My New Year’s wishes to you, yours and all of us, from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:
Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they began in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. to hope is dangerous, and yet is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope…..To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable.
Anything could happen, and whether we act or not has everything to do with it. Though there is no lottery ticket for the lazy and the detached, for the engaged there is a tremendous gamble for the highest stakes right now.
Shop Indie Bookstores
Buy yourself a present from an indy book store, or Better World Books. And while you’re at it, consider Changing the Present, a very cool new site where gifts have new meaning.
I was working on a seasonal recipe post for this week but decided there are enough recipes being published in the blogosphere and other media in advance of Thanksgiving.
Instead, I’m giving thanks for being part of a family with deep roots in small, local food businesses. While these businesses closed before I was born, I grew up with their stories, which surely helped germinate Local Orbit – three generations after my great grandmother ran her catering company.
Happy thanksgiving to all.
 my grandfather Ben's chocolate business (1930's)  my grandfather Lou's gourmet deli - Perry's Delicatessen (1950's)  my great aunt & uncle's deli - Liberman's Quality Delicatessen (1940's)
If we want an ecologically sound local food system that’s available to everyone, we’ll need to figure out how to reinvest in…lost infrastructure. Small farmers can’t do it on their own. (Tom Philpott)
Philpott is a new farmer who left a career as business writer five years ago. Newsweek published his recent essay on the relationship between government farm subsidies, the cost of food, and how these funds can be better used to support small farms.
He looks at the consolidation of our food system; the loss of local food processing infrastructure; and the environmental, health and safety costs that have been enabled hundreds of billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies.
read on for excerpts
I just discovered Jonah Lehrer’s neuroscience blog, The Frontal Cortex. He has an interesting post on Grocery Shopping, in response to Mark Bittman’s recent New York Times article, Faster Slow Food.
Lehrer and Bittman explore the role of online technology in facilitating good food buying decisions. They’re a great follow up to my earlier post on Ezekiel Emanuel’s thoughts about the challenges of changing the culture of how we eat, and its impact on health and health care.
Bittman writes about the potential of online grocery shopping to make it easier to eat healthier, with less environmental impact: This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser.
You could specify, for example, “wild, never-frozen seafood” or “organic, local broccoli.” You could also immortalize your preferences (“Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car”; “Show me no animals raised in cages”; “Don’t show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home”), along with any and all of your cooking quirks (“When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary”). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived — yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever — you would receive store credit without any hassle.
Lehrer adds another benefit: I think the most important improvement triggered by online supermarket shopping would be a reduction in impulse purchases.
Summarizing Walter Mischel’s research on self-control in young children, he writes: ...there was one simple way to dramatically enhance the self-control of four-year olds: Instead of giving them an actual marshmallow, show them a picture of a marshmallow. Although the practical consequences were the same – if they picked up the picture, they could get a tasty treat right away – the presence of the photograph was much less alluring, a much “cooler” stimulus. The end result is that most kids didn’t have trouble resisting the reward.
When we shop in a supermarket in person, we are confronted with an endless supply of “hot” stimuli, the shelves full of temptations. Maybe it’s Haagan-Dazs ice cream, or all those different kinds of potato chips. Perhaps our weakness is dark chocolate or Snickers or sour gummy bears. The point is that everyone has a favorite food, and seeing that food right in front of us makes it much harder to delay gratification.
Like those four-year olds, however, we can ignore that pint of Haagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche when we’re only looking at a picture of it. The stimulus has been cooled off by the online shopping experience – it’s an abstraction, a mere image – which allows us to make more responsible shopping decisions. The same logic also applies to non-food impulse purchases, from cashmere sweaters to electronics. (This suggests that whenever we feel our self-control slipping away we should leave the store immediately and go shopping online. If we still want to buy the sweater on our computer, then maybe it really is a good deal.)
So here’s a research proposal: someone should do a carefully controlled study looking at how our online supermarket decisions differ from our in person supermarket decisions. I’d bet that we make healthier choices when those tasty snacks are just photographs, shrunken to fit our computer screen.
Provenance (aka the story behind the food), practical information (cooking, nutrition, reviews), convenience, economic impact (personal and community) and personalization. Both articles address some of the core thinking behind Local Orbit and I highly recommend them.
(thanks Kevin Ertell for the link pointing me to The Frontal Cortex)
Last week I posted recipes for potato-leek-fennel soup, carrot and beet salad, and roasted pears.
This week’s recipes:
- roasted garlic and squash soup
- squash stuffed with wild rice
- spicy collards done 2 different ways
read on for the recipes and my new discovery that there’s a purpose for kitchen mallets
Ezra Klein talks to Ezekiel Emanuel, health care policy advisor to the Office of Management and Budget, in a recent Washington Post article. Emanuel doesn’t address the impact of corporate food marketing on our eating habits, but he offers excellent perspective on the disconnect between the health care debate and food, as well as cultural obstacles to encouraging better food choices.
The Obama administration is raising awareness about healthy eating through the high profile White House Garden and new local food campaigns such as Know Your Farmer. It’s a good start, but, as Emanuel notes, “lifestyle issues are hard for the government to address.”
Along these lines, Adam Corner proposes that psychology is the missing link in the climate change debate: …while the consensus may be growing on the need for changes in behaviour, we’re no closer to understanding how we’re going to do it. Attempting an unprecedented shift in human behaviour without the input of psychologists is like setting sail for a faraway land without the aid of nautical maps.
Excerpts from What’s Missing in the Marketplace:
Our political system is a lot more comfortable talking about health care than about health. We’ll pay enormous amounts of money to treat diabetics, but we don’t do much to change people’s diets to prevent diabetes. That’s a strange use of resources: Focusing on health-care coverage without doing more to address the factors, such as diet, that determine our health is a bit like buying fire insurance while ignoring the fact that you have a gas stove and a large fireplace in a wood cabin. A dry wood cabin.
…”My own view,” says Emanuel, “is we know there are large parts of health that are primarily best approached as a public-health issue and not as a doctor-patient issue. Nutrition, wellness, exercise and smoking, for instance. But lifestyle change is hard to accomplish. What smoking showed is it’s not a single thing. It changed from being socially acceptable and doctors would recommend it in the ’50s to being scorned and barred indoors.”
The smoking case is an interesting one. Emanuel brings it up repeatedly as one of the few examples where public-health advocates managed to change the culture around a previously unexamined act, which is exactly what they’re going to have to do with diet. “On smoking, there are a combination of things that had to happen,” he says. “We had to make smoking socially unacceptable. We took it outside the building. We raised taxes on it. It became linked to cancer.” But as he admits, “you can’t take eating outside the building.” Nor can you demonize it entirely. Certain products can be attacked, but in a world of organic Oreos and Splenda with added fiber, it won’t just be an uphill climb. It’ll be a climb with constantly changing footholds.
Moreover, as Emanuel says, lifestyle issues are hard for the government to address. They’re personal, for one thing. Whether it likes it or not, the government is fiscally invested in the way we eat because it pays for the consequences of a bad diet. But few feel comfortable with the government’s involving itself in the choices that lead to that bad diet.
…So where does that leave us? “You have to change the whole culture around this stuff,” Emanuel sighs. “That’s a complicated thing. It’s even more complicated than how to change the health-care system, if you can believe it.”
Klein piece via ethanagri4 on the Comfood listserve
Corner piece via the foodtimes
In our house, the fall harvest means a lot of cooking and freezing. I’ve spent my spare time in the past few weeks turning great veggies into winter meals.
This week I’m going to share a few recipes I love that are healthy and easy to make. Most important – the ingredients will be in season for another month or more.
Next week we’ll make roasted squash and garlic soup, squash stuffed with wild rice, and spicy collards done two different ways.
For today:
read on for the recipes
The Toronto Star sent Margaret Webb to find farms that produce the raw materials for junk food. The result of her search is a compelling and unsettling piece about the journey of food from field to factory to snack.
Ultimately, however, Webb articulates what many of us already know and are working toward in the way we eat, produce and distribute food:
Food is powerful. Change is possible with every purchase we make, in every link we forge between good food and good farming, and in every bite we take.
From Where they grow our junk food:
Follow the flow of food. That’s what any farmer will tell you. Because apples don’t grow in supermarkets.…to get to the root of the exploding obesity epidemic, I went in search of a junk food farm.
Such farms are not so easy to spot. No fields of Dorito bags waving in the breeze, no orchards blooming with soda pop, no soil bursting with 99-cent burgers.
read on
I ordered 5 dozen ears of corn last week from Valley Family Farm in Milan, Michigan. I usually get 3 dozen ears to freeze for the winter. But farmers Patricia and Ken grow super sweet corn that barely needs cooking, and at $15 it was pretty hard to pass up the very heavy burlap bag of 60 ears they had waiting for me.
So I had to figure out what to do with it all – quickly. I froze some (blanched for a minute and then cut it off the cobs). Gave some away. Roasted some (in an open pan, slathered in olive oil and sea salt). Boiled some. And still had more corn. Big ears of corn.
Which lead to an experimental corn chowder pulled together from whatever I had in the house, mashing up recipes from a half dozen cook books and web sites. It was a successful experiment by all accounts – not least because the corn was so good.
read on for the chowder recipe and a lovely way to cook smelt; served together with a baguette, this is a really good dinner
I’m a big fan of Springwise, a site that spots intriguing business ideas (where else would I have learned about Van Gogh is Bipolar a restaurant in Quezon City, Philippines?).
A recent post highlights an unexpected – and very cool – local food distribution model that offers convenience and direct farm-to-consumer sales.
In a world wrapped up in complex supply chains, small farmers are in a catch-22: sell to the supermarkets and get less cash for your carrots, or spend a lot more time and effort trying to sell directly to customers. Consumers, meanwhile, are torn between loyalty to local businesses and the convenience of those established supply chains. Now a German farm, Peter-und-Paul-Hof, has found a solution in the form of… vending machines. The result of a collaboration between the farm and vending manufacturer Stuewer, the specially designed Regiomat machines currently sell fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese, potatoes and sausage in thirteen German towns and communities.
It’s not a solution that sprung up overnight. Initially, Peter-und-Paul-Hof were operating a service delivering milk to their customers. Finding this too time-consuming, they began encouraging customers to collect the milk from fridges on their farm, which proved successful and inspired them to use vending machines as a more versatile solution. The Regiomat machines can be placed outdoors 365 days a year as long as they’re under a roof (some have even been placed alongside hiking trails in Switzerland), effectively giving locals a 24-hour farmers’ market and farmers a lot more free time. By cutting out the middleman, this system also offers potential savings over retail stores. An update to the traditional farm stand that is beneficial to both farmers and local-loving consumers, this is definitely a concept we can see spreading to other parts of the world.
What if a version of the Regiomat was installed in schools throughout the US – both for student snacks during the day and quick grocery shopping for parents and staff on their way home?
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