Civil Eats

There has ostensibly been a dialogue among New York City legislators around food, as seen through Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s Food Works resolution, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s (at the moment dormant) NYC Foodprint legislation, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Blueprint for Sustainable Food System initiative. But there has yet to be a watershed policy that explicitly acknowledges and addresses the connection between “cool foods” and reducing the effects of climate change. Read More

An iron-clad rule for government bureaucrats of all ranks: thou shalt not question the American habit of eating more than a half pound of meat per day. The folks responsible for churning out millions of pounds of steaks, chops, nuggets, and burgers–and vast, toxic manure cesspools–are sensitive souls. Hurting their feelings is … mean! From the Hill:

The Farm Bureau is none too happy with the EPA today for publishing a blog post urging Americans to give up meat. Read More

I blame Bakesale Betty.  If the blue-haired Aussie-American Alison hadn’t lured me into her store with lamingtons and sticky date pudding I would never have succumbed to the charms of her legendary fried chicken sandwiches, which cause perfectly sane people to line up on Telegraph Avenue in North Oakland. For a sandwich. I kid you not.

It also doesn’t help that Bakesale Betty is on my way home from my editing gig and I’m often ravenous as I drive by, doing a quick scan to see if there’s 1. a line snaking down the street or 2. any parking.

If the parking gods and queue karma are on my side, I’m in and out with one of her sandwiches before you can say hello hypocrite.

Let me explain. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 17, when I gave up meat in what my mum, a good cook, viewed as just another one of my rebellious teenage acts. Despite growing up in a meat-loving land, where the backyard barbie rules, I became a greens and legumes kinda gal. Read More

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

I grew up in Kansas – the land of corn-feed beef, boneless, skinless chicken breast, and pork: the other white meat. I never gave much thought to meat except whether it was low in fat and calories, so when I told my family I was becoming a vegetarian, I was met with blank stares and a heated disagreement surrounding my anemia (with the lack of red meat, the family was concerned about my iron levels). My shift towards vegetarianism began slowly with Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation followed by Peter Singer’s The Ethics of Eating Meat, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and eventually, I found myself reading Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s The Face On Your Plate. For three years, I was vigilant about my food, checking the labels of grocery store purchases and grilling restaurant servers about the ingredients in each dish. It took me nearly 6 months to go completely meatless and only one In-and-Out cheeseburger, three years later, to fall off the proverbial wagon. What happened? How did I devote such a significant amount of my life vegetarianism only to be tempted by a cheeseburger? Read More

I can’t believe I missed it: the Meat Industry Hall of Fame’s first-ever induction ceremony occurred in Chicago on October 27. And what a night it was: headlined by the illustrious Bill Kurtis—the former CBS anchor who currently narrates criminal justice shows for the A&E Television Network.

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.” Read More

Hospitals around the country have taken a crucial first step toward building a sustainable meat production system by joining the Balanced Menus Challenge. Launched in late September, the Balanced Menus Challenge is a voluntary commitment by healthcare institutions to reduce their meat and poultry offerings in patient meals and hospital cafeterias by 20 percent in 12 months. Balanced Menus is a climate change reduction strategy that also protects the effectiveness of antibiotics and promotes good nutrition. Fourteen hospitals are already participating in the national challenge, which was developed and piloted by the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility and nationally launched in partnership with Health Care Without Harm’s Healthy Food in Healthcare Initiative. Read More

So last summer, my husband and I bought a quarter of a cow. Hung, butchered, wrapped, and frozen, it filled our entire chest freezer. Most of it wound up as ground beef, but a few less-than-choice cuts come with the territory. Thus far, we’ve tackled beef liver and beef tongue.

The liver was, to put it succinctly, a bust. We soaked it in milk for a few days, on the theory that this would dull some of the, well, livery taste. (It’s a good theory, since, as Matthew Amster-Burton explained in his column on milkshakes, the fat in dairy can flatten out sharper flavors.) Then we pan-fried it, ate a few bites, looked at each other, and gave the rest to the cat.

It was just too strong a taste for us. And, heck, we like liver, at least the kind that comes in poultry; we’re happy to pan-fry that stuff and spread it on bread any day. But this? This was overwhelming.

At least, until I unwrapped the beef tongue. Holy cow. Holy cow. Read More

It is disappointing to see members of the media spread misinformation due to their own ignorance, gullibility, or, worse, disinterest in digging for the truth — especially when it has to do with the health of children. Case in point, a reporter from a South Dakota talk radio show apparently believes that Baltimore City Public Schools’ Meatless Monday meals are lacking in protein. Read More

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

The second installment of Kitchen Table Talks was held last Tuesday in San Francisco. The evening featured Jessica Prentice, a professional chef, local foods activist and author and a clip of Edible City, a forthcoming documentary which follows the lives of Bay Area residents who are creating a local food system in their neighborhoods and communities.

Slated for distribution in early 2010, Edible City is a project of East Bay Pictures, a film company committed to making motion pictures that inspire reflection, compassion and imagination. The film, which uses character vignettes, showed Joy Moore, a longtime activist and teacher, discussing gardening and nutrition with the students at Berkeley Technology Academy. To help bring this inspiring film about growing local food systems to a larger audience, East Bay Pictures is seeking funds to finish the film. Read More

Bill McCann wrote to me out of the blue. The very first email he sent ran to two pages and started with the words “Way back in the day (1971), I was working as what was then called a cooks’ runner.”

It went on to tell this story: one night, during the younger Bill’s term rushing ingredients around a hotel kitchen for a battalion of short-tempered French, Swiss, and German cooks, the kitchen ran out of veal scallops. (It’s an outmoded cut, but used be central in Continental cooking.) The whole place went ballistic until a thick, German assistant to the chef grabbed Bill by the elbow and wrangled him down to the basement butchery room. There, the assistant lifted a veal hindquarter from its rail, and “deftly boned, seamed, and sliced it into beautiful thin scallops,” which Bill scrambled to platter as neatly as the man had butchered them. Read More

Every year, Americans find a new diet or pill to help them lose weight. Popular examples abound. There’s the low-fat diet, the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the list continues. Fast food and quick service restaurants rush around to change their menus to offer low-fat dishes, more bread, less bread, 24 oz. burgers loaded with bacon, piles of cheese. And after a few months or years, the “it” diet fades from people’s minds until another one comes long and sweeps the country. These fad diets rarely lead to reducing obesity or making Americans healthier. Rather most lead to the over consumption of factory-farmed meat, cheese and “low-fat” or “low sugar” processed foods filled with high fructose corn syrup, fake sweeteners and partially hydrogenated oils. Well, I think its time we try another kind of diet: the low carbon diet. Except rather than getting you into that teeny, tiny yellow polka dot bikini, this diet helps reduce carbon emissions, fatten the slim wallet of small farmers and cut inches from big agriculture.  Read More

So we can just never eat meat again? Is that what all the science is telling us? Before you start gagging down fake bacon or eating your al pastor tacos behind a garbage bin on the other side of town out of sustainable food shame, let’s talk about the real problem. Read More

The clamor is getting louder: Cows are bad news for the environment.

It’s astounding how far we’ve come in a few short years. Read More

It seems you can’t turn around these days without hearing someone reiterate the same basic message about the standard American diet: Simply put, we need to eat fewer animals. Read More

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

I am trying to convince all of suburban California to buy animals whole.

Buying whole animals might sound macho. It might bring to mind flikr photos of smug carnivores committing heroic feats of nose-to-tail cookery, and mewling over every last, high-stakes moment of it. (And to folks that tackle 500 pounds of beef with such gusto, I raise my PBR beer can in congratulations.) But unless you require such theatrics, the process does not need to be so excessive. Read More

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…. They are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

It can be easy to forget that food comes from somewhere. Those of us who eat animals tend to like it that way. For that reason, for most of my life, I’ve done my hunting in the deli case, training my shopping cart on plastic-wrapped livestock at rest in a Styrofoam pasture. Read More

I ate meat for the first time in over twenty years recently.  The moment presented itself after a culmination of many things, primarily an ever-increasing personal momentum within the world of food.  Writing a food column, owning a cookie company, and working for Slow Food Nation kept bringing me face to face with a myriad of dining experiences.  How could I refuse to just take a taste?  To enter, finally, over the threshold of a zone that can still uphold craft, integrity, responsibility, and culture. Read More

Anyone who has had the pleasure of reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is familiar with Joel Salatin, a self-described “grass farmer” and owner of Polyface Farm in Virginia. The end product of Salatin’s farm is meat (and eggs), but the production process bears little resemblance to the standard American livestock ranch. Salatin’s cattle rotate between “salad bars”—pastureland with an unusually high level of plant diversity—leaving in their wake a field of manure that Salatin’s chickens and turkeys then make their way through, turning droppings into compost with their beaks and claws. Pigs nudge past in the chickens’ footsteps, aerating the soil with their snouts and hooves. This inter-species cooperation keeps Polyface pastures in a state of continuous, rich regrowth, and makes for delicious, naturally-raised beef and poultry. Read More