Civil Eats

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the sort of feeling I get often when I watch many of the recent spate of food documentaries to be released.  Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system, and on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, but not their strategy.

It happened again while watching the British documentary film Pig Business. Read More

When I moved to the country this past spring, I breathed a sigh of relief for the natural environment and abundant animal life surrounding me. Gophers are everywhere—supposedly they ran the Russians out of Sonoma County—their wild escapades are evident across the dimpled landscape of the 80-acre organic farm I call home. Jack rabbits run through the olive groves and coyotes cry their lonely songs at night.

Dozens of birds encircle the farm: owls, hawks, crows, blue birds, hummingbirds, robins. Their songs and dances endlessly entertain. I’ve been graced by fox, deer, badgers, skunk, and raccoons, not to mention the neighbors’ chicken, ducks, sheep, goats, horses, llamas, and ostrich. And, I’ve fallen madly for the cows in the grassy field across the way. The glossy girls do a little jig when they see me coming with my bucket of kitchen leftovers and garden waste, which I should be saving for compost.

Nothing prepared me, though, for the wild turkey who planted herself firmly in my front yard the first week I arrived. Read More

Recently, Michael Pollan, author and local food guru, has been the target of attacks from local food naysayers. One, by Missouri Farm Bureau official Blake Hurst in the American Enterprise Institute’s Reason Magazine has gotten a lot of attention.

The article, entitled Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-Intellectuals, goes after the whole local food movement as a kind of effete endeavor by people who don’t know what they are talking about. And since the New York Times alerted its online readers to the article without digging much deeper, I will attempt to do so here. Read More