Ask TracyFood: Veg-what? 14 August 2007 8:29 am
Posted by Tracy in : advice,books,food snobbery,friends,meat,Morning Glory,not even vegetarian,responsibility,sundance,vegan,vegetarian , 5 commentsA few months ago, Marcy (who is so much better than Barbie) wrote:
So right now are you a vegetarian, almost vegetarian, or veggie-friendly? Ever since I started cooking for myself, I’ve been fairly veggie-friendly because I don’t really like dealing with raw meat. Up here I’m even more veggie-friendly because I’ve been shopping at the local food co-op which is all vegetarian except for the frozen free range, hormone-free, chicken breasts and assorted frozen fish. So because I’m lazy, and the food co-op has really nummy everything else, I’ve been very veggie-friendly lately. Yum yum! It’s so great to have access to tempeh and other such delicious veggie novelties.
Shameless nerditude: Belasco’s culinary triangle 25 April 2007 10:27 pm
Posted by Tracy in : anthropology,convenience,cooking,culinary triangle,eating,identity,Michael Pollan,responsibility,school,Sidney Mintz,vegetarian,Warren Belasco , add a commentSo. Warren James Belasco is a historian and professor of American studies at the University of Maryland who writes about food — and very well, I might add. I read his 2006 book, Meals to Come: a History of the Future of Food over winter break, and today I finished his 1989 book, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture took on the Food Industry, because it was due back at the UO library today and I wanted to return it on time rather than provoke the wrath of our housemate The History Librarian. Belasco is the co-editor of Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies, a collection of excellent academic papers about food and its marketing which was also due today. (Eventually I would like to review all these books on TracyFood, because I am a colossal geek.) In my Fall 2006 food and culture anthropology class (ANTH 365 at the University of Oregon), we used Belasco’s “culinary triangle” model of food selection to describe and discuss the way individuals approach the question of what to eat, and I find myself wanting to refer to Belasco’s terminology on TracyFood a lot, so I’m going to define it here for future reference. (more…)
Monkey Monday: “eat local” weekend food logs 23 April 2007 8:22 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,anthropology,breakfast,cheese,convenience,cooking,CSA,dessert,eating,environment,eugene,hungry planet,local food,milk,monkeys,responsibility,school,seasonality,sustainability,tea,work , 2 commentsImportant finding number one: Quitting caffeine cold turkey is not for the faint of heart like me. I had a raging headache by around 2 PM Saturday and gave in and had some freaking tea already around 8 PM, after which sources report I was much less hellish to be around (and I will concede that it was much more pleasant to be me, oh yes). But! Aside from that tea and some salt and some cumin, everything else I ate this weekend was grown or manufactured in Oregon, with the exception of some russet potatoes from Washington, because I miscalculated the amount of spuds it would take to get me through the weekend. The single lamest part of the experiment (besides the whole wanting to kill everything for lack of caffeine) was that I got totally insanely possessive about my food, because there were so few things in the house that fit my (admittedly totally arbitrary) dietary parameters. The caffeine-withdrawal-induced crankiness almost certainly didn’t help with my food possessiveness, to put it mildly. Anyway. On to what I ate! (more…)
Foto Friday! 23 March 2007 8:54 pm
Posted by Tracy in : cheese,eating,responsibility,restaurants,school,sundance , add a commentPhoto Phriday just doesn’t look right at all, does it? I thought so, too. Anyway, woo for spring break! I’m finally relaxing a bit after losing way too much sleep on my sustainable agriculture paper (ugh) and then I found this relic of my time in the Sundance cheese department while doing some much-needed spring cleaning in the office — would you believe there’s a floor in there sometimes? But now, behold the glory of Crater Lake Blue by Rogue Creamery: (more…)
What can I say? It’s finals week. 21 March 2007 10:58 pm
Posted by Tracy in : agriculture,environment,politics,responsibility,school,sustainability , 1 comment so farMy paper was going really well until about 7:30 PM or so, when I realized I had started to backtrack and revise earlier sections instead of writing onwards first. Oooops. Also I realized I was missing the UC Berkeley webcast about the 2007 Farm Bill, which would actually have been sort of relevant to the subject at hand:
What are the prospects of approximating sustainable agriculture on a global scale over the next half century? What models are already in place and what would need to change? Include some discussion of individual vs. institutional approaches.
Anyway. In case you’re curious, here’s the first paragraph of my final essay-in-progress, a response to these questions and my sustainable agriculture class in general. (more…)
