The words “local, seasonal, sustainable” have been repeated so often and with so little thought that they have become soothing background noise, feel-good mood-music for any socially conscious eater worth his or her naturally obtained organic sea salt. So it’s refreshing to encounter a book that treats the subject intelligently.
Was it Holden Caulfield who said that the measure of a good book was one that makes you want to call up the author on the phone?
Reading Ben Hewitt’s The Town That Food Saved impelled me to pay a visit to the author at his home, a raggedy farmstead at the end of a rutted, muddy, unmarked lane tucked among the folds and hollows of north-central Vermont.
In an interview with Brit chef and self-styled food revolutionary Jamie Oliver, John Hockenberry over at the Takeaway says "I can't decide if you're the Kung Fu Zen master or The Beatles invading our shores."
What Hockenberry's referring to of course is Oliver's "The Food Revolution," which began airing last Friday on ABC and has its second episode tomorrow. The conceit: Oliver visits Huntington, West Virginia, a town of 50,000 that ranks highest in obesity in America, and tries to change its eating habits through the entry point of the school cafeteria.
The reception Oliver receives is neither one a Zen master or The Beatles would expect. Instead of quiet disciples or cheering teen-age girls, the chilly school lunchroom staff wonder just what the hell he's up to. I sympathized with them, after all, the idea that Oliver is launching a food revolution in the U.S. is, well, a tad overplayed, ya think? Regardless, he has a point to make, one which needs to be made given the sad state of our diet.
By the looks of it, Huntington is eating a lot of junk, through really no more than the rest of country. What sort of "food"? Pizza for breakfast at school, chocolate and strawberry flavored milk (which The Slow Cook pointed out was nearly indistinguishable from Mountain Dew), chicken tenders, followed by chicken tenders, followed by chicken tenders. The only real food on the school menu is the fresh-baked bread the school kitchen makes but most of which sadly ends up in the rubbish bin, as the Brits call it. Mashed potatoes form when water is added to a pearly substance. When Oliver makes roast chicken -- gosh! real chicken, not frozen stuff - the staff is nearly in shock but the kids don't bite. They go for the pizza, again.
When Oliver pitches his plan to local radio host DJ Rod, he's nearly spit-roasted. "We don't want to sit around and eat lettuce all day," Rod says. "Who made you the King?" What Rod doesn't seem to get is that his neighbors are dying more quickly because of what they eat. But maybe he can't get past the messenger.
Oliver clearly has his work cut out for him. In one home, he cooks up the mom's usual daily fare -- pizza, chicken tenders, corn dogs, donuts, etc., etc., without a fresh vegetable in sight. The family ends the scene by burying the fat fryer in the backyard.
Oliver's not alone here. In fact, the series coincides with the rather rich debate going on over school lunch and childhood obesity. You have Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, the passage by a Senate panel of a modest increase in the school lunch budget, the enormous and significant work of Renegade Lunch Lady Chef Ann Cooper, and on and on. For another take, check out Fed Up with School Lunch, which features daily offerings at a Chicago school cafeteria by an anonymous teacher who's actually eating the stuff, every day! Clearly a revolution is underway, but it's only just getting going.
Each year, Paris holds Le Grand Prix de la Baguette de Tradition Française de la Ville de Paris, a blind tasting for the best baguette in the City. This is quite an affair and important for the winning baker since sales typically shoot up as does the baker's renown. (I got a taste of its importance at the boulangerie I worked at last year, which had previously won the honor).
In a rare inside look the contest, an American living in Paris applied for one of the random seats and was chosen to serve on the judging panel. (I wish she gave her name but hasn't on her blog She later revealed herself as Phyllis Flick. The result: she spent four hours tasting 163 baguettes, a record number of entries. "It was an absolutely incredible experience and for now I can’t imagine looking at another baguette," she writes.
It may seem hard to believe, but a lot of mediocre bread can be found in France. Walk into your average corner bakery and if you don’t know what to look for, or to ask for, you risk walking away with a very average, and at times inedible, baguette.
Here's a list of the winning boulangeries, something you'll want to clip if you happen to be heading to Paris.
Food is highly entertaining, no doubt about that, and television is perhaps the best medium to really show how to cook something, outside of joining a class. But as many others have pointed out, as food has soared as entertainment, viewers' cooking skills have continued to decline.
The gap between celebrity and real food being cooked is huge. People are watching TV, but there’s so few people cooking good, honest food. That is the stuff of daily life. If you know how to cook you’ve got a skill. Long after the TV’s off, you’re still going to need to eat.
With school lunch being debated on Capitol Hill, "Top Chef" should get in on the action and focus some kitchen challenges on school meals. One challenge could have each contestant try to cook a collection of delicious and healthy meals (breakfast and lunch) that spend less than $1 on food per meal. Another might be to cook in a real school, perhaps H.D. Cooke Elementary School, the setting of The Slow Cook’s excellent multi-part series on school meals, or use the actual school kitchen staff as assistants, though this one might be getting a bit close to the upcoming Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution on ABC. The contestants could also integrate ingredients from local farms with USDA-provided material.
Washington and the school lunch community also offers plenty of interesting possibilities for guest judges: First Lady Michele Obama, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Chef Ann Cooper (the "renegade lunch lady"), or a room full of cute and opinionated schoolchildren.
What a terrific idea! It would be one small step in making television food real for the ultimate judges: kids. But here's a thought on the ground rules: no pizza, fries, hot dogs or cupcakes. If you're wondering, What's left for kids to eat? That, my friends, is the heart of the problem.
I wrote a story on local slaughterhouses that ran today in WaPo -- my first story for the food section and one I wondered whether they would take. I mean, how do you write about a slaughterhouses in the food section? These sections generally focus on food, maybe the farms, but slaughterhouses don't usually figure in the mix. So I give editor Joe Yonan credit for seeing the story.
I decided to tackle the subject head on, literally, and lead with the slaughter of the animals. After all, that's what I had come to see. It wasn't only important for the article but for me as a meat eater. I felt I should at least be able to at least see the process if I was going to eat the stuff (others go further and actually participate).
People have asked how I felt seeing animals slaughtered. I thought I would be slightly sickened by the experience, but I wasn't. The men doing the work were serious and careful. They weren't rushed and the animals met their end quickly. (As Tim Amlaw, director of American Humane Certified, a
farm animal welfare program, told me: "It needs to be instantaneous -- that's the most humane.") I found the work fascinating. It isn't easy to turn an animal into meat and there is a true craft to butcher work -- a dying craft actually in this age of automation.
The slaughterhouse I focused on, True and Essential Meats, is part-owned by Joel Salatin, the farmer who figures in Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. But what I found interesting was the way Salatin roped in former landscape architect Joe Cloud to reinvent his career and buy the facility with him. Cloud was an easy target: this guy loves food and lives on a beautiful farm out in the Shenandoah Valley.
Here's the lead of the story:
HARRISONBURG, VA. -- Huddled in a small pen in the slaughterhouse, the four sheep and two goats were quiet and still. A few men nearby in thick rubber aprons cut away at still-warm carcasses hanging on hooks.
"They don't seem to know what's going on," a visitor remarked.
"Oh, they know," one of the butchers replied. "They know."
Maybe it was that awareness that led the men to work quietly and efficiently, dispatching each animal with a bolt shot to the head, until the last sheep, perhaps realizing that the flock was gone, began to bleat. Then she too fell silent.
That's what many fear about genetically engineered alfalfa. Organic farmers grow alfalfa as a forage crop for livestock, but genetically engineered crops can pollinate organic crops, making them non-organic. No organic forage, no organic livestock. No organic livestock, no organic milk.
That scenario has already played out in corn and canola, at least in some regions. A seed scientist at an organic seed company told me it's virtually impossible to find corn seed from the midwest that has avoided GM contamination. As a result, this company buys its organic corn seeds from a remote region of the Southeast. The same is true of rapeseed (canola) in Western Canada.
To avoid this fate with Round-Up Ready Alfalfa, 200,000 people have submitted comments to the USDA criticizing a draft environmental impact statement on the GM crop by the agency, which had recommended approval of the crop.
This battle has been brewing for sometime. In 2006, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) sued the USDA for failing to conduct an environmental impact statement, as required by law, before deregulating the crop. The federal courts sided with CFS and banned GE alfalfa plantings until USDA analyzed the impacts of GE alfalfa on the environment, farmers and the public.
Strangely, that environmental impact statement concluded, "There is no evidence that consumers care about GE contamination of organic alfalfa" -- even though it would no longer qualify as organic if it were contaminated. Stranger still, considering that organic milk is the leading organic product sought by consumers.
Regardless of what you think about genetically modified crops, the question is whether a crop should be approved that could threaten the organic status of another crop. In this case, it's not just a crop, but the animals that depend on the crop for forages and the consumers who want the products produced by those animals. None will be organic if the feedstock is contaminated.
Big news for a prized but endangered fish. Hopefully, this will lead to movement to ban trade in a species that is headed for extinction. The Washington Post reports:
The U.S. government announced Wednesday that it supports prohibiting international trade of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a move that could lead to the most sweeping trade restrictions ever imposed on the highly prized fish.
Sushi aficionados in Japan and elsewhere have consumed bluefin for decades, causing the fish's population to plummet. In less than two weeks, representatives from 175 countries will convene in Doha, Qatar, to determine whether to restrict the trade of bluefin tuna -- valued for its rich, buttery taste -- and an array of other imperiled species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
