Soda. Pop. Coke. S.S.B. (sugar-sweetened beverage). Whatever you wanna call it, it’s bad for you. Or so argues Mark Bittman, the New York Times‘ “Minimalist” columnist and prominent foodie in this Sunday’s New York Times. This phenomenal article poses the question of whether soda may be the next tobacco. He interviews proponents calling for a special excise tax on soda to fund obesity prevention programs, as well as other measures to curb the intake of these empty calories in a can (or bottle). The article comes after Michelle Obama’s appointment to lead a national campaign against childhood obesity, which some believe is linked to an excessive consumption of soda and candy.
If you didn’t catch Jonathan Safran Foer’s wonderful piece “Against Meat” in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine Food Issue, it’s well worth reading. He writes how his Holocaust survivor grandmother’s “obsession with food” formed his own vegetarianism, and how his Jewish values and experiences informed his and his wife’s decision to raise their children vegetarian. But Safran Foer also points out his way to vegetarianism was not a straight path. He very nicely captures the ambivalence of those of us who lean towards vegetarianism, but still eat meat, as well as what appears to be a kind of ethical inconsistency in our enjoyment of the taste of meat. As he bluntly puts it,
When Job reflected upon the wisdom of God’s creation “Truly the ear tests words as the palate tastes food” (12:11), could he have been alluding to the remarkable evolutionary development of the bones in our middle ear? According to Natalie Angier in her article in the Science Times section of the New York Times today,
“Imagine what a dinner conversation would be like if you had decent table manners, but the ears of a lizard. Not only would you have to stop eating whenever you wanted to speak, but, because parts of your ears are now attached to your jaw, you’d have to stop eating whenever you wanted to hear anybody else….Sometimes its the little things in life that make all the difference – in this case, the three littlest bones in the human body. Tucked in our auditory canal, just on the inner side of the eardrum, are the musically named malleus, incus, and stapes, each minibone, each ossicle, about the size of a small freshwater pearl and jointly the basis of one of evolution’s greatest inventions, the mammalian middle ear. The middle ear gives us our sound bite, our capacity to masticate without being forced to turn a momentary deaf ear to the world, as most vertebrates are. Who can say whether we humans would have become so voraciously verbal if not for the practice our ancestors had of jawboning around the wildebeest spit.”
After 70 years of publication, Conde Nast is ceasing publication of Gourmet magazine, while maintaining its support of Bon Appetit magazine. As with many (most?) corporate decisions, it was a precipitous one, announced to its staff on Monday just as the November issue was off the presses.
As an immigrant to this country, I learned about the cultural rituals of my new country through the Girls Scouts manual– obtained from my small, neighborhood library, another American treasure– and later on, the pages of the food magazines. The National Geographic was too arcane for me, but Bon Appetit broadened my cultural horizons past my family’s tenement apartment in New York’s Chinatown. It showed me what people really do eat in their own homes and how to prepare their dishes. It gave me a cultural passport, even before I could afford to travel on my own salary.
In another important case against Monsanto and the USDA, the Center for Food Safety has again prevailed, demonstrating that GMOs pose serious risk of harm to organic farmers and consumers, and that the USDA is failing to sufficiently protect us from the contamination that can result from the planting of these crops – this time in Sugar beets! As lead counsel for CFS on this case, I’m excited to share the news with you!
A Federal Court ruled yesterday that the Bush USDA’s approval of genetically engineered (GE) “RoundUp Ready” sugar beets was unlawful. The Court ordered the USDA to conduct a rigorous assessment of the environmental and economic impacts of the crop on farmers and the environment.
This blog is not the right place for it, but still, Roger Cohen has really gotten on my nerves over the last year or so. His ranting about how wonderful Iran is and how great it is for the Jews there made me question my devotion to the New York Times. His piece “Advantage France,” in Sunday’s paper, about some of the differences between the French diet and the American diet, may have me beginning to change my mind. I’ve only spent a few days in France, and only in Paris, but I’m guessing he’s exaggerating somewhat. Nevertheless, the idea of Americans adopting any diet (or lifestyle, really) that required not only combining the ingredients and cooking them, but processing them to begin with (filleting the fish, making the pasta, etc) does sound beautiful and absurd. The idea of connecting to food on a “gut” level and a geographic one far predates the terroir of which Cohen writes, at least in Jewish tradition.
Is it bad that home cooking is on the decline? Should we accept the advice of Harry Balzer, the food-marketing analyst Michael Pollan quotes in his disturbing piece in yesterday’s NY Times Magazine: “A hundred years ago, chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anybody who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well, that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren: something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it.” Personally, like Pollan, I don’t like that we are moving from a nation that prefers to watch cooking on television as a spectator sport than to do it ourselves. But why do I have such a visceral reaction to being reduced to a cultural dinosaur? Maybe it’s partly because living a Jewish life in the 21st century is as much a creative and meaningful “anachronism” as cooking meals at home.
Michael Pollan’s thoughtful piece in this week’s New York Times Magazine examines the increasing popularity of cooking shows in a culture where eaters spend less time than ever preparing their own meals. Pollan’s argument that “The Food Network has helped to transform cooking from something you do into something you watch” is particularly relevant in light of Nora Ephron’s new movie Julie and Julia – America’s relationship to kitchen-related activities has certainly changed since Julia Child’s “The French Chef” debuted in 1963. Read more to find out how this shift happened, and why it’s important to reverse the trend.
Cross-posted at davka.org
Tiny Vial of Pharisäer
What do you put in your coffee?
Pharisees of course
Ever-sensitive to appearances of Jewish references in popular culture, I was a bit surprised to read Maureen Dowd’s headline in the New York Times on Sunday, July 19, 2009: “Pharisees on the Potomac”
I did not see any mention of late antiquity in her column and it was not until a number of hours later that I realized she had used the Christian allusion to Pharisees as hypocrites! Shame on her and shame on her editors (I wonder if William Safire saw the column). As the Wikipedia makes quite clear:
“Rabbi Shimon taught: ‘…Three who dine at a table and exchange words of Torah are considered as having eaten at God’s table…’” (Pirke Avot 3:4) I suppose a discussion of religion is considered verboten almost everywhere by certain people, but not in Jewish culture. Then again, we like to talk politics in public, too! But in the days of the Mishna, of course the conversation was only with the other people at the table. After all, there was no e-mail, no phones… and no text messages! I remember, when cell phones were first becoming popular, my friend railing against people who would answer calls during dinner. I agreed with her, but felt there should be some wiggle-room: what if your friend is calling to say she’ll be late? What if he needs directions to the restaurant? Also, why should it bother me at the next table? I understand if it is the person you’re dining with, but the “noise” argument makes no sense, since you wouldn’t be bothered by the people at the next table having a normal conversation. Nowadays, we’re all used to this and most of us are pretty polite about it (music on the subway is a different story entirely, but I’ll restrain myself for now.) Text messages, though around for years, have recently become more of a problem according to the NYT Dining section.
A New York Times article from Saturday highlights some college students and graduates who have gone from academics to organics and agriculture. While the article brings up a good point - that American youth want to find a way to do their part, to contribute to society in a way that they find valued and sustainable – this trend is not a new one. Idealism and wanting social change have been a part of college student and twenty-somethings’ culture for generations.
I’d like to take us back to May 2000…
This past Thursday I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn – for a garden. Yeah, there were a bunch of other reasons, but I did some serious downsizing for the opportunity to be an urban gardener. But more on that in a minute.
Moving in New york, if you’ve never done it, is a real big pain. In a city where you can’t normally find parking, where are you going to put a 14-foot rental truck while your friends (for the price of some pizza and your eternal gratitude) help you load all your worldly possessions? All things considered the move went pretty well until we showed up at my new apartment with all my stuff to find my new bedroom only half painted and an apologetic note from the new roommate. So settling in was going to have to wait until the painters could finish the job – Saturday. So with my life boxed up in the living room, I decided to head over to the Brooklyn Food Conference, which was free and a convenient walking distance from my new digs.
This week White Castle treated us to yet another problematic fast food burger commercial. The commercial features a person in a full body pig suit performing a highly sexualized dance on the stage of strip club. You can view the ad in all its BBQ-sauce money shot glory on whitecastle.com. You can channel your discomfort by reading this interesting article on the relationship between meat and gender issues, with some specific studies from, of all places, Israel.
Three weeks ago, the lamb stand I work for got a new product. Eugene, the usually tactiturn farmer (except on his blog), was telling everyone who’d listen that lamb belly was the new pork belly; Frank Bruni or Mark Bittman, or some big shot at the New York Times, had said so. Good news for us. We were selling lamb bacon.
