Monkey Monday: food news roundup and more! 5 March 2007 8:42 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen, CSA, agriculture, environment, eugene, monkeys, news, responsibility, sustainability , trackbackSo I’ve noticed that whenever I start a Monkey Monday post ahead of time, by the time Sunday night rolls around whatever I’m writing on TracyFood starts to sound a lot like the reading summary I’m supposed to be writing for Monday’s sustainable agriculture class (it’s true for anything I write on Sunday night, but especially bad for Monkey Monday entries, since they don’t have a lot of structure to begin with). Last night I kept trying to do my homework instead of writing here, but I kept getting distracted and decided to try going to bed and getting up early to finish my homework. Bad idea, but I was only half an hour late to class, so I ended up missing part of the guest lecture by the director of the Eugene Farmers Market. Oh, the logistical nightmare of it all!
Speaking of logistical nightmares and trying to plan ahead and get up early, this past Saturday I was going to record America’s Test Kitchen for later watching (and possible TracyFood commentary) but when I got around to programming the VCR and checking the TV listings, it turned out no dice. Phooey. At least I’ve still got my subscription to Cook’s Illustrated to geek out on, and one more day with Jack Bishop’s A Year In a Vegetarian Kitchen, oh yes. But I think I promised something about food news, didn’t I? Here goes:
Last week Worldchanging focused on food, which made and still makes me all kinds of happy because they’re about good news over there, intelligent optimism and real progress and all that. First and foremost I should link to the overview page, Food of the Future, and the Future of Food, if only to remind myself that there’s a number of articles there which I haven’t read yet. The first Worldchanging piece that got my attention was last Monday’s Food Miles: Green Good Sense, Ill-Considered Hype, or Naked Protectionism? which led me to this BBC article about UK supermarket chains working to reduce their environmental impact and even an online food carbon footprint calculator for UK residents. Holy monkey gods. What planet do I live on? I’m trying to imagine a greenwashing war between, say, Safeway and Albertsons, but the best I can do is figure that Whole Foods will make a big self-promoting deal about their efforts in the carbon footprint area once the whole freaking out about WalMart going organic settles down some (buying Wild Oats might have helped with that). On the other hand, and while I’m on the subject of Whole Foods, check out this hilarious New York Times article about how maybe they’ve sold out, which reminded me that while I may not live on Planet Europe, I’m certainly at the very deep hippie core of the U.S. alternative food system, and maybe I should try to remember what else was burning my brain a year ago and see if the Times thinks it’s news now.
Back to Worldchanging last Monday: Challenges and Advancements in Solar Cooking on 26 February. Very cool, but also a little sad because of the restrictive gender role stuff (what do you mean women won’t need to collect firewood?) Maybe patriarchal men would be less threatened by and more willing to adopt the new technology if it came with a history of how labor-saving devices often aren’t, especially for women working in the home? Sigh. (That same day, there was a bit about a recent ruling on genetically modified alfalfa in Salon’s “How the World Works” blog. Yay for good news!) Food miles continued as a hot Worldchanging topic on Tuesday, with Food Carbon, Corporate Farming and Transnational Community-Supported Agriculture. I do sort of think of fair trade as transnational community supported agriculture, even if it’s really more individually supported at the consumer level than a traditional CSA, where the members can get to know each other. Still, thought-provoking stuff.
On Thursday, Worldchanging published a piece called Food is Power by Anna Lappé, coauthor of Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet along with her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, best known for the 1971 classic Diet for a Small Planet, which inspires me to many things, but none of them are a pithy summary. I’m trying to read both the latter and Hope’s Edge right now, in the hopes that one of them will inspire a five-page book report for my sustainable agriculture class. The good news is that both of them have recipes, even if the 1971 ones are sometimes the very stereotype of hippie crap food. Last Thursday I also heard a radio interview with Frankie Lappé that only added to the general “woo! future of food doesn’t totally suck!” theme of the week for me (I managed to work a reference to the “Food is Power” piece into my reading summary for class today, because the Forum on Food Sovereignty fits so well into all our discussion of international agricultural politics). And finally, Worldchanging’s Lunch at the Langar: Exploring a Free Kitchen in Delhi makes me so very happy, and not just because it’s full of pictures of yummy food. Check this out (emphasis mine):
Every Sikh temple throughout the world has a Langar (Punjabi for “free kitchen”). This is not a soup kitchen. It’s not exclusively for the poor, nor exclusively for the Sikh community. Volunteering in the cooking, serving and cleaning process is a form of active spiritual practice for devotees, but the service they provide asks no religious affiliation of its recipients. Our guide’s chorus was, “Man, woman, color, caste, community,” meaning you will be fed here regardless of how you fit into any of those classifications. This spirit of inclusion and equality is reinforced by the kitchen’s adherence to vegetarianism, not because Sikhs are vegetarian, but because others who visit may be, and by serving no meat, they exclude nobody.
I’m going to steal that last idea about inclusiveness a lot, I think. Oh, and this article led me to Culiblog, which I promptly added to my Google Reader because that’s how I roll.
If you need news to be cranky, check out Frank Bruni’s “Where Only the Salad Is Properly Dressed” before it disappears into the archive of articles you have to buy — someone at the Times really should have known better, but it gave the kids at Slate and plenty of other blogs (Feministing, Broadsheet) something to be speechless about (okay, Broadsheet actually had stuff to say, like “Dear Mr. Bruni, you’ve conveyed that you are a creepy patronizing jackass” and also linked to another Times food section article about women chefs and high-tech avant-garde molecular gastronomy type yuppie hell cooking that really needed better editing — the headline and introduction were all about the exclusion of women from that completely horrible field, but then the article was of course full of exceptions to that rule, and the whole thing made my head hurt, but of course that’s true of pretty much everything I read about “cooking” that involves foams. Ew.) On the whole, in case it wasn’t completely obvious, I of course recommend all the Worldchanging stuff way more highly than the New York Times articles, which are all about to disappear into their pay-to-play archive anyway.
So. That’s not even a small fraction of everything that happened last week, but it’s everything I remembered to bookmark for TracyFood. And now I’m off to get myself some dinner.
Comments»
I’ve been trying to get across for years that not serving meat means not excluding people and people are always like “but I like meat!” which seems to be the entire reasoning process for far too many people. Thanks for letting me know I’m not crazy for thinking this is a smart way to do stuff.