pease porridge

Required Reading

As far as I'm concerned, What to Eat by Marion Nestle ought to be required reading.  Not just foodies, or people in the food industry, or food bloggers, but everyone who eats food should read this book.

Marion Nestle (no relation to the food industry giant) is a nutrition professor at NYU who you may have already met if you saw Super Size Me.  So, she knows something about food and she probably shares some of the same political preferences as me, which information totally did not prepare me for the tour de force that is What to Eat.

Books About Food

Lately I've been on a bit of a binge.  I've been tearing through books about food as if they were made of food.  Most of these weren't quite what I'd call gourmet meals, but none of them were junk food either:

The Ethical Gourmet: How to Enjoy Great Food That Is Humanely Raised, Sustainable, Nonendangered, and That Replenishes the Earth, by Jay Weinstein - I think maybe the title sums it up, don't you?  Weinstein seems to be aiming for the lowest-common-denominator approach to organic eating, but whatever, his heart seems to be in the right place.  This is a combination buyers' guide and cookbook, with some basic information about organic and fair trade standards, and fishing and farming practices.  Weinstein is a Jasper White protege, and it's always nice to see chefs taking an interest in conscientious cooking and eating.

A Field Guide to Buying Organic by Luddene Perry and Dan Schultz - Pretty much what the title says, this is a buyers' guide for organic food.  The first part is a breakdown of organic food facts, and the second is a breakdown of products on a case by case basis to help you decide based on cost, health benefits and environmental/social factors how to spend your food dollars.  There are even two quizzes (I scored as a 'classic organic shopper' on both).  This book really wasn't my speed, but if you like consumer guides in general you might check it out.

Grub: Ideas For an Urban Organic Kitchen, by Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry - This is a really sweet little book made by and for idealists.  The first half is a brief infodump about the evils of the food industry, followed by some recommendations for how to shop organic, and the last half is a bunch of menus with a vegetarian/vegan/macrobiotic bent (with soundtracks included alongside).   I found it hopelessly optimistic, and thus adorable, but I wouldn't read it unless you are inspired by young people who still believe they can make a difference in the world.

Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, by Hervé This - This (er, the author) has great credentials, and the title and the ideas behind the book are great, but the work itself is pretty flat.  There are like a hundred really short chapters (often one or two pages each) that skim about the subject without ever delving.  Much of the book is little details dispelling food myths and the best way to make particular recipes.  The middle section hit upon what I was most interested in - cutting edge info on how we taste food - but, again, suffered from being very brief and cursory.  I would've loved this book if he had just taken that section and expanded it into a real book, but as it was I was really disappointed.

Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew, by Samuel Fromartz - Samuel Fromartz is business journalist, and it shows.  This book is a primer on the development of the organic food industry; it's chock full of facts and data and can be pretty dry at times.  You may find this book interesting if you don't know much about organic food (but want to know more) and enjoy reading the Wall Street Journal.

The Sex Life of Food: When Body and Soul Meet to Eat, by Bunny Crumpacker - A sort of stream-of-consciousness rambling set of essays about food and sex, this book starts off kind of interesting but quickly becomes dull, and then veers off into strange (but not in a good way).  Why a book about food and sex needs chapters about farting, cannibalism and Adolf Hitler, I'm none too sure.  The basic premise is that food and sex are linked.  Gee, really?  I imagine that Michael Pollan, say, could've gone somewhere with that, but Ms. Crumpacker (I'm trying really hard not to make fun of her name, here) just circles about; food is linked to sex is linked to food is linked to...

If You Can't Stand The Heat...

Last night I went to a reading/book signing with Bill Buford, author of Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.  On one hand, I thought he was a pretty good speaker, and really funny, and his point about needing to learn about where food comes from and how to prepare it was right in line with my own views on the subject.

On the other hand, his apparent affection for the raging asshole behavior of the various chefs he ended up working with was a little disturbing.  Quick note: I haven't read the book, yet, although I have it on order at the library, so I don't know the actual printed work's take on the matter, but he seemed pretty enthralled.  Perhaps unsurprisingly so, since his first book was all about soccer hooligans, and, as he mentioned casually last night 'I love those guys'.

I imagine as an editor and contributor to the New Yorker, he doesn't get a lot of opportunity to indulge in violent, misogynistic behavior, and perhaps he envies a bit those who do.  For my part, I'm completely unimpressed with that bullshit, and unimpressed by those who find it fascinating and alluring.  There are plenty of excellent cooks out there who seem able to get their jobs done without resorting to hazing, or shouting, or throwing things.

In any case, I probably will still read the book, since what little I have read was funny and interesting and entertaining, as was the majority of the talk last night.  It's not like the presence of a little glorification of violence has stopped me from enjoying any of America's cultural output in the past, after all.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

I feel like I have to start out by saying that I love Michael Pollan's work, so this will not be an entirely unbiased account.  The Botany of Desire is one of my favorite books; it definitely informed, if not inspired, many of my attitudes toward food.  Thus, I approached reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, with some trepidation, because I imagined it would possibly have a similar effect.  I was not wrong.

Michael Pollan follows four meals back to their sources, food chain-style.  He writes that he originally considered three meals, but the more he looked at 'organic' food the more he discovered a vast difference between local, sustainable farming, and industrial organic (a la Whole Foods).  Along the way he considers fundamental questions about how we decide what to eat, and how to eat.

I'm sure that you can find reviews of this book written by much better reviewers than I, so I'm not going to talk about what's in it so much as the changes that I'd like to make in my eating habits based on what I found there.  Please note that this isn't a book full of scare-tactics and lecturing.  It's an extremely honest, well-considered work that makes you think simply because Pollan himself is thinking so deeply and so brilliantly.

The biggest change I'd like to make is to be more mindful of the food I eat; not just how it tastes (although that's important, too; too frequently I find myself eating for fuel rather than for enjoyment), but where it comes from.  As you might have guessed, it was the 'industrial organic' chapters of The Omnivore's Dilemma that hit me the hardest.  We have been trying to eat mostly organic food, but we have been relying on the chain stores to do it for us.

As I've mentioned on this blog before, we've joined a CSA for produce, which is a good first step.  We're also trying to find local dairy and meat sources.  Unfortunately, these are not year-round solutions, so there's going to have to be some sort of compromise.  Limiting processed food is probably a good way to go, as is some rigorous checking up on the companies that we do end up buying from.

If you're thinking this sounds crazy ambitious, you're probably right.  It's inconvenient, expensive, and a lot of hard work.  I don't know how much I'll actually be able to go through with, but I do think it's worth trying and it's worth doing.  As Pollan reminds us, nothing (except sunlight) is really free in agriculture, it's just a question of who pays.

Robbing the Bees

I recently finished reading Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, by Holley Bishop, and, while it inspired me to think a little bit more about honey (and taste a little bit more), I was ultimately disappointed by the book.  It started out pretty well; the author's obsession with bees was contagious and her writing style was as easy and fluid as warm honey.  Unfortunately, later chapters were less about her relationship with her bees and more about laundry lists of references to bees and honey in literature, religion, science and culture.

Bishop follows around a seasoned honeybee wrangler and describes the seasons as he and his bees experience them, and these parts are definitely the most interesting.  The book starts out just before Tupelo season, with frantic preparations followed by an even more frantic harvest, and ends with the bees peacefully hibernating in their (very short) Florida winter.

Although it's loosely organized through this seasonal progression, the chapters are also each focused on particular honeybee products or functions, such as honey, wax, medicine, pollen, etc., and it's here that the book falls down.  The meat of these chapters seems to be stuff the author found in other people's books/the internet and just paraphrased to fill out her wordcount.  Some of it is interesting, but a lot of it is so vague as to be pretty much useless.

These chapters are punctuated with short interludes about the author's own experiences raising bees as a hobby, and these are probably the best parts.  I think if it were a much slimmer volume about her own experiences and those of Smiley, her honey-farming friend, it would've been a lot more successful.  As it is, I wouldn't recommend this book unless you're doing a superficial study of honeybees and want a one-stop clearinghouse of vaguely interesting facts (and for some reason don't have access to the internet or a local library).

A Revolution in Eating

"America's culinary history is inextricably linked with suffering." 

I'm not going to lie to you: I didn't quite finish reading James E. McWilliams' A Revolution in Eating: How the quest for food shaped America, although I really tried to.  It's a really interesting idea for a book, and the introduction is fascinating, it's just that the chapters that expand upon the introduction are repetetive and, while they occasionally have a few fun facts, they return again and again to restating the thesis in a way that was fine for eighth-grade English, but not really what I expect from a published work.