Civil Eats

An 18-year-old Dolly Freed describes the philosophy of “possum living” as follows: “It’s easier to learn to do without some of the things that money can buy than to earn the money to buy them.” For five years in the late 1970’s, this teenager and her father lived off the land outside of Philadelphia, managing a small budget, eating from their garden and choosing to actively disengage from the commercial world surrounding them. Her 1978 manifesto, Possum Living, reflecting the back-to-the-land movement of that time, is now reissued.  Although she does not make an ideological case for a return to the land as others had proposed, her participation with homestead living nevertheless aligns herself with proponents of a sustainable movement. For this reason, Possum Living has new relevance and deserves a new audience. Read More

In a city well-known for hosting some of the largest conventions in the country, but not for its diverse and progressive taste in food, an experiment was born: Encourage food organizations and businesses from across Central Indiana to man information booths, and pair that “convention” atmosphere with works of art inspired by food, hands-on activities and of course, food itself.

The experiment was a success. Read More

At a farmers market in Los Angeles, Chip Brantley bit into a plum-apricot hybrid, known as a “pluot,” and contrary to expectations found that it was not mealy or tasteless but remarkably sweet and juicy. As Brantley knows, lately consumers have been experiencing unmemorable plum-eating experiences. Why do the nicest looking plums often taste unremarkable?

In Brantley’s account, The Perfect Fruit, his fascination with the breeding and production of stone-fruits is told through a story about mad scientists and ambitious businessmen, leading him to the San Joaquin Valley to investigate the consumer and producer ends of the market. Read More

You may think you’re living frugally in San Francisco if you pillage derelict Yellow Pages for Rainbow Grocery coupons and pack your own lunch before work each day, but that kind of economy is for lightweights. You don’t know thrift until you’ve woken before dawn to shop at the city’s wholesale produce warehouses to cut the middle-man markup from your grocery bills. Even then, you haven’t sealed the real deals until the lettuce-slingers know you well enough to inquire about your family vacation and hug you when you leave with your car buckling under the weight of damp brown cardboard boxes. That’s when you know you’re getting rock-bottom prices. Read More

February 17, 2010: I crawled out of bed in a stupor this morning. The electricity blew out in my shared room last night, and by 8 o’clock, the bedroom—usually just tolerable enough to sleep in with the fan constantly whirring overhead–had turned into a sweatbox. I stumbled towards the kitchen for coffee and fruit. It wasn’t until I sat down and took my first sip that I realized it was finally over: Carnaval. Read More

Annie Novak is a young farmer on a mission to engage her community about real food.

This weekend, she will be putting on an event called Food from Field to Fork to help raise funds for her organization Growing Chefs.

Through Growing Chefs, Novak has held workshops, most often focused on cooking with children, in order to show that simple fresh food is fun to grow, easy to prepare, and delicious to taste. “When I started Growing Chefs five years ago,” Novak said, “I was simply creating a program I hadn’t yet seen in the world.” She continued, “The philosophy of Growing Chefs is quite simple: through action-based education, telling the narrative of food, from field to fork.” Read More

February 11, 2010: I’m sitting on the terrace of my temporary home in Rio, Casa Amarelinha in the Santa Teresa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, feeling remotely cool for the first time in over a week. It’s been hard to think much in this heat—we’ve been topping 110 degrees regularly this past week, in one of the worst heat waves Rio has seen in recent memory (to exacerbate what has been an unusually hot summer all around), with about 75% humidity. When the mercury rises to about 90 back in New York, everyone retreats into their air conditioned offices and apartments or flees to the beach or countryside. But here in Rio, life in the streets goes on in full force, despite the blazing sun. I am so grateful it does, for what life courses through the streets of this city! However, the oppressive weather has made my volunteer work challenging to bear, even for a seasoned farm gal. Read More

Is tradition ever changing or static? Where does it actually come from? What happens if a tradition is no longer serving its followers or their environment? If these questions sound like they could have been formed in a therapy session about relationship patterns, in a way, I guess they were. We do have a relationship with food (especially when it comes to so-called traditional foods) and it’s not always a healthy one for the planet or for us.

To explore these questions with customers and the community and to start a conversation about what a more sustainable, local, seasonal Jewish deli tradition might look like, Saul’s Restaurant and Delicatessen in Berkeley, CA. hosted a Referendum on the Deli Menu last week. Read More

In Sunday’s New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd.

It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan’s name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.

I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin’s piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this: Read More

I grew up in Kansas – the land of corn-feed beef, boneless, skinless chicken breast, and pork: the other white meat. I never gave much thought to meat except whether it was low in fat and calories, so when I told my family I was becoming a vegetarian, I was met with blank stares and a heated disagreement surrounding my anemia (with the lack of red meat, the family was concerned about my iron levels). My shift towards vegetarianism began slowly with Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation followed by Peter Singer’s The Ethics of Eating Meat, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and eventually, I found myself reading Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Face On Your Plate. For three years, I was vigilant about my food, checking the labels of grocery store purchases and grilling restaurant servers about the ingredients in each dish. It took me nearly 6 months to go completely meatless and only one In-and-Out cheeseburger, three years later, to fall off the proverbial wagon. What happened? How did I devote such a significant amount of my life vegetarianism only to be tempted by a cheeseburger? Read More

Thanks to Cathy Erway, I right now have bread dough rising on my kitchen counter. Three years ago I read Mark Bittman’s New York Times article with Jim Lahey’s phenomenally easy bread recipe, but it took sitting down with Erway’s new book, The Art of Eating In, for me to get cracking. Read More

I took what is called January Term (J-Term) at University High School this year. The focus of the term was the importance of sustainable food and understanding our current food system. I feel that what I learned about the food movement, and slow food, has inspired me to one day develop my own farm and grow vegetables. Read More

This week, Jamie Oliver received a prize of $100,000 from TED, a non-profit about spreading ideas, for his efforts in bringing attention to the obesity crisis. He also gave a talk at the TED conference, which is famous for their twenty-minute videos. His talk focused on obesity in America, specifically on what kids are eating in schools. After he demonstrated how much sugar a child will consume from drinking milk alone during the elementary school years–using a wheelbarrow–he gave his ideas on improving our food system, saying “We need to re-boot.” Here are Oliver’s points of entry for change, followed by the talk: Read More

When was the last time you went to a conference that followed dinner with a rock, paper, scissors tournament among 150 participants?  At times the 2nd annual Southeast Youth Food Activist Summit (SYFAS) felt more like summer camp than a conference (in a good way).  Don’t be mistaken though; we got down to business.

SYFAS is the first of six Real Food Summits that will be happening over the next two months across the country as part of the Real Food Challenge, a student movement to increase the procurement of real (sustainably grown, fair, humane and local) food on college and university campuses, with the national goal of 20% real food by 2020. Read More

As one of the teachers involved with Michelle Obama and the White House vegetable garden, I’ve been impressed with the sudden surge of public interest in the simple act of children planting seeds. At Bancroft Elementary School, where I work first and foremost as an art teacher, we know only too well the benefits children get from growing their own food.

But I don’t think the public has any inkling how hard it is for teachers to maintain school gardens like the one we have at Bancroft. Despite all the hoopla over school gardening, the truth is teachers engage in these activities at risk of their jobs. You see, gardening is not part of the mandated school curriculum. We are supposed to be teaching reading and math. As much as we believe school gardens offer a multitude of teaching opportunities, schools do very little to support us. Principals and teachers have been bluntly told that they will lose their jobs if math and reading scores don’t improve. We desperately need help. We need someone to take charge of our school gardens. Read More

This is the first in a series of posts from our new Foodshed Nomad column.

January 29, 2010
It’s difficult to explain, and I’m certainly aware that I’m still in a phase of first impressions rather than any sort of intimate. But in short, I find this city absolutely magnificent. There’s a phrase in Brazilian Portuguese that has no literal translation: saudade. It connotes a sense of longing, a deep yearning and nostalgia for a person or place, and is often used when expressing your love for something or someone while you are still with it or them (perhaps the sentiment Toni Morrison was trying to express when she wrote, “It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody before you leave them” in her book Sula). I’ve been here just a week, but it already feels like much longer. Rio’s languorous pace draws you in very quickly, and running around Brooklyn packing up and saying goodbyes already seems months behind me. One of my new friends and I were just discussing the intoxication that comes from being in Rio, the sense that you are living in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a place with no life or time outside its limits. Here we all move as one, and even those of us who move at the quickest pace in our outside lives are forced to give up the hurry here. It is as giving in to love. Read More

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience. Read More

One of the advantages we enjoy here in Iowa is that we get to see our presidential candidates and their families up close and personal during our caucus process.  While I had seen then-Senator Obama give that stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, it was really a speech here in Iowa by his wife Michelle that made me a fan of his.  I figured if a lady this smart and classy married him he must be worth a look.

Many of us foodie-activist types were excited when Barack Obama was elected because we believed that maybe finally something could be accomplished for our agenda of “Good, Clean, and Fair” food for everyone.  Sure enough, that first spring there was the First Lady out there planting an organic garden on the White House grounds.  Say what you will about their former opponents, no one could imagine Cindy McCain doing anything even remotely similar. Read More

It took a teenager from Wyomissing, PA who had never heard of Alice Waters to figure out what was missing on the culinary scene in Berkeley. Read More

On Wednesday, Michael Pollan appeared on Oprah to discuss the food system and the film Food, Inc. At the beginning of the program, entitled “Before You Grocery Shop Again: Food 101,” Oprah said that she saw Food, Inc., and it inspired her to host this discussion. “We all have to start paying more attention to what we’re putting in our bodies,” she said. “Do you know where you food really comes from? What’s been added, what’s been taken out? What goes down before they put a label on it?” Interspersed throughout the show were clips of the film, including the film’s introduction on the disconnect between our idea of food production and its reality; chicken production, featuring a farmer speaking out against the industry; and a family that can’t afford to eat real food and is forced to choose fast food. Read More

Literary editor Howard Junker may not like it but a sold-out crowd at the San Francisco Ferry Building ate up everything Michael Pollan had to say today about Eating Food. Mostly plants. Not too much.

In case you missed it: This week the ornery editor of Zyzzyva blogged that “foodieism is the most dangerous threat to lit” and bemoaned the fact that three nonfiction Pollan paperbacks are currently on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and, his latest, Food Rules).

Pollan spoke about, and signed, copies of Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual as part of a benefit for CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, a nonprofit group that runs the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market. The event was hosted by Book Passage Bookstore and held upstairs in the Ferry Building, while hundreds more below dodged rain showers in search of organic winter greens. Read More

In his latest book, The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel explores the failures of so-called free market capitalism, and highlights some of the ways people are changing the democratic system. One of the most exciting social movements for Patel is the food movement, where thousands of people are raising the bar for social justice by improving the health and environmental impacts of the food we produce, and the labor practices employed in how we bring food to the table, with the goal of providing a stable food supply for all people.

The title of his book comes from a quote by Oscar Wilde, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I spoke to Patel this week to better understand where our market system went wrong, and how we can begin to reclaim the idea of value from the marketplace. Read More

In 2007, a research vessel stationed off the coast of eastern Canada cast two fishing lines, each with 1,500 hooks, in order to estimate how many cod were left in this region’s waters. They caught only a few fish. Eleven years earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had declared a moratorium on cod fishing with the goal of rebuilding the species’ population back to a secure, if not profitable, number. The Arctic cod population, like that of Western Atlantic bluefin tuna, Chesapeake Bay scalloped hammerhead shark, Atlantic salmon, North Sea haddock, Southern Atlantic snowy grouper, East Gulf of Mexico red snapper and American plaice, is reaching what director Rupert Murray foresees as “the end of the line.” His so-titled documentary examines the decline of our ocean’s diverse species while proposing immediate solutions. Read More

Caitlin Flanagan is right: I am an educated, middle-class woman whose school voluntarism is “a locus of (my) fathomless energies.” When I see students whose support system, for a myriad of reasons, has failed them, I want to do something about it. And I am one of the Alice Waters groupies Flanagan talks about in her January 2010 Atlantic Monthly article, so when I want to effect change, one of the places I turn is the Life Lab garden Flanagan writes is “cheating our most vulnerable students.” Read More

I can’t believe I missed it: the Meat Industry Hall of Fame’s first-ever induction ceremony occurred in Chicago on October 27. And what a night it was: headlined by the illustrious Bill Kurtis—the former CBS anchor who currently narrates criminal justice shows for the A&E Television Network.

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.” Read More

Will 2010 be the year that real food triumphs over “edible foodlike substances?” I don’t want to get overly optimistic, but real food certainly had a good first week, at least on cable TV. Read More

What happens in Iowa doesn’t stay in Iowa. This is the lesson illuminated in Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney’s latest film, Big River, a companion to their successful film King Corn (made with director Aaron Wolff). In King Corn, Ellis and Cheney grew an acre of corn and followed it to the plate by way of the processing that brings us most of our packaged food and the confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that bring us 99% of our meat. This time around, they follow the top soil, fertilizer runoff, and pesticide residues from the acre they planted into the local water system and further to the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone. Read More

Michael Pollan wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I was too young to read it — honestly I may still be too young to read it at thirteen. The new version, the Young Readers Edition, is written for us kids. The book begins with a really great introduction that puts into words what you might be thinking: “I never gave much thought to where my food came from. I didn’t spend much time worrying about what I should and shouldn’t eat. Food came from the supermarket and as long as it tasted good, I ate it.” I felt that way in the beginning, too. It’s food, why worry about it. ‘People’ wouldn’t let us eat food that is bad for us, right? Unfortunately this is not the case, and Mr. Pollan’s book can help kids understand why. Read More

Winter is a time for slowing down, pulling on layers and feeling cozy. With the arrival of cold weather we finally have an excuse to stay indoors, work on forgotten projects by a crackling fire and fill the house with baking aromas. But it can also be a time of overindulgence, holiday excess and stress. When that celebratory eggnog has found its way to your lips more consistently than your waistline would like or, somehow, once again, what started as one nibble has turned into an empty bowl where the spiced nuts once resided, you might start to think that a starvation diet is the best, or only, way to bring your body back into balance. Not so says the ancient healing system of Ayurveda. Essentially, a long, dark winter can throw our eating habits off balance and, in turn, create toxic turmoil within. This premise is a cornerstone of Ayurveda, which recognizes that nature’s elements directly affect our state of being, with our diet being a crucial component. Read More