TracyFood

Monkey Monday: last week of winter term edition. 12 March 2007 7:22 pm

Posted by Tracy in : CSA, Morning Glory, WFFC, agriculture, cooking, eating, monkeys, people, restaurants, reviews, school, sustainability, tea, work , trackback

You’d think maybe I could avoid this sort of thing since I’m only taking the one class this term, but I still managed to lose sleep to schoolwork this weekend, more so than the usual “stay up late on Sunday writing the reading summary due Monday,” even — and the onset of Daylight Savings Time did not help one bit, oh no. So this afternoon (after class and working out and lunch and a short stint at WFFC before I had to admit I was tired) I have been drinking lots of tea and doing my best to stay awake, and it’s proving rather difficult to keep myself out of bed until dark. But I must perservere! The monkeys demand it!

Today in my sustainable agriculture class I turned in a book report on Diet for a Small Planet that started as a TracyFood entry, which is to say even the final version turned in for class may have included the sentence fragment “Holy monkey gods, the recipes.” You know me; that’s how I roll. I had meant to write my report on Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, but it was just too hard to summarize and the earlier book had eaten my brain more. I had to stop writing the TracyFood entry to finish the book report, but I’ll see what I can do about bloggifying (new word?) what I wrote for class.

In other school-related news, last week my class went on two field trips! The first was to Konyn Dairy just north of Coburg, OR (turns out most of the dairy farmers in Oregon are Dutch!) and the second was to Food for Lane County, which organization continues to impress me the more I learn about it, even as it’s incredibly upsetting that it needs to exist at all, let alone at such an epic scale (biggest freezer ever! pressure cookers named “Bonnie” and “Clyde” that could easily fit a full-size human!) I’m supposed to write a report on one of those field trips (sort of like I did for the Small Farms Conference), and if I write anything fun in the process of that reporting, I’ll be sure to share it here.

In book news, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? American women and the kitchen is a fun and easy read so far, sort of like Manly Meals and Mom’s Home Cooking by Jessamyn Neuhaus only less encyclopedic. I haven’t gotten to its discussion of vegetarianism in the 1960s and 1970s, but the author’s comments about meatless meals during WWII rationing are especially interesting in light of my recent reading of Diet for a Small Planet, with its almost unbelievable (to my admittedly incredibly spoiled by her vegetarian-friendly surroundings ears) defensiveness on the subject of “eating less meat (or none!)” — and fyi, that’s a direct quotation from the back cover of my copy of the 1975 edition of Diet

In news about stuff I read online, I must admit that Culiblog is my new crack. I can read Debra Solomon all day, and it sort of feels like I have been doing exactly that ever since discovering her site, but I’m not in the least bit sorry. A few good pieces I’ve stumbled across there today: Possible Epiphany, about the weirdness of recipe writing, All I Really Want Is Locative Food, about a beautiful dream (come to think of it, maybe Apple could be in or at least very near a train station? That would be super-rad, and not just because it would remind me of Morning Glory and The LocoMotive), and An Improbable History: Meal Assembly Centers, about an even better fantasy even more not unlike my still-imaginary urban farm and community kitchen. Community supported agriculture is the answer, doncha know.

Speaking of urban farming and city food, it looks like I’ll be in the Netherlands at the end of June and beginning of July, which means I’ll have a chance to catch The Edible City, an exhibit by Debra Solomon and colleagues at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Maastricht. So very awesome!

Hey, the tea must have worked for me to write this much, but now I should see about some dinner and then getting myself to bed at a reasonable hour and all that.