reading this book about a trailblazing young woman with more chutzpah than most dudes workin’ the land and raising livestock in one of Oakland, CA’s less “tasteful” neighborhoods strewn with tumbleweaves (yes, discarded hair pieces that have become part of the landscape).

The book is organized not by the four seasons as one might expect of a farmer’s journal, but rather in three sections: Turkey, Rabbit, Pig. For each of three years on the farm detailed in the book, Novella Carpenter and beau gradually up the urban farming ante in the species that thrive on their squatted lot. At times there seems to be an inverse relationship to her level of sanity too – hogs in the inner city? Yes, the book is complete with stories of dumpster diving in the alleys behind Berkeley’s famed restaurants for pig feed and neighbors complaining of stench, and anxiety leading up to the eventual slaughter of the numerous residents of which she has become so fond. Novella is even a fan of Slow Food, and has taken to raising a few Ark of taste varieties of veggies and poultry.

More after the jump

Connecting Face and Food: Simone Goes to Market

by Youth Programs Intern Reece Trevor

At first glance, David Westerlund’s Simone Goes to the Market seems to fit the bill for a standard children’s book. It’s got a simple narrative structure, eye-catching pictures, and an educational message. It’s in that message that Westerlund’s book starts to look a little different, from, say, The Cat in the Hat. He calls Simone a “book of colors connecting face and food.”

“And what, exactly, does that mean?” I wondered as I opened the cover. Just what it sounds like, it turns out. Westerlund describes a trip with his daughter, the title character, to their local farmers’ market. Simone and her father find purple pole beans, green serrano peppers, gold honey. And here’s where the important part comes in: facing each image of vibrantly colorful food is a photograph of the farmer who produced it. The pole beans come from Gretchen, the peppers from Maria, the honey from Bill and his bees. This connection between what we eat and the closely personal image of its producer, Westerlund thinks, is vital.

I couldn’t agree more. Ultimately, that’s a huge part of the slow food movement. We need to reestablish that vital connection, and Westerlund is right when he describes how important it is to start this process at a young age. If children come of age in an environment where it’s clear that food comes from their neighbors instead of magically appearing on supermarket shelves, then we’ll have made important steps towards systemic, grassroots change in the way we think about food as a society.

You can learn more about Simon Goes to the Market and get a copy of your own at http://www.faceandfood.com.

Slow Food leader twitters her tastebuds to the White House

Amy McCoy likes to keep up with food and sustainability news.  And she should – as the blogger of Pour Girl Gourmet and the leader of Slow Food Rhode Island, she keeps up with the local and national scene of the food movement.  Amy created an account with Twitter a few months ago, and through the service, she recently found out about a recipe contest sponsored by Regionalbest.com.  The contest, “Asparagus Lovers Unite for Obama!” searched for the best asparagus recipe in America and was designed as a fun way to support the Obama’s efforts to get more green into the White House.  They contest also tried to help President Obama discover new ways to enjoy asparagus.  (you may find asparagus growing in the White House garden, but you won’t find it on the President’s plate). 

Amy’s Pancetta, Asparagus and Sundried Tomato Sandwich was not only proclaimed as the best sandwich of his life by Amy’s husband, but it also won RegionalBest.com’s Grand Prize in May.  Her recipe and seven regional recipes will be sent to the White House with hopes of convincing the president to give asparagus another chance.  Amy found out that she won the contest through a notice on Twitter, and since then she has been enjoying the grand prize winnings - delicacies sent to her by RegionalBest.com. 

When she’s not tending to her vegetable garden or planning projects for her local chapter, Amy is developing recipes for her forthcoming cookbook, a collection of recipes for 4 people that cost $15 or less.  Amy’s recipes focus on seasonal ingredients and items found at the supermarket, and her goal is to de-mystify cooking and help make it a fun and low-cost activity.

“The Challenge is keeping it to $15 without having so many stipulations, such as cutting coupons, or time-intensive activities such as making your own beans,” Amy said.  She experiments with vegetables on a daily basis, and recently learned from a neighbor that it’s okay to eat the leaves of nasturtium flowers, and she made a delicious pesto using them.  Her book, tentatively titled The Poor Girl Gourmet Cookbook, will be published next year.

Amy is following Slow Food USA on Twitter.  You can too!  Click here.

Books on Food: Art, Science

Part of what I love about “food books” as a genre is that the phrase is entirely non-specific, and covers everything from poetry to science, from art to history, from memoir to fiction.  Today, some more summer reading suggestions, both about our broken food system, but very different from each other.

First, Robyn O’Brien‘s the Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.  Her book is a good companion piece to “Food, Inc.” I think, exploring how food is making our kids sick, and how big business is profiting from that, all from a Mom’s first-hand perspective.  As she explains it, pretty plain and simple: “the recent deregulation of the American food system allowed chemicals and additives into the American food supply that have either been banned or labeled from foods around the world in order to enhance profitability for the food industry.”  Click here to read an excellent interview with her on Civil Eats.

Next up, a book I had the pleasure of getting to hear read aloud live (ok, well, parts of it) by the author the other night.  Lisa Hamilton, a photographer and writer has crafted a beautiful triptych—three stories, three farmers, and how they are struggling to keep their way of farming alive in a world pushing towards the industrialization of damn near everything.  Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness is clearly the work of a seasoned photographer; it reads like a giant photograph, with depth of field, and texture, and life bubbling up off the page.

Summer Reading

One of the great advents of the past few years has been “The Food Issue.”  I’ve really enjoyed seeing magazines like The Nation, The New York Times, Yes magazine, Mother Jones, and The New Yorker devote an entire issue to stories around food. The Atlantic Monthly upped the ante by creating an entire website for food stories.  I mean, it’s a pretty lefty bunch, but I guess that’s not a huge surprise.

Now we’ve got Slate’s food issue, with a few choice nuggets including Tom Laskawy’s piece on how Mother Nature’s gonna bite big Ag in the butt, and a review of Mark Kurlansky’s new book The Food of a Younger Land, about America Eats, the 1930s Federal Writers Project, and how it created a new genre: food writing.  Reading this piece, I thought—this would be a great partner book for Jane and Michael Stern’s new book 500 Things to Eat Before They’re Gone!  Turns out the folks at the San Francisco Chronicle are more clever than I and they had the Sterns review the book just last week. They had issues with it—mostly that they are more hopeful than Kurlansky about the state of American food. 

No doubt the Sterns will be roadtripping this summer.  I hope I get to roadtrip too, but I’ll also be reading—probably their book, probably Kurlansky’s.  What will you be reading this summer?