Sometimes a spoonful of sugar does, indeed, make the medicine go down. Though you won’t find that catchphrase in the just-released hardcover edition of Food Rules, Michael Pollan‘s best-selling little eater’s manual.

Food Rules does sport the whimsical and witty illustrations of well-known artist Maira Kalman, however. And the new book also boasts 19 new rules—many gleaned from eaters around the country that Pollan wished he had thought of and included the first time around.

Take two is again full of commonsense kitchen wisdom such as If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry; and When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.

The takeaway message: food need not be complicated, and the act of eating is as much about pleasure and communion as it is about nutrition and health. In other words: lighten up a little and enjoy your dinner.

In case you’ve been living under a compost pile, Pollan is a champion of small-scale, sustainable farming, humanely-raised livestock, and access to real food for all. A foe of what he calls highly-processed, edible food-like substances, Pollan’s food philosophy is famously simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

He is the author of five previous books including the popular In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, andBotany of Desire, and he writes regularly about food matters for The New York Times. Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and co-instructor of the Chez Panisse Foundation funded Edible Education 101 at Cal this fall.

Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world last year and everyone from students and grandmas to Oprah and the Obamas listen up when the mild-mannered man speaks out about corporate food, Big Ag, school food, factory farming, eating culture, and food safety.

We talked, briefly, following an Edible Education lecture given by former Berkeley School Lunch Lady Ann Cooper, whom Pollan introduced before taking her to dinner at—where else?—Chez Panisse. And we spoke again the next day, at length, via phone.

Pollan, 56, dedicates his latest work to his mother, former New York Magazine style columnist Corky Pollan, “who always knew butter is better for you than margarine.” He lives in North Berkeley with his wife, the artist Judith Belzer. His formerly picky eater son, Isaac, recently dispatched to Wesleyan, misses family meals.

Why Food Rules Two?

I wanted to work on a more visual version of Food Rules to reach more people and continue the conversation that the first edition started. My wife and I saw an exhibit of Maira Kalman’s work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and Judith suggested we collaborate.

When you look at Maira’s work—like a painting of a Snickers bar on a pink ground or a framed collection of onion rings—it often manages to be poignant, funny, and sad all at the same time.

Eating is important to her but she doesn’t take food too seriously and is not politically correct about it in the least. We’re already neurotic enough about our eating; I wanted this book to be fun while it covered some serious ground.

Can you give us insider insights into Edible Education 101?

It’s been an interesting experience for me personally because I’ve not taught undergraduates before, though I should note my co-instructor Nikki Henderson is carrying most of the load as I’m technically on leave. I’ve found the students terrific; they ask questions that are sharp but well phrased and polite. In a community meeting with corporate food people you might expect to hear the Berkeley hiss, but there’s been none of that. They’re an engaged and impressive group.

We’ve learned things too. We might have had a more effective dialogue in the case of the corporate food lecture, which included Wal-Mart, if it hadn’t been webcast. That had an inhibiting effect on the conversation. I’m also used to three-hour classes; these 90-minute ones go by really fast. I think they work best when we have just one guest so we can really drill down and expound on the issues. At this stage of the semester I wouldn’t be sorry if one of our guests had to cancel just so we had some time for reviewing and contextualizing the material with the students.

And, it has to be said, what a gift this is from the Chez Panisse Foundation to the community as well as the students. The list of speakers and the subjects covered is impressive.

Has interest in the food movement peaked in the popular culture?

It’s hard to know where we are right now but I don’t think so. I remember when I was trying to finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma, published in 2006, I thought I was coming to the subject a little late. It took me forever to finish that book. I do feel a sense of urgency to keep writing about food. We’re just beginning to see the impact of our food choices on health care and insurance costs—obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are soaring—and we need to keep the pressure on the government and corporations for change. If anything, I only see the conversation deepening, and that’s especially encouraging given the economic situation since 2008.

Do you ever want to write about something other than food?

I haven’t always written about food but I find it’s a good place to talk about other things like the environment, the economy, health, culture, and politics. Food is a very big tent as subjects go. That’s why it’s held my interest.

How—and what—do you cook?

I make simple food. I grill more nights than I don’t and my wife and I typically cook together. We work well in the kitchen together. One of us makes the main and the other the sides. We’re fortunate to work from home so we’re able to make dishes that require slow cooking like braises and soups.

Some of our readers view you as an elitist foodie and roll their eyes at such stories as your New York Times Magazine piece, The 36-Hour Dinner Party. Is that unfair?

I reject that characterization while I’m sensitive to the fact that not everybody has access to good food. I appreciate that food and class are intimately tied: that story is set in Napa, which implies a lot of leisure in certain circles. But I don’t think Americans should be afraid of aestheticism; as a culture some times we can have an aversion to pleasure.

To eat healthily in this country—by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment—costs more than it does to eat poorly. That situation is a public policy problem. We need farm policies that will correct this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones.

There is no question that there is an elite strand within the food movement, but a lot of social change movements in this country—I’m thinking of abolitionists, women’s suffrage, and civil rights as examples—have been started by the affluent because they have the leisure and resources to do so.

As a recognized leader in the food movement how do you handle the rock-star status?

A sense of humor helps, so does remembering that this type of attention is fleeting. And regardless of what people say about my books, the next morning I still have to get up and face the page and come up with sentences I like. All that other stuff doesn’t help with writing, which can be incredibly hard.

What’s the subject of your next book?

It’s about the transformation of food through cooking methods such as baking, fermentation, and cooking with liquids or heat. So it focuses on the science of cooking, the classical elements; I’ve been doing research about fire, for instance. It should be out in early 2013.

What gives you hope on the food front?

I see movement happening all around the country, like grass-fed beef in supermarkets and young people taking up farming. I’m now asked to speak in places like Troy, New York, Cleveland, and Lubbock, Texas. They aren’t typical food towns. People in their 20s are as engaged with this issue as their parents, whether it’s for health, the environment, or both. I have a lot of faith that as consumers we can change things by voting with our forks.

WATCH: Michael Pollan reads excerpts from Food Rules here, featuring the illustrations of Maira Kalman:

Photos: Top, Author Michael Pollan, by Fran Collin. Middle, Food Rules cover. Bottom, #76: Place a Bouquet of Flowers on the Table and Everything Will Taste Twice as Good. Illustration: Copyright (c) Maira Kalman 2011. Reprinted with permission from The Penguin Press from FOOD RULES by Michael Pollan.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.

When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair.

Mark Bittman had an op-ed in the Times a few weeks ago in which he argued that, despite subsidies, junk food can actually be more expensive than cooking meals from scratch. You have said in the past that we live in a country where it’s cheaper to feed  our children Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. So, which is it?

We live in a country where it’s easier—to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Sometimes that’s price but a lot of times that’s access and a lot of times it’s knowledge, too. Price, access, and knowledge come together as this set of three factors, which can make it really hard to do the right thing when it comes to food.

Take potato chips. To buy a pound of potatoes in the form of potato chips, you are probably spending $11 or $12 a pound for potatoes. And potatoes, even the fanciest organic fingerlings, are never more than $2.75 or $3 pound, which is obscenely expensive. (Generally potatoes are $1 per pound.) So we’re talking ten or twelve times more for the junk food version.

Now the issue with that, though, is that it’s not just a matter of personal choice. It’s not that low-income people are making bad choices—it’s that they live in a food environment where making good choices is really really difficult. And so we need to change the structures that make that the case.

Bittman did acknowledge food deserts, but he implied that most people are lazy and opt to watch T.V. rather than cook. I think there’s some truth to these skewed values, but I also know there are many poor people who want to eat better but don’t because they’re pressed for time and are surrounded by fast food.

If we pretend that food is a democracy, you have to acknowledge that for a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods, there are no polling stations and there’s only one candidate, and it’s the incumbent. And just saying “Well, if you just voted differently, we’d have a different food system,” verges on pathologizing poor people for bearing the traits of poverty. We can’t do that. We do have to talk about, “Hey, everyone needs to learn how to cook.” This should be something we value and the time should be valued, as well. Everyone should be engaged in building a world where it’s not easier to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Whether that’s a matter of price, access, or knowledge.

Before you became the president of Slow Food USA, you were the co-director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project. Tell me a little about that project.

I was hired by Yale to get local, sustainable food into the dining halls and to build a farm on campus. And also to build curriculum and extra-curricular programs for undergraduates. It was a great adventure.

The idea was, “Let’s intervene with this incredibly intelligent—and for the most part very privileged—group of young people right before they catapult into the world.” Since ’72, every single presidential election at that time had a Yale graduate as one of the top two candidates. If you can intervene in that population you can create incredible change in the world.

At the same time, I was feeling a need to tap into the energy that was growing all over the country—particularly post-Omnivore’s Dilemma. I was seeing a lot of people—not just college students—either really angry or really inspired about food. They needed a place to put that energy. After Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, you saw the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations take readers of the book—people who would be engaged in pushing for social change. So I thought, “Slow Food should be the vessel for all that energy.” I got asked to join the board and eventually got asked to take it over.

So was that your charge as president—to engage in movement building?

Exactly. Which takes organizational change. But we turned ourselves into an organization that’s built to do that work.

Every mom who drops her kid off at school for the first day and realizes, “My child may be eating something that’s going to make her sick”—that mom needs a path to do something about that concern. Everyone who reads Michael Pollan and complains about corn subsidies with a friend over a cup of Fair Trade coffee—they need something to do about it! And our job is to give them something to do about it. That’s what gets me up in the morning. I think it’s what gets all of our staff and volunteers up in the morning—how do we make sure that we take that energy and turn it into power to make change?

I noticed the shift in Slow Food’s mission right around Slow Food Nation, in August of 2008. After that, the popular perception started to change from the notion that Slow Food was a club for foodies (whether or not it was) to a social justice organization.

It wasn’t just me. It was a mood—a tone and tenor and culture of the movement that needed to change. We realized we needed to move in that direction.

But social justice has always been embedded in Slow Food’s overall mission, no?

Absolutely—and globally. Right now we have members in 150 countries. Slow Food has nothing to do with being a gourmet club in these countries. It has to do with changing the world, preserving traditions and maintaining the sovereignty of the people who are growing and eating in their countries. It has a lot to do with corporate power and the way globalization plays out.

Slow Food’s tag line has always been about making food good, clean, and fair.

At the very beginning it was a protest against McDonald’s on the Spanish Steps. And so it started with that sense of anti-corporate protest—it’s in its DNA. And I think some people forgot and thought it was good, clean, or fair. But the “and” is really important.

The latest e-mail I got expands on that: “Food that is good for those who eat it, good for the farmers and workers, and good for the planet.”

And that’s basically how I describe what Slow Food is. It’s the opposite of fast food—it’s all those things.

Do you still get remarks from people who think Slow Food is elitist?

I’ve always been clear that I don’t want to spend any time in an argument about whether we’re elitist or not. I want to do work that makes it completely apparent that we’re not. I’m committed to doing work that is relevant to the people who are most hurt by these problems. If we can do that, I think the argument will fade away.

I think it is clear from all the “campaigns” you’ve engaged in—from the $5 challenge to the fight to ensure that taking photographs of farms is legal.

Our first campaign, in 2009, was about school lunch. It was called “Time for Lunch.”

We had over 300 potluck protests all over the country and yet no one talked about that as a social justice campaign or a campaign that was about social change. It was talked about as fixing school lunch. But school lunch is a program that feeds 31 million of America’s poorest children every day. It’s a program that disproportionately impacts low-income people and people of color. Time for Lunch was not just about this lesson: everyone should cook. It was about “What makes it more challenging to feed our kids real fruit rather than Froot Loops?”

The 2012 Farm Bill is right around the corner. Is Slow Food planning a campaign around it?

Food and farm policy is completely against our nutrition and environment policy. It’s a really interesting political climate right now—it’s a budget-driven climate. So we see huge opportunities to take away some of the incentives that allow corn and corn syrup to be so cheap. At the same time there is a huge risk that some of the programs that feed people or support ranchers and farmers will also get taken away.

We’re not sophisticated lobbyists, but what we are are really good organizers. The $5 challenge is essentially a way of helping us find anyone who is concerned about these issues and setting them up to be advocates on the Farm Bill.

We’ll have a policy platform that we’ll be pushing and we’ll be asking Congress to do the right thing by it. The timing of it remains to be seen. But we know that with or without Congress, we’re organizing people around good, clean, fair food policy. The $5 challenge is the launching pad for that.

So what will the organizing on this issue look like?  Will you ask members to call their Senators and Representatives or will there be more of a MoveOn house party model?

The face-to-face engagement—whether it’s political or not—is vital. The kind of relationships we build when we have a meal together is the foundation for doing good work to change the world. What you’ll see are small groups meeting all over the country for meals and taking the $5 challenge over and over again. And pushing legislators by phone and meeting them in their home states.

A lot of the really effective advocacy that’s happening right now is happening not in Washington D.C., but back at home. That’s where legislators are listening. I actually think that’s a healthy trend. We’re set up to do that kind of advocacy because we have 225 chapters, members in every state, and this great volunteer corps.

What is the membership of Slow Food USA these days?

We have about 25,000 active members. We reach a network of about 250,000 people via e-mail. Through Oct. 15^th, membership is pay what you can. So instead of it being $25 for membership, even $1 will make you a member. It’s part of trying to make sure everyone can be involved in this work and be part of the organization.

We also have a really big Twitter and Facebook following. I think we’re at 179,000 Twitter followers now and have 85,000 “likes” on Facebook. What’s great about that community is they’re all over the country and they’re sharing stories of the work they’re doing on the ground but then they’re also talking about food all the time. It’s a nice mix.

We beat McDonalds by a couple thousand Twitter followers—we’re pretty proud.

Does Slow Food do some kind of outreach to low-income communities or food deserts? I would guess that people in most of these communities are not familiar with Slow Food, but I could be wrong.

Our chapters have over 500 local partnerships in the communities where they work, with other organizations. They range from churches to nonprofit organizations and direct service organizations. And a pretty substantial percentage of those local organizations are doing work in low-income communities. For us the key is to do work that is relevant in those communities and let the Slow Food identity and membership follow. So we’re actually not that focused on aggressively diversifying our membership but we are really focused on making sure that the work of Slow Food is relevant to diverse constituents. And if diverse membership follows—and particularly if diverse volunteer leadership follows, whether that’s socioeconomic or racial diversity—that, we think, is a really good thing.

I think Slow Food’s New York chapter gave money for the garden at Automotive high school in Greenpoint.

That’s a great example. Almost all of our tangible on-the-ground work happens at the local chapters. Our hope is that the local chapter will be better at doing local work—whether it’s gaining local press or raising local money than we ever could be at the national level. Our work at the national level is to build up the leadership of those chapters and support them so that they can be effective at their work but then bring us all together around national campaigns.

Bryan Walsh, in his article about the food movement, was tallying up the membership of Slow Food as if it were the main sign of this being a viable social movement.

But you know, another way to look at it is that it’s about potential. The Tea Party at its outset had a much smaller membership than Slow Food has now.  If you look at the early Civil Rights movement—the assets both in organized people and in dollars—it’s much smaller than the food movement.

I think the question now is how do you tap into the passionate concerns of people who want to change things and give them pathways to do it?  For me, I look much less at our current membership than to our potential membership, which is enormous. And then what you do with those folks is incredible as well. We have a set of three Slow Food chapter leaders in Denver: Andy, Gigia, and Krista. They started a garden in their kids’ school and soon parents at other schools were saying, “We wanna see gardens in our school. Would you help us do it?” So they did.

Finally, the three of them were running twelve different gardens in twelve different schools. And they thought, “We can’t do this any more!” The next parent who came up and said, “We want to do this, would you start a garden in our kids’ school?”  They said—“Go find twelve parents and teachers that get together regularly and we’ll train you how to do it yourself.”

A few years later, they’ve got gardens in over 60 percent of the public schools in Denver and they’ve organized a network of 500 parents and teachers to get this whole thing off the ground. So for me, show me, 50 Andy, Gigias, and Kristas—and we’ve got a Tea Party for the food movement.

Were you pleased with how many people turned out for the $5 challenge?

Over 30,000 people took the challenge and there were over 5,500 events on that day. We thought we’d have 500 events and maybe a few thousand people taking part. We never could’ve anticipated this turnout. I think this speaks to the potential power that’s out there and the drive and desire to share food and knowledge and get together in our communities.

There’s a section of our Web site where we posted the tips, tricks, and recipes people sent us. It ranges from videos, pictures, and recipes to a theory of cooking beans. The underlying idea is our communities collectively have a lot of the solutions we need. Whether it’s how to cook real food on a budget or it’s how to effectively drive our legislators for meaningful change for federal policy. We own those solutions ourselves, so let’s begin using them and sharing them with each other.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Everyone can eat every day food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it. That food is a universal right and not a privilege. That’s the short definition.

I used to be a vegetable grower and I would sell very expensive produce at a farmers’ market in an affluent neighborhood. There were some low-income people who would come to that market and they couldn’t afford the produce I had. So I would give it away. My partner and I were making maybe $12,000 between the two of us.

So there’s this paradox. To even stay at the poverty line as a farmer, selling directly to consumers, you have to charge prices which means that your food—which is real food—is completely unavailable to low-income people. And you are a low-income person! So we have this false choice. My only option would’ve been making zero—losing money. When you have those kinds of paradoxical situations, I think it doesn’t call on farmers to lower their prices. And it doesn’t call on poor people to spend more money on food. It calls on all of us to change the way that we grow and share food in this country, so that we don’t have those kinds of choices anymore.

Originally published on The Faster Times

Ann Gentry is the creator and founder of Real Food Daily (RFD), a mecca for organic, vegan cuisine in Los Angeles, where she and her staff serve up delicious, plant-based food to celeb devotees including Alicia Silverstone, Ellen DeGeneres, and Conan O’Brien. The executive chef to Vegetarian Times magazine, and star of her own cooking show, Naturally Delicious, Gentry is also the author of The Real Food Daily Cook Book. Her new cookbook, Vegan Family Meals: Real Food For Everyone, just out this week, offers more than 100 tasty recipes. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Gentry about cooking for families, raising children vegetarian, and why she believes in feeding people whole, natural food.  

What’s a Southern girl like you doing in a vegan joint in Hollywood?

I’m from Tennessee, and like most people, grew up eating the Standard American Diet, only Southern style. People ate a lot of meat, everything was fried, and no one questioned frozen or packaged food. When I moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue an acting career, I worked in a natural foods restaurant and that experience had a big impact on me. I became interested in the cause and effect relationship between my body and the food I ate. But mostly, I just felt really good eating whole food. When I moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, I worked as a personal chef to actor/director Danny DeVito, and later had a home delivery service before I opened the first RFD restaurant in 1993. I base my cooking on macrobiotics (a diet based on whole grains and vegetables), which taught me the connection between diet and health. I’ve been vegetarian and vegan on and off for three decades; these days I eat a small amount of dairy and fish.

What about cooking for families appeals to you?

I thought the RFD cookbook would be my one and only. But, I realized I had another book in me after I had two children (a daughter, Halle, twelve, and a son, Walker, eight) and began feeding my family out of my own home kitchen. I wanted to create a book with very simple and tasty recipes. The central theme of this book is family and who is around your table and it doesn’t have to be kids. Your family is your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even just yourself. I want people to sit down and eat together in a healthy and delicious way. The focus is on texture, color, cooking methods, simplicity of ingredients, accessibility—you can find most of the ingredients in your own pantry. I grew up sitting down to a meal of protein centered in the plate with several side dishes. People are busy and don’t have time to make all of that food now. In this book, you can learn to make a whole meal out of salad, which is my favorite way to eat, and you can be completely nourished and satisfied.

Your family helped you with this book. What is like raising kids vegetarian and/or vegan?

I’m lucky because my husband is as committed, if not more, than I am to eating well. We keep a vegan household, though sometimes we have goat ice cream or yogurt, and the kids eat what we eat. My daughter breastfed and was vegan for first two years of her life and then she became vegetarian, and now she’s exploring food. She is sort of a radical vegan, who understands what it means to kill an animal. Children do. It will be interesting to see if my kids will rebel against it and if they do, I’m not going to stand in their way. I made a conscious decision that I don’t want to be the mother who follows her kids around with “special” food, though I do appreciate families whose children have allergies.

Why is eating less meat important?

I try to never preach and knock people over the head with a vegan message. Veganism is a noble cause, but most people aren’t going to become vegan or vegetarian. That doesn’t mean they don’t seek out and want more grain-based food in their lives. I’m hopeful that the more grains and vegetables people eat, the more they will want to eat this way. And times have changed. People are eating less meat due to the horrible practices involved with industrial animal agriculture and also for their health and the environment. And there are a lot of vegetarians who are living on processed tofu meat-like products. While I do include recipes in the book with tofu, tempeh, and nondairy cheese, I’m not trying to replicate flavors or textures of meat. I’m much more interested in getting people to eat whole, unprocessed food.

You were one of the first restauranteurs to commit to organics. Why is organic important to you?

Choosing fruits and vegetables that are grown organically in pesticide-free soil is the best thing you can do for yourself and your family. My dollars go toward supporting small family farms and keeping chemicals off my plate, out of my body, and out of the environment. Nearly everything we have at RFD is almost 100 percent organic. We bite the bullet and pay the extra cost for organic ingredients because we believe it is better for our customers and the planet. When we first opened, I went to the Santa Monica farmers’ market twice a week, and I have longterm relationships with some incredibly committed organic farmers, including Bill McGrath, Coastal Organics, Burkhart, Maggie’s farm, and Del Cabo—Larry Jacobs is my brother-in-law, and we love using his cherry tomatoes in our guacamole.

What’s your take on MyPlate?

From my perspective, USDA’s MyPlate represents a shift in the right direction from prior recommendations, but that’s not saying much. Let’s face it, the agency has a stated purpose to promote the sale of agribusiness products. Leaving my cynicism behind, I do like that fruits, vegetables, and grains comprise three-fourths of MyPlate. But why did they stop at half? Mostly likely because the cereal manufactures won the day at that negotiation. Madison Avenue has convinced America that whole grains come from a cereal box. The inclusion of “protein” as a “food group” is an obvious win for the meat industry’s lobbyists.   These guys have spent big bucks for generations convincing Americans that protein is the flesh of a dead animal. For the most part, they have succeeded. So now we have  ”official” guidelines with their “code word” taking up one-fourth of the plate.  On the positive side, beans, peas, nuts and seeds make the list of “protein foods.” The fact is, all plants contain plenty of protein for a healthy diet and American’s over consume protein, which many experts say contributes to depletion of calcium.  Eating more calcium will never overcome the problem of bone loss and I’d like to see that cup of dairy on the side of MyPlate fed back to the calves as the mama cow had intended. Obviously, the dairy industry’s lobbyists earned their pay here.

One of Gentry’s favorite recipes from her new book follows. On Tuesday, June 21, she will be cooking up some vegan fare and discussing her new book at 18 Reasons in San Francisco.

Lasagna Rolls with Tofu Ricotta and Everyday Tomato Sauce

This is a fun way to serve lasagna: Instead of the traditional layering, you top the individual noodles with a vegan ricotta cheese and vegetable mixture and roll it up. My tofu ricotta cheese is a blend of tofu, miso, and tahini, which creates a creamy consistency that easily spreads. The tomato sauce takes no more than 10 minutes to make; if there is any left over, use it the next day over rice or noodles. Serves 6 (makes 12 rolls)

2½ tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into ¼-inch pieces
2 zucchini, cut into ¼-inch pieces
1 head broccoli, stems removed and florets finely chopped
2 cups Tofu Ricotta Cheese (recipe follows)
12 eggless lasagna noodles
3 cups Everyday Tomato Sauce (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large, heavy frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the onions, garlic, basil, salt, and pepper. Sauté until the onions are tender, about 10 minutes. Add the carrots, zucchini, and broccoli and sauté until the carrots are crisp-tender, about 12 minutes. Let cool completely. Mix the vegetable mixture into the tofu ricotta cheese.

Cook the noodles in a large pot of boiling salted water, stirring often, until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and rinse the noodles, then toss them with 1 tablespoon of the remaining oil to prevent the noodles from sticking together.

Coat a 13 by 9 by 2-inch baking dish with the remaining 1½ teaspoons oil. Spread 1 cup of the tomato sauce on the bottom of the dish. Using a spatula, spread about ½ cup of the vegetable mixture over each lasagna sheet, leaving about ½ inch of each end uncovered. Roll up each sheet tightly and place it seam-side-down in the baking dish. Pour the remaining 2 cups tomato sauce over the lasagna rolls.

Cover the dish with aluminum foil. Bake until the sauce bubbles, about 55 minutes. Remove the foil and continue baking for 15 minutes.

***

Tofu Ricotta Cheese

When blended, the tofu gives this vegan cheese a creamy consistency that resembles ricotta. This recipe is borrowed from my first book, The Real Food Daily Cookbook—when you have a good recipe, why change it?  Makes about 3 cups

(14-ounce) container waterpacked firm tofu, drained and  cut into quarters
²⁄3 cup yellow miso
²⁄3 cup water
½ cup tahini
¼ cup olive oil
5 large garlic cloves
1½ teaspoons dried basil
1½ teaspoons dried oregano
¾ teaspoon sea salt

Blend all the ingredients in a food processor until smooth. The cheese will keep for 2 days, covered and refrigerated.

***

Everyday Tomato Sauce

This is a perfect, simple tomato sauce. The key is to use canned crushed tomatoes, easily found in a grocery or natural foods store. Eden and Glen Muir are my favorite brands because they are organic.
Makes about 4 cups

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 shallots, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano

Heat the olive oil in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the shallots, garlic, and salt and sauté until fragrant, about 20 seconds. Stir in the tomatoes and the 1 cup water. Bring to a gentle simmer, then decrease the heat to low and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes, to allow the flavors to blend. Stir in the basil and oregano. Remove from the heat.

—From Vegan Family Meals by Ann Gentry/Andrews McMeel Publishing

If a women’s place is in the kitchen, then why do men get celebrity chef status?

This age-old question, although archaic, still has some validity when you take a moment to study the statistics on which gender tends to hold more power in the culinary arena. Of course, we can acknowledge and celebrate the legions of legendary women who have risen to the top of the food world, but we should also not forget to keep asking ourselves if things are truly equal.

This holds true in beverage circles as well.  The list of iconic winemakers, distillers and brew masters heavily tilts to male.  So where are the ladies?  Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing is helping to turn the tide.  Opened in 2005 by wife and husband Emily Thomas and Chad Brill (she actually taught him how to brew), they are all organic, integral to the local community, and work to promote beer education through a myriad of events throughout the year.  The second annual Strong Women Brew Day took place on a rainy weekend during SF Beer Week, and the turnout was heartening despite the downpour.  Strong women gathered to learn about, taste and craft the next batch of the brewery’s Belgian Wit. In between hauling canfuls of mash, forklift trips and temperature checks, owner and brewer Emily Thomas ducked inside to talk with me about women and beer.

So tell me more about the Wit.

We took a Classic Belgium style wit, which is a lighter style beer typically made with oranges and coriander, it’s got a specific yeast profile that has some cloves and vanilla.  Both Nicole (brewer & manager) and I are very novice herbologists and so we like the idea of getting some healthy properties while we’re drinking.  It’s more about putting some good stuff into the beer that we’re brewing.  So we brew our beer with St. Johns Wart and lemon balm as well as the orange peel and the coriander.  That’s why it’s called the Feel Good Wit.  We got in trouble with the witches because we were calling it the Witches Wit, based on this idea that witches were just female brewers. It came out in the newspaper and then we started getting these messages on our machine from women who were part of the Santa Cruz Mountain Witches and they didn’t want to be associated with that at all, so we decided to change the name.

Why do you think there aren’t more female brewers?

I think in general beer has always been perceived to be a man’s drink and that just led to men being brewers and getting interested in it. Even with homebrewing, it seems like men really picked it up a lot more, which is strange because originally it was mainly women who brewed, but over time it definitely shifted. I think with beer popularity growing with women, it’s starting to open a lot of doors in homebrewing and brewing in general, but it’s still dominated by men and that can be really intimidating for women to even get their foot in the door.

Are there any female brewers, beside you, working at successful breweries?

Yes. There is a society of women brewers called the Pink Boots Society and I’ve been to a few of their meetings. And there is a brewery started by a women and her husband about 30 years ago called Sprecher up in Wisconsin.  There are also several women in California; North Coast and Stone have some women brewers.

Historically, did women play a role in beer?

Yeah.  One of our customers just gave me this book called Beer in the Middle Ages and I just started reading it.  It is one of the first real concrete pieces of literature that talks about women as brewers.  There is a lot of speculation about how the term “witch” came to become associated with brewing techniques, and all the symbols that were actually part of brewing like the broom and the cats and the kettle and the cauldrons…traditionally they would stick a broom outside their door so people would know this is where you get beer.  Especially in the Middle Ages, women’s work was definitely separate from men’s work, which was building and hunting.  Women would produce food and beverages.

Why do you think a “witch” became such a negative thing?

I don’t know.  I can’t wait to really get into this book, because it did become a really negative thing.  But I think in general during the Renaissance things shifted from solid ideas like this is earth and this is water, and all the spiritual stuff just took on a whole negative connotation.

What compelled you to start this annual event?

That’s a good question.  Well, Nicole and I do a lot of beer traveling and we also do a lot of brewing and we just thought, here is a unique opportunity and nobody else is doing this.  Probably the reason no one else is doing it is because there aren’t that many women brewers and here the two of us are.  We kind of just did it on a whim last year, it wasn’t really well planned, we only had a couple of people, but then people were interested in it long after.  So then it was like, oh yeah, we have to keep doing this.  It’s become this neat thing about us and our brewery.

In general, do you see a rise in women’s participation in brewing?

Yes, I think one thing, especially about this area, and I guess the across the whole country too, is that women in particular are really aware of food and what’s going into it and how it’s being produced. There’s more of a drive of knowing who’s making what I’m going to put into my mouth.  Partly because there’s a big scare about mass-produced food right now, but also because it’s just an interesting thing.  So women are definitely gravitating more towards brewing and doing it themselves, which is a whole other movement too.  Growing it yourself, making your own products, canning, preserving, cheesemaking, brewing…

Do you think it goes along with the resurgence of DIY trends?

Definitely.  That’s the driving force.  Also, beer is evolving so it’s not just fuzzy yellow Budweiser or whatever.  There are so many complex flavors and styles and adaptations, especially for people who like cooking, and that really draws them in and starts to inspire them as a culinary thing too.

Few would argue that Joan Dye Gussow is the mother of the sustainable food movement. For more than 30 years, she’s been writing, teaching (she is emeritus chair of the Teachers College nutrition program at Columbia University), and speaking about our unsustainable food system and how to fix it. (This excellent article by journalist Brian Halweil showcases her work in detail.) Now more than ever, her ideas have wings. Michael Pollan, for example, has said, “Once in a while, when I have an original thought, I look around and realize Joan said it first.”

Gussow lives what she teaches, growing most of her own food year-round in her backyard. The New York Times profiled her last spring as she was rebuilding her garden after it was destroyed by a flood. When I asked her about her newly rebuilt garden, she said, “It’s given me 10 additional years of life, at least!”

I spoke to her recently about how far we’ve come, the future of the food system, and her new book, Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables.

Your have been talking about food, energy and the environment for decades. Do you think there is real potential now for a big change in the food system?

I must say that compared to the reception my ideas got thirty years ago, its quite astonishing the reception they’re getting now. I am excited to see the kinds of things that are going on in Brooklyn, for example. People are butchering meat, raising chickens, and it’s become the sort of “heartland” of the food movement. But whether or not there’s going to be sea change in the whole system is so hard to judge. I am politically very discouraged, because of what happened in the [last] election and what has happened with our president whom we elected with such hope. He seems completely unable to get really really passionate about anything.

Do I have hope? Yes, because as Michael Pollan wrote in the Omnivore’s Dilemma, what it means to say that something is unsustainable is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply. I believe the short-sightedness of both national and international leaders and their inability to do anything useful politically is so stunning that we’re going to come to a crisis period much sooner than anyone expects. But what I really believe is hopeful is that there are so many experiments going on on the ground now all over the country, everything from [Growing Power’s] Will Allen to what’s going on in Hardwick Vermont, and the Slow Money movement putting money into agriculture and the food system. There’s going to be models out there when we need them.

What do you think went wrong the first time around with the “Back to the Land” movement? and how can this generation get things right this time around?

Seeing young people in agriculture is so promising. However, I also know people who’ve hung in there who are in their 40s or 50s who have no retirement and no health insurance, and don’t know how long they can continue to farm.

We’re only set up right now for those people to make a living in a situation where there are enough rich people to buy their food at a decent price. I know there are all kinds of groups working to make good food accessible to poor people, but the reality is that you can’t go into a supermarket for the most part and get anything good for someone in that situation to eat. And there is still a class divide, an economic divide between the foodie movement, if you like, and the reality of the world.

In 1980, they had just brought out a report at the USDA that studied organic foods. There was so much hope. There was an alternative energy center in the upper Midwest, and I remember getting a newsletter from them that was dated January 1980, and showed all of the things they were trying, and I wrote at the top, “The End.” Because it was clear that Reagan would just kill it all, and he did. He took the solar panels off the White House roof, he fired the one person at USDA focused on organic agriculture and he sent us back twenty years. And it was very hard at that point to keep the momentum going because there was no money in it. At least now there is money around the fringes. The thing that is different now is that it’s got publicity, it’s caught the eye of the press, which is of course dangerous too.

How so?

We’re such a faddish country. And of course you’ve noticed there is a real blow back. These attacks on “local” saying how naïve it is, how its better to import your lamb from New Zealand. And then you have the corporations gathering together to do a publicity campaign. The last one I saw was that the meat industry is getting together to push back against this notion that this way that we’re raising animals is not healthy.

Do you think this is the last gasp of industry, or do you think they have the ability to mobilize that other 80 percent against this growing movement?

[Laughs] Oh they have many more gasps left. I believe that is the reason that you have to keep hope alive, you have to keep moving along the way you believe in and keep telling the truth and trying to get the word out there. Because the reality is that the pressure is on the other side. There is a lot of money at stake, and they’re not giving up their livelihoods.

How do you see the field of nutrition now as opposed to when you first started teaching your “nutritional ecology” course?

The existence of farmers markets, CSAs, all these things have in a sense forced the profession to move. [But] there is a huge resistance. I gave the keynote address at Teacher’s College in which I talked about giving up nutrients [because] we don’t know enough. Like what is the ideal mix of fat, carbohydrates and protein? We don’t even know that. And when it comes to micro-nutrients, we are really up a tree.

The fact of the matter is that we’ve allowed people to be led astray. Michael [Pollan, in In Defense of Food] identified that moment when the FDA said that if a food is essentially equivalent you didn’t have to call it imitation. Once you could restore the nutrients and say something is nutritionally equivalent, we allowed ourselves to be lured into thinking that as long as it met nutrient requirements, it was healthy. [Yet] here we have this abundant food supply and this incredibly unhealthy population. The level of obesity, the level of diabetes, all these things are shocking.

Michael [Pollan]’s advice in that book, which is to get off the western diet, is really the right advice. And if I had tried to say that twenty years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible. There was no place to go to buy foods that were not so processed, to get meat that was raised right, or many types of fresh fruits and vegetables.

In Growing, Older you write about how “having possibilities” means freedom from despair in the face of climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, soil loss, etc. Could you explain this?

Temperamentally I’ve never been the sort of person who looks ahead in my life and gloomily assesses the future. Maybe at this point in my life I should be doing that a little bit more [laughs]. I have to say that [I have possibilities] because I don’t know what the answers to anything are going to be. Like when my garden was totally destroyed last March, people were sort of astounded that I didn’t fall apart. And I spent the whole summer rebuilding it two feet higher.

If someone had told me that I would look upon what happened [in 2010] as a blessing I would have thought they were out of their mind. I am not a religious or superstitious person, but I honestly believe that mother nature took care of me in the spring. She looked down and she said, “Joan you’re not getting any younger, this yard is getting worse and worse. Its getting wetter all the time because the tides are rising. You have access to your land from the north for the first time in 100 years because someone has torn down a house and isn’t going to build until April, and you have the first ever advance that you’ve ever gotten on a book, so you can pay for it.” So wham. And that’s what it feels like, it feels like I was given this gift. Now I couldn’t have forecast that, I couldn’t have wished for that.

If there is anything that worries me, really worries me deeply, its how we’re going to overcome American and modern peoples’ detachment from the natural world, and how we’re going to get them connected again. Unless we’re connected, we’re never going to be able to save the planet. I mean we can’t isolate ourselves in these boxes that are artificially maintained by energy that we don’t even recognize as maintaining us, and save the planet. We have to be in touch with what the planet is calling out for us to do.

What is it about gardening that inspires you?

It provides so many rewards. There is so much beauty out there and there is so much interest out there, and there are so many wonderful plants and animals sharing your life with you out there. Katherine Hodgson Burnett wrote that “to have a garden is to have a future, to have a future is to be alive.” That’s my theme for my old age.

In a chapter called “My Obituary” You write about how you would like to be remembered. What do you hope is your legacy?

I’d love to be remember as having a sense of humor. I was most pleased when some of my students told me I should go into stand-up environmental comedy. I would like to be remembered as having tried to tell the truth.

I feel like the food movement has difficulty in trying to explain to people that reducing their consumption is actually a net benefit for them, that it’s not about deprivation, but about life improvement.

I obviously feel that the life that I live, in which I attempt to consume minimally, and don’t waste things and don’t buy things often, I consider it very life affirming. I really do believe that people would be so much happier and creative if they had some limitations and if they acknowledged their limitations. What I love about the way I eat for instance is that basically I eat what is available. Going to the supermarket to try to figure out what to eat is so deadly to me. It doesn’t feel good at all. What does feel good is that you don’t have to go out and shop, you can make do with what you have.

The common wisdom says that if we don’t buy stuff, the economy will collapse. How do you respond to that?

My brilliant young friend Jennifer Wilkins, who writes a monthly column up in Ithaca, was at my house at Thanksgiving and was looking at the paper about Black Friday. And she decided to write about the sudden changeover from these Thanksgiving values, which is the only really non-commercial holiday we have where your not asked to buy cards or go shopping for gifts, you just buy food and you eat.

She wrote about how Black Friday is the opposite: get out there and spend. And when you don’t spend you aren’t helping the merchants, and the economy doesn’t recover. She also talked about “Buy Nothing” day and she goes on and says that the answer is not to buy nothing, it’s to invest your money in things that make a difference, and that help grow the things that matter to you, like local food and local merchants, or having a meal with friends. Something that promotes your values, which is sort of the premise of the Slow Food movement. When you put your money down there, where is it going to go? What is your money doing out in the world? If we need to keep spending to keep the economy going, we just have to start deciding which economy, which parts of the economy do we want to grow? And if what we want to grow is a sustainable local food system, then we need to put our money where our hearts are.

Photo: Lohud

Only 20 percent of people who seek out kosher foods are Jewish; the rest look for the label because they believe it signals food that is healthy, safe, and generally high in quality. The reality is that many kosher meats and processed foods — like their conventional non-kosher counterparts — are made in large, industrial facilities. Today’s kosher standards are focused mainly on religious ritual and do not account for aspects of the production process that might impact the environment* or food system workers.

If Rabbi Morris Allen and the team behind a soon-to-be-introduced seal and certification process called Magen Tzedek (or “seal of justice”) have their way, however, this won’t always be the case. Through Magen Tzedek, Allen hopes to give food producers a chance to incorporate social justice, corporate transparency, and environmental stewardship into the world of kosher food. And, while Jewish people make up only two percent of the U.S. population, the movement to create a complementary label for sustainable kosher food has significant implications for the wider food world. Forty percent of all products sold in the US are certified kosher and the market is growing. When they were last measured in 2008, sales of kosher foods totaled $12.5 billion. I spoke with Rabbi Allen recently about his motivation and the challenges he’s facing in advancing this new frontier for kosher food.  

CUESA: How did you (and your congregation, Beth Jacob Congregation in Minnesota) arrive at the idea for Magen Tzedek?

Rabbi Morris Allen: In 2006 I was helping to source fresh kosher meat for a supermarket in St. Paul through an Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa. We were very successful for a few months, until a national news story was released detailing horrible labor practices at the plant. Having sort of staked my reputation on being able to work with them, I was distressed. When a national commission of people went to Postville, we discovered many things that were troubling and we made suggestions for changes they could make. [Editor's note: when the plant was raided by immigration officials in 2008, they found 57 under-age workers. Many worked 12-hour days with harsh chemicals and very sharp tools.]

It was around that time that I decided we could wait to see if they figure out all these issues, or we could use the model of how food was certified as ritually kosher to create a way to certify food that had been produced in a manner that was consistent with Jewish ethical values.

Q: A number of people buy kosher because they perceive it to be safer; are there aspects of the current kosher certification process that do make it any safer?

Not necessarily at all, unfortunately. People believe that it is more healthy, safer, etc. and I think that is part of the appeal to food producers. The fact is, you can have kosher food that is really unhealthy for you but is kosher.

Q: Where is the process today?

Beginning this month, we hope to begin beta testing our standards with three companies. If they all participate fully, we will be certifying over a billion dollars’ worth of food production. Let’s just say they’re all significant players in food production in America. Once we know it’s working we can begin taking applications from companies interested in being certified.

Q: Do you think there are there many companies already able to meet your current standards?

Yes. There are a number that are already doing the right thing, and they need to know that people take note of that fact. It’s the first time that a religious community has essentially decided to demonstrate that good corporate citizenship is a religious issue.

The standards are in five areas: Labor Concerns, Animal Welfare, Environmental Impact, Consumer Trust and Corporate Integrity [Read a draft of the standards].

Q: There’s an increased cost when you treat workers well and respect the environment. Have you gotten pushback from the kosher industry about those costs?

The major complaint is that this is an unnecessary [certification] that will punish people who keep kosher because their costs will go up. In the first place, many people are already doing the right thing and won’t see their costs go up. On the other hand, the food industry is the only one in the world where we walk into a store and say “I always want to buy the least expensive product.” You wouldn’t walk into a car dealership and say that.

We can buy the head of broccoli that is $1.99, or the locally grown, organic one for $2.50 — and we might actually be spending $1.99 for the product and 50 cents for the community or to benefit us in other ways. Those kinds of equations aren’t necessarily thought through in the grocery store. But if eating, and in particular eating kosher food, is an act of the sacred, then you have to think about those things.

People don’t want to pay more for food, but we have to make the argument that it’s not about paying more, it’s about doing right.

Q: So, just for clarity, you see Magen Tzedek going alongside the standard kosher label?

Yes. We’re also speaking with some people in the Halal community about ways they might be able to adopt our standards down the road. Of course, you can have too many labels, and the key is to make sure our food products don’t start looking like Nascar vehicles.

Keep up with the Magen Tzedek process on Morris Allen’s blog.

Read a related article, Kosher Wars, about the contemporary take on kosher slaughter and other ritual-based dietary rules.

* A number of companies now adopt the kosher label alongside organic certification, but the national organic standards do not include labor practices

Originally published on CUESA

Louisa Shafia is the author of Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life, a cookbook that focuses on the earth-friendly kitchen. Shafia is a teacher, she runs a catering company, and has cooked at restaurants like Aquavit and Pure Food and Wine in New York City, and Millennium and Roxanne’s in San Francisco. I got the chance to talk to her last week about Thanksgiving and the art of eco-eating.

In Lucid Food, you talk about “eco-conscious cooking.” Could you explain what this means?

Eco-conscious cooking is a broad term that simply means making food choices based on the health of the planet as well as your own personal health. So, for example, I stay away from processed foods not only because they are made with unhealthy chemicals and preservatives, but also because they come with lots of packaging that ends up in a landfill and pollutes the earth and our water supply. I avoid white sugar because it makes my blood sugar peak and crash, but also because white sugar production has been linked to environmental destruction, the invasion of indigenous lands, and unsafe working conditions throughout the world. For those reasons, I favor cooking with honey or other less processed sweeteners. When I buy honey at the farmer’s market I know exactly where it came from.

How do you change a person’s mind who thinks locally-focused, eco-conscious cooking means deprivation?

Eating seasonal food isn’t about self-denial and Spartan living; it’s about embracing the treasures that each season has to offer us, and eating the ingredients that taste best at different times of the year.  Our palates are activated before any food actually reaches our mouths; our minds tell us what is going to taste good. If the food on the plate looks beautiful and appealing, we’re a lot more likely to enjoy the taste. For that reason, I like to cook with ingredients that have bright colors. For example, right now I’m really excited about beets—yes, beets! They’re in season right now so they’re affordably priced, they’re really healthy, and they’re gorgeous. My favorites are Chioggia, aka “candy striped” beets; they look like a target inside, perfectly marked with red and white spirals. I try to use these as much as I can right now, especially when cooking with kids, because the vegetable itself looks so stunning you just want to eat it.

Any tips for home cooks who want to prepare an eco-conscious meal this Thanksgiving? Where should they start?

Get a heritage breed turkey from a local farmer! The vast majority of turkeys sold in supermarkets are of the Broad Breasted White variety, but there are many other breeds that are more moist and flavorful than those that are mass-produced on factory farms in unspeakable conditions. Heritage breeds like Narragansetts and Jersey Buffs were once popular in the United States, but disappeared with the demise of the small farm in favor of birds with higher breast meat production and a shorter growing period, traits favored by large, corporate poultry operations.

Visit the farmer’s market. Buying from local farmers helps to support the preservation of small farms and undeveloped land. And not only does local food taste better and have higher nutritional value because of its freshness, but you know exactly what you’re getting—unlike with products from far away, where details about pesticides, land use, and working conditions are hard to come by. In contrast, local farms are transparent places where people are usually welcome to buy goods or take tours.

Does “greening” your diet necessarily have to cost more?

I know that when people hear about eating local and seasonal food, the first thing that comes to mind is that it’s unreasonably expensive and unaffordable. I’ll be the first to admit that shopping at the farmer’s market often costs more than shopping at the supermarket. However, I think you have to consider what you’re paying for upfront now, and the hidden costs of cheap food that you’ll have to pay for in the future. If I eat cheap, processed food for many years, I’ll pay back the difference in price with poor health and high medical expenses down the line.

There are options beyond just being a passive consumer, however. I think what many people have realized is that they can’t just sit back and wait for the food system to improve, but that they have to take an active role in changing it, and providing better food for themselves. I just came back from Milwaukee, WI, where Will Allen’s Growing Power urban farm has set a breathtaking example of how people in “food deserts” with a limited amount of food dollars can access fresh, healthy food. Allen has established a model of super-efficient aquaponic farming that can be replicated in any community. Through the active participation of community members, the landscape of the north side of Milwaukee is being transformed into a sustainable urban farming area.

Aside from the actions that we as individuals can take, our elected representatives could clearly be doing a lot more to subsidize sustainable agriculture so that healthy foods are affordable for everyone. Currently, the U.S. government offers its assistance almost exclusively to the industrial agriculture giants who grow commodities using conventional—and damaging—pesticide control and energy-intensive production methods. Our tax dollars fund these subsidies that allow mega-producers to keep their prices low while small farms struggle on their own with little to no government support. That’s where consumers come in. As more and more people make the switch to healthier, safer, locally grown foods, small farmers and the people who buy their food will have a bigger say in how farm subsidies are doled out. The momentum will build for a fundamental change in the way our leaders approach this crucial issue. Just as importantly, the more consumer demand builds for locally grown products, the more suppliers will bring these goods to the marketplace, helping bring prices down for everyone.

Many people are visiting family this week for Thanksgiving. This can sometimes cause consternation for eco-eaters when family members lack access to good food and/or the will to track it down. Any advice?

When I visit someone else’s home for Thanksgiving, I offer to contribute a couple of dishes to the meal; in case it turns out that I don’t feel good about eating the rest of the spread, at least I know there is something I will feel good about eating. I might contribute a simple dish like mashed sweet potatoes with orange juice and a little butter, fresh cranberry relish, grilled mushrooms, a raw kale salad made with avocado and olive oil, or a from-scratch pumpkin pie. 

Other than that, my general rule is to put a smile on my face, eat whatever I can enthusiastically, and know that in a day or two I’ll be going home and can go back to eating how I like. Diplomacy is a highly valued skill in encouraging others to eat healthy, and I’ve found that a preachy, pedantic attitude is met with resistance. Be quiet, and let your tasty food do the talking. 

I would like to note here that I have the opposite problem when I go home to Philly for Thanksgiving. My whole family eats the same way I do, so I’m asked to cook everything, or to schlep five dishes with me on the train from New York! Like most Americans, I always overeat at this holiday, because I love the feast that my family creates.

Here are three delicious recipes that will shine on Thanksgiving, from Lucid Food:

Cucumber and Pomegranate Salad

The festive colors of this Mediterranean salad brighten a holiday meal, and its light, refreshing character makes it a great counterpoint to hearty winter dishes. It should be served as soon as it’s made, or it can turn soggy. You can prepare the individual ingredients ahead of time and store them in separate bowls, tossing everything together just before serving.

Serves four

2 cucumbers, peeled, halved, and seeds removed
Seeds of 1 pomegranate
1⁄4 cup thinly sliced scallions, green parts only
1 ⁄2 cup fresh cilantro leaves
Juice of 1 lime
3 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 ⁄2 cup crumbled feta cheese

Cut the cucumbers into slices 1 ⁄4 inch thick. Put the cucumber slices in a bowl with all but four tablespoons of the pomegranate seeds. Add the scallions, cilantro, lime juice, and olive oil. Toss and season with salt. To serve, divide the salad among bowls and top with the crumbled feta, a tablespoon of pomegranate seeds, and a few grinds of pepper.

Sweet Potato and Cranberry Cornmeal Biscuits

My contribution to my family’s Thanksgiving meal has always been cornbread. In making it so many times, I discovered that it’s a great vehicle for fruit, cooked grains, or vegetables. This variation has a thick batter, so these are more like biscuits than bread. Pale orange and scarlet flecked, these biscuits make a beautiful addition to a holiday table.

Makes 12 biscuits

1 sweet potato, peeled and coarsely chopped
1 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
2 teaspoons salt
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus 1 tablespoon
melted butter for brushing
3 tablespoons maple syrup
1 cup fresh cranberries
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon baking powder

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Grease a baking sheet or muffin tin and set aside. Put the sweet potato in a small saucepan with the orange juice, 1/2 cup water, and 0ne teaspoon of the salt. Bring to a boil, then decrease the heat slightly and boil gently, covered, until very soft, about 10 minutes. Coarsely mash the potatoes and cooking liquid with the five tablespoons butter and maple syrup. Stir in the cranberries. Let cool and set aside. In a large bowl, whisk together the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, and the remaining one teaspoon salt. Stir in the sweet potatoes. Refrigerate for one hour. To form each biscuit, pack the dough to just below the top of a 1/3-cup measuring cup, then invert and tap out onto the backing sheet. Repeat to make 12 biscuits total. Brush the top of each biscuit with a little melted butter. Bake for 15 minutes, then rotate and continue baking until the tops are golden and firm, about five minutes more. Transfer to a wire rack to cool. Serve warm or cold.

Persian Stuffed Dumpling Squash with Rose Petals

This dish features aromatic ingredients used in Persian cuisine; barberries and tart cherries are both sweet and sour, the defining flavors of Persian foods. Find these ingredients at the ethnic food stores, or substitute more dried apricots for the barberries and dried cranberries for the cherries. The dried rose petals give this dish its distinct floral taste and stunning appearance. Find them at gourmet and Middle Eastern food stores, or dry your own on a screen.

Serves six

6 sweet dumpling squash (or substitute acorn squash, or use bell peppers instead)
1/3 cup olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large yellow onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup cooked basmati rice or barley
1 cup walnuts, finely chopped
1/4 cup barberries
1/2 cup dried, pitted tart cherries, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup dried apricots, minced
3 tablespoons dried rose petals, plus more for garnish
3/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
1 teaspoon saffron dissolved in
2 tablespoons hot water

Preheat the oven to 425°F. Neatly slice off the top of each squash and set it aside. Check the bottoms to see if they’re level. If not, slice off enough so that they will stand steadily. Scoop out the seeds and place the squash in an oiled baking dish. Rub them inside and out with olive oil until well coated, and season with salt and pepper. Heat a skillet over medium heat and add four tablespoons of the olive oil, followed by the onion and sauté until lightly browned. Add the garlic, rice, walnuts, barberries, cherries, apricots, and rose petals. Stir well and continue cooking for five minutes, adding a little water if the mixture is dry. Taste and season with salt and pepper. Fill each squash with stuffing and replace the tops. Whisk together the orange juice, saffron water, and the remaining oil and pour over the squash. Cover tightly with a dish lid and bake for one hour, basting occasionally with the juice. Uncover, baste, and bake until the squash is golden and tender, about five minutes more. To serve, transfer the squash to a platter and pour the liquid from the baking dish on top. Garnish with rose petals.

Recipes and images reprinted with permission from Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life by Louisa Shafia, copyright © 2009. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Random House, Inc.

Photos: Author photo, Cory Pavitt, food photos, Jennifer Martiné © 2009

Despite the efforts of many communities that are working hard to support local agriculture and improve nutrition standards, the majority of the food consumed in the USA is still highly processed, unhealthy and unsustainable. Mark Winne, the co-founder of Connecticut Food Policy Council, End Hunger Connecticut!, and the National Community Food Security Coalition and author of the recently published Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture talks about the myths of Big Agribusiness, the possible casualty of American democracy and how Food Citizenship can reclaim our dilapidated food system.

Industrial agriculture promises that it can feed the world.  Why don’t you buy that?

The industrial food system means factory style production, high technology and is capital intensive and we have seen a tremendous amount of harm that’s come from it. I mean, look at the growing resistance to antibiotics, look at the spread of genetically modified foods. We don’t even really know if GMOs are safe or what could be the long term consequences of such crop production. We also can see the way the industrial food system operates. It’s very powerful, it’s very well-heeled, and it has the best lobbyists in any state capital or at the Washington DC level. And it can pretty much control everything from labor practices to whether or not genetically modified food is accepted.

So what I’m saying is that the solution to feeding a hungry world doesn’t have to be about technology. It can be an engaged citizenry–but you, the consumer, need to participate.

In the first chapter of your book called “A Food Story for Our Times,” you have created a rather grim vision of our food future, a la Pottersville from It’s A Wonderful Life, which takes place in November 2020, just ten short years from now. The dairy industry has been nationalized, with a mega pipeline stretching across the country. All the soymilk is now produced by genetically modified growers and is sold by one big corporation called MongoPlant, and the Secretary of Agriculture has become the new authoritarian Food Czar. Can you really see this all happening in ten years or less?

I do think that kind of nightmarish scenario is possible. Things could reach such a crisis level that we unequivocally place all of our trust in the industrial food system, because we are frightened, because we are told there is not going to be enough food to go around, that there are far too many people. And climate change will have taken such a toll on our ability to produce food that we have to resort to more extreme technological measures.

The worst fear to me is that we may voluntarily forfeit control of our food because it’s easier and we may not feel we have an alternative because circumstances have become so dire. And the first casualty in all of that will be democracy. I am trying to make it clear to people who are in the alternative food system that while a lot of good things are happening, they are still pretty small measures. We shouldn’t be so sanguine, we are still barely at the margins.

You speak about an alternative food system, one that is based on self reliance. But there’s no profit in self reliance. Can this really work?

In the book I talk about self reliance and individualism, about Ralph Waldo Emerson as the champion of individualism. And I do think that’s the other part of the story here. That is the antidote. Hundreds of thousands of people over the last 10 or 20 years have gotten into all manner of alternative food work.  And whether you’re a small organic farmer or you’ve created something like Stonyfield Yogurt–and you know, Stonyfield’s initial investment came from an order of nuns who made a socially responsible loan with a very low interest rate to Stonyfield, which launched the whole the Stonyfield enterprise–I think that it all has its roots in American individualism and self-reliance. And much of that has been profitable.

What does it mean to be a Food Citizen?

I often say that your hands are in the soil, your vegetables are on the cutting board and your voice is down at city hall. That is my little mantra. I use this term, “getting your heads above the plate”–meaning that we also need to start to become good food citizens. That means being aware of the political, environmental and economic issues of food. It gets pretty complicated and you might end up having indigestion. But what’s more important here is that we start to challenge each other more about all of those things. Shifting from food consumer to food citizen is an educational process, it’s about becoming more aware of these issues and then beginning to actually participate.

What about the idea of Food Citizenry as a force for community development? What steps can a community take to encourage more conscious food consumption?

I recommend two basic actions here: one is simple food production, whether its backyard gardening or community gardening, to broadening that out to a larger kind of commercial food production venture in our communities. And the second thing is education–we have to provide more educational opportunities in growing our own food. There is an excellent educational nutrition kitchen program in Austin, Texas that I talk about in the book called the Happy Kitchen which focuses on cooking and food purchasing and provides a good model to follow. Growing healthy local food also needs to be part of the public school curriculum. I think those are things that people can do. And they are doing them. We just need more.

You co-founded the Connecticut Food Policy Council back when no one knew what a food policy council was. What about today, are food policy councils on the rise?

It’s been huge lately. There are over 100 food policy councils in this country and especially in the last three to five years there has been a soaring demand for them. There are a couple of reasons for this: one is this huge new wave of interest in food that is taking over this country. And then with the last Farm Bill, there was this unprecedented interest in a much wider range of food and agriculture issues, and people who had not been interested in public policy work before came to see that there was a connection between food, health, agriculture and government. And so now with a food policy council, I think this is a perfect representation of a democratic institution at a local and state level where people and representatives of the food system can come together, where we can have open and transparent discussions about what’s going on and what the needs are and we can act accordingly. This allows all of us, as Food Citizens, to be involved, on the ground, in an ombudsman role.

What makes for an effective food policy council?

Number one, it needs to represent a wide variety of food interests and involve many sectors of the community. Secondly, it’s critical that it does actually influence policy, and that is has done things over time from research to public education to getting laws passed, to being able to influence the size of government budgets as they effect food, to simply putting food on the agenda. And that’s where food policy councils have been enormously effective–they have taken food and brought it before city councils, brought it before state legislators, before department heads in government and made them pay attention to the role that government can play in influencing the quality, the price, the availability of food. So that is what defines a successful food policy council. It’s fairly aggressive and it is representative of a broad number of food systems interests, it has a vision, but it has a practical way to implement that vision. It’s not starry eyed.

Where have you seen food policy councils have an impact of late?

The New Haven Food Policy Council was instrumental in getting the school food service to go private and independent, and bring in Tim Cipriano, who is now the new executive food service director of New Haven Public Schools. That was one of the more significant wins from a food policy council. It’s all part of the task of keeping food on the public agenda. I also advise food policy councils to just let your elected officials know all the time what your position is on the current issues so that every time something comes up, your position is out there. Take the recent salmonella poisoning in eggs–what should your community food policy council say about that? Maybe we can say the industrial food system and government regulation has failed and we probably should be looking for ways to support local agriculture. Or let’s look at our own health inspections in our city and in our state and see whether or not they are adequate. There are things happening in our food system all the time, big ticket items and the little things. I encourage the food policy councils to create a body of knowledge, a whole string of documentation of what their positions are, what their interests are and keep that in front of their policy makers, and when possible make it available to the public at large.

Click on the links to read an excerpt of Mark’s latest book, Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture or his last book, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.

School gardens are as old as schools themselves. As Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Pringle see it, however, their return might just be the key to a modern education. Bucklin-Sporer and Pringle are the executive director and programs manager (respectively) of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance (SFGSA) and authors of the new book How to Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers. I spoke with them recently about the book, their network, and what it will take to change education—one green schoolyard at a time.

What will readers get from How to Grow a School Garden?

Arden Bucklin-Sporer: It’s a practical guide on how to build and design a garden, grow the community around it, and sustain the project. It’s not about how to grow this or that plant–although we do include anecdotes about what plants work best with kids.

Rachel Pringle: It really brings you step by step through the process; if you’re a parent or a teacher at a school, it shows you how to begin. And then once you have that space, how you sustain that space by creating a program around it–whether it revolves around nutrition or environmental education or outdoor education, or all those things.

What is the school garden landscape like right now?

ABS: Even in this time when resources tend to be shrinking, the green schoolyard landscape is thriving. In San Francisco, that’s largely thanks to Prop A, which provides bond funding to build green schoolyards. We have about 80 school gardens here and the nice thing is that they’re connected through SFGSA, so they can speak with one voice, and we can advocate on behalf of everybody.

RP: And that’s something we’re seeing not just in our city but also in Berkeley, in LA, in Boston, and in Texas; these regional networks are popping up all over. I have a Google alert for school garden, so every day I get a whole list of things that are happening across the country and around the world. But the thinking around school gardens is also really expanding into nutrition, connecting kids with nature, and outdoor education.

There’s this renewed focus on agriculture and on where food comes from and I do think the recession has had a big hand in it. We’re in a society where we’re removed from how things come to be; there’s so much technology and everything just happens for us and it’s incredible, but I think people are really interested in the inner workings.

Especially when they have more time than money.

ABS: Exactly. So instead of looking outwards, more people are looking in their own back yards and in their schoolyards for adventure.

Green School Yards are also places to teach the practices of sustainability. For instance,  we have rain water harvesting in some gardens now, and other ways we incorporate discussions of percolation and ground water–these concepts are really important for kids to get.

You mentioned that these gardens are now often speaking with a unified voice; what is that voice saying?

ABS: We’re letting city and district officials know that we’re here—that this is a movement, and it’s organized. We’re also asking for funding, because green schoolyards are often under-resourced, so we’re looking for clever ways to support these programs.

RP: In general, we’re asking for a shift in the way people think about education. The recent Berkeley study is just the latest of several to show that garden-based learning really enhances traditional learning—math, science, language arts. So we’re asking for a shift in our ideas of what can happen in schools.

Is there a sense that a class that takes place outside the school buildings is peripheral?

ABS: Yes, there’s the idea that outside is for informal learning and inside is for formal learning. But you can do plenty of formal learning outside, and I think it’s more likely that a child who learns outside understands that learning goes on everywhere—rather than just turning it on when you’re in the classroom and off when you leave.

We’re also very concerned with place-based learning and making students aware of how their particular environment and ecology shape the garden. We want our kids to really know where they’re from, because we realize that if they haven’t taken care of or cared about something in their own sphere of influence, they’re less likely to care about broader environmental concerns.

Do you want to speak to some of the challenges people face when establishing a school garden?

ABS: For one, you have to think carefully about how to make it sustainable. Because no one really wants a garden that has fallen into disrepair and is causing problems for the school’s landscaping department. So there are challenges always in understanding what is an institutional garden that will go beyond your kids’ experience at the school and hopefully continue for decades. Resources and money to pay a garden educator are also often a challenge. You don’t have to have that, but it really does make a better program.

RP: Teachers coming out of credential programs and colleges are by and large not coming out with a background in ecology—or a general sense of systems or biology.

So we have all these teachers who are trepidant about incorporating an outdoor classroom into traditional teaching. Ultimately I think the sustainability of these programs relies on getting all teachers more familiar with outdoor classrooms—so you don’t have to hire a garden coordinator or find that extra funding.

We hear a lot about the barriers to entry for young farmers; are school gardens another outlet for young people who want to grow food?

RP: Yes, it melds into the urban agriculture world. And I think that is going to be a more common type of farming–growing food in urban areas and in small spaces. So teaching in a green classroom is kind of a primer for that, and I think there are a number of students looking for jobs like this.  I’ll be curious to see what’s happening ten years from now.

Originally published by CUESA

As a long-time regular of Angelica Kitchen restaurant in New York City, I’ve come to consider it a “second kitchen,” a place I feel good about supporting because it shares the values I keep in my own kitchen: High quality ingredients that provide a fair income to farmers who are working to protect the environment–and which provide nutrition without sacrificing any of the flavor–all for the reasonable cost afforded by buying direct.

And I am not alone. Since it opened its door in 1976, Angelica Kitchen has cultivated a loyal following, and their sustainable business model–maintained without serving alcohol (you can BYOB)–is a case study for success outside of the mainstream restaurant industry. Angelica’s is also one of the most popular vegetarian restaurants in New York City, precisely because it attracts a clientele that includes many non-vegetarians. In honor of Vegetarian Awareness Month, I spoke with owner Leslie McEachern–who is being awarded for her long-time advocacy of small, local farms by the Northeast Organic Farming Association this month–about running a restaurant built on relationships.

With over thirty years in New York City, why do you think Angelica Kitchen has been such a success?

We’ve earned the trust of people who are seeking out a plant-based diet. I think people have experienced the satisfaction of eating really fresh organic ingredients and having their body respond well to that, because we’ve really focused on a balanced, nutritional whole foods diet at Angelica. All of the thought that has gone into providing a balanced, whole food meal, especially with the quality of the ingredients from the farmers, I think people just respond well to it sometimes without even knowing why.

Why did Angelica Kitchen decide to be vegan from the outset?

The three guys who started the restaurant were very much into the whole macrobiotic scene. And even though macrobiotic is not vegan, I think they were interested in as clean a diet as possible, and a plant-based diet to them was the way to go.

Why did you decide to maintain Angelica’s as a vegan restaurant?

I had been a vegetarian for over 10 years at that time, and actually, I’d been living out of the woods in North Carolina for six years, out of a little hut with no electricity, no plumbing or anything. I’d been living on a very straight-forward plant-based diet, just living very close to the land. Then I moved to New York all of a sudden because I fell in love with a guy–the guy who owned Angelica’s. So it never even occurred to me to shift away from what was going on because philosophically I was already aligned, not only with seeking out the farmers which was happening when I got involved, but also because I felt it was an intelligent approach to having a restaurant in that neighborhood.

Who do you think Angelica Kitchen’s audience is?

I don’t try to appeal to anyone in specific. We don’t advertise, we’ve always been word-of-mouth. Back in the early 1980s, it was very much the neighborhood coming to the restaurant. When I built the restaurant on 12th Street, where we opened in 1988, there was a lot of education going on about “you are what you eat.” Now, people come from all over the world because there is such an interest in eating clean. And that has continued to grow. We don’t approach or make our menu to meet a certain need. We have our passion, which is really about whole foods, about supporting the local farmers–we support 24 different artisans and farmers year-round–and using their products to show off the plant-based menu.

Do you think there is more awareness now about food than there was when Angelica Kitchen opened in the 1970s?

There is a tremendous amount of awareness. I see people really making intelligent choices now about what they’re putting into their bodies. That’s a broad statement and I’m certainly not including all of western culture. Just the numbers of people that are coming into Angelica’s Kitchen, the number of people who are going to farmers’ markets, the number of books that are available about eating clean and eating well. Like my friend Marion Nestle, she’s written these great books, like Food Politics, What to Eat, and Safe Food–Marion has sold so many books. And I just don’t know that that would have been possible 20 years ago.

What made you decide to focus on organic food when you first got involved with Angelica’s?

My soul responds to nature. When I started reading Wendell Berry in the early 1970s, I found a voice for that. And once I’d found that voice, not only through his philosophical writings, his agricultural writings, his poetry and his novels, I was very inspired. Frank, the owner at the time [I got involved], had already been ordering from local, organic growers. I had always been in the natural foods business, and I had worked with a lot of organic ingredients before, and I knew where my heart stood on that matter. So I had the opportunity to get on my soapbox through my actions once I got involved with Angelica’s and say that this is what I feel is the best way to feed people. And so I continued to network to find the ingredients from local growers–organic, diversified, small, independent family farms.

Are there farmers that you’ve kept ties with since the beginning, that you’ve worked with for the past two decades?

Definitely. There are farmers who didn’t even have children then, whose children are now graduated from college. It’s very rewarding having long-term relationships with Guy Jones at Blooming Hill Farm, Mark Denau from Martin Dell Farm, and Lou Harris Farm up in the Finger Lakes. Getting to see the farmers when they bring their produce in on deliveries is a terrific bonus as far as doing this kind of business. In fact, those relationships are the very thing that keeps me inspired to keep going.

What is the most popular dish at the restaurant?

Through the years its definitely been the Dragon Bowl [steamed vegetables, sea vegetables, beans, rice and tofu with a choice of dressing], I think because we’re so close to NYU and its such a complete meal, and lots of times people eat half of it and take the other half home. And [the Wee Dragon] is under $10, and its a well-balanced meal when you are hungry.

You have been asked over the years to expand the restaurant to other locations–why have you said no?

Wendell Berry talks about having a sense of place. In a certain way I would love to see more people doing whole foods, fresh from farms. But the way I’m made up personally, I don’t want another restaurant. It’s really a lot of work to do it well. One of the problems that I came across was that most people who I’ve had this kind of conversation with were concerned only about the bottom line. You can’t do a restaurant like Angelica Kitchen if you are concerned just about the bottom line. Because you’re going to start cutting corners, you’re going to start paying staff less. We deliberately keep our prices low, and this is a point of contingence with people who would be interested in opening more Angelica Kitchens. Its a philosophical conflict for me to undo what I’ve tried to put out there as an example of what is possible to be done: a whole foods restaurant, without alcohol, that is serving the farmer, that is serving the public.

You’ve called yourself a “reluctant restaurateur.” What do you mean?

(Laughs) I think the best way that everyone could eat is to be at home and cook and eat with your friends and family. Ideally–again, how ideal is this world?–there wouldn’t be a need for a restaurant.

Below is a recipe from The Angelica Home Kitchen cookbook, which is available at the restaurant or through the Angelica Kitchen Web site. This stew is just right for the fall, features root vegetables and the fundamental ingredients of Japanese cuisine such as kombu, shoyu, ginger and rice wine (mirin). Enjoy!

Oden (Asian root vegetable stew)

2 teaspoons olive oil
2 cups diced onions
6 cups water
1 cup burdock, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cups carrots, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup daikon, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup rutabagas, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 cup parsnips, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch pieces
4 to 6dry shiitake mushrooms
1 (3-inch) piece dried kombu
5 slices ginger, each the size of a quarter
1/2 cup shoyu or tamari
2 tablespoons mirin
1/4 cup kuzu
1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
2 tablespoons sliced scallions for garnish

In a heavy saucepan, sauté the onions and burdock in the olive oil over medium heat for 10 minutes. Add six cups of water and bring to a boil over high heat. Add the carrots, daikon, rutabagas, parsnips, shiitake mushrooms, kombu, ginger, mirin and tamari. Lower the flame and simmer covered for 30 to 40 minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Remove ginger and discard. Remove kombu and shiitake mushrooms, slice into bite-size pieces, and return to the pot. Dissolve the kuzu in 1/4 cup cold water; stir into the stew and simmer for 1 or 2 minutes longer. stir in the sesame oil. NOTE: You should never cook with toasted sesame oil because high heat will release free radicals in the oil, making it toxic. Use toasted sesame oil as a last-minute addition; treat like a flavor enhancer such as salt or vinager. Serve with noodles or rice, accompanied by baked, marinated tofu, kimchee, and scallion garnish.

Photo: jwrkc via Flickr