Dining and Opining

In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer offers this thought: "If this entire book could be decanted into a single question—not something easy, loaded, or asked in bad faith, but a question that fully captured the problem of eating and not eating animals—it might be this: Should we serve turkey at Thanksgiving?" Should we serve turkey at Thanksgiving? This is his whole book in a sentence. The chapter goes on to explore the dark side of turkey production in the U.S.  (Read short versions of similar stories here , here , or here ). But in classic Foer fashion, he leads up to this "single question" with a personal take on the meaning of Thanksgiving and of storytelling. The way he recounts his own Thanksgiving memories, and their embeddedness in some bigger ideas about a good meal, is beautiful:  . . . Two dozen or so mismatched chairs circumscribed four tables of slightly different heights and widths, pushed together and covered in matching cloths...

There's a fascinating article in the NYTimes about the problems that have arisen as big organic agriculture has grown: Organic Agriculture May Be Outgrowing Its Ideals Check it out! Some of the most interesting excerpts: The upsides for the economy of some of the parts of Mexico that export organic produce to the U.S.: "They also point out that the organic business has transformed what was once a poor area of subsistence farms and where even the low-paying jobs in the tourist hotels and restaurants in nearby Cabo San Lucas have become scarcer during the recession." The limits of the organic label: Organic produce has to be grown without synthetic fertilizers, hormones, and pesticides, but "the checklist makes few specific demands for what would broadly be called environmental sustainability, even though the 1990 law that created the standards was intended to promote ecological balance and biodiversity as well as soil and water health." Attempts...

I just wanted to spread the word about a really cool new resource that's just come on line: The Food & Environment Reporting Network (affectionately known as the fern) is now available at thefern.org to keep you updated about all kinds of important news as related to food and the environment. You can read more about it at Civil Eats here . But, basically, this is a journalism non-profit for investigative reporting in the area of food, agriculture, and environmental health that makes up for the existing deficit in reporting around these issues. The Fern's first piece of reporting, Milk and Water Don't Mix covers the story of how a "chain-smoking Texan forced the New Mexico dairy industry to clean up its act." It's fascinating, and definitely worth a read. Let me know what you think!

Today's links: One beautiful food photo: Tempeh-Lettuce-Tomato (TLT) sandwich One interesting food-related article:  Alice Waters, Robert Reich talk up a delicious revolution   One recipe to try: Roasted Beets With Chiles, Ginger, Yogurt and Indian Spices

Today's links: One beautiful food photo: Roasted Eggplant with Tomatoes and Mint (from Smitten Kitchen) One interesting food-related article:  Honey Laundering and the Global Marketplace   One recipe to try: Thanksgiving Turkey Cake Happy Thanksgiving!

Today's links: One beautiful food photo: Carved Watermelon Turtle One interesting food-related article: Mark Bittman, At Thanksgiving, No Turkeys Here (an awesome list of resources) One recipe to try:  Apple Pie, Baked in an Apple

Today's links: One beautiful food photo: Poppy Seed-Crusted Butternut Squash with Kale and Pomegranates (fall colors through food) One interesting food-related article:  Michael Pollan on The Farm Bill: New Film From Nourish   One recipe to try: Raw Carrot Cake

We're going to be taking a break this week over Dining and Opining, so although I won't be putting up new posts with original content, I'll check in each day with links to: One beautiful food photo One interesting food-related article One recipe to try Feel free to share your own links in the comments!  --- For today: One beautiful food photo: Heirloom tomato wreath One interesting food-related article: From NPR, Local Food Is No Small Potatoes: Farmers Rake In Almost $5 Billion One recipe to try: Raw Butternut Squash Salad

Have you heard?! Michael Pollan has a new illustrated edition of Food Rules out, with beautiful drawings by Maira Kalman (whose "And the Pursuit of Happiness" blog at The New York Times was just stunning and sometimes made me cry. ) If you thought his Food Rules couldn't get any better, just wait until you see Kalman's drawings, which are rich and beautiful. Like this one for the rule "If You’re Not Hungry Enough to Eat an Apple, Then You’re Probably Not Hungry." See Kalman hilariously narrate some of her drawings here (like the comment "I wasn't as pure as I thought I should be [when Pollan asked her to illustrate the book], and I told Michael that cheese doodles play an important part in our family history. He forgave me for that."): And Pollan was also on the Colbert Report last week, talking about this little slip of a book: Some of my own favorite Food Rules, you ask?  Well, here are my Top Ten, with the numbers f...

Today, it turns out, is Food Day! I didn't even know there was such a thing before a few days ago, but now I do, and it's totally the kind of thing I can get behind. The goals of Food Day, run by the Center for Science in the Public Interest , as stated at foodday.org : Reduce diet-related disease by promoting safe, healthy foods  Support sustainable farms & limit subsidies to big agribusiness  Expand access to food and alleviate hunger  Protect the environment & animals by reforming factory farms  Promote health by curbing junk-food marketing to kids  Support fair conditions for food and farm workers  Pretty rad, right? There are events happening all over the country. Look yours up here: http://foodday.org/participate/events/ In Madison, there are: Food Day Celebration at Goodman Community Center  Food Day Reception and Celebration at Whole Foods Opportunity to voice your opinion about food at the MMSD Board of Education ...

The following essay won the "Best Culinary Essay" Award from Saveur . The essay, " Serious Food: In the Kitchen with Grandma ," details the very emotional and nostalgic elements of cooking, while highlighting generational differences in really funny ways. You'll have to go to actual blog post to read it, as the embedded photos are golden, but I'll give you a sneak peak: When Mom and I arrive at Grandma’s the following afternoon, we find her in full lady-locks swing. We’ve brought her a couple of leftover slices of pizza from lunch, but she’s so busy that she takes a slice and just keeps going. (The detail that she places the box with the remaining slice atop the oversized pot of boiled cauliflower, which I now feel well acquainted with—after all, it’s right next to my friends, the plastic-wrapped black bananas—is not lost on me.) She takes a bite, scoots past the kitchen island, pulls open the refrigerator door with the non-pizza hand and announces t...

There's been a lot of talk lately (among my circle of friends anyway) about food cleanses.  If you're not familiar with them, the most extreme version is the Master Cleanse , which involves drinking only a mixture of water, lemon, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper for something like 10-14 days (and no food!). Another version, less extreme, that some of our friends have done is just to eat only brown rice and plain vegetables and fruits for about a week.  And plenty of others abound: the raw food cleanse , the food lover's cleanse , Michelle Obama's cleanse . The basic idea of all of these is to give your body a little time to recover from the heavy foods many of us eat during our regular lives. To intentionally take a break from the things we love but that leave us feeling too full or too heavy or uncomfortable.  I've heard that these cleanses will often change your palate--making you realize how salty or sugary many of the foods we eat actually are.  But because ...

My favorite blogger who writes about agricultural issues, hands-down, is Sharon Astyk . She writes beautifully, has a very sharp wit, and lives the kind of life I often dream of (has a farm in upstate New York, grows most of her own food with her husband and four children, uses only 10% of the energy of the average American family, writes for a living). Though I'm still eager to read her books ( Depletion and Abundance , A Nation of Farmers , Independence Days ), I follow her blog very closely and try to read most everything she has to say. This post, from the archives , is one that I think of often, and wanted to share it here, for all of you. It considers how sustainable eating and poverty go together, how good food doesn't have to be an elite privilege. Enjoy, and let me know what you think: Barriers to Eating Sustainably, Real and Imagined Posted on: April 5, 2010 2:16 PM, by Sharon Astyk During the period of my life when I was a professional smart-ass (ie, my ado...

Last week, Civil Eats posted an article about the Top 10 Things You Should Know About the Farm Bill . It's worth a read. I didn't really know anything at all about the Farm Bill until I read The Omnivore's Dilemma in 2006 and began to understand Michael Pollan's linkage of the cheapness of processed foods with the incredible corn subsidies that are paid for by the Farm Bill. Now, it seems more and more like many of America's dietary problems stem from problematic government incentives for certain kinds of production. This Bill is a big deal, but most people don't pay any attention to it because federal agriculture policy doesn't seem all that exciting. The Farm Bill gets revised and re-issued every five years or so, and the 2012 version is currently being drafted. So, definitely go read the whole article , but here, in brief, are the Top 10: 74% of all subsidy payments go to just 10% of farms for the largest five commodity crops (corn, cotton...

To help fulfill my goal from last week of reading more food blogs (and my ongoing goal of prioritizing family--my Mama is coming to town today for the week!), I figured I'd spend the week re-posting great posts/articles from other blogs or news sources from around the web.  And since I started this blog, way back when , with a reference to Mark Bittman, I feel a duty to pass on good things he has to say, even though many of you probably see his articles in the NYT even without my mediation. This week he wrote a quick article, " Make Food Choices Simple: Cook ," about how much easier it is to eat in healthy, ethical, inexpensive ways when cooking at home rather than eating out.  An excerpt: "When I cook, though, everything seems to go right. I shop an average of every two weeks in a supermarket, and make a couple of trips a week to smaller stores. I’m aware that my choices are mostly imperfect, but I rarely conclude that I should make a burger and fries for d...

I've recently been thinking about how I'd like to read more food writing, both of the blog and book variety--not just about food politics or about recipes, but about the sensual, visceral, personal stories people have with food. To that end, I'd taken on a summer project of exploring popular food blogs and books, starting with this list from Saveur: The 2011 SAVEUR Best Food Blog Awards: The Winner. I also just read through Saveur's A Brief History of Food Blogs, to get a sense of where Dining and Opining fits into all of this. Some books I'd like to read include: Anything by M. F. K. Fisher, but especially The Art of Eating (and also her biography, An Extravagant Hunger ) Anything by Ruth Reichl: Tender at the Bone , Comfort Me with Apples , Garlic and Sapphires The Man Who Ate Everything , by Jeffrey Steingarten And maybe an anthology like this one: Best Food Writing 2010 ooh, and this one! Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink What...

It's rare that someone from my world (environmental historians who write about food and are trained in an academic setting) actually writes a book that is immensely readable, and brings ideas of history to bear on the state of the current food system. But in her 2007 book, Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back , Ann Vileisis succeeds in doing just that. Here she explains the premise of her book in a short video: If you're looking for a book that connects history, food politics, and American food today, I'd highly recommend this one (until my own book comes out, that is!)

In her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle , Barbara Kingsolver offers a really useful image to help us think about seasonality and when different fruits and vegetables will be ripe and reading for the eating. She calls it the vegetannual.  She suggests that the seasonal nature of vegetables follows the general development of one single plant itself: from leaves to green fruits to colorful fruits and back to roots again. I find it a really lovely and satisfying image. In her own words: "To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation--an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves ...

I recently wrote a couple of articles for the Slow Food UW Hands-On Cookbook--a really neat compilation of all the recipes from the group's Family Dinner Nights , along with articles about practical-food related skills. You can download the whole thing here , for free! And here are the articles I wrote (on pages 36 and 52 of the cookbook), about Pressure Cooking (which I 've written about before ) and about Canning (which you're sure to read more about soon). Click on the images to enlarge them for easier reading. Enjoy!

A few readers and friends (NB and MBS among them) have asked me to write a bit about my thoughts on soy, and the general health benefits/costs associated with the food itself, rather than only with the “meat substitutes” that are sometimes made from soy, and which I’ve written about previously . A year or so ago, one of my good friends SF asked me for my views about soy, and this is what I wrote at the time: “As for soy, I guess I generally like to follow the Michael Pollan approach to food: if it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t . So, although I know there's lots of uncertainties about the health benefits/harms of soy, I guess I think that minimally processed, organic, non-GMO soy products are fine in moderation, until I get further evidence that I should stop eating them. But I have started trying to stay away from things like TVP, soy nuggets, and other super-processed sorts of soy foods (though locally-made soy milk and tofu stay on my good list)....