Courtesy of The Daily Table, President Bush has declared that the best way to deal with the rising cost of food is to give your local farmers' markets and your local farmers your business. Hallelujah! It's certainly a first step and I hope he (and whoever follows in the next administration) puts their policies where their mouths are. Part of supporting the non-subsidy farmer is making sure he/she can actually sustain themselves so, in other words, stop the criminally uneven commodity crop subsidies.
Finally, I feel like our country is at a point where we can seriously talk about how we're feeding ourselves and in what direction we want to go. Food is at the forefront like it hasn't been in decades.
Am I wrong to feel somewhat pleased about the skyrocketing food prices in the U.S.? After all, that's what happens when much of your food distribution relies on petroleum...
Eat, drink, and discuss.
Showing posts with label sustainable agriculture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sustainable agriculture. Show all posts
3.28.2008
A Nibble of This and That
I was a tad more eager than usual for this week’s NYT Dining section because I was really curious to see the Letters section re: last week’s “The Fat Pack Wonders if the Party’s Over” by Kim Severson. Alas, no Letters section in the physical paper and no section in the online version. Not one that I could find, anyway. No one had anything to say, that was printable, about that article? Really? I was hoping for some great discourse and was totally disappointed to not get it.
Once again I find that combining food and children’s literature in a single blog isn’t entirely random. Check out Allison’s post over at Shelftalker about Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls written by Marjorie Winslow and illustrated by Erik Blegvad. Allison has included a couple of the “recipes” in her post and it sounds so “completely and utterly charming.” I’ve put a hold request on the one single copy at Queens Library.
As part of the prerequisites for NYU’s Food Studies program, they require you to have some hands-on experience that extends beyond your own home kitchen. So I’m looking through the course schedule at the Institute of Culinary Education (aka ICE) with absolute delight. A Greenmarket cooking class! A knife class! A “Fine Cooking” class! A salt class! Where to start???? I’m thinking of the knife class – it’s only a 3-hour class I can take after work so I don’t have to worry about too much commitment at this point. If it goes well, I can do the “Fine Cooking” class, which is much more money and five 5-hour classes. Between those two classes, I will have satisfied the prerequisite. I’m on my way!
I recently heard about the journal Gastronomica and thought a subscription might be in order. So I went to the website to check it out and read an intriguing letter from the editor that is in a similar vein to our earlier discussion about NYT’s “Fat Pack” article. She discusses the juxtaposition of providing healthy, delicious, affordable food to disadvantaged families and communities with the idea that good food – or any food, really – should cost more. Those ideas seem completely contradictory to each other. She’s right, though: I live in a lovely part of Queens with decent restaurants, a fish monger, a cheese store, and a great market for my other needs. And I spend a significant portion of my income on food. But I work in a disadvantaged neighborhood, right across the street from the bus depot, and it is incredibly difficult to find healthy food around here. I usually bring my lunch to work but, occasionally, I’ll forget and need to buy lunch here. You wouldn’t believe the difficulty in doing that. There’s a market nearby, but the produce is sub-par and comes from everywhere but New York. Forget good bread or any unprocessed cheese. Everything comes frozen, in a can, in bulk, or vaccuum-packed. Not surprisingly, you’ll see a significantly larger number of overweight and obese people in the neighborhood I work in as opposed to the one I live in. During my info session, the director of the Food Studies program repeatedly threw around the term “food crisis in this country” and I don’t think that’s stating it too strongly. Darra Goldstein’s letter just added one more voice to the dull roar.
On that note, the Sustainable Table has a wonderful blog and they posted about a curriculum package by Equal Exchange. It teaches kids about fair trade, food production and sustainable living. This seems as good a place as any to start turning this thing around.
Once again I find that combining food and children’s literature in a single blog isn’t entirely random. Check out Allison’s post over at Shelftalker about Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls written by Marjorie Winslow and illustrated by Erik Blegvad. Allison has included a couple of the “recipes” in her post and it sounds so “completely and utterly charming.” I’ve put a hold request on the one single copy at Queens Library.
As part of the prerequisites for NYU’s Food Studies program, they require you to have some hands-on experience that extends beyond your own home kitchen. So I’m looking through the course schedule at the Institute of Culinary Education (aka ICE) with absolute delight. A Greenmarket cooking class! A knife class! A “Fine Cooking” class! A salt class! Where to start???? I’m thinking of the knife class – it’s only a 3-hour class I can take after work so I don’t have to worry about too much commitment at this point. If it goes well, I can do the “Fine Cooking” class, which is much more money and five 5-hour classes. Between those two classes, I will have satisfied the prerequisite. I’m on my way!
I recently heard about the journal Gastronomica and thought a subscription might be in order. So I went to the website to check it out and read an intriguing letter from the editor that is in a similar vein to our earlier discussion about NYT’s “Fat Pack” article. She discusses the juxtaposition of providing healthy, delicious, affordable food to disadvantaged families and communities with the idea that good food – or any food, really – should cost more. Those ideas seem completely contradictory to each other. She’s right, though: I live in a lovely part of Queens with decent restaurants, a fish monger, a cheese store, and a great market for my other needs. And I spend a significant portion of my income on food. But I work in a disadvantaged neighborhood, right across the street from the bus depot, and it is incredibly difficult to find healthy food around here. I usually bring my lunch to work but, occasionally, I’ll forget and need to buy lunch here. You wouldn’t believe the difficulty in doing that. There’s a market nearby, but the produce is sub-par and comes from everywhere but New York. Forget good bread or any unprocessed cheese. Everything comes frozen, in a can, in bulk, or vaccuum-packed. Not surprisingly, you’ll see a significantly larger number of overweight and obese people in the neighborhood I work in as opposed to the one I live in. During my info session, the director of the Food Studies program repeatedly threw around the term “food crisis in this country” and I don’t think that’s stating it too strongly. Darra Goldstein’s letter just added one more voice to the dull roar.
On that note, the Sustainable Table has a wonderful blog and they posted about a curriculum package by Equal Exchange. It teaches kids about fair trade, food production and sustainable living. This seems as good a place as any to start turning this thing around.7.26.2007
Up and running: Harry Potter and NYU
Like so many others, I’m in the midst of reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Unlike so many others, I’m reading it pretty slowly. I was at the very start of my career as a children’s librarian when Sorcerer’s Stone came out – I remember that we actually got review copies of it. And since then I’ve been on many adventures of my own so I’m feeling particularly nostalgic about this book and a little sad it’s going to be over soon.
Thus far, I have the same complaint about Harry Potter that I (and so many others) have had about the past three books: it needs tighter editing! There are just some scenes that drag on for unnecessary amounts of time. It really gets ridiculous sometimes. But I also feel like that’s a minor quibble at this point: Rowling is a master at creating suspense, tension, and excitement in her stories, and I’m so along for the ride.
On my other favorite subject, I went to a food-related event at NYU last night: “Sustainable Agriculture vs. Industrial Food: A Conversation with Dan Imhoff and Dan Barber. Clark Wolf was the moderator. For the most part, I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t already read in Omnivore’s Dilemma. What I did learn more about was the Farm Bill which, as Marian Burros points out in her Times article, needs to be called the Food Bill. The conversation got me completely fired up about supporting a movement that has the potential to reverse the dangerous course American food culture is currently on. As soon as I finish Harry Potter and a book I need to review for SLJ, I’m going to pick up Dan Imhoff’s Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill.
Here are a couple things I got out of the event:
After the talk, Adam and I went to dinner at Rouge, our favorite restaurant in our neighborhood. We had a bottle of Valley of the Moon Sangiovese, which has become one of our new favorite versatile wines, and shared a cheese and meat platter along with a frisee salad with gorgonzola, hazelnuts, and bacon. Simple but fantastic. And because I had such a light dinner, I went for the out-of-this-world gateau au chocolat avec crème anglaise, a flourless cake they serve that is really a small slice of heaven. Adam had vanilla custard with berries: he liked it, but it was a little too gelatinous for my tastes.
We finished off the evening by going to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Overall, a lovely evening.
Thus far, I have the same complaint about Harry Potter that I (and so many others) have had about the past three books: it needs tighter editing! There are just some scenes that drag on for unnecessary amounts of time. It really gets ridiculous sometimes. But I also feel like that’s a minor quibble at this point: Rowling is a master at creating suspense, tension, and excitement in her stories, and I’m so along for the ride.
On my other favorite subject, I went to a food-related event at NYU last night: “Sustainable Agriculture vs. Industrial Food: A Conversation with Dan Imhoff and Dan Barber. Clark Wolf was the moderator. For the most part, I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t already read in Omnivore’s Dilemma. What I did learn more about was the Farm Bill which, as Marian Burros points out in her Times article, needs to be called the Food Bill. The conversation got me completely fired up about supporting a movement that has the potential to reverse the dangerous course American food culture is currently on. As soon as I finish Harry Potter and a book I need to review for SLJ, I’m going to pick up Dan Imhoff’s Food Fight: A Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill.
Here are a couple things I got out of the event:
- California produces 50% of our nation’s fruits and vegetables but they receive no subsidies – those all go to farmers of corn, wheat, soybeans, and other commodity crops.
- Transparency is the biggest issue of the Farm Bill. We want to know where our food is coming from, how it’s processed, what is used to make it.
- Mondavi has an organic wine out…I’m going to buy a couple of bottles and enjoy them while I read House of Mondavi, which is on my long long long reading list.
After the talk, Adam and I went to dinner at Rouge, our favorite restaurant in our neighborhood. We had a bottle of Valley of the Moon Sangiovese, which has become one of our new favorite versatile wines, and shared a cheese and meat platter along with a frisee salad with gorgonzola, hazelnuts, and bacon. Simple but fantastic. And because I had such a light dinner, I went for the out-of-this-world gateau au chocolat avec crème anglaise, a flourless cake they serve that is really a small slice of heaven. Adam had vanilla custard with berries: he liked it, but it was a little too gelatinous for my tastes.
We finished off the evening by going to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Overall, a lovely evening.
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