The Food Movenment, Rising

The New York Review of Books recently published a great essay by Michael Pollan along with a recommended reading list. The above image is the front cover of Joel Salatin's book which I have been wanting to read since I saw him speak at Columbia a while back, it details how small farmers are constantly being put out of business because large agribusiness controls government regulatory bodies that have laws passed that only huge corporations can afford to follow. For example, if you want to slaughter your own chickens you're suppose to do it in an enclosed facility with a designated toilet for the USDA inspector? Joel talks about this in the great documentary movie Fresh while he is sitting outside with some farm workers slaughtering chickens in a nice, clean, breezy area, that looks perfectly sanitary to me....

I have yet to order it as there is only so much frustrating food information I can read and I'm still digesting the amazing, must read Bringing It To The Table by Wendell Berry.

Thanks to my friend Keith in Berlin for giving me the heads up on the article in the New York Review of Books.

Joel Salatin: The Revolution will be Farmed

Easter Sunday at 5 o'clock I was sitting in a lecture hall at Columbia University waiting to hear a visionary farmer talk about the future of food, actually to be more precise his talk was about the Price of good food and can we feed the world. He gave two talks which were both organized by the good folks who made the new documentary film Fresh check out their site for upcoming events, they have been very busy and wonderfully creative in mobilizing foodies here in New York to raise awareness of their film. Tomorrow is a Six Points Craft Ale and Mast Brothers chocolate tasting at Mast Brothers chocolate factory which I would love to go to!

Click here to get tickets and more information.

In addition to this tasting there are still a few farm to table dinners coming up so definitely check them out.

I've been mulling over in my head what exactly to say about Joel Salatin, who you might better know as the guy Michael Pollen wrote about in his seminal work Omnivore's Dilemma. Joel also makes an appearance in Food Inc. He owns Polyface Farms near Staunton, Virginia.

Mr Salatin is a force of nature, an incredibly smart, passionate, articulate farmer and activist who has some very insightful and scary information about how our food is grown and the phenomenal cost of our "cheap" fossil fuel based monoculture corporate agriculture.

Most likely if you are reading this here you don't need me to go on about it any more. The similarities between Wendell Berry (whose book Bringing It To The Table I'm currently reading) and Mr. Salatin are quite striking.

The essay I read just before the lecture was written in 1971 it was about the Governments war on small, local slaughterhouses, a topic Mr. Salatin also spoke about. It's interesting to me to see how this conflict has been going on for well over 40 years now and how the federal government has in those forty years done everything in it's power to destroy the lives and livelihoods of small farmers. To replace honest hard work and quality with cheap, dangerous destructive and inferior mass production. To destroy a body of knowledge about our land with knowledge about pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers that are all fossil fuel based and it probably goes without saying, are killing our land.

Joel wrote a book which is for sale on his website that I am going to order it's called:

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War stories from the local food front.

I highly recommend you go and see the movie Fresh, but I suppose more than anything I have to say to you is to go out and have a conversation about food and farming with someone who doesn't already know about the problem. It's time we all started expanding the conversation.

Here's Joel in action.

Rules, Rules, Rules

Michale Pollan's new book Food Rules has been getting a ton of press lately which is no surprise, he is after all the most articulate, intelligent and high profile person talking about our screwed up food system and beyond sounding the alarm to wake people up about it he is also giving reasonable and sensible ways to help us all eat better.

Here are some highlights from an article he did for the Huffington Post - my favorite is #39 and my own personal rule is that wine and beer are delicious, but like food need to be taken in moderation! This is personal wisdom gained in the last 6 months after years of not drinking beer I started again in Berlin (who could resist?) and then Mexico? Well I have had t put a halt to it or I would be auditioning for Santa Claus jobs by Christmas!

#11 Avoid foods you see advertised on television.

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don't.

#36 Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.

#47 Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored

#58 Do all your eating at a table.

How Cooking Made us Who We Are and Why We Shouldn't Abandon It

Today I finally finished reading Richard Wrangham's fascinating book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

Many times while reading it I turned down a page thinking I would quote it here.

The basic premise of the book is that cooking drove the evolution of the human species. Our ancestors learned to control fire and cook their food which allowed us to evolve into creatures with smaller stomachs and bigger brains. Cooked food is more energy efficient and more nutritious and it changed how we socialize, the way our teeth and jaws formed, it allowed us to spend more time hunting and less time digesting, and lots more.

Mr. Wrangham is a professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard and this book is the culmination of his life's work (so far). I have two words for you: read it. Not one to rush out to buy a science book, rest assured that the very concise 207 pages read like a can't put it down best seller.

On the last pages of his book Mr. Wrangham throws what I thought was an unexpected curve ball, he takes his well crafted argument about evolution and invokes Michael Pollan:

We should choose to eat "real foods" not "nutrients." For Pollan, real food is natural or only lightly processed, recognizable and familiar. By contrast, nutrients are invisible chemicals, such as essential oils and amino acids and vitamins, objects of scientific expertise whose significance we must take on faith.

In the end Mr. Wrangham encourages us to eat healthier food and acknowledges that the modern processing of foods has created an epidemic of obesity. In essence we need to get back to cooking our food from recognizable ingredients, like we used to.

Just a few days ago I posted about Pollan's article in the NY Times which basically says we all need to cook more, which is to my mind what Mr. Wrangham is saying only from a very different perspective. He's saying that here is this thing that helped us achieve and become who we are as a species and we have tossed it to the side of the road like so much wrapping paper from the big Mac we got from the drive through.

Then to top it all off I see the wonderful Tom Philpott at Grist has an article about Pollan's article discussing the issues at hand as to why people don't cook more and what can be done along with some critical analysis of Pollan's article.

He uses a quote from Pollan's piece from this food marketing guy:

A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.

Nice. Cooking, if you believe Wrangham and I do, created us, and now we are going to give it up because....it's obsolete?

Pollan and Philpott are much better at discussing all the politics, pros, cons, limitations and history as to why it is we find ourselves at this place of non-cooking.

It's an interesting place to be at as someone who so enjoys, even thrives on cooking, who sees the act of cooking as a way of being creative, sharing love, being with friends, creating a home-life, taking care of the health of myself and my friends as well as the planet.

When I'm hopeful, I see that we may be approaching a tipping point, a swelling movement of people who care deeply about food; where it comes from, how it is raised or grown and yes, how it is prepared. Anybody can cook, any relationship can be formed in any way the people involved in the relationship see fit. We can make this cooking thing work.

It's hard to comprehend how we don't, especially given how people respond when they eat good home cooked food, like I see them do in our house all the time. "You made this?" As if I had split an atom or created a space ship that can fly to Mars. How can something so basic become unnecessary, burdomesome, undesirable? Such strange times we live in.

People who cook at home and eat with their loved ones are happier, healthier and more productive.*

Let's make a deal, I'll continue to post recipes and menus if you promise to keep dropping by and cook some of them, OK?

It's a small step, but it's a start.

Michael Pollan Does it Again

Not that he needs my help in getting his message out, but the ubiquitous Michael Pollan has written a wonderful piece in this Sunday Times magazine discussing, in part, how we are fascinated with watching people cook yet how we, as a culture, are cooking less and less. The impetus for the article is the new movie Julie and Julia and how when he was a child he watched Julia Child with his mother. Read it, really wonderful.