November 20th, 2009 By Stacey Slate
Jonathan Safran Foer speaks with the reasoning of a vegetarian, the skepticism of an investigative journalist and the concern of a parent in Eating Animals. This persuasive narrative forces us to ask why we have ignored the issues associated with factory-farmed meat and fish for so long. We’ve done so, Foer argues, by telling ourselves a fable about our relation to the animals we eat. Read More
November 16th, 2009 By Tina Traster
When we moved into our renovated house in late October 2005 I said to my husband, “We should host Thanksgiving this year.” We finally had a real dining room after living in our shoebox on the Upper West Side.
“No one will come,” he said.
I knew he was right. No one wants a turkey-less Thanksgiving. I resigned myself to a meal at someone else’s house, cringing at the sight of a gravy-dripping bird proudly displayed in the center of a dining room table.
It was either that or dinner for three, which my husband, daughter and I did one year.
This year there’s a twist in the family drama. Various dysfunctions among siblings, parents and even a friend prevent others from hosting. My dining room will be christened for Thanksgiving. What I’m most grateful for is the chance to gather nearly a dozen people for a meat-less harvest meal. Read More
November 2nd, 2009 By Twilight Greenaway
Nicolette Hahn Niman has been thinking about livestock for nearly a decade. Before she married (and began ranching with) Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch*, Nicolette worked as a senior attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance where she was in charge of the organization’s campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry. Nicolette spoke with CUESA recently about greenhouse gas emissions, the sustainable livestock tipping point, and her book Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (HarperCollins, 2009). She also authored a New York Times op-ed on Saturday called The Carnivore’s Dilemma. Read More
September 2nd, 2009 By Kerry Trueman
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.”
Any film (or book) that gets Americans psyched about cooking real food can only be a good thing, of course. But when Julie Powell hatched the Julie & Julia Project, latching on to Child’s old-school continental cuisine to lift her out of a dreary day job, she hitched her blogger bandwagon to a diet dominated by meat, eggs, and dairy.
Back in the day, that was OK: in Child’s era, phrases like “manure lagoon,” “gestation crate,” “battery cage,” or “bovine growth hormone” would have sounded even more foreign than “boeuf bourguignon” or “sauce béarnaise.”
But a half century or so later, I’m less excited about dishes that require preheating the oven to 350 degrees than I am about recipes for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions to 350 parts per million (ppm). That’s the level of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere that scientist James Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, agree that we need to achieve to avert catastrophic climate change. We’re at nearly 390 ppm now.
We won’t get back to 350 on a diet of denial and duckfat; a better blueprint for eating green would be meals centered around foods grown through photosynthesis, not fossil fuels–i.e., fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains. But before you can say “Bittman, ” I’d like to nominate someone less well-known, but uniquely–and supremely–qualified to be this century’s Julia Child. Read More
January 19th, 2009 By Paula Crossfield
For a President who prefers canned vegetables to fresh, it probably wasn’t hard for George W. Bush to decide last week to make it impossible for Americans to buy Roquefort. In a last ditch effort to stick it to the French, a 300% tariff was added to the cheese, making it prohibitively expensive. This move only added to the animosity between the two countries that began after the French refused to go to war in Iraq and America responded with Operation Freedom Fries. But the reasoning behind the move was more astonishing: to punish the E.U. for their continued ban on our growth hormone-treated beef. Read More