Quick hit: books and writing and fangirling, oh my! 4 November 2009 1:16 pm
Posted by Tracy in : books,cooking,fangirl,geekery,politics,school,writing , trackbackWell, sanity of the stayed-up-till-3:30-AM-writing sort prevailed, and so today I am not spending six hours going back and forth to New Haven for a two-hour presentation, even one on a topic that interests me so very very much. In the meantime (for instance during that aforementioned staying up until 3:30 AM, all hopped up on coffee and pumpkin cheesecake, nom nom nom), I have been writing the heck out of my policy midterm report about emergency food, in part as described in Janet Poppendieck’s completely freaking brilliant Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement. I thought it was really good before I did a little fieldwork volunteering with Broadway Community Inc./Community Impact, now it gives me goosebumps and I’m absolutely sure I need a copy of this book and Poppendieck’s next, Free For All: Fixing School Food in America. To borrow a little from the hot mess I’m still writing,
Any book with either the depth and breadth of research or the clear, cogent and unhesitating political analysis of Sweet Charity? would be good; Poppendieck’s skillfully written combination of both is great. The historical perspective provided in Sweet Charity? was essential background for reading Mark Winne’s Closing the Food Gap; when we discussed the Winne book in Marion Nestle’s food sociology class last month, I was not the only student who brought up Sweet Charity? in comparison. Dr. Nestle also spoke very highly of Poppendieck, noting that Sweet Charity? manages to utterly condemn the system it describes without being unkind to the people who participate in that system. Certainly my shift at Broadway Presbyterian reinforced my agreement with Poppendieck’s critical assessment of emergency food, that soup kitchens and food pantries are at best a short-term solution imperfectly pressed into addressing a long-term problem.
The writing, it is actually going pretty all right. And I’ll go a little further and say that Dr. Nestle promised to use Free For All in whatever she teaches next term, which might mean I have to take that class no matter what (I think it’s something like “Ethical Dilemmas in Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health”). Do I qualify for a minor in Marion Nestle studies yet? Or am I still just a big fangirl?
Um, don’t answer that.
