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

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

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

Early in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010) former Texas Agriculture Secretary Susan Coombs declares that, “it will take 2 million angry moms to change school food.” Based on what we now know of the dreary state of our children’s cafeteria fare, there must be at least that many mamas, as well as a good number of papas who are ready to storm the barricades. Fortunately for them and America’s 55 million students who gulp down something resembling a meal every school day, they’ve been joined by Hunter College sociologist Janet Poppendieck who gives us the best reasons yet for unconditional school food reform. 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

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

Last week in Trafalgar Square, British historian and freegan Tristram Stuart served lunch to 5,000 people. The meal was made from 6 tons of food that would otherwise have been thrown away by farmers, supermarkets and wholesalers because of failed cosmetic inspection, overproduction or expired sell-by dates. All of the food was perfectly edible. Although not strictly a hunger relief event, the meal was a practice in mindful eating and food redistribution. In Stuart’s view, we could be doing even more to cut waste on a global scale. His newest book, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, demands that we eat all the food we buy and become informed about larger inefficiencies in the food system. Read More

One thing we know for sure is that we just don’t know enough about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and biotechnology to know that in planting their seeds, we aren’t affecting future generations’ ability to feed themselves. For many people, the fact that they’re corporately controlled and thus make for bad social policy, or that they genetically contaminate other species and as such increase claims against farmers, while undermining a farmer’s ability to save seed and be self sufficient, are enough of an argument against their propagation. But in Claire Hope Cummings’ excellent book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, she weaves in the stories of the people and places behind a phenomenon that’s gotten a few rich, while farmers struggle with shrinking margins. Read More

Jonathan Safran Foer speaks with the reasoning of a vegetarian, the skepticism of an investigative journalist and the concern of a parent in Eating Animals. This persuasive narrative forces us to ask why we have ignored the issues associated with factory-farmed meat and fish for so long. We’ve done so, Foer argues, by telling ourselves a fable about our relation to the animals we eat. Read More

There’s nothing funny about all those E. coli and salmonella outbreaks that keep popping up and plaguing us like the Undead. But with trick- or-treat season right around the corner, I thought it might be nice to take a brief break from food scares and focus on scary food we can safely sink our teeth into, like Rocky Road-To-Perdition Fudge or I’Scream Cake.

Those are just two of the diabolically delicious recipes I found in Ghoulish Goodies by Sharon Bowers, a clever collection of Halloween-themed concoctions. Some are sweet, others savory, but they all sound eerily tasty. I spotted this book at a friend’s house last weekend and essentially stole it after leafing through its pages and finding such ingenious Halloween snacks as Cheddar Eyeballs, Candy Corn Pizza, and Bandaged Fingers, to name just a few of the more than seventy inventive recipes featured in Ghoulish Goodies. The recipes have simple ingredients, easy-to-follow instructions and plenty of photos to inspire you. Read More

Just twenty years after humans cease to exist, our vegetable gardens will have reverted back to “unpalatable wild strains.” So envisions Alan Weisman in The World Without Us, a reminder that the history of food has run in parallel to human development. Put another way by Tom Standage, “The story of the adoption of agriculture is the tale of how ancient engineers developed powerful new tools that made civilization itself possible. In the process, mankind changed plants, and those plants in turn transformed mankind.” This course is the focus of An Edible History of Humanity, his account of how food has influenced world history. Read More

A few months back, I picked up a book by Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton from a stack of review copies on my table, opened it and began to read. There had been very little press coverage of this book, but the title boldly re-created the world the food movement is working towards, and thus attracted my eye – A Nation of Farmers: How City Farmers, Backyard Chicken Enthusiasts, Victory Gardeners, Small Family Farms, Kids in Edible Schoolyards, Cooks in Their Kitchens, and Passionate Eaters Everywhere Can Overthrow Our Destructive Industrial Agriculture, and Give Us Hope for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness in a Changing World. That is a huge subtitle, to be certain, but even bigger is the authors’ request: for 100 million farmers and 200 million cooks. The book details the state we find ourselves in (peak oil and general resource scarcity, climate change, lack of political will, soil depletion), takes on the false ideas that keep us stuck in the current system, and discusses the potential and context for a paradigm shift in how we approach these crises — and, dare I say it, creates a vision of a future more gratifying than our current status quo. Read More

“Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.” Bleak, maybe. But these are the sentiments behind a book as inspired as it is sad. As Masanobu Fukuoka explains in The One-Straw Revolution, after three years working too hard as a produce inspector for a government customs office (along with some bad luck in love), he began to suffer fainting spells, then pneumonia, hospitalization, depression, a vision—and ultimately shaken confidence in the ability of intellect to explain the world. Humbled, he moved back to his father’s farm, where he began to experiment with natural methods of farming, planting rice, grains, and citrus. First published in 1978, his account of these experiences became an inspiration for the alternative food movement and was re-released this year as part of the New York Review of Books Classics series. Diet for A Small Planet author Frances Moore Lappé comments in the new introduction on its continuing importance as a rejection of fear “that has fueled the drive for control over nature” and as a source of hope for those who would follow in Fukuoka’s footsteps. Read More

Recently, a good friend handed me Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s outstanding book, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, and succinctly said, “I think you’ll appreciate this.” And she was right. Named one of the best 10 books in 2007 by the New York Times, Little Heathens is a breath of fresh air, a message of hope and revival, and a timely reminder of how we once knew how to grow our own food, chop our own wood, and survive on next to nothing. I’ve returned to the book as a constant reference, source of inspiration, and general salve for simple, good ideas, common sense, and for a dose of Millie’s refreshingly honest and joyous take on life. Part memoir, part how-to manual, her life lessons of hard work, self-reliance, and determination to make it through one of the toughest times in American history are especially relevant today. Read More

There has been a lot of talk lately about what will do us in. For the moment, at least, it is all a foregone conclusion: America is on an inevitable decent toward complete destruction or (if we are lucky) total irrelevance. Batten down the hatches and learn Chinese because we won’t be around to see the next World Cup.

It is probably all ridiculous, of course, and certainly premature, but who who can completely shun this sublime game? To draw a picture of the world we know with its boundaries reassigned is so humorous that we pay attention to lunatics like Igor Panarin, the Russian professor whose map of America has become an internet staple. (If you haven’t seen it, now is the time – it is inexplicably fun.)

If our recent troubles have made a parlor game out of predicting the end, so to do they explain our nostalgia for the America that no longer exists. Read More

Nora Ephron’s effervescent Julie & Julia has evidently sparked a mad dash to snap up Child’s epic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Butter’s back, and margarine’s been marginalized. Three cheers for real food! After all, as Joan Gussow says, “I trust cows more than chemists.”

In farmer David “Mas” Masumoto’s latest book, Wisdom of the Last Farmer, he looks back on his agrarian life so far. In it, Masumoto focuses primarily on the things he has learned from his father — the things he wishes he’d paid more attention to (like welding) and the things he chose to do differently once he’d taken over his 80 acre peach, nectarine and grape farm near Fresno, California (like transitioning to organic, and making the tough decision to rip out some very old grape vines in order to preserve and nurture others). Meditating on farm legacies seems to have more meaning just now, when his 23 year old daughter, Nikiko, has decided that she too will continue farming Masumoto peaches.

Wisdom of the Last Farmer contains within it a wealth of experience, which make great lessons for young and beginning farmers. It made sense, then, that Mas and Nikiko Masumoto led a workshop together for young farmers last weekend at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, NY. The workshop gave beginners the opportunity to ask questions of the experienced farmers present, including Stone Barns’ own livestock manager Craig Haney and four-season vegetable grower Jack Algiere. It was also a chance for local apprentice farmers to get to know each other, fostering a sense of farmer community — something Stone Barns hopes to continue building upon. Read More

Americans are more obese than ever, our current agriculture system is dependent on oil and other limited resources, our waterways and air are polluted by factory-like farming operations, and still opponents try to push sustainable agriculture to the margins. But change is possible, as Jill Richardson writes in her new book, Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, which breaks down many of the issues facing the food system and provides approximately 70 pages of solutions. Read More

If you liked Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, my guess is that you will love Novella Carpenter’s new book, Farm City: The Education of An Urban Farmer. I found it to be both grittier and funnier than Kingsolver’s book and even easier to read.

The book chronicles Carpenter’s somewhat unintentional experience of creating a “squat garden” in the vacant lot next to her apartment building in Ghosttown, which is what she and the other residents call their rundown neighborhood located near downtown Oakland. Read More

The title of Nicolette Hahn Niman’s compelling new book, Righteous Porkchop, is honest, and indicates one of the book’s strengths—its exploration of the moral issues behind our broken food system. As a vegetarian rancher she is uniquely poised to be even more righteous than most. Not only has she abstained from eating meat herself since young adulthood, she spends her days sustainably raising cattle for others to eat. Who can top that? Read More

In her new book, “Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness,” journalist and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton takes your hand and leads you down the life path of three unique characters who share one commonality: a passion for stewardship of the land. Hamilton spent two years profiling three families in rural America who are fighting against the groundswell swallowing up farms that are forced to get big, or get out. Her eye for detail of place and people at odds with industrial agriculture is astute and compelling, and she draws the reader into the quiet lives of Americans slowly changing the system. With advanced praise from the incomparable Wendell Berry, this is a must-read book for those who care about the future of farming in America. Read More

Practical and prophetic, particular and poetic, and entirely personal, this is how I would describe Our Life in Gardens.  Composed of nearly 50 essays arranged in alphabetical order, the book is termed by its authors a “gypsy trunk of this and that.” I’d think of it more as an old-time curiosity cabinet, a curio full of treasures to be pulled out and carefully savored, one by one. Part memoir, and part garden how-to, it is a completely engaging book to enjoy, perhaps while sitting in a favorite chair in the garden on a sunny afternoon, or by the fire on a cool, wet day, when gardening might be more of an intellectual pursuit. Read More

Sometimes things just get a little too serious, especially when it comes to the issues we often discuss here on Civil Eats. If you ever feel that way at times then here’s a demented solution to your conundrum. Go out and buy the glorious The Devil’s Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies (Written by the demented mind of by Barry Foy with devilish illustrations by John Boesche.) Billed as the “most unreliable food book you’ll ever own,” this beguiling little volume will surely help to put a smile on your face even in the worst of times.

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Hank Cardello knows a great deal about the food industry; for more than three decades, he helped some of the world’s largest companies sell their products to you.  In his book, Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s {Really} Making America Fat, Cardello shares his vast knowledge about the industry in a readable, organized and highly accessible fashion — and attempts to make up for his past sins with a critique on the system he no longer works for.  Read More

Veteran cookbook author and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman knows his food — and what he dishes out is smart, contemporary and consistently delicious. For years, his books – including “How to Cook Everything” and “The Best Recipes in the World” (his “Chile Shrimp” is one of my husband’s all-time favorite dishes) have been permanent fixtures on my book shelves, and his kitchen savvy has informed my own style of cooking. Read More