The History of Gastronomy
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June 18, 2007
October 25, 2006
Out of Our Gourds
By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS, published 24 October 2006 in the New York Times
This time of the year, the windows of America are beginning to be dotted with carefully carved jack-o’-lanterns, but in a week or so, the streets will be splotched with pumpkin guts. Orange gourds will fly from car windows, fall from apartment balconies, career like cannon fire from the arms of pranksters craving the odd satisfaction of that dull thud.
There are, to be sure, more productive ways to deploy a Halloween pumpkin. Post-holiday, composting is a noble option. A pumpkin grower in Wisconsin once turned a 500-pound Atlantic Giant into a boat.
But what we almost certainly won’t do is eat it. First cultivated more than 10,000 years ago in Mexico, cucurbitaceae were mainstays of the Native American diet. If for no other reason than its status as one of America’s oldest cultivated crops, an honest pumpkin deserves our reverence.
October 16, 2006
The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
by MICHAEL POLLAN, published October 15, 2006 in the New York Times Magazine
Soon after the news broke last month that nearly 200 Americans in 26 states had been sickened by eating packaged spinach contaminated with E. coli, I received a rather coldblooded e-mail message from a friend in the food business. “I have instructed my broker to purchase a million shares of RadSafe,” he wrote, explaining that RadSafe is a leading manufacturer of food-irradiation technology. It turned out my friend was joking, but even so, his reasoning was impeccable. If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat — sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism — to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.
March 29, 2006
My Saudi Arabian Breakfast
By Chad Heeter
Please join me for breakfast. It's time to fuel up again.
On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this particular morning is a healthy looking little meal -- a bowl of imported McCann's Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet's Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a café in downtown Berkeley, I'd likely have to add another $6.00, plus tip for the same.)
My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So, for just over a buck and half an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I'm energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I've just added a little butter, milk, and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.
February 28, 2006
Alice Waters: Eating for Credit
by Alice Waters
Published February 24, 2006 in the New York Times
It's shocking that because of the rise in Type 2 diabetes experts say that the children we're raising now will probably die younger than their parents — the result of a disease that is largely preventable by diet and exercise. But in public schools these days, children all too often are neither learning to eat well nor to exercise.
Fifty years ago, we had a preview of today's obesity crisis: a presidential council told us that America's children weren't fit — and we did something about it, at great expense. We built gymnasiums and tracks and playgrounds. We hired and trained teachers. We made physical education part of the curriculum from kindergarten through high school. Students were graded on their performance.
Universal physical education is a start, and it's a shame that schools have been cutting back on recess and gym. But in a country where nine million children over 6 are obese we need the diet part of the equation, too. It's time for students to start getting credit for eating a good lunch.
February 21, 2006
Go With Your Gut
By Harriet Brown
Printed in the the New York Times, 20 February 2006
Last week's reports that low-fat diets may not reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer have left Americans more confused than ever about what to eat. I'd like to make a radical suggestion: instead of wringing our hands over fat grams and calories, let's resolve to enjoy whatever food we eat.
Because, as it turns out, when you eat something you like, your body makes more efficient use of its nutrients. Which means that choking down a plateful of steamed cauliflower (if you hate steamed cauliflower) is not likely to do you as much good as you think.
November 22, 2005
Vegetables and Fruits: the Case for Closeness
The news wires are currently running a story about the rising number of fruits and vegetables contaminated with food-borne illnesses such as salmonella and E.coli.
According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), produce triggered 554 outbreaks of food-borne illness between 1990 and 2003, sickening 28,315 people. Of those 554 outbreaks, 111 were due to Salmonella. Although poultry has historically been responsible for far more Salmonella infections, in the most recent years in CSPI’s database, produce seems to be catching up.
The CSPI rightly calls for stricter standards for how food is handled as one way of reducing the risks to consumers. To address the root cause of the problem, however, one must look at the big picture of our food system. Since 1980, the distance that food travels from field to fork is up by 25%. A significant percentage of this increase is due to well-traveled produce. Consumers have come to expect that they can have any foods they want anytime of the year, regardless of the season and the fossil fuels needed to make the global supermarket function.
If we're serious about health, both our own and that of the planet, we'll need to think about how to "relocalize" the global food system. Health officials like to talk about increasing the traceability of foods through high-tech labels. Surely, the easiest way to trace where food comes from is to have it grown and processed as close as possible to where it will be consumed.
November 17, 2005
Food Security Starts at Home
It's taken a while, but the term "food security" is finding its way into public discourse and not a moment too soon. As garden writer Barbara Damrosch eloquently points out in a recent column in the Washington Post, kitchen gardeners have an important role to play in making our food system more secure.
Here's an excerpt:
A growing food security movement views local, community-based agriculture, quite rightly, as an important means of lifting people out of poverty, and its best efforts give them the pride of growing their own sustenance. Our towns and even our cities abound in arable land waiting to be tilled, currently disguised as "lawn." I can imagine a day when the greenswards surrounding empty industrial parks become our salvation. Ironically it was Henry Ford, the godfather of motorized transport who said, "No unemployment insurance can be compared to an alliance between man and a plot of land."
The reasons why I grow my own food have nothing to do with a sense of fear and foreboding. I make time for it because I enjoy the work and because I love the taste of what I grow. Still, it is reassuring to know that if push came to shove, my family could be fed within the closed circle of our yard. We would plant in soil enriched with compost from wastes the garden and kitchen provide. By eating food appropriate to the season, root cellaring some crops, drying and canning others, making sure we grew enough staples such as corn, potatoes and dried beans, we could be self-sufficient. We wouldn't even have to buy seeds if we grew only open-pollinated varieties rather than hybrids, so that we could save the seed from each year's crop to plant the next.
October 16, 2005
One Garden Salad to Go -- Hold the Oil
Hurricanes Rita and Katrina are having a clear effect on both the hearts and minds of Americans, but I'm wondering what long-term impact they will have on another part of America's collective anatomy: Our stomach.
This may sound like a frivolous consideration in the midst of the suffering that has been taking place in the Gulf Coast, where people have been threatening each other over warm soda and potato chips. What may seem trifling to some, however, is essential to others. I side philosophically with the 19th-century French foodie Brillat-Savarin, who wrote that the "destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves."
With costly battles raging abroad, our long-fought war against Mother Nature ramping up in intensity, and gas prices reaching all time highs, it seems like we Americans may have finally bitten off more than we can chew. Or have we?
Physics tell us that for every action, there is a reaction. The destiny of America may depend on how it reacts to the current confluence of troubling events happening at home and overseas. If history is any guide, there will be a reaction in the way we eat. During World War II, U.S. citizens responded to government's call for greater food production by planting thousands of "victory gardens," which continued enriching American communities and dinner tables well after the war was over. In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans became culinary homebodies, dramatically reducing the number of meals purchased at restaurants and take-out joints in favor of home cooking.
My hope is that we will respond to the current instability in the world - political and meteorological - by reducing the amount of oil we eat. I'm not talking, of course, about olive, peanut or canola, but sweet crude: the amount of fossil fuel it takes to produce and transport food from field to fork.
This won't be easy. America is the nation that invented long-distance food transportation. The WorldWatch Institute estimates that the ingredients for the average American meal travel more 1,500 miles before landing in our plates, 20 percent more than they did two decades ago. Growth in the global food system is one of the single most important causes of increased greenhouse gases during the past 50 years.
Yet, far from being a badge of shame, these statistics represent American ingenuity at its best for some. The construction of the interstate highway system was heralded as a remarkable feat that would create a national - and, ultimately, global - market for local food products. That food harvested in California could appear shiny and shrink-wrapped days later on the shelves of Maine grocery stores was seen as nothing short of a miracle.
The whole American food system is prefaced, though, on two important theories that recent geo-political events are proving untrue. The first is that that there is a limitless supply of cheap petroleum products to fuel our long-distance food system. For those of you who continue to cling to this belief, a trip to your local gas station should quickly disabuse you of this. The theory that is even more dangerous is that we can keep on eating the way we always have - any food we want, from anywhere, at any time of the year, no matter what the fossil fuel implications may be - without it having an impact on the natural cycles that make the growing of food possible.
It's true that we still don't know for sure what and where these impacts might be. For some areas, it may be hurricane-strength rains like the ones that washed away entire landscapes of sugarcane and soybeans in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Alabama. For farmers in other areas, like the Midwest, it could be extreme droughts like the ones they have experienced this summer, which sent the Missouri River to its lowest level ever and is now sending those farmers running in search of federal disaster assistance.
In striking at the heart of Cajun country, Katrina and Rita dealt a staggering blow to one of America's most loved cuisines. Their long-term culinary legacy, however, need not be tragic. By raising gas prices and food transport costs, they may end up blowing some wind into the sails of a local foods renaissance that is crossing the nation. This revival brings with it the promise of fresh flavors, healthier citizens and vibrant local economies. I don't know about you, but that's a national destiny that I'd be willing to chew on.