Monkey Monday: catching up. 17 November 2008 1:51 pm
Posted by Tracy in : Marion Nestle, baking, books, consumerism, economics, events, fast food, food snobbery, geekery, meta, news, nyc, politics, recipes, school , trackbackSo I missed a few posts at the end of last week because it was Penny’s birthday and cake was more fun and distracting than writing here. (I did eventually finish entries for Thursday and Friday, so check those out when you get a chance. Also, I rewrote What is Tracy Food? just a little bit.) Quick summary of the rest of this entry: more baked goods, food news stories and commentary, a little school update, and my plans for additional food geeking this week.
If the Deep Chocolate Vegan Cake I made for Penny’s birthday sounds like too much work or not enough of an adventure, you might consider Wired’s Chocolate Cake in a Mug, mentioned on Culinate last week.
Speaking of baked goods, last week the New York Times reported that school bake sales are going out of style in the face of rules restricting unhealthy foods, and a few of my favorite blogs responded. Michael Ruhlman gave his post the heartrending title “Banning the Chocolate-Chip Cookie and Other Depressing Food Notes” and Kate Harding went the rantier road.
If you like to battle bad news with comfort food, you might try Isa’s new chocolate-chip cookie recipe at the Post-Punk Kitchen blog. At last, the definitive answer to CJ’s vegan chocolate-chip cookie recipe request last year. No banana, no soy margarine, no egg replacer — heck, no ingredient more obscure than tapioca flour? Sold.
Back to the New York Times, where I only just discovered their Diner’s Journal blog, which reminded me that the New Yorker food issue is out this week. Also, that Barack Obama doesn’t like beets, to which I can only say: yay, more beets for me! Over on the editorial pages, the Times published some disheartening news about the future of food fish (also noted by Ruhlman) and the Opinionator blog had a piece about increased consumption of cheap fast food in economic hard times.
Prediction: we’re going to see a lot more stories about cheap food, both good and bad, all over the place. As Dorothy Gambrell so brilliantly puts it in her latest Donation Derby comic, “Gas is cheaper than chicken.” That said, I hope we can all agree to laugh at anyone who tries to claim that a bad economy may be good for public health. Sure, as Heather Havrilesky pointed out on Salon, hard economic times can put a lot of things (including food) in perspective, but of course they’re not really going to hurt the people who have the luxury of saving money by spending more time cooking whole foods. Duh. (Now to be fair, Havrilesky was writing back in April, when people were still worrying about recession instead of depression, but still.)
While I’m getting geeky on the microeconomic aspects of diet and health: Parke Wilde’s fantastic post about the difficulty of defining “food deserts”, which just happens to be illustrated with photographic examples taken a few blocks from my apartment. He links to a 2007 study about East and Central Harlem which I gotta read one of these days.
Speaking of school, and Marion Nestle, for that matter, it looks like I’m taking her Nutrition in Food Studies class next term. So awesome. My other class will probably be Research Methods with Amy Bentley, provided the department manually overrides the computer error that’s been making it impossible for me to register.
But it’s a good week for extracurricular food geekery, too. Tuesday night there’s HAMBURGERS. PIZZAS. PANCAKES. (“They are delicious. They are circular. And they are beloved around the world.”), a reception and presentation to celebrate the launch of the Edible series with its first three books:
Wednesday is the Politics of Food conference at Columbia, and even if you can’t join me there, there’s always the online readings. And what do you know? The Harlem study’s on the list. On that note, I really do have to get reading if I’m going to keep on being caught up this week.
(Finished and published 18 November 2008 at 2:08 pm, posted to 17 November 2008 in an effort to keep the calendar sorted.)
