Dining and Opining

Check out my guest post "Catering as a Wedding Gift" at 2000 Dollar Wedding ! And leave a comment there, too, if you'd like!

While traveling recently, we ended up sitting behind two women and a lovely little girl who were having lunch on the airplane.  They were eating McDonald's chicken McNuggets and french fries--the familiar, warm smell wafted throughout the entire plane. Even though we might not have wanted to admit it, the smell made us hungry. And so we pulled out our own lunch: a stir fry of burdock root, homemade seitan, hand-picked wild chanterelles, ramps, foraged wild nettles, chives, and ginger all over quinoa and seasonal asparagus. (take a minute for a giggle) The contrast could not have been more stark. And so as we began to eat our stir fry, enjoying the unusual ingredients and bold flavors, we reflected on how much our diet has come to differ from the Standard American Diet , and how this makes us a little sheepish, even as it pleases us culinarily, environmentally, and ethically. Because we don't want to be the food snobs with the weird food, we don't want our diet to di...

Food fascinates me not only in a recreational and personal context, but also in a historical and professional context. Although I haven't spent a lot of time writing about it here (what does that suggest about how I view my work and this blog?!), my dissertation (i.e. my full-time job) is a historical analysis of canned food in twentieth-century America. To begin the tale of why I chose this topic, let me share several photos with you. Take some time to study each one carefully, to think about what kinds of questions and stories emerge from a close look at these compelling artifacts and an attention to their dates and captions. Dolores Harris, daughter of FSA (Farm Security Administration) client George Harris, with canned food prepared by her mother. Dameron, Maryland. August 1940: Mrs. Watkins (project family) in her smokehouse showing canned foods and cured meat. Coffee, Alabama. April 1939: "In a fish cannery, Los Angeles, Cal." From The Chinese in California, ...

When Walnut Way Conservation Corps organizers asked members of the neighborhood what kind of fruit trees they wanted to plant in a community orchard, the neighbors said peaches. Peaches? In Wisconsin?  The organizers were somewhat skeptical about the growing potential of peaches in a  northern Wisconsin climate. But when the organizers checked with local  horticulturists, they found that peaches could indeed grow easily and prolifically in the inner city Milwaukee neighborhood. The peach trees  now produce pink blossoms in spring, ripe fruit in summer, standing as a testament to possibility--to horticultural and human growth alike. In addition to visiting the Sokaogan Chippewa community as part of this year's CHE place-based workshop , we spent an afternoon with some of the most inspiring, light-filled folks at Walnut Way. Sharon Adams founded the neighborhood organization in the early 1990s, after returning to the neighborhood where she'd grown up and in...

When most of us eat, we think of the food as something that tastes good, something that provides us nutrients, sometimes as something that builds community.  But rarely is it something that is a product of our labor, that embodies physical work and longstanding tradition. In the case of many Upper Midwest Native American tribes and their relationship to wild rice, however, food is most centrally a product of labor. The Sokaogan Chippewa tribe of northeastern Wisconsin originally came to this land because of an Ojibwe prophecy that they would go to where "the food grows on water." And so, basing their livelihood on wild rice farming was a fulfillment of this prophecy. This is why the community was able to band together with such power and emotion when their waters were threatened by a proposed zinc-copper mine in nearby Crandon, WI.  Beginning in the 1980s, Exxon-Mobil, the world's largest resource corporation was hoping to build this mine near the Sokaogon Chippe...

I've been thinking a lot about the art of filmmaking lately, about its effectiveness as a medium for communicating a message, and about how much creative artfulness can play into this effectiveness. I came across this video from My New Roots about how to cook quinoa recently, and thought you all might enjoy it--both for its instructional value and its artistic qualities. Beautiful. My New Roots - How to Cook Quinoa from My New Roots on Vimeo .

Although I'm still a total novice at garden planning, I spent a couple of hours putting together our 2011 garden plan a few days ago, and I figured I'd share my work, if only to get feedback and advice from those of you who know what you're doing. We've had a garden here at our condo for a couple of years now, but have approached it in a pretty haphazard way, throwing some random seedlings and seeds into the ground--ones we've acquired from friends, our CSA , or a seedling sale here or there.  We've focused pretty heavily on tomatoes and peppers and herbs, just because we know we love them all and have had success growing them. Last year, I started some seeds indoors, and had mild success in that venture, even without grow lights, but many of those plants got taken over by runaway squash . This year, we have an 8' x 10' plot, and I would like to try out the Square Foot Gardening technique, or some modified version of it. We're starting with sixte...