When San Francisco voters passed the three phases of the Proposition A facilities upgrade bond in 2003, 2006, and 2011, they approved money to cover the design and construction of green schoolyards for at least 83 San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) elementary, middle, and high schools. SFUSD is the first urban school district to embrace outdoor learning opportunities in this fashion. It is also one of the first large districts in the state to implement the Common Core State Standards, a new set of English language arts and mathematics standards focused on real-world college and career readiness.

Seizing on this opportunity, I met with Rosie Branson Gill last fall to discuss how our organizations (San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and 18 Reasons, respectively) could work together to provide more opportunities for San Francisco students to engage both in school gardens and with the craft of cooking. On February 17 of this year, 13 elementary classroom teachers, garden coordinators, and parents gathered for the launch of Cooking the Common Core: Bringing Educational Standards to Life in the School Garden, a new training series designed to do just that.

Cooking the Common Core offers teachers innovative, interdisciplinary lessons to help them teach the new standards. Rosie and I wanted to design a training that promoted cooking as a way to increase students’ access to and opportunities for learning in the outdoor classroom. We wanted teachers to feel empowered introducing students to the craft of cooking, to fresh ingredients, and to the full garden-to-table experience.

To that end, each lesson in Cooking the Common Core combines freshly harvested produce from the school garden, Common Core standards, and basic cooking skills, while leaving ample room for teachers to use the lessons to explore other classroom topics. Social studies, ecology, and respect for other cultures easily integrate into recipes such as fried rice, summer rolls, handmade pasta, or Brassica slaw.

Keeping in mind that public school educators are increasingly asked to do more with less, one of our priorities from the outset was to provide participating schools with outdoor cooking kits, in order to make the lessons as accessible as possible.  These kits include a Burton stove, fuel canisters, cutting boards, paring knives, mixing bowls, peelers, a box grater, tongs, serving utensils, a colander, and a dough scraper.  We have already heard back from participants in our first two trainings that the kits have allowed them to quickly and easily incorporate cooking into their teaching.

Rosie and I dream of writing lessons for every grade level linked to memorable meals from around the world. We are currently seeking sponsorship for the cooking kits so we can continue to offer the courses at a reduced fee for teachers and develop new lessons to meet the growing demand. When summer break rolls around in June, we will have provided cooking kits to and trained educators from 18 SFUSD schools, two nonprofits working with San Francisco youth populations, and one other school district in the East Bay.

Learn more about San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, 18 Reasons, and Cooking the Common Core.

Paula Deen’s public admission that she has Type 2 diabetes and her follow-up announcement that she is also a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its diabetes drug, Victoza, has sparked an interesting debate about the deeper issues surrounding our food system—especially the impact it has on the many people diagnosed with diabetes. And according to Deen’s comments on the Today show, she implies to her millions of fans, that the primary ways to deal with this largely diet-related disease are through personal responsibility and pharmaceuticals.

Indeed, when Al Roker, asks her if she is going to change the way she eats and the foods she cooks, Deen says, “Honey, I’m your cook, I’m not your doctor. You are going to have to be responsible for yourself.” Evading the question, Deen puts the onus back on the individual to decide what foods to eat or not, despite the fact that she promotes unhealthful and processed foods on TV. The one comment she does make about food choice is “moderation,” one of the most meaningless and confusing bits of nutrition advice. In fact, this is what the industry giants often use as their defense for harmful, unhealthful foods.

Personal responsibility and consumer choice are solutions heralded by conservatives and liberals alike—the idea being that ultimately good health comes down to what we choose to buy and eat. But it’s not that simple.

There are three main issues when it comes to the myth of personal responsibility about food choice and they get at the root of our nation’s health crisis: The public’s confusion about nutrition; the lack of time and knowledge about real home cooking; and the promotion of quick fixes like drugs, diet foods, and fads in lieu of addressing underlying causes. The Paula Deen diabetes story manages to hit on every single one of these issues.

Americans suffer from nutrition confusion, thanks to an array of conflicting and often inaccurate public health messages, misleading labels and claims on packaging, and a lack of nutrition knowledge by many doctors, dietitians, and other health care providers.

Deen’s cooking, and now her public diabetes announcement, only adds to this confusion. During the Today show interview she repeatedly mentions the amount of fat in her recipes, as do many in the media reporting on the story. “For 10 years, wielding slabs of cream cheese and mounds of mayonnaise,” a New York Times article begins, “Paula Deen has become television’s self-crowned queen of Southern cuisine.”

But real, unprocessed cream cheese and mayonnaise are not the problem. The issue that mainstream media has largely overlooked is that Deen uses the processed, packaged versions of these foods, which are full of chemicals, additives and trans-fats. Actual home cooking would require whipping these foods up herself in her kitchen using real ingredients. And that is the real story behind Deen’s diabetes diagnosis: Her health problems are largely due to her reliance on packaged, processed foods that are the foundation for many of her recipes.

Even though her cooking show is called Paula’s Home Cooking, there’s a lot going on in her kitchen that is as far removed from home cooking as you can get. Many of her recipes include “ingredients” like Krispy Kreme doughnuts, biscuit mixes, cans of mushroom soup, and sour-cream-and-onion flavored potato chips. This is processed food cooking, not home cooking.

Heaping the blame on all the “fat” she cooks with only serves to confuse the public further. A New York Daily News article also cites fat as one of the main culprits in Deen’s cooking and her diet. But the most recent research indicates that when it comes to diabetes, fat is not the problem. The problem foods are sugar, refined white flour, chemical additives, artificial sweeteners and flavors, trans-fats, and the various other chemicals and additives found in the processed foods that abound in Deen’s recipes.

Now Deen is pushing the idea that taking medicine is the real solution to diabetes. On the Today show, she says, “Here’s what I want to get across to people, I want them to first start by going to their doctor and asking to be tested for diabetes. Get on a program that works for you. I’m amazed at the people out there that are aware they’re diabetic but they’re not taking their medicine.”

According to Deen, the reason she waited three years to go public with her diagnosis was because she didn’t have anything to give her fans. “I could have walked out and said, ‘Hey ya’ll, I have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.’ I had nothing to give to my fellow friends out there. I wanted to bring something to the table when I came forward.” So what is she bringing to the table? A sales pitch for a diabetes drug that costs $500 per month and has some seriously troubling side effects, including thyroid cancer, as Tom Philpott reports.

Just think of the kind of influence she could have wielded had she come out with a new cooking show that focused on using fresh, real food ingredients that cut way back on sugar and refined carbohydrates. In fact, if she had done so and eaten this way for the past three years she might have reversed her own diabetes diagnosis, which is entirely possible given the right diet.

But instead, Deen is getting paid to leave that task to a drug company. This isn’t her first corporate sponsorship (here she peddles Smithfield ham) and I doubt it will be her last. Diabetic and diet foods can’t be far behind in products she’ll attach to her name.

Alas, we can’t fairly discuss personal responsibility without taking into account the under-regulated advertising industry that pushes cheap, convenient, and processed foods on an overworked and cash-strapped population. Add to this the diminishing knowledge on how to shop for, cook, and prepare foods from scratch and we have a serious problem.

As Deen now joins the 25.8 million other Americans suffering with diabetes, she “brings to the table” the ideas of moderation, personal responsibility, and the drug Victoza as the solutions. She could do so much more with all the power she wields.

Anthony Bourdain put it squarely when he said of Deen, “If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us.” And this was before her diabetes announcement. Bourdain has also said that Deen is the “worst, most dangerous person to America.” He might have a point.

When I was an intern in Santa Fe, New Mexico a thousand years ago, my mother sent me a three-page letter (yes, a letter. It was that long ago).  Worried that her underpaid intern son might be starving in the desert, she wanted to pass along her wisdom on how to cook and eat on the cheap.  It was called “Good Old Mom’s Three Days on One Chicken and Other Depression Folklore.”  It kept me fed that long hot summer and later became a family treasure.

I was reminded of it recently when I had the opportunity to read An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler.  Ms. Adler has certainly made her bones as a cook, having worked in such legendary establishments as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at Prune in New York.  It may have been there, under James Beard award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton that she found her voice as a writer.  Hamilton after all is not only among the most talented chefs in New York, but is also the author of the widely acclaimed memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter–a must-read itself.

An Everlasting Meal is part memoir, part cookbook, and part self-help manual for all who wish to cook better with less; and these days, who is not among that group?  She points out, for example, that “Minestrone is the perfect food. I advise eating it for as many meals as you can bear, or that number plus one.”

The book is full of that kind of clever phrasing. Adler clearly shares my fondness for MFK Fisher, and can channel her at will, it seems.  Her writing is never pedantic, never preachy, always smart, descriptive, and leisurely.  It is as practical as the recipes she includes.

Her recipe for the classic Italian peasant soup is simple and uses lots of ends and bits, like Parmesan rind and the end of a good piece of hard salami.  These and many other ingredients are simmered “45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone.”

Adler reminds us that “Some vegetables are persistently underrated.”  Here I’d have listed turnips, but she looks toward ones we take for granted, like onions and celery, and finds both comfort food–onion soup–and less common dishes like celery poached with lemon and topped with a handful of breadcrumbs.

There is good food to be had in the barest of pantries, Adler assures us, if we are resourceful enough and know the basics of how to cook.  In a chapter entitled “How to Weather a Storm,” we find recipes for chickpeas with pasta, spicy green beans, and fish cakes made from canned salmon or mackerel.  There’s even one called Salad for a Natural Disaster, made of ingredients she found in a chef’s earthquake kit, presumably while in the Bay Area.

Perhaps most helpful for the frugal but passionate cook is the inclusion of an appendix subtitled “Further Fixes,” where we learn two dozen or so suggestions for what to do when things have gone wrong.  Meat a little dried out?  Make crispy lardons.  Chicken undercooked?  Remove it from the bones, simmer in butter and chicken stock and toss with egg noodles.  Curry too spicy?  Eggplant too salty? Rice or lentils overcooked?  Adler includes fixes for them all.

In a time when we can all appreciate the value of frugality in the kitchen, when each of us can ring a wry smile from the Tuscan proverb she quotes: Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio (“We were better off when things were worse”), it is refreshing to know that with just a little effort, and a lot of love, delicious healthy meals are waiting to be awakened from their slumber in the back of the pantry.

Earlier this summer, as I was hauling a bag of farmers market produce home 15 blocks and up four flights of stairs, sweating bullets, cursing my choice to buy a melon (they’re heavy!), I stopped mid-step.

“Does it really have to be this hard?” I asked myself.

My story is particular to me, of course, but all over the country there are people trying to put food on the table and asking themselves “does it really have to be this hard?”

I was living, at the time, in a neighborhood with few supermarkets. The ones within a long walking distance were either very expensive or lacking the seasonal produce I craved. So on weekends I would hike over to the big farmers market. But at the farmers market I always find myself of two minds. In one moment I am buying something and can’t believe how much I get for so little money; the next item I pick up gives me sticker shock. How can both of these things be true?

When people ask me: “Doesn’t the food you eat (some mix of local, sustainable, organic, etc.) cost so much more than “regular” food?” I protest and agree at the same time. When they say “Doesn’t cooking from scratch take a lot of time?” I remember the awesome pasta I cooked the other night that took 7.5 minutes. But also the weekend of foraging I did going from one store to the next.

I live in New York City; I make a living wage; I am not trying to feed a family; I work on these issues for a living. If I find it hard/tiring/expensive sometimes, what must other people feel?

In the spirit of this conundrum, Slow Food USA launched the $5 Challenge last week.

The economy is tanking. We’re all stressed about money and we’re all stressed about time. And yet. Every day there are people all over the country who find a way—despite the challenges of access, affordability, and time–to cook healthy food on a budget. It’s not easy—especially at first—but they’ve developed tips and tricks for stretching their food dollars, and decreasing the amount of time it takes to make a fresh and delicious meal. This campaign seeks to learn from those people, to share their wisdom—and then work together to make eating this way a reality for everyone every day.

So, on September 17, take the challenge: get together with family and friends and cook a “slow food” meal for less than the cost of fast food. Know how? Teach others. Want to learn? This is your chance. You can host a potluck where nothing costs more than $5. You can cook for a crowd and charge $5 at the door. You can cook with your family for less than $5 per person.

Now I recognize that $5 is actually not a small amount of money—but it is the cost of a typical fast food “value meal,” so we figured that was a good starting place for cooking up a meal that reflects your values.

Next week we’ll be rolling out a page where you can share your tips and tricks—and read the ones that other people have submitted. The idea is to embrace this crazy conundrum (the one I call the “It’s easy, it’s hard” conundrum)—to find ways to make eating ”slow” easier, while also acknowledging what makes it hard. Understanding the hard part and how to fix the hard part… is the hard part. And it’s where we’ve all got our work cut out for us.

Let’s start by taking the challenge.

I think we can all agree that the sedative power of television provides escape; much like any number of self-numbing tools we may choose to consume one way or another. I fully admit to administering a daily dose of TV at the end of a long day, just enough to blur the mind space and glaze the eyes until I drag myself to bed a short hour or two later. I’m not very proud of it, I know there are countless more productive things I could be doing during that time. But the whole seduction is just that…television takes away the need to be productive. It is a glossy, other world of fantasy, adventure, and illusion. Why else do we find ourselves saturated in this “reality” TV culture? The lives of others takes us outside of our own, an episode of someone’s experience gives us respite from the banality of our day to day. Sometimes, however, there are occasions when some genuine truth seeps in. And if we can discipline our channel surfing thumbs to the right place, the content that sneaks into our brains can actually present some positive, constructive, and educational information.

Real Food Real Kitchens is a new PBS cooking show that is just that: Real. Far from the patina falseness of Rachel Ray’s shiny kitchen set, this show portrays actual homes and documents a person making a family recipe. It is at once a look at community, at culture, at health, and at food. And, in a time when we are so far removed from all of these things in this country, it is a welcome change from the usual Food Network lineup.

Craig Chapman is the Producer for the show. During what he calls a “lull” in his freelancing production manager schedule in New York, he came up with the idea and decided to make the jump into self-employment. When asked what attracted him most to the show idea, he said:

 I loved the concept because while I am not the biggest foodie in the world, I love really great, personal stories and I felt like food was the one thing in life everyone needs and it’s the one thing in life that usually includes a group of family members or friends. The world of food in television has gotten so saturated with celebrity competition type cooking shows that RFRK just seemed fresh and simple to me and it seemed like an idea that would appeal to everyone.

Episode One features Javis Finney, who welcomes us into his Brooklyn home and offers his grandmother’s Trinidadian Curry Chicken. It’s real life, real ingredients, a real kitchen, and a real family. No product placement, no corporate sponsored bells and whistles blurring the lines between content and advertisement.

Speaking about some of the difficulties in finding the right combination of authenticity and personality while making sure the chosen recipe is along the same lines as well, Chapman said, “The hardest part of casting was finding genuine, traditional, cultural, and historical dishes that had a deep emotional connection to the guests. Everyone has a famous family French toast twist or peanut butter and jelly twist but getting a true, from scratch dish isn’t as easy to find as I thought it would be.” He continued, “Another difficulty in casting was finding guests that can carry an entire 30-minute show. No one is a celebrity and no one has hosted a TV show before so it’s hard to find a natural. Many potential guests would mimic food shows they have seen on TV and that is exactly what I was not looking for.”

The simplicity of one recipe that turns into one family meal gives the viewer just the right mix of personal connection with cooking instruction. It links food to story, which is truly what we all share and what can ultimately bring us all together. No matter who you are, what walk of life you tread or what your views are, you have food memories, food stories, nostalgic flavors. When we talk to each other about these things, we cross lines. Real Food Real Kitchens is a visual tool that captures the essence of how food unites us with a common thread.

And if you think you have that delicate balance of teacher, cook and superstar, e-mail info@realfoodrealkitchens.com with the following information, along with photos, and your email address:

- Describe yourself and your personality.
- What are some of your favorite dishes or types of food to cook (Trinidadian, Ethiopian, Indian, French, Russian, American, etc.)?
- What is your specialty?
- Who do you cook for (family, friends, etc.)?
- Where do you like to shop for your food?

Good Luck!

Civil Eats contributor Sarah Henry reports at KQED’s Bay Area Bites on the edible explorations of Daniel Klein, the omnivorous chef and his vegetarian girlfriend/cameragal Mirra Fine, who form the dynamic duo behind The Perennial Plate, a web-based, weekly documentary real food romp devoted to socially responsible, sustainable and adventurous eating.

Season one of the good grub chronicles introduced video viewers to a year of food finds in Minnesota, a state that Klein and Fine used to call home. Klein wants people to see where their meat comes from, so he documents rabbit, pig, and turkey killings, along with deer hunting, squirrel slaughtering and bison butchering, often set to a haunting soundtrack. For the more squeamish among us, there’s also cranberry harvesting, morel mushroom gathering, and wild food foraging, typically accompanied by more uptempo tunes.

In season two, which began in early May, the culinary couple took their show on the road for a six-month journey across America in search of stories (and the people behind them) that speak to the heart of food and farming practices in the nation. To date their eating expeditions have led them to harvesting produce in urban farms in New Orleans, hunting feral pigs in Texas, and catching frogs in Arkansas.

Read Henry’s interview with Klein and more about the show at KQED.

Watch episodes of The Perennial Plate here. For a taste, watch:

The Perennial Plate Episode 52: Real Food Road Trip from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

Photo: Wendy Goodfriend via KQED

I buy local and organic food as much as possible, but find that not only do I have to force myself to eat vegetables, but I lack enough ways to cook them besides the handy but boring steaming and stir frying. Many farmers’ market patrons and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members have a similar problem. However, Basics with a Twist (available here), by Kim Sanwald, has truly inspired me to transform my own cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as blogger and author Julie Powell had when she cooked her way through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As a truck farmer at Brickyard Farms in southwestern Michigan, Sanwald and her partner, Valerie Lane, grow 17 varieties of tomatoes, seven varieties of potatoes, hard garlic, three varieties of beets, seven varieties of carrots as well as different greens including collards, kale, Swiss chard, and spinach.

The five-and-a-half acre farm’s success is attributable to the production of fresh, flavorful vegetables grown in good clay soil that has “some amazing minerals” to enhance their “shocking taste.”  This is all done without chemicals or sprays, although the farm is not certified organic.

Last year Sanwald and Lane grew 4,800 tomatoes from 1,500 plants and from 650 seed potatoes, they harvested 7,000 pounds.  Their market customers couldn’t get enough!

In the book, Sanwald takes readers through the growing season by focusing on the farm’s most popular vegetables: Garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and beets. She provides tried and true recipes for salads, soups, stews, sauces, dressings, casseroles, and side dishes that go well with various meats. They make your mouth water just reading them.

But the book is more than a cookbook. It is also a memoir of Sanwald’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer–a farmer growing a diverse range of vegetables on a small scale, often sold from truck to consumers or to restaurants–in rural Cloverdale.

Sanwald first started working on the farm in 2007 when she and a group of friends came to Lane’s aid after her partner, Cate Burke, had died unexpectedly from a blood clot at age 46.  Lane had purchased the farm in 2001 after leaving a career as a building and remodeling contractor.

Being close to the land and close to her source of food awakened something in Sanwald despite the fact that the work is hard and dirty and the days are long.

One day as she was harvesting kale she suddenly broke down in tears realizing that she was connecting to the earth in a deeply spiritual way.

“I’m home,” she said.  “I felt like I had arrived.”

Doing what others encouraged or expected her to do had made her unhappy and depressed through most of her life. She found happiness, however, by growing food. Today, she said she rejects hair coloring, make-up and stylish clothes, things that once held great importance for her.  She has also reduced her weight by 30 pounds and two dress sizes.

“I feel better,” she said, “And the better I feel, the more I want to do this work.”

Basics with a Twist shows readers what can happen to a person through greater attention to food.  Ever the cook, Sanwald expresses her appreciation for the aesthetic pleasures of food that is flavorful, healthy, homegrown, home-cooked—and shared with others around a table.

The whole project came about because Sanwald found herself giving out hundreds of recipes to customers at the Fulton Street Farmers’ Market in Grand Rapids, where Brickyard Farms is a vendor. Lane suggested she put the recipes together in a book, however, Sanwald was anxious to write about what her new life as a truck farmer meant to her.

“The book is a validation of who we are and who I am,” she said. “I love to write and cook. It’s my creative outlet and this book stretched me and my learning process. By combining both of these things, I am able to help others as well.”

She has plans to write a second book that encourages people to grow their own gardens.

The book also includes a resource list for people looking for information about self-sustaining and organic methods of farming and gardening as well as commentaries on the local food movement and environmental issues.

A version of this piece was originally published on olgabonfiglio.blogspot.com

One of the how-did-we-get-here narratives of food goes something like this: Starting in the late 1960s, the women’s movement called upon educated women to forge a new path into professional life while an increasingly convenience-driven industrial food complex conspired with demanding weekday schedules to culminate in empty kitchens and the near extinction of home cooking. It’s a tale that oversimplifies the reality. But when Michael Pollan, in his 2009 New York Times essay “Out of the Kitchen Onto the Couch,”  singled out Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique as the tome that convinced women that cooking is drudgery, he set off a feminist firestorm. Several angry blog posts and counter-defenses later one thing is clear: If more home cooking is essential to changing the food system, men had better get into the kitchen as well.

It’s happening. In 1965, fathers accounted for only five percent of the time spent cooking for the family; now they’re in the kitchen nearly one-third of the time. John Donohue’s new book Man with a Pan, a collection of essays by fathers about cooking for their families, celebrates this change. Donohue, a New Yorker cartoonist and editor, pulled together thoughts by food writers and culinary professionals like Mario Batali, Michael Ruhlman, and Mark Bittman. But one of my favorite things about the book is the inclusion of the voices of “ordinary” dads who have come to cooking simply because it’s work–pleasurable, of course–that needs to be done for their families every day.

“It was very important for me to include a broad cross section of men who cook for their families in the book,” Donohue says. “I wanted the well crafted essays by professional writers, but I also wanted to hear from other working fathers, ones who might have more demanding jobs than being a successful writer. It’s one thing to make your own hours, it’s another to have to be on the job as a fireman, a bond trader, a carpenter, an economist, and still get food on the table. I wanted the book to be an inspiration to men of all professional stripes.”

Inspiration comes from surprising places, like from horror novelist Stephen King, who urges readers to lower the heat and take a “gentle” approach to cooking. Screenwriter Matt Greenberg contributes an homage to King in the form of a screenplay about a man who becomes fatally obsessed with a barbecue grill while caring for an empty, isolated hotel in the off season. There is the classic “overreacher,” Manny Howard, who writes about how his “stunt foodways” (like roasting a whole pig on the beach) are incompatible with feeding a family.

The more practical firefighter Josh Lomask says cooking is like building a house. “It’s a manual process. But unlike a house, which might take months to build, cooking takes one night, and that gives me a great sense of satisfaction.” He says what Pollan was trying to say in “Out of the Kitchen,” but somehow the sentiment is less incendiary coming out of a firefighter’s mouth. “With both parents working, there’s been a whole generation of neglect in the kitchen. Guys are going to have to learn what fifties housewives must have all known–how to plan a menu and feed a family week by week.”

Shankar Vedantam, a reporter for the Washington Post and author of The Hidden Brain digs most deeply into the topic of gender roles. Through a short exercise he illustrates the subliminal biases that cause many of us to think of professional cooks as male and home cooks as female. For Vedantam, when Dad walks into the kitchen to cook for his family he becomes an activist, “actually engaging in political activity that is every bit as serious as that of the suffragettes who marched to win women the right to vote, or the civil rights protesters who marched to win equal rights for racial minorities. If you’re a man who abhors sexism, take up the spatula.” (Somewhere a adjunct professor is photocopying this chapter long with Gabrielle Hamilton’s chapter on “where are the women chefs” from Blood, Bones and Butter for her food studies course.) If that’s not convincing enough for you, there is also the opening quote by 18th-century gastronome Brillat-Savarin: “What woman wants, God wants.”

Donohue is hoping the diverse voices in Man with a Pan will inspire readers of both genders to cook more–and he’s not leaving those readers empty-handed. Every contributor also lists a couple of his favorite, time-tested recipes along with a list of his favorite cook books. There are several recipes for “The Best!” roast chicken, along with Tofu Bolognese, Ceviche, Chocolate Mousse, Ghanian Peanut Butter Soup, pickles, Pan-National Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sink Fish Cakes, and Whole Roast Cow. Okay, maybe that last one is not so useful (though the accompanying chimichurri recipe looks good), but the recipes and cookbook recommendations help Man with a Pan multitask as entertainment, polemic, and a tool book.

On his blog, Stay at Stove Dad, Donohue documents his own efforts to feed his family, wife Sarah Schenck, filmmaker and co-founder of video-based family food website Parent Earth, and their two daughters. Planning home-cooked meals for the family is, as Donohue puts it, like a chess game. “You have to think many moves ahead. Will there be something in the fridge to eat that Wednesday night you have to work late?” he asks. “Good question, one that can only be answered Sunday afternoon when you have the time. I make sure there are pasta sauces, pots of cooked rice, containers of black beans, roasted chickens, and the like always on hand.” Donohue does most of the cooking, but Schenck is usually the one to pick up the children and serve them dinner, putting together the sauces and staples Donohue prepares in advance. With his wife on the front lines with two hungry kids the food had better be good–and it looks like it is.

After reading Man with a Pan, I’m starting to catch a new vision of home cooking, one that involves men exchanging recipes and strategies. In the 1983 film Mr. Mom, Michael Keaton’s character is a recently out-of-work auto industry exec who has switched places with his wife. She’s supporting the family now while he does the housework. At a job interview he enthusiastically exchanges cooking advice with another laid-off worker, a scene that plays like a joke. They’re so into it–ha! When do we ever see men get so passionate about home cooking? I’ll tell you when; here and now, in one-third of our kitchens. For a book about men, Man with a Pan has surprisingly little chest thumping and a glorious amount of pleasure, generosity, and joy.

The story of the modern family dinner has been on the table, so to speak, for a while. Time published an article on the statistics behind family dinner in 2006. But in the wake of the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act I’ve noticed a new emerging wave in the good food movement that focuses on family dinner.

A few new non-profits and cookbooks are drawing attention to how family dinner can be the engine that drives the good food movement: our growing health crisis, the quest for a robust regional food system, the affordability and the access difficulties–all these issues manifest themselves at the family dinner table. Could there be a more significant expression of food’s importance than an intimate group of people sitting down together to share nourishment?

If you look at that image in the Time article, you see the smiling, white, nuclear family enjoying a multi-course meal. (Sure, I’ll give you that it’s probably ironic.) What’s new about the current dinner movement is that we’re finally moving past this ideal and getting real about the challenges of feeding a family–and while we’re at it, we’re also changing our notion of what a family can be in the first place.

I don’t need to tell you about the statistics myself–for every issue in family life, from academic performance to health to drug use, family dinner is a solution. What’s new about family dinner talk, though, is the focus. For the most part, proponents of family dinner are not looking at this ritual through idealized lenses, but are instead acknowledging and meeting head-on the of the challenges that keep us from eating dinner, at a table, all together.

Bill Mawhiney founded the nonprofit Time at the Table just last year. Through his organization he hopes to help people with many of the challenges–time, cooking skills, lack of tables even–that keep families from eating together. But he is also interested in expanding the definition of family dinner to something more inclusive, that greater numbers of people can identify with.

“The idea of family is open to interpretation. Family is what you mean in your heart,” Bill says, and he would know. For three years he was a guardian to a troubled teen, now 21 and living independently. Bill’s dinner epiphany came from a dinner party with friends. He had moved away from his roots in the Midwest and settled in New York City, and as a single guy he sought to create a new family (he now has a partner of five years). While hosting a dinner party with friends he suddenly realized, “Never once did we turn on the TV and never once did we leave the kitchen table. Why don’t we do this more often? I did this as a kid. Now we’re all eating around the TV, and we’re eating crap, and it just snowballs from there… This is where my mission needs to head, where I need to focus my energy.”

Bill is especially interested in reaching out to single people with roommates, college students, and single parents.  He recently did a workshop in a Kansas City assisted living space for people with disabilities. The residents live in a dorm-like setting with individual apartments. When Bill came in he noticed that the posted menu for the residents featured Hamburger Helper for four different meals. Realizing how far the residents were from enjoying whole-foods cooking (“But we like Hamburger Helper,” they told him,) he designed a recipe that mimicked a favorite Hamburger Helper dish but used fresh ingredients. And with grocery budget is $65 per person every two weeks, he’s shopping with the residents at Walmart. He believes in meeting people where the are.

“There’s lots of great information [on the importance of family dinner] out there, but you don’t really see the story of families and what they struggle with: time, money, motivation. We know what families struggle with, but we don’t know how to handle those struggles.” In addition to workshops, Time At The Table is gathering solutions in the form of recipes, shopping lists, and videos.

Laurie David’s new book, The Family Dinner, is taking on those struggles, too. Previously known as an environmental activist and producer of An Inconvenient Truth, David is now becoming famous for having gotten her ex-husband to the dinner table. In fact, it’s her divorce that makes The Family Dinner such a powerful book; the ritual kept her family afloat through the crisis of divorce.

Laurie emphasizes that family dinner doesn’t have to happen every single night, and it doesn’t have to include a three-course meal. What’s most important is that the family have “ritualized access to each other.” Hers is a no-guilt approach, but she still makes it clear that if you really want to make family dinner happen you have to make it a priority.

I thought of Laurie David when I read Peter Wells’ farewell column for Cooking for Dexter. He lamented that he worked too much (responding to e-mails features prominently) to make family dinner happen. “In some circles, it has become kind of cool lately to talk about those of us who don’t manage to cook for our families as an abstract but urgent societal problem.” If I could get him in the same room with Laurie I imagine she’d give him some of the same advice she gave me.

“If you can’t do dinner, find another ritual that brings you around the table together, like breakfast or a bedtime snack. It’s about creating happy, cozy, family moments, where you’re reminding yourself ‘this is why it’s so good to have kids.’” As for those kids, even if they’re at the age where dinner is more chaos time than cozy, Laurie urges parents not to wait. “They’re in training. They will be teenagers someday, and that’s when you’ll really need the ritual in place.’” Her book is filled with ideas for making dinnertime meaningful for kids of all ages.

Grace Freedman, a public health researcher, founder of EatDinner.org, and mother of three, takes issue with the practice (common among professional families) of holding one dinner for the kids and a later, separate dinner for the parents. “If you get into the habit of feeding kids on a different schedule than the parents or different foods than the parents eat, that can be a habit that undermines family dinner.” She adds that everyone sharing the same food can pull you out of the “kids’ food” trap and encourages more experimentation “I council not to fight over the food, but just to offer it. I think there’s something about sharing a meal that has cultural value. It’s okay if not everyone likes everyone likes the meal every night.” (It’s true, my son doesn’t love every meal I cook, and yet he has not starved to death.)

Parenting media editor and writer Jenny Rosenstracht might point Peter Wells to the book Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage & Dirty Dishes. The authors recently wrote a paradigm-shifitng post on Jenny’s blog about managing dinner for busy families. Jenny herself is working on a book titled Dinner, A Love Story. “What led me to focus on family dinner was the fact that family dinner was getting the short shrift in the conversation! It’s almost always positioned as a chore, a dreaded inevitability, a major source of stress. I wanted to shift the tone and show how much fun it could be, too. How valuable. That’s why it’s a love story!”

How do we get from unhealthy habits to a love story, especially with families who work nights or who have poor access to healthy, affordable food? Health and hunger organizations are working on the big picture of access and affordability, but people like Bill Mawhiney and Grace Freedman are helping families deal with the food system we have now–table by table.

Photo: H e r m a n via Flickr