Civil Eats

Vegetable expert and bestselling cookbook author Mollie Katzen’s handwritten and illustrated cookbook, The Moosewood Cookbook, (not to mention The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and her cookbooks for children, Pretend Soup and Honest Pretzels) introduced many to the love of cooking. She was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2007 and her most recent book, Get Cooking, was recently nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals Award. Beloved by many, new to some, Katzen continues her clarion call for taking back our food system one delicious meal at a time. I recently spoke to Mollie about vegetables, the new Good Food Movement, and the radical necessity of cooking. Read More

It’s citrus season in California, and yet many of us are drinking orange juice out of cartons — juice from Florida oranges picked last spring, stored without oxygen and then flavored with synthetically produced “flavor packs.” I recently spoke to Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice, about this irony, the industry behind it, and the value of fresh fruit. 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

Nicolette Hahn Niman has been thinking about livestock for nearly a decade. Before she married (and began ranching with) Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch*, Nicolette worked as a senior attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance where she was in charge of the organization’s campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry. Nicolette spoke with CUESA recently about greenhouse gas emissions, the sustainable livestock tipping point, and her book Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (HarperCollins, 2009). She also authored a New York Times op-ed on Saturday called The Carnivore’s Dilemma. 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

The first time I saw “Pressure Cooker” was at Slow Food Nation last Labor Day. It left me–and as far as I could tell every single other viewer in the theater–in tears. It follows three seniors at a Philadelphia public high school, charting their journey through a culinary arts curriculum under the wing of the hilariously blunt, tough-loving Mrs. Stephenson. The film has been making the film festival circuit for the past 9 months and will now be enjoying a theatrical release in several cities (scroll all the way down for schedule). Here I sat down for an interview with Co-Directors Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman: Read More

I grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nominally pastoral, petrocentric Los Angeles suburb, so peak oil prognosticator James Howard Kunstler’s dim view of our car-crazed culture really resonates with me.

Kunstler’s relentless skewering of suburbia, and his penchant for apocalyptic predictions have landed him a reputation as a cranky Cassandra. But as Ben McGrath observed while strolling around Saratoga Springs with Kunstler for a recent New Yorker piece, “Far from the image of the stereotypical Chicken Little, he was more like an amiable town crier whom the citizenry regarded fondly, if a bit skeptically.”

So, when a friend and I found ourselves headed to Kunstler’s neck of the woods for a conference recently, we arranged to have dinner with Saratoga Springs’ resident soothsayer. Contrary to his contrarian reputation, Kunstler proved to be an affable, upbeat guy. Read More

If you’ve been listening to the news in the past month, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about biofuels. Simply put, they are fuel made out of plants – principally corn and soybeans in the United States.

The new Obama administration is solidly in favor of increased biofuels production. Everyone from his Secretary of Agriculture to his Secretary of Energy has voiced their support for this policy. But the production of biofuel is by no means uncontroversial, and solidly at the center of this controversy is Dr. David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences at Cornell University. Read More

I spoke with Dan Barber last week about his restaurant Blue Hill, located at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, an 80 acre four-season and pastured livestock farm in Tarrytown, New York that provides most of the food for the restaurant and conducts educational programs open to the public.  I wrote about my experience at Stone Barns and the restaurant here. Read More

The Humane Society has brought a wave of national attention this year to the cause of the fair treatment of farm animals, beginning with the video of a slaughterhouse in Chino, California that displayed for the world the terrible treatment that cows in our food chain are receiving.  Now, The Humane Society is sponsoring Proposition 2, which, if passed with a vote of “yes” tomorrow on California’s ballot, would require pregnant sows and veal calves enough space to turn around and stretch their legs, and would require hens the space to spread their wings.  The ballot initiative has received so much national attention, even bringing the President of The Humane Society, Wayne Pacelle, to Ellen and Oprah’s stages.  Naomi Starkman spoke with Wayne Pacelle to ask him about what will follow Proposition 2’s vote tomorrow. Read More

Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of Work Architecture are the architects behind New York’s innovative urban farm for the Young Architects Program at MoMA. They called their project Public Farm 1. They gave me a tour of their edible green space, which was on view at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York. Read More

Daphne Miller, M.D. is the author of The Jungle Effect: A Doctor Discovers the Healthiest Diets from Around the World – Why They Work, and How to Bring Them Home. She is an associate professor of nutrition and integrative medicine at the University of California, and works in a private family practice in San Francisco.

Paula: What first got you interested in studying how indigenous diet effects health? Read More

Raj Patel is the author of the book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He will be speaking on August 29th at Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought. You can read more about his work on his website.

This is Part 2 of this interview. The first portion can be found here.

Paula: How did the advent of the supermarkets change the way people think about food? Read More

Raj Patel is the author of the book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He will be speaking on August 29th at Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought. You can read more about his work on his website. Read More

Amy Franceschini is the founder of Victory Gardens 2008+ as well as the web-based collectives Futurefarmers and Free-Soil, where she contributes her talents as a multi-media artist to conceptual projects designed to raise awareness on sustainable living and inspire inquiry and innovation. Amy seeks to engage people of diverse disciplines in a spirited dialogue about lessening our impact on the earth through encouraging us to focus on nurturing our creative energies and thus allowing for the cross-pollination of ideas. She is also currently a professor of art at Stanford University and the San Francisco Institute of Art. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the SFMOMA, the MOMA and Whitney museums of New York, as well as internationally in the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Read More

This is the second and final portion of my interview with Dan Imhoff, the author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill, a book about the outcome of the 2008 Farm Bill and what we can do to effect change despite business as usual in Washington. He will be taking part in Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought panel series, and is co-author of the Vision Statement for Agriculture and Food Policy for the 21st Century, being presented at SFN August 28th.

Part 1 of this interview can be found here.

Paula: What would a different, better version of the Farm Bill look like?

Dan: First of all, farmers would have to be enrolled in some kind of stewardship program before they can get anything at all, and they should be rewarded for how well they farm, instead of how much in commodities that they are putting into the pipeline. And why direct giveaways [for things like waste mitigation]? I mean these are big corporations, why can’t they be loans, why don’t they have to be paid back? I mean they are just complying with the Clean Air and the Clean Water Act, these are things that, if they are treated as industries, which they really are, they would have to be doing with there own money. There has to be some kind of responsibility. Are you helping to preserve the land, maintain it so that we can pass it on to the next generation? Are we doing research, finding beneficial ways to grow crops, for when we are not going to be able to afford petroleum-based fertilizers? Are we starting to build the infrastructure for a regional food system we are going to desperately need when oil tops off at $500 per barrel? Are we rewarding farmers for growing a diversity of crops, actually contributing to producing healthier food that can be fed to the kids in our schools?

Paula: Do you see agribusiness lobbyists as the main obstacle to a fairer Farm Bill and a better system?

Dan: Agribusiness lobbyists and the inability to enforce the anti-trust laws that we already have on the books are two huge obstacles, absolutely. I would say there is a real lack of a vision, getting back to what you asked earlier about the objectives, I don’t think there are clear objectives for a healthy food and farming system like you might think, that there are “ten principles” that everyone who walks into the USDA looks at on the board and goes, “better food, better farmlands, healthier future for America.”

Paula: You discuss the industrial agriculture system as unsustainable in your book, Food Fight. Do you think it is possible to feed as many people that are on the planet without the use of industrial agriculture?

Dan: Yeah, I think increasingly, you see that there are some pretty good studies that say that it is the small, diverse systems that can either equally produce or out produce most industrial systems. I think we will increasingly see that the cost of maintaining those industrial systems, the fertilizers and long distances and all the chemical inputs [becoming] unaffordable. I would hope that regions all across the country are starting to have meetings to say that this is the kind of food system that we want, so in three years time, they can go to their elected representatives. Because that was really a big part of what was absent in the discussions this time, long term planning, region by region. I think extremely quickly we are going to have to have a far more regionally based production capacity. And I don’t think people are aware of just how quickly things can change. How quickly the cost of energy [and] severe storm events can influence the food and farming sector.

Paula: You are producing the Vision Statement for a new Food, Farm and Agriculture Policy, being presented at Slow Food Nation. Could you give us a taste of that proposal?

Dan: We will try to make the point that a healthy food and agriculture system is the basis of a secure country and a secure world. And the current system that we have is not sustainable, it is out of balance and it is breaking down. We can see that in the food riots, escalating food prices, and in parts of the country where they’ve re-plumed the hydrology to industrially farm corn so that [the land] can no longer absorb water in huge flood events. And I think that what we need is, I hope, some kind of vision that says it’s our duty, as citizens, as parents, as farmers, as eaters, to try to make the healthiest food system we can, that we can pass on to the next generation. One of the things that was severely absent in this Farm Bill was the voice of the medical community. The medical cost of the obesity crisis is four times what we are spending on the commodity programs. Just think if we started to think differently, if we started to think of healthy food as preventative medicine. Ultimately it’s going to save us costs in other areas. We should be investing in our health, first and foremost, because I think in the long run it will save us money and it will do so much more to help us to feel healthy as a nation.

Paula: What can the average citizen do?

Dan: Just learn as much as you can. Don’t let your representatives off the hook. Vote with your fork, eat like an activist, and just try as best as you can to bring your goals for the planet in line with your diet and how you vote and how you live your life.

Photo by Jan Tik

Dan Imhoff is the author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Farm Bill, a book about the outcome of the 2008 Farm Bill and what we can do to effect change despite business as usual in Washington. He will be taking part in Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought panel series, and is co-author of the Vision Statement for Agriculture and Food Policy for the 21st Century, being presented at SFN August 28th.
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