Catch up on your summer food reading
By from July 2, 2005
Here's a good article about the legendary 1976 article that rocked the wine and food world in which French judges agreed to a blind wine tasting and chose two California wines as superior to French wines. "Before the Paris tasting, France was on a pedestal and everybody else was making plonk," [the original reporter] Taber says. Taber was only able to write the story because he spoke fluent French; the judges never released their comments. And as one California vintner says, "even at this late date, the French still find it too painful to write about."
Then here's a useful MetaFilter thread about how to learn to like to cook if you currently hate it. And a complementary article on inspiring, instructive cookbooks for beginners (you'll have to ignore the annoying "husband-proof" focus, though).
Finally, can you take on the challenge to only eat food grown, harvested and raised within 100 miles of your house? The people issuing the challenge say that eating locally is the best thing you can do to support the environment. " 'Our food now travels an average of 1,500 miles before ending up on our tables,' says one of the Locavores, Sage Van Wing, of Point Reyes. The process imperils 'our environment, our health, our communities and our taste buds.' " This article focuses on the San Francisco bay area, but we're lucky enough to live in another great microclimate for food.
<< | Posted on July 2, 2005 at 12:37 PM | >>
I think people who have the time money and thought to spare on eating locally help create a market for it. And then producers try to better serve the market. And it becomes easier and cheaper for people who were not in that first wave of local-food-fans to eat locally. Without even knowing it, maybe. Without even meaning to. Just because it makes more sense.
Posted by josh @ July 3, 2005 10:53 AM
There's almost nothing cheaper than making food from scratch, especially vegetarian food. When people talk about how poor people in this country can't afford healthy food, I can't help but think how much of what people are eating now is packaged, prepared, nutrient-poor food--how expensive is that compared to, say, a lentil salad you make from scratch? Very expensive. We are also members of a farm cooperative, and we end up paying about $7 per person per week for piles of incredible locally-produced organic seasonal vegetables, which seems really reasonable to me. I've also read that the percentage of household income Americans spend on food is at an all-time low, both compared to other nations and compared to our history.
I feel like it's a real knee-jerk reaction to say that ordinary people can't afford healthy, responsibly-produced food. Sure, even I can't really afford to feed myself exclusively on Whole Foods deli fare, but there's so much more out there if people are willing to educate themselves, change their eating and cooking habits, and make an effort. I know it's not as easy as just waking up one day and choosing to do something different, but I also think it doesn't have to be impossible.
There's also the whole topic we haven't talked about concerning the societal costs of artificially cheap food. You just shift the costs, but they're still there: the cost of pollution from shipping more and more of our food overseas, the cost of environmental degradation from waste produced by factory-farmed animals, the cost to farmers of losing control of their own seed stocks to Monsanto and other evil corporations, the cost to all of us when the ever-more-limited set of monoculture crops is hit by some major new pest or problem, not to mention pesticides, hormones, loss of topsoil, polluted groundwater.....it goes on and on. We will all pay the price for subsidizing food costs as we do now, and you can bet it's the poor people who will suffer most from the environmental costs, as always happens.
Posted by freddy @ July 3, 2005 2:11 PM
Post a comment:
I think the local food issue is an important thing to think about and take action on for people who have things like disposable income, choice, and the free time to research where their food comes from. However, a large portion of our country's population doesn't have these luxuries, and I find it kind of squirmy when people start creating these kinds of imperatives, I mean challenges, and passing judgement on those who can't or choose not to shop only at farmers' markets and local organic co-ops.
Posted by Shoshanna @ July 3, 2005 10:37 AM