NAME THIS POST! 22 January 2007 7:03 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,anthropology,books,convenience,eating,health,Marion Nestle,news,sundance,sustainability,Warren Belasco , trackbackDear readers:
I’m looking for a clever way to describe miscellaneous news of the kind I find myself wanting to write about this Monday evening. So far I seem to be big on alliteration, as I’ve thought of: Monday morsels, Monday melange, and Monday miscellany. But none of those really roll trippingly off the tongue. Monday mix? Still not so good. If you have a good idea (or really, any idea, since as you can see mine are not exactly rockin’), post a comment and I’ll change the title of this entry to give mad props to my favorite suggestion. Also I might make mystery Monday (or whatever I end up calling it) a regular feature if it turns out I generally start the week with a lot of ideas for little items.
Thanks in advance, and here are some such (hopefully amusing) little tidbits,
-Tracy
Exercise makes food taste awesome! Even in a food desert!
I found myself having a Marion-Nestle-is-my-hero moment this past Saturday at the UO gym, eating an organic apple and studying the vending machine food and drink offerings with morbid fascination. Good news first: The apple was one of the best things to happen to me that entire day: hunger is still a fantastic seasoning, and exercise is still a good way to work up a healthy appetite, and I do mean healthy. (For some reason I often end up craving delicious fruits and vegetables after working out or going for a long bike ride or a walk, which is all the more reason to make it a regular habit. But I digress.) Bad news next: Maybe I have been living in my hippie grocery store bubble for too long, or maybe I was just really feeling the aforementioned exercise-brings-healthy-food-cravings effect, and maybe my apple was so delicious it was skewing my perception, but absolutely nothing in the vending machines looked like food to me, let alone Tracy food. Some of the fruit juices and iced teas in the drink display looked okay, but only the unsweetened ones. Everything else? Gross. After long consideration (and finishing my apple), I decided that the beef jerky was probably the closest thing to food for sale there, which is really saying something about the relative nastiness of the other items on display, because I’m pretty much never in favor of eating dead cow, except I guess when it’s part of the shortest ingredient list of any item in a whole case of stuff designed to keep basically forever at room temperature. But yeesh.
I’m a big geek!
Anyway, writing that reminds me to look up “Access to healthy foods: Part II. Food poverty and shopping deserts” by T. Lang and M. Caraher (Health and Nutrition Journal 57), the article that introduced the term “food deserts” to describe places like convenience stores, which are full of pseudofoods like the chips and cookies and pretzels and candy in the vending machines described above. (Pseudofood is itself a term from “Bringing political economy into the debate on the obesity epidemic” by Anthony Winson, one of last term’s class readings for Food and Culture; I seem to recall writing about this subject on our final exam, and it seems to be pretty well seared onto my brain now, but again I digress.) Also I seem to recall a reference to food deserts in Brian Halweil’s Eat Here: Rediscovering homegrown pleasures in a global supermarket, one of the assigned books for Sustainable Agriculture this term, so I should double-check and see if that’s about this same concept.
Awkwardness!
And speaking of class, I had a silly moment this morning and actually laughed out loud when Prof. Martin mentioned that we would be watching The Future of Food — I hadn’t known that we would be watching the movie in class and had actually gone on a little rant about it in my summary of this week’s assigned readings, mostly about biotechnology. Awkward! (The rant’s actually a pretty good one, so I may eventually.) Anyway, I am taking notes on this second viewing of The Future of Food, and I may write a review here if I can come up with something more eloquent than mocking its “booga booga technology is bad and science is rampantly, shamelessly, and even self-righteously misunderstood” scare tactics.
Books!
I reluctantly returned Anne Mendelson’s Stand Facing the Stove: the story of the women who gave America The Joy of Cooking to the UO library on Friday, along with Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: a history of the future of food. Both were great fun, and I look forward to writing more about them (as well as Belasco’s Appetite for Change, which I picked up to keep my “to read” pile stayed ridiculously huge).
More random!
Finally, today’s mail brought me the latest stack of clippings from my custom news service (hi, Mom), including a book review of Barry Glassner’s The Gospel of Food by none other than Stand Facing the Stove‘s Anne Mendelson. Sweet! There’s hardly anyone better to write the line “Any culinary historian familiar with the meat chapters of cookbooks from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century…”
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mom
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http://hahahaha Cj
