TracyFood

Monkey Tuesday: More randomness! 1 May 2007 10:25 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Michael Pollan, books, cooking, eating, meta, monkeys, news, pictures, school, seasonality , trackback

My writing attention span seems to be only a few paragraphs long this week, so I’m going to combine a few short entries in this one, Monkey Monday-style. Also I have been thinking extra bonus good thoughts for my stinky monkey brother Piett for a few days now, so it only seems appropriate to dedicate a few extra TracyFood posts his way.

Delicious dinner news

Pan-roasted asparagus is excellent good stuff, and super-easy! You just heat the cooking fat of your choice (in my case a mix of olive oil and butter) in a skillet big enough to fit whole spears of the delicious green stuff, and then cover the pan when you add the veggies. After a minute or two (or longer if you’re using thick spears, which I suspect would work very well for this like they do for roasting in general), season with salt and pepper, and bam. You could of course dress everything up with sauce or maybe garnishes like some fancy cheese or a fried egg or something, but the result is very fine all on its own. Yay for Cook’s Illustrated recipes!

Quickie book review

Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice, foreword by Deborah Madison. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vermont. 2006. 344 pages.

I wanted to like this book. Thirteen chapters named after moons, organized around central ingredients in a vaguely seasonal way, laced with personal anecdotes and recipes — sounds like Tracy food writing, right? But I wasn’t inspired to cook any of the food Prentice describes, and the personal anecdotes were more annoying than anything. Furthermore, I can point to the exact spot where Full Moon Feast really lost me: the bottom of page 54 and the top of page 55:

People who eat antibiotic-laden foods can become less responsive to medical antibiotics when they are needed to fight disease or even save lives.

No! No, no, no! Wrong, wrong, wrongitty-wrong-wrong! For one thing, it’s not that people become less responsive to antibiotics, it’s that bacteria evolve resistance so the antibiotics are less effective at treating the diseases caused by the micro-critters. And for another, it’s not just people who eat “antibiotic-laden food” who are at risk — it’s every-damn-body. I can’t decide if Prentice just doesn’t know her science or she really wants to believe that eating right confers special superpower privileges. It’s probably both. Also, it seems like a book about food as a means of forging connections between people ought to address the fact that eating affects a lot more than just the people who consume foods (and, in the case of meat, the animals that get eaten), and although this book tries in some places, it failed with those lines, which made me put it down and stop reading. Dangit.

Random News Item

Big monkey bonus points to anybody who helps me make sense of The Twinkie Offense, which I guess is a response to Michael Pollan’s recent New York Times Magazine piece, “The Way We Live Now: You Are What You Grow.” The author of “The Twinkie Offense,” whose name I have thus far been unable to determine, pokes all kinds of fun at Pollan and the “Willie Nelson wing” of food and farm politics, and generally bewilders me. I’d lost the editorial’s point well before the claim that Twinkies taste better than carrots, but at that point it got really hard to keep reading.

Finally, Happy May Day!

At the Urban Farm, we celebrated by making a pretty color wheel around last year’s Maypole. Also there may have been talk of the day’s historical significance, both to pagan religions and the labor movement, as well as dancing and pretending that we had ribbons, and other such hippie crap, despite the fact that the weather did not cooperate.

I was in charge of collecting orange flowers, but I may have gotten distracted and picked many other pretty blooming things on my way to class. Pictures of my bike all bedecked can be found here and here. Urban Farm is the best class ever, I tell you! On Thursday we’re going on field trips to Food for Lane County Gardens (I’m going to the Youth Farm because it’s the one I’m least likely to visit on my own, what with not exactly knowing where it is and all).