food

Nine Gallons #2: True Stories by Susie Cagle

tina — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

In Nine Gallons #2: True Stories by Susie Cagle, writer and artist Susie Cagle recounts her experiences with Food Not Bombs. For those unfamiliar, Food Not Bombs is a "franchise activist non-organization dedicated to fighting hunger with vegetarian meals comprised mainly from wasted food.” Food Not Bombs chapters are all over the world, though predominantly in major cities.

Though this publication is small, Cagle covers a lot of ground. You learn that it’s not easy being involved with the non-organization. One will face working for free (not everyone can afford to volunteer), unreliable volunteers, and uncertainty over where food and resources will come from. The public responds to your work in varied ways, ranging anywhere from positive support to fevered rudeness. There are also issues of class and racial privilege that come into play. As the writer perfectly states, "a largely white monopoly on Food Not Bombs as a cultural institution is an impediment to people of color self-organizing.”

Though the artist didn't touch on weather being an issue, the climate in which you live greatly affects when and where you can serve food. One year, the Food Not Bombs chapter I was involved in served spaghetti at a park on the fourth of July. With little warning, there was a rainstorm that showered us and our hard work. We couldn't afford a tent or cover of any kind, so the food was flooded and had to be thrown away.

Susie's writing is skilled, her illustrations are well-formed and charming, and her characters are both believable and easy to relate to. The only qualm I had with the zine was her illustration style. The artist draws people from a two-thirds angle and they are usually facing the same way. I am unsure whether she is limiting her angles and facial drawings due to necessity or artistic choice. Either way, this repetition distracts us from good stories that deserve our focus.

Overall, Nine Gallons #2 serves as an easy to read, honest, and articulate recount of working with Food Not Bombs.

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, April 11th 2011

Veganize This!: From Surf & Turf to Ice-Cream Pie--200 Animal-Free Recipes for People Who Love to Eat

mandy — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Jenn Shagrin

Da Capo

One of the struggles faced by many vegetarians, vegans, or any other person who has a restricted diet is that you can no longer eat the “comfort foods” you enjoyed earlier in your life. One of my favorite foods to eat when I was a child was beef stroganoff. I can still taste it when I think about the flavors, aromas, and even its delightfully sloppy appearance. Alas, I no longer eat red meat, so beef stroganoff is not a part of my culinary repertoire. And although I’ve made the low-rent version with mushrooms and cream sauce, the flavors and aromas that went along with this venture are just not as memorable.

Veganize This! author Jenn Shagrin gets this quandary, and thoroughly addresses it in her cookbook. A self-described “lazy vegan” who grew up enjoying Italian and Chinese food in a Jewish home in Youngstown, Ohio, Shagrin respects the importance that certain rich, classic recipes can hold in our lives. She succinctly describes the dilemma of eating according to your ethical perspective, while creating food that not only tastes amazing but appeases your nostalgic side as well. The goal of her compilation is to help people recreate recipes that were originally centered around meat, in a stellar vegan style.

Despite her self-description, Shagrin's recipes are anything but lazy. She has created concoctions that are ambitious, interesting, and sometimes a bit terrifying. In the mood for meat and potatoes? Try dijonaise-crusted "beef" tenderloin medallions with vegan béarnaise sauce over roasted eggplant and garlic smashed potatoes. Anyone up for chicken wings? Bourbon buffalo mole "chicken" wings with vegan bleu cheese-avocado oil aioli are sure to please.

The titles of the recipes aren't the only things that are long; the ingredients lists are extensive as well. No one ever said creating carnivorous dishes in a meatless fashion would be easy. However, due to time constraints and a lack of confidence, I made the vegan bacon as my test recipe.

Aside from having to purchase a few items I don’t keep stocked in my kitchen, such as liquid smoke and mirin, I possessed the vegan staples needed to make the bacon, such as soy sauce, tofu, and onion powder. After a few hours of marinating in the fridge, and then some baking in the oven, my "bacon" strips were done! Anyone who is a former omnivore knows that there is nothing under the sun that can rival real bacon; however, this version was meatier and more substantive than the frozen kind you can get at the grocery store, and infinitely cheaper to boot.

Most of the recipes in Veganize This! require ample time and preparation, and may require ingredients that are not at your local grocery. But I wholeheartedly recommend this book as a staple for anyone who promotes environmental, social, or animal welfare in their diet. Want to enjoy your Grandma’s best recipe, but you no longer eat beef? Veganize This! ensures you will not be disappointed.

Written by: Rachel Muzika Scheib, April 4th 2011

Meat: A Benign Extravagance

mandy — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Simon Fairlie

Chelsea Green Publishing

Simon Fairlie’s contribution to the debate over how food choices influence the ecological and socioeconomic health of our communities, collected as sixteen chapters in Meat: A Benign Extravagance, probably will, as the foreword predicts, impact the future of sustainable agriculture. The scope of the project is grand, and Fairlie presents what appears to be both thorough research and sound reasoning regarding several interrelated issues. His readable, likeable style, and mostly objective tone, have led reviewers to interpret his findings in contradictory ways (i.e., we should cut back on meat/we should eat meat), which actually may be a testament to the book’s value.

Fairlie’s willingness to entertain the notion that meat production (if carried out properly, i.e., on small-scale, holistic, integrated farm systems) may be the best model when all variables are considered comes across as a practical, humble, yet mildly self-interested position. He admits he doesn’t have all the answers, but that, as a once economically poor “born-again carnivore,” he still likes keeping livestock and supporting “small farmers and peasants in their struggle against agribusiness.” He recognizes his bias, and explains he feels “instinctively that the world would be much the poorer without domestic livestock and (that he wants) to work out why."

I was originally drawn in to the data orientation of Meat via tables delineating the Mellanby diet (which Fairlie learned from the 1975 book by a Scottish ecologist – Can Britain Feed Itself?). Apparently it all began with highly informal sketches, what Fairlie calls "at best, a back of an A4 envelope job," which should not be seen as "anything other than a rough guide, and a useful framework for thinking about such matters." Such candor and occasional attempts at humor make it a refreshing read, not only for fellow scholars in the various fields he surveys, but also for policymakers (for whom the book seems particularly well suited) and novices (like myself). It’s not every day that an author suggests to readers who are daunted by his voluminous data that they can “cherrypick” whatever is most intriguing. Thankfully, Fairlie’s clear presentation style, and his inclusion of tables and figures whenever they are useful for illuminating his points, makes that unnecessary.

One of the benefits of Fairlie’s multidiscipline approach is that you get the sense that he is exploring the whole terrain of an issue. For example, in the chapter titled "Animal Furlongs and Vegetable Miles" (in which his central theme is the contest between animal power and biofuels, and the general "reluctance to examine animal power") there is an amazing range of perspectives surveyed, from current information about progress in biofuel technology to agricultural knowledge about houses, hectares, and cabbages, to even Ghandi's 1915 opinion on using cows to plow the land. Juxtapose this with highly data oriented chapters analyzing, for example, methane and CO2 versus their relative milk and rice production, down to the gram.

If I had one criticism it would be that Fairlie’s fun titles, like "Holistic Cowboys and Carbon Farmers," did sometimes obscure the nature and purpose of the writing. The chapter reads more like a reflective account of data collection and number comparisons (dollars, tonnes, miles, mycorrhizal fungi levels, soil carbon savings, etc.) than a narrative about contemporary cowboys and farmers. Although I appreciated when Fairlie emerged from the numbers and concluded the chapter with a shot of voice and personality, it nonetheless seemed a bit artificially framed.

While I couldn’t recount much of the data I tried to wrap my head around while reading this book, I did come away with a few conceptual nuggets. For instance, the spread of permaculture (a contraction of "permanent" and "agriculture"), was mainly the outcome of an effort to reverse the destructive widespread plowing in the twenties that led to the dustbowls. In one chapter, Fairlie explores how permaculture techniques might apply to the development of comprehensive land use strategies for vegan communities.

I also liked learning about the dialogue on forestry versus agriculture in the UK, in the chapter titled “The Struggle Between Light and Shade.” In it, Fairlie points out that forest productivity and farming productivity was not separated on such a strict binary prior to the industrial revolution. This helps us understand how a "permacultural approach...will not be one that favours trees on the grounds that they have a superior indigenous pedigree; it will be one that juggles with the dynamic between light and shade to produce landscapes that are rich, biodiverse and convivial for humans."

Fairlie presents his “rich, biodiverse and convivial” vision with clarity, and his attempt to gather data that clarifies the vision’s potential for both accuracy and success is admirable. If there is a downside to Meat, it is that some of the essays are limited in applicability to the United Kingdom or comparable environments. I’ve always been intrigued by islands, though, so this enhanced my experience of a highly interesting and relevant book.

Written by: Julie Ann, April 3rd 2011

Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

mandy — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Parama Roy

Duke University Press

The introduction to Alimentary Tracts begins with a Salman Rushdie quote about peppercorns and includes the phrase “symbolic anthropophagy.” Similarly to the first two sentences, the remainder of the book would continue to intrigue and baffle me.

Alimentary Tracts consists of four long chapters entitled “Disgust: Food, Filth, and Anglo-Indian Flesh in 1857”; “Abstinence: Manifestos on Meat and Masculinity”; “Dearth: Figures of Famine”; and “Appetite: Spices Redux,” and one short final chapter, “Remains: A Coda.” The style of writing is admittedly dense, like an over-rich chocolate cake. And at times the meaning seems to be lost in the thickness of the form.

More simply, overall, Roy questions what is eaten, and what or who is involved in the process of cooking, sharing, and ingesting. She provides an analytical investigation of the “gastropolitics and gastropoetics.” Alimentary Tracts essentially asks how aspects of food politics (such as famine) impact identity and history in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Roy argues that “who eats and with whom, who starves, and what is rejected as food are fundamental to colonial and postcolonial making – and unmaking.”

In discussing famine, Roy brings attention to questions of equity and access. In the first chapter Roy provides greater context to Gandhi’s famous protest of the salt tax in India. She also looks at the issue of pollution for high-class Hindu males in food as interlinked to concepts of sex. And, in subsequent chapters, she discusses Mahasweta Devi’s coverage of famine in her short stories and novels.

In chapter two, she discusses Gandhi’s experiments with truth, eating, and abstinence. Humans today have certainly come a long way in acceptance of organic, local, vegan cuisines when compared to when Gandhi first went to England. At that time, open defiance of Hindu traditions were seen as civilized; eating meat and drinking alcohol was just one aspect of the norm.

I found the chapter focusing on appetite to smoothly flow the best. Roy traces the evolution of the term curry, an invention of Anglo-Indians in India, rather than an appropriate description of the various styles of cooking and spices that go into Indian food. Incorporating analysis of cookbooks and Indian writers, she weaves together what seems initially to be a strange combination of concepts.

Its easy to imagine excerpts of this text in a reader on South Asian studies, food politics, literary criticism or cultural criticism; it is nothing close to a cookbook and isn’t meant for light reading. In her introduction, Roy states that the alimentary tracts of colonial and postcolonial India contain lessons for students of literary, feminist, cultural, and area studies. Though the text can be painfully difficult to wade through, that is because it contains much substance.

Written by: Lakshmi Eassey, April 1st 2011

Whitewash: The Disturbing Truth about Cow’s Milk and Your Health

farhana — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Joseph Keon

New Society Publishers

Joseph Keon’s Whitewash aims to provide enlightenment on the industrialization of dairy farms: a place where happy cows no longer exist. Keon, a wellness consultant, nutritionist and fitness expert examines the production of milk while emphasizing the negative impact it has on the health of American consumers. It also helps that John Robbins, the son of the founder and owner of Baskin-Robbins ice cream company provides endorsement in the foreword of the book.

Keon builds on the fact that bone fractures and osteoporosis rates remain higher in countries with a higher intake of calcium (like the United States) and attributes this to the inability to retain the nutrient. However, he also explores a host of other potential illnesses that milk contributes to including acne, allergies (lactose intolerance) and heart disease. However, at times his scientific truth appears to be stretched as he demonizes cow’s milk to also contribute to Crohn’s disease, cancer, and infertility, not recognizing other potential factors. He also discusses obesity and the forty billion dollar diet industry.

However, one cannot help but feel that he may be part of that industry as well as he spends a chapter endorsing veganism. At times, there is simply not enough scientific evidence to place a significant proportion of the blame on the dairy industry. It is also never considered that there may be other components of milk that are causing this reaction in humans. Unless of course you consider the poisons present in America’s favorite source of calcium.

Whitewash points out the obvious existence of pesticides and natural growth hormones in milk (it is meant for baby calves, after all). However, Keon goes a step further and discusses the existence of rabies in unpasteurized milk, a onetime incident of flame retardant being mixed in with cow’s feed and other chemicals present in milk. These brief incidents in his book only weaken his overall argument as it seems a bit overreaching since it cannot be a basis for each gallon of milk in every freezer section across America. It can be agreed though that our health, physical inactivity and overall exposure to drugs (and chemicals) can be attributed to the price that we pay for living in a modern society in comparison to the rest of the world.

Essentially, a deep analysis of other imperfect industries (for instance, chicken, livestock, and the consumption of eggs) would potentially produce similar results. Keon has demonized cow’s milk similarly to the blame placed on high fructose corn syrup and the corn industry that was initially one of the scapegoats for the obesity epidemic facing America. Additionally, the alternatives Keon provides to dairy are essentially idealistic as the consumers of cow’s milk would now be relegated to investing more money into alternatives to get vitamins A, D, K and calcium which may not be feasible. International alternatives are also not provided. If cow’s milk in the United States is so detrimental to our health, does that mean that imported powdered milk can be a replacement? This is highly unlikely since so much emphasis was placed on the fat content of the milk itself.

Whitewash may not set the ardent milk consumer straight, but it will allow us to take a second look at the fat content. However, the average low/medium income family will not be rushing out any time soon to pay higher prices for calcium alternatives. Perhaps further insight on the dairy industry itself would sway the average milk drinker into sympathizing for the unhappy cows across America.

Written by: Aneesa A. Baboolal, March 27th 2011

Holy Kitchens: True Business

brittany — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Daljit Singh

Junoon Hospitality

Punjabi chef Vikas Khanna is known for bringing great Indian food to discerning New York City diners. Although he surely has his hands full with his new restaurant Junoon, Khanna is working on an arduous extra-curricular project—a series of short documentary films about the worldwide connection between spirituality and feeding the hungry.

The series, Holy Kitchens, will explore different religions’ beliefs and practices regarding serving the needy through feeding them. The first film, True Business, is about Sikhism, but Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism will all be featured in upcoming films.

True Business follows Khanna as he returns to his childhood home of Amritsar, India. In the film’s brief thirty-seven-minute run time, the chef takes us through a history of the Sikh religion, including the belief behind langar, the practice of serving free food to the public. The first guru, Guru Nanak, started the tradition in sixteenth-century India at a time when people were deeply divided by religion, gender, and caste. The notion of sharing food with people regardless of their beliefs or social position was a radical concept at the time. Arguably, it still is.

Today, langars thrive on several continents. Khanna focuses on the langar in Amritsar at the Golden Temple, but he also showcases langars in the United States and South America. Khanna’s travels show that wherever Sikhs live, they offer langars to bring people together and serve their communities. Langars worldwide serve a staggering amount of people, as many as 50,000 a day in some kitchens, which means huge-scale food production. The best part of True Business is watching the few scenes that show this process—how the meals get to the table. At the langar in Amristar, volunteers pile made-from-scratch flat bread in five-foot-tall stacks, laboring over hot cooking stones to prepare tons of food for strangers.

Between depictions of the international langars, the film shows some grainy but still impressive footage of Gurdwaras (places of worship) and other urban scenery in India. Khanna uses very little narration, but does feature several interviews with scholars and leaders, including Deepak Chopra, reflecting on the history and significance of langars as a practice.

The film could do with a little more organizing to give background and structure for people who aren’t familiar with Khanna’s career as a chef or with langars, but overall True Business does paint a picture of the roots and community mindedness of Sikhism. It will be interesting to see what approach Khanna takes to other religions, with which he might not have a personal history, in the films that have yet to be released.

Written by: Hannah Moulton Belec, February 13th 2011

Jonathan Safran Foer (01/19/2011)

brittany — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

London School of Economics

London, England

Jonathan Safran Foer spoke about the issues in his most recent book Eating Animals to a packed house at the London School of Economics. I haven’t read the book yet, or either one of his other two titles Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, so I went bracing for a preachy rally full of vegetarian dogma.

For those of you who have read the book, you probably know that I had no reason to fear. I’m a vegetarian, but both vegetarian activists and passionate meat eaters alike bother me. I tire of vegetarian propagandists shoving violent pictures of animal cruelty in people’s faces in an attempt to convert the nonconvertible. Just the same, I grow weary of telling people I’m a vegetarian and fielding questions like “No meat? What the hell do you eat?!” “Why? It’s natural to eat meat, y’know” or my favorite, “Ok, but jamon you eat, right?”

Thankfully, there were no leaflets handed out for either cause. Rather, I was captivated by Safran Foer’s social and environmental observations gained from the three years of research he put into the project. Safran points out that at this point in society’s development, everyone can recognize that eating meat is an “issue”, something we care about. However, voices from both sides are overly judgmental.

Safran Foer says vegetarian activists have helped create this strict dichotomy between meat eaters and non-meat eaters so much so that people do not see the benefits of just cutting down on meat consumption. “They have created a framework in discussing this so that they feel there are only two options: you’re a vegetarian or you’re a carnivore. And, most people cannot condition themselves to become a vegetarian… I think most people can condition themselves to eat less meat.” According to Safran Foer, if Americans can attempt to not eat meat for just one meal every week, the influence on the environment would be the same as taking five million cars off the road.

Vegetarians are often teased that they have canine teeth because humans are meant to eat meat naturally. Perhaps that was true during times when food was simply putting calories in our bodies. But Safran Foer points out that the huge social discourse surrounding the meat industry and the great lengths they take to create an idealistic picture of factory farms plays a much larger part in what we eat than we realize. According to Safran Foer, the animals in factory farms in the U.S. consume eight times more antibiotics than humans. Safran Foer asks “Is it natural to eat these kinds of animals that are raised in these ways? What’s natural about eating an animal that cannot survive without antibiotics? What’s natural about eating food that most nutritionists biologist and doctors I’ve spoken with say is probably the reason why girls are going through puberty at ages nine and ten?”

The system in which meat is produced is so distanced from consumers that we aren’t conscious of the externalized costs to the environment. Safran Foer says fast food “is presented as the cheapest food that’s ever been produced, when in fact it’s the most expensive food that’s ever been produced.” Indeed, the cost rung up at the supermarket does not include the destruction done to the environment. Safran Foer says the Global South has paid a huge price for this. Africa, South America, as well as parts of Eastern Europe all export food that they grow themselves but don’t eat to American and European companies. Their natural environments are destroyed in the process. Safran Foer asks “For what? Only for burgers. Not to solve the healthcare problem. Not to create peace in the Middle East. It’s for cheap burgers that make us fat.” Safran Foer also found that ninety-nine percent of the world’s soy crop is fed to animals concluding that, “No one eats tofu like meat eaters.”

Safran Foer claims that Eating Animals exists to begin a discussion about how people eat meat. He was not trying to create a book to persuade readers to become vegetarians, which is why he approached it journalistically, relying on the industry’s statistics and using two fact checkers. Even if you’re a die hard carnivore who scoffs at anything coming from the Kingdom Plantae or if you’re a vegan who refuses to swat a malaria carrying mosquito or somewhere in between, you should read Safran Foer’s book, if for no other reason than to learn about the affect the foods you choose to eat have on the rest of the world.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

An mp3 recording of the event can be accessed here.

Written by: Sara Custer, February 9th 2011

Green for Life

mandy — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Victoria Boutenko

North Atlantic Books

Green for Life is both fascinating and troubling at once. In a nutshell, Victoria Boutenko persuades the reader that people should consume one quart of blended greens per day. She further demonstrates that humans should be eating the same diet as chimpanzees, because "modern people and chimpanzees share an estimated 99.4% of our DNA sequence." Many folks may pick up this book expecting a cookbook; however, Green for Life mostly consists of health information and testimonials. Although a few recipes are included, they are a minority of the book's content, and placed in the very back; these recipes are designed more for health than flavor, foodies be damned.

In each chapter of Green for Life, Boutenko discusses a different health topic: fiber, stomach acid, protein, alkalinity. Every subject concludes that consuming green smoothies is the best solution for overall human health. I felt reluctant to believe much of what I was reading, as there are not enough sources listed, a major flaw of this publication.

There was also the issue of not knowing precisely what really constitutes as "greens" throughout most of the book. Chapter fifteen finally gives a list, though it's only a list of what the author and her family have personally consumed, and therefore not comprehensive. I would have liked this information to have been included at the very beginning.

The testimonials from people who consume green smoothies are positive. So positive, in fact, that I was in disbelief. Could moles really fall off from drinking smoothies? Diseases be cured? Cataracts shrink? I hope this is all true, but it all seems too good to be.

Green for Life does little to consider those with lower incomes and limited access to healthy resources. "This miraculous drink is available to every person in every country," Boutenko offensively states. Not everyone on Earth has access to quality blending machinery or healthy food. And this lifestyle change is a drain on time and money; few people can afford a Vitamix blender (or other equally high-powered blender) and daily supplies of organic produce. It is explained that a weaker blender and conventionally-grown produce would not yield the best results. Bummer.

Though a good beginner's guide that is ripe for discussion, Green for Life requires further sources, study, and more consideration for those who have fewer means.

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, January 16th 2011

Growing Roots: The New Generation of Sustainable Farmers, Cooks, and Food Activists

barbara — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Katherine Leiner

Sunrise Lane Productions

Seared Scallop Salad with Honey Vinaigrette and Moqui (Spicy) Mac (n’Cheese), yum. This was simply the one of the selections of delicious recipes in Growing Roots that I attempted with the assistance of my boyfriend/sous-chef. But Growing Roots is much more than a cookbook. Chronicling one woman’s cross-country road trip and profiling folks on the ground at every level, from composting queens to herbalists to family farmers to social entrepreneurs-restaurateurs, Growing Roots is a unique window into the breadth of labor and love that is going into the ever-growing movement of food sustainability.

Each interview flows into the next by region, not issue area, but it works because you get the sense you are tagging along on this road trip with Leiner and her dog, Luna. Leiner gives a little exposition on how she met the people she interviews and where she spoke with them along the way in her travels; interestingly though, she predominantly uses their own words. Interviews focus on the daily lives and progress of their work on sustainability. Most of the profiles are complemented by each individual’s favorite recipes; most include ideas for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert, and all of them look incredible. The two I made on Sunday, mentioned above, were scrumptious and strangely complemented one another, even though they came from different folks.

From the scope of the interviews, Katherine Leiner appears to have a real insider’s connections throughout the industry. She notes lots of personal relationships, and though she tries to sound down-to-earth her Manhattan foodie fabulousness bubbles up again and again. It appears that she sees the book as a platform to highlight the little people of the sustainability world. Perhaps she sees it as doing her part, or perhaps she has compiled this as a pet project simply because she can.

Ironically, everyone highlighted in the book describes sacrifices they’ve made in order to do this work. Day jobs that they love and feel are so important leave them with limited means or other losses. Juxtaposed with Leiner, it seems at times she is almost using them. But to be fair, I come from very much the same school of privileged environmentalism that Leiner does, and the opportunity to credit these hard work activists is incredible—very few people could pull it off.

More than anything, the consistent pattern of each interview would seem to get old quite fast, but it doesn’t at all. Each person’s story is compelling and inspiring and makes you want to read more and more. It even began to create grand delusions in my own city girl mind about the beauties of farming and that even I could be capable of it. Now, that’s a hell of a book.

Written by: Nicole Levitz, November 25th 2010

Starting from Scratch: A Novel with Recipes

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Susan Gilbert-Collins

Touchstone

In Starting from Scratch, Olivia Tschetter successfully defended her doctoral dissertation and lost her mother all in one day. The youngest of four siblings, Olivia moves back home to be with her father, to run away from her responsibilities at school, and to grieve. Her connection to her mother, who was an incredible cook, is food. At first, she uses food as a way to shove her pain aside, but it eventually becomes one of the ways she gets past her grief.

This is the simplest way to describe a book that is both straightforward and layered at the same time, particularly when revealing those layers would give away all the best parts. Let me just say that it’s easy to enjoy this book on a superficial level—it’s well-written, the characters are easy to relate to, and it’s a quick read—but there are also moments that can be appreciated more deeply. For example, when Olivia unexpectedly starts with an old friend of her mother’s, Winnie, she stumbles into a minefield of sorts as Winnie reveals secrets Olivia’s family has kept from her. It turns out that Winnie is estranged from her own daughter, and the parallels between the way Olivia is suffering and the way Winnie and her own daughter deal with their own issues are quite compelling. It all reminds the reader that life-changing moments are universal, and that even if we deal with things in our own way, we don’t have to deal with them alone.

Another thing I must point out (again, without giving too much away) is the way this novel pulls off having both food and abuse as its subject matter. It sounds completely absurd, yet Starting from Scratch does it in a beautifully poignant way.

Food is almost like this family’s own language; it’s the way they communicate with each other, for better or worse. As Olivia works to finish the cooking newsletter her mother was working on when she died, the reader is taken through Olivia’s mourning and her reaction to the secrets she’s learned from Winnie. Meanwhile, the way women and their families deal with abuse is at the very heart of this story. Surprisingly, one thing does not take away from the other or make the abuse seem trivial. In short, Starting from Scratch is a pleasant surprise. I found myself laughing out loud at some parts, and weeping at others. The story sucks you in and it’s over all too soon. By the end, I felt like I was a part of this family, and I wanted desperately to find out what happens to all of them beyond the point at which the story ends.

Written by: frau sally benz, August 22nd 2010

The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite

admin — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By David Kessler

Penguin India

Obesity and the health issues that accompany it have long been a subject of intense discussion in the Western world, where the abundance of super-cheap and highly processed foods has been linked to many health disorders. David Kessler’s The End of Overeating is an important addition to the books written on the subject. Kessler has the background to take on this complex subject, having served as commissioner at the US Food and Drug Administration. He is also a man who has grappled with weight issues, giving him a more personal interest in the topic.

One of the biggest strengths of The End of Overeating (and the reason I called it an important book) is that Kessler articulates convincingly a position on obesity that moves it away from the issue of individual control and choices ("if you’re fat, you have no willpower, and you really ought to control yourself"). While for a large part of America calorie intake is outpacing calorie absorption, he acknowledges that it’s not as simple as "having the willpower to say no." Kessler also acknowledges that a small percentage of obese people are obese due to other medical reasons and that "hypereating" is not restricted to obese people.

Kessler advances his position by taking a close look at the food and restaurant business, and how it gets consumers to eat larger portions, eat more often, eat at any place, eat at more locations, eat more indulging foods, and eat mind-blowing combinations of fat-sugar-salt that make us want to, well, eat some more. He also goes to some length to explain how overeating can become a habit by conditioning and by altering the stimulus-reward circuits in the brain. By indulging in high calorie foods, which offer a temporary but pleasurable sensation, we are primed to remember those sensations the next time we come across the same stimulus.

If all this sounds esoteric, think of a food experience that you particularly crave—perhaps a burger at a particular fast food joint or a particular brand of chocolate—and think about how hard it is to turn away from the treat it promises. That is what Kessler is talking about, and The End of Overeating helps us to understand why we don’t just ’say no’. The first three sections—"Sugar, Fat, Salt," "The Food Industry," and "Conditioned Hypereating Emerges"—are all about dissecting the problem, and are the strongest parts of the book.

One quibble is that Kessler sometimes stops short of covering an individual’s story in sufficient detail, preferring to move on to the next of numerous chapters. One also suspects Kessler would have done well to stop with his thorough analysis of the problem rather than extend the book to offering solutions as well. The sections "The Theory of Treatment," "Food Rehab," and "The End of Overeating" are somewhat disappointing in their generality when compared with the rigorousness of the first half of the book. While there are a few useful suggestions, they don’t go beyond what common sense suggests, nor are they buttressed with any studies or other information on their efficacy. They also veer dangerously close to the "you can stop eating if only you try" approach that Kessler disses in the first half.

Despite these drawbacks, The End of Overeating is an interesting read for anyone who has struggled with weight or with the expectations of desirability in an increasingly appearance-conscious world. Those of us living in India can already see the wholesale import of Western brands and lifestyles into what was a slower and more wholesome way of eating. For us, it may be the "Beginning of Overeating," but that is no reason we shouldn’t be better prepared.

A longer review can be found at Apu's World

Written by: Aparna V. Singh, August 14th 2010

Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Robert Paarlberg

Oxford University Press

As an ethically and environmentally aware feminist vegetarian, I view food and politics as ineluctably joined. Robert Paarlberg’s Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know challenged some of my basic ideas about hunger, famine, and the scope of issues contained by the term food politics, yet the book ignores some of the ways in which food is always simultaneously personal and political.

Food Politics covers a wide range of topics connected to the way we eat as well as to our food’s impact on the world around us at local and global levels. Paarlberg examines population growth, food costs, politics of chronic hunger and famine, farming technologies, food aid, obesity, environmentalism, agribusiness, fast food culture, organic and local food, GMOs, and the overarching structures that govern the world food system. At times Paarlberg oversimplifies complex problems, especially in his chapters “The Politics of Obesity” and “Agriculture, the Environment, and Farm Animals.” Moreover, although he supports his points with statistics and logical arguments, he frequently flattens alternative positions, sometimes inconsistently. For example, he suggests that vegetarianism has little global impact on the food supply in one context yet acknowledges the consumption of less red meat as a better way to reduce the environmental impact of food than eating local produce.

Paarlberg recognizes the significance of women’s labor in third-world farming systems. He addresses the political disenfranchisement of women in these economies when he depicts the problem of chronic undernutrition in “poor and hungry communities” where women are prevented from political action because they are, first, overextended by their duties as farmers and as caregivers for the children and elderly and, second, their socially marginalized status. Feminists doubtless know this and would like to see Paarlberg push his points further, as I wanted him to, but his attention to the gendered politics of undernutrition is significant.

Paarlberg considers the work of Rachel Carson and Frances Moore Lappé in dialogue with Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, but he dismisses Frances Moore Lappé’s as a “young countercultural food activist.” Although Lappé was young when she published Diet for a Small Planet, she has created The Small Planet Institute and established a rich, innovative series of books, videos, teaching aids, and other resources about the politics and environmental impact of food. Although he supports some of Lappé’s points, he does so in a way that shifts their focus—he implies that her actions are good, but not for the reasons upon which she bases them, which is a partial, uneven, and reductive way to treat an argument.

The greatest flaw of Food Politics is Paarlberg’s oversimplification of other groups’ and individual’s claims. He provides useful and even groundbreaking information but only by suspending these fundamental components of food politics in a way that does not allow for the inextricability of belief or ideology from the way we eat.

Written by: Emily Bowles, August 7th 2010

Soul Kitchen

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Fatih Akın

Corazón International

Soul Kitchen is a lot like cotton candy—sweet but, ultimately, not very satisfying. Like many festival favorites, the plot of this independent German film revolves around a cast of lovably quirky characters who get themselves eye-deep into trouble.

Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), a German of Greek descent, has a lot of stuff on his plate. He’s the proprietor of Soul Kitchen, a struggling eatery in a rundown section of Hamburg. The tax people, led by Frau Schuster (Catrin Striebeck), are knocking at his door. His ne’er-do-well brother, Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu), seeks employment at the restaurant wanting “to go through the motions” of working so that he can make parole. Neumann (Wotan Wilke Möhring), a shady real estate agent, is sniffing around in hopes of acquiring the property. An uninsured Zinos makes the mistake of trying to move a heavy dishwasher by himself and gets a herniated disk for his trouble. On top of all this, Zinos is pining away for his girlfriend, Nadine (Pheline Roggan), who has hightailed it to Shanghai.

Attempting to revamp the restaurant’s simple cuisine, he hires the temperamental Shayn (Birol Ünel), a culinary snob who lost his last job for pulling a knife on a paying customer who asked for hot gazpacho. Things start looking up for Zinos when Shayn’s gourmet creations take off with the hip crowd. Eager to reunite with Nadine, Zinos makes plans to move to Shanghai, leaving Illias to manage the place. Illias gambles the restaurant away to Neumann. And poor Zinos discovers that Nadine has been cheating on him and aggravates his back injury on the same day. Zinos burns down his apartment in a fit of painkiller-induced pique. Homeless, loveless, jobless, and broke, Zinos has to figure out a way to get his restaurant back.

The script, co-written by the director and the leading man, is chock full of sly jokes and the dialogue is genuinely inspired. The filmmaker wisely decided not to let the food upstage the story. The problem is that the characters, with the exception of Zinos, are mere stereotypical sketches. Too much of the plot rests on contrivance—the romance between Illias and the surly waitress Lucia (Anna Bederke), for example—and things wrap up a little too neatly at the end. I never could root for the burgeoning relationship between Zinos and Anna (Dorka Gryllus), the physiotherapist who treats his back injury; the two don’t spend enough time onscreen together for me to care.

Full of whimsy, Soul Kitchen is definitely a film I would watch again. I can also see how it won the Special Jury Prize and the Young Cinema Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. It should enjoy a respectable run on the art-house circuit when it’s released in the States later this summer; however, the film is much too flawed to ever make any “best of” list, and it definitely isn’t Fatih Akin’s best work.

Written by: Ebony Edwards-Ellis, July 31st 2010

Hungry Town: A Culinary History of New Orleans, the City Where Food Is Almost Everything

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Tom Fitzmorris

Stewart Tabori & Chang

I’ve had a long and passionate love affair with New Orleans, although I’ve never been there. In fifth grade, I did my state report on Louisiana, and as a bored teenager in a Los Angeles suburb where everything was bright, shiny, and new, I’d dream of spending my days in the historic French Quarter, hanging out in smoky jazz bars and eating poor boy sandwiches at cramped lunch counters. I idealized the city even further when a childhood friend became a teenage runaway, hitchhiking her way to New Orleans with her much older boyfriend, both of them squatting in abandoned houses and panhandling in the streets. For some reason, that sounded like a beat novel I wanted to be a part of, as opposed to the nightmare it actually was.

Like everyone else, I watched with a heavy heart as one of our nation’s finest cities, so completely unlike any other place because of its history, demographics, and genetic makeup, disappeared off the face of the map, under sludge and murky water. I knew New Orleans would recover—it had to—but I was worried it would never be what it once was, that it would turn into a sad caricature of itself. If the premise of Tom Fitzmorris’ book Hungry Town is correct, no matter what happens, New Orleans will never be lost as long as its food culture survives and thrives, breathing life into the incessantly struggling city.

Fitzmorris’s thesis is actually quite simple: Food saved New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Now, I know many won’t believe that. I also know that recommending this book to lovers of food, regional cooking, or the city of New Orleans itself wouldn’t be fair. Truth be told, there are many who won’t understand the purpose of this book. Many will not like the author’s obsessive details or encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s food and restaurants. They'll think he's pompous, self-important, and crazy to think that it was the poor boy or red beans and rice or simple gumbo that saved the city—and that’s fair. But for those of us who know the power of food, its ability to bring people together, to calm the nerves and the soul, and quiet the hunger, we can believe that Fitzmorris is right in every way.

The author is a lifelong New Orleanian who’s been critiquing the city’s food, writing about it in various formats, and discussing it endlessly on his radio show for over thirty years. It all started in the late 1970s, when he began publishing a newsletter called The New Orleans MENU, which lives on today on his website. It would be an understatement to say that Fitzmorris is a fanatic, a man completely obsessed with his city’s food culture, its Creole and Cajun cuisine, and its restaurants; Hungry Town is the embodiment of this fanaticism.

After Hurricane Katrina, the author was forced to stay away from his beloved city for longer than he ever had before: about two weeks. While away, he received word that some of the city’s restaurants were reopening, using bottled water and small burners to feed the crowds that braved the storm. Fitzmorris began calling chefs and friends in the area, each day adding to a list on his website that featured all the eateries that were opening their doors. Just two weeks after the hurricane blew the lid off of New Orleans, twenty-two restaurants were open for service. It is because of this and similar compelling evidence that Fitzmorris believes that food saved New Orleans and that its slow-coming rebirth is beginning in the kitchen.

Interwoven with recipes for delicious New Orleans treats, menus from some of the city’s oldest restaurants, timelines, and a rundown of every major player in the New Orleans food scene, is the story of how Fitzmorris' love affair with his city’s food began. I thought Hungry Town was a beautiful ode to a great city and its wonderful food, but I know it’s not for everyone. This summer, I will be traveling by train to New Orleans and I’ll be using Hungry Town as my restaurant guide, which I think is a testament to how informative Fitzmorris' book is and how alluring a beignet and a cafe au lait can be.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, July 11th 2010

Ham: An Obsession with the Hindquarter

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Mark Scarbrough, Bruce Weinstein

Stewart Tabori & Chang

Finally, a cookbook with some pizazz! Ham: An Obsession with the Hindquarter was written by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough, food lovers, life partners, and exactly the kind of people who could breathe life into the sometimes stale world of food writing.

The recipes featured in Ham are solid, easy to follow, and delicious, but I was pleasantly surprised by how witty and well-written the book was. Along with the recipes, readers are treated to informative pig/ham-related tidbits sprinkled throughout, testers’ notes for many of the recipes, and personal stories from the writers. It was this last bit that I was particularly fond of.

I’ve never laughed out loud reading a cookbook, but after following the couple’s attempt to make their own dry-cured ham at home I couldn’t help but chuckle at the absurdity of it. If it’s done incorrectly and consumed, it can result in “respiratory failure and paralysis,” but even when the ham is drying properly, it goes through a period where it is regularly “dripping ugly bits of mucousy sludge.” Obviously, dry curing your own ham isn’t a good idea, but checking out this cookbook is. Follow Weinstein and Scarbrough on their endearing journey as they reveal all you ever wanted to know–and in some cases, some things you didn’t want to know–about that porky, fatty thing people all over the world call ham.

I already know this is one of those cookbooks I will go back to time and time again for family get-togethers, dinner parties, and plain ol’ good eatin’. I’m not one to spend a tremendous amount of money on meat when grocery shopping, but I couldn’t have done this book justice without trying one of the duo’s recipes for fresh ham. Thankfully, the book appeared on my doorstep just around Easter, which provided good reason to schlep a massive ham home from the local Mexican market. Which, by the way, was the only non-Whole Foods-like market around to have fresh ham; different than the variety you see at grocery stores around April that are pre-cooked. The recipe called for a ten pounder, which would reportedly feed “six teenage boys, sixteen adults, or twenty-six ‘twentysomething’ models,” so I knew my bone-in twelve pounder would be enough for my voracious family.

The roasted fresh ham with a maple-spice glaze was ridiculously delicious and so unlike the bizarre, overly sweet orange juice-glazed and pineapple-ringed monstrosity I grew up eating when my grandpa did all of the holiday cooking. No, this was crispy-skinned, moist, and had the perfect amount of sweetness thanks to a sugar, cinnamon, allspice, clove, and nutmeg rub down and a good basting of Grade A maple syrup.

All of the other recipes I tested revolved around prosciutto, that salty, fatty, delicious Italian ham that Weinstein and Scarbrough managed to work into everything from pizza to quesadillas–and I loved it all. Some of my favorites were the pizza with dry-cured ham and artichokes. Stubborn as I am, I refused to use store-bought dough as the recipe called for, but I think the dish was better for it because good lord, everyone needs to eat a homemade pizza laced with fatty Italian ham and artichokes.

When testing recipes on my parents, as I often do, my mom would always complain that I never used enough meat; the woman loved her some meat. She seemed excited to hear that I was testing recipes from a book devoted to pork, one of her favorite animals (to eat). One of the last meals I ever cooked for my mom before she died unexpectedly in early May was Ham's recipe for chive and cheddar ham biscuits with honey mustard. I threw some cheese on her biscuit for good measure because if there’s anything she loved more than meat, it was cheese. Needless to say she loved it and I love that a silly cookbook provided one of our last moments together as mother and daughter. Life–and food–is funny like that sometimes.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, June 29th 2010