Monkey Monday: Morning Glory update and more 19 March 2007 9:24 am
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,anthropology,books,convenience,cooking,eating,monkeys,Morning Glory,responsibility,school,sustainability,vegan,Warren Belasco,work , trackbackHappy Monday!
Background information relevant to this entry: One of Morning Glory’s specialties is vegan “omelettes” (I use the term lightly, of course) of seasoned sautéed vegetables or veggies and tofu, folded into a giant potato pancake-like shell. We generally try to have a stack of these potato shells ready-made, partially-cooked so we can finish crisping them up on the grill instead of making them to order, which is sort of time-consuming and a pain in the ass. Until very recently, I had only a vague notion of how the shells were made (in a big frying pan, flipped like an omelette or pancake, and then put on the grill to finish par-cooking so the pan is free for the next handful of shredded potato). Last week, that changed. Also I’m supposed to be writing a final paper for my sustainable agriculture class.
The Latest about me at Morning Glory, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Make Potato Shells
Last Thursday morning, I got a phone call from Morning Glory at 7:15 and went in to help out, emergency-style. There were two potato shells left, and of course our first two tickets of the morning required no less than three. So I broke out a food processor and shredded some spuds and learned to make potato shells in a great big hurry. Turns out there’s definitely some skill to it, but less voodoo than I thought, and I’ve been feeling pretty good about the adventure ever since. Awesome!
Much less awesome is whoever broke into Morning Glory last Sunday night/early Monday morning and stole everybody’s tips (they couldn’t get into the locked cash register). Lame, lame, lame.
To end on an awesome note: we had a wacky busy last Saturday in part because they were training new floor staff, but also on account of all the hippies we fed before and after the big peace marches. Yay!
Oh, and my work schedule is changing to Mondays and Saturdays where it was Tuesdays and Saturdays before. One slow day, one fast day, and random emergencies and covering for people… it suits me fine.
In other news…
I have sustainable agriculture on the brain even more so than usual because I’m supposed to be writing the final paper for my class and of course the essay question is open-ended as all get-out. I will probably cite Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: a history of the future of food a bunch, like whenever I want to emphasise that I am in no way clairvoyant but the future will probably be just like now, only a lot more so. After waiting a minute and rereading that statement, it is as true in this now as it was in the past now in which it was written, and I suppose it will continue to annoy me with its glib truthiness well into the future. Argh.
Speaking of sustainability, though, here’s an essay about food miles over at the Ethicurean that tries to quantitatively compare the ecological impact of Bangladeshi rice with similar grains grown in California — the example is from Peter Singer’s The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, which is on hold for me at my friendly local public library. Because I am a pedantic geek, I posted a comment pointing out that the distance from a farm to the store where its crops are sold as food probably isn’t the total food miles except in very rare cases. I’ve been looking up some of the academic research done about the distance food travels farm-to-fork, and mostly the methodology is pretty sound but it of course gets translated in all kinds of weird ways. The famous 1500 miles figure for the average food miles of a supermarket product, for instance — I’m still tracking down the original source of that idea, and even then it’s still looking at individual supermarket items instead of say, what people eat. And don’t get me started on the hundred mile diet. Or do, but I will point you to
