Reason #537,307,738 to buy local

"My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables)" over at the NY Times should be required reading for anyone who, oh I don't know, EATS FOOD IN THIS COUNTRY. Not only does it suck that huge farms are able to force small farmers out of business, but it's *dangerous* to leave your food supply in the hands of so few. It's bad for prices, it's bad for the environment (both because of the pollution that must be generated to distribute this food all over the country and because large farms MUST use techniques that are damaging to the environment, even if they are "organic") and it's risky as hell. What if disaster strikes one of these farms and they lose most of their crops one year from weather or disease? As global warming continues to affect us, freak weather patterns and bug attacks will only happen more frequently. Yes, these potential disasters are all fairly unlikely. But if something happens just once, the consequences could be devastating, especially for those who are already struggling to afford enough food to eat.

For information on how organic doesn't necessarily mean what you think it does, I highly recommend this long but interesting and informative blurb from Michael Pollan. It may sound rather familiar to those who have read Omnivore's Dilemma.

In other news, I made mayonnaise and 50% whole wheat bread yesterday. And on Friday, I spent $20 on fruit - $16 of that was for just three cherimoyas, but man was I glad to see them. January - March is imported cherimoya season, and I was beginning to worry that I wouldn't find any this year.

Food budget? What's that?

clearing the cobwebs

I'm feeling ambitious and completely food obsessed at the moment, so I've decided to attempt to revive this poor, neglected blog.

Recipes and food photos will (hopefully) be coming soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to share some thoughts on food and poverty. This is a key issue in my new job (which involves organizing a new CSA in a mixed-income neighborhood), but as someone who has been concerned about both poverty and the effects of industrial agriculture/processed food/conventional meat production for a long time, it's a problem I think about a lot. Is it fair to advocate that everyone, regardless of income, should be spending more for organic/local food? Everyone suffers the public health and environmental consequences equally, so low-income families stand to benefit from eating better food, too.

And the thing is, if you have time to cook at home and plan your meals carefully (I do recognize that cooking at home regularly is difficult if not impossible for some) it is entirely possible to eat quality food on a tight budget - see Rebecca Blood's amazing experiment as proof.

Also, more and more communities are starting up programs like the one I am working on - we will be accepting food stamps as payment for CSA shares and will be fundraising as much money as possible to support subsidized shares for families that are truly in need.

What brought this all to my mind today, though, was a post on Mark Bittman's blog, Bitten, discussing a recent London Times article in which the British chef Delia Smith argued that chefs should stick to food and stay out of politics. Smith recently published a cookbook aimed at lower income cooks with recipes full of things like frozen mashed potatoes and canned mincemeat. Bittman comments that he fails to see why using the worst possible ingredients is necessary (are fresh potatoes so much more expensive than frozen ones? If anything, they are probably cheaper because they are unprocessed) and wonders why other cheap, whole foods like dried beans didn't figure into her recipes more frequently.

My favorite part of the entry, however, is a comment left by a reader that beautifully skewers Smith's apolitical stance. This could apply to a variety of disciplines beyond cooking and is highly worth a read.