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Should We Really Be Defending Beef?

by Maeve McInnis

While I thoroughly enjoyed and agreed with much of the contents of Defending Beef; The Case for Sustainable Meat Production, in the back of my mind there was the niggling thought that the author, Nicolette Hahn Niman, is married to Bill Niman—the owner of Niman Ranch, which is highly revered for its quality grass fed beef. This fact alone calls in to question her credibility and argument because it raises the question of her motive. She does, of course, address this obvious conflict by stating that she is a vegetarian and a lifelong environmentalist. These points do assuage my fears somewhat—I am also a vegetarian and environmentalist—however, it stills leaves traces of distrust as she is directly promoting her husband’s business regardless of whether her motives are pure.

Irrespective of my general suspicions, I thought this book had a solid argument. It was loaded with statistics and technical information yet written in colloquial language for an easy read, especially for people who are interested in this ongoing debate yet aren’t looking for a highly academic and scientific read but want the nitty gritty details of the argument. She breaks the book down into three distinct categories; Cattle: Environment and Culture, Beef: Food & Health, and Critique & Final Analysis.

I couldn’t agree more with the argument she makes in the first chapter that we need to change our industrial form of food production to a more ethical, holistic approach. One which does not separate a symbiotic ecosystem into separate systems thus creating un-manageable environmental and health problems. She discusses how we’ve taken animal husbandry off the family farm where the animal manure was the ecosystem’s fertilizer onto large-scale factory farms that now have ponds full of toxic liquid manure.

In this first section, she also discusses the impact cattle have on the environment. She bravely contests the popularly held believe voiced by many environmentalist that beef is detrimental to the environment, stating that what it really comes down to is properly managed cattle. She is against cutting down vast untouched areas to increase our cattle production. Instead, she suggests that society can use swaths of land that are arid and unsuitable for crops as grassing areas for these animals.

She relies heavily on the workings of a soil management guru, Allan Savory, who has had great success using cattle to improve the health of environment. He argues that certain geographical locations that we consider ‘healthy’ actually aren’t at all and need large animals to regenerate the soil.

In the second portion of the book, she moves on to discuss the human health effects of grass fed beef arguing that this type of beef, hormone and antibiotic free, is good for us as it has protein that you can’t get in any other type of food. This again raises the issue of her being a vegetarian; I would like to know whether she thinks that she would be healthier if she ate meat and why it is that she hasn’t gone back to eating meat when she argues that it is good for one’s health. Is that not the cardinal rule? Practice what you preach?

The final section ends with a general analysis and critique of the other arguments out there against meat. Returning once more to my underlying suspicions, as stated she cited a ton of studies but did not clearly discuss who funded the studies, which is a crucial aspect of transparency since the source of funding will have an impact on the outcome of the study

How does one know who to trust on what is good for our health? Her argument intuitively makes sense: that otherwise unused plots of land not suitable for food cultivation be used for well-managed cattle rearing because they improve the soil with their manure. She argues that not only is this way of managing cattle healthy for the environment, but that beef is healthy for human beings to eat. There are also many arguments against fully against eating meat, even grass fed ethically raised animals such as cows. As a health conscious person who has been raised vegetarian and eating organic food, I find it difficult to choose a side of this argument. I find myself, despite my above mentioned suspicions, drawn to the argument she lays down because it makes sense to me. It also helps that she is vegetarian and a lifelong environmental activist. Another point of her argument that hits home with me is that she is thinking in terms of the whole ecosystem’s health (inclusive of humanity’s health) which to me is crucial. We can’t remove pieces of the puzzle and attempt to solve it that way. Today’s conundrum of climate change and population growth requires this whole systems approach. But once again, how does one reconcile these opposing views with such legitimate numbers to back up their arguments?


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Maeve McInnis just graduate with her Masters of Science in Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management with a specialization in Food Policy from the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at the New School. She was the President of the Sustainable Cities Club and a member of the Student Advisory Committee with the Dean. She is an avid traveler and lover of food, culture and social justice. 

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The GMO Deception: A Review

by Maeve McInnis

Do we want to live in a world where all of our food has been at one point genetically altered, where synthetic chemicals are sprayed on our food, and the corporations have complete control over all aspects of our food? Or, would we like to buy vegetables from our local farmer with the knowledge that the genetic makeup of the food is pure, that it has no synthetic chemicals in it, and where we have the freedom to choose GMO or non-GMO food products?

The intention of The GMO Deception: What You Need to Know about the Food, Corporations, and Government Agencies Putting Our Families and Our Environment at Risk, a volume comprised of articles originally published in GeneWatch edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber, is to start a larger public dialogue on what they refer to as the deception of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). For anyone who has limited knowledge of the GMO situation in our society the Merriam Webster dictionary defines GMOs as manipulated, or altered organisms to contain specific desired traits not naturally occurring in that organism. The GMO Deception spans topics such as the health and safety of GMOs, labeling, ethics and their environmental impacts, along with other social aspects of the GMO debate. The article ‘Busting the Big GMO Myth’s’ by John Fagan, Michael Antoniou and Claire Robinson did exactly as the title states. “…GMOs could be allergenic. Similarly the toxicity of certain GMOs and the reduced nutritional value of other GMOs have been scientifically demonstrated…More and more evidence is accumulating, showing that GMOs can be harmful to health and the environment.” The article titled ‘Changing Seeds or Seeds of Change?’ By Natalie DeGraaf discusses how “[f]armers in rural India have noted instances of animals dying from grazing on GM crops and new reports are investigating the relationship between increased allergy prevalence and GM foods as well as transference of antibiotic resistance to consumers.” With these alarming reviews of the health concerns of GMO’s from the scientific community, one wonders if this is the sort of technology the global society should rely on to feed its population.

Around the world, from the Government Office for Science in the U.K. to the National Research Council in the United States to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., there is consensus: In order to address the roots of hunger today and build a food system that will feed humanity into the future, we must invest in “sustainable intensification”—not expensive GMO technology that threatens biodiversity, has never proven its superiority, even in yields, and locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, fossil water, and agrochemicals. (Grist, 2011)

The popularly held belief that GMOs will help feed a growing population, while highly contested in this book, also begs the question at what cost to our individual’s health and the health of the environment. Again Natalie DeGraaf addresses these health concerns by citing a “severe lack of unbiased research being conducted external to the reports issued by GM company laboratories.”  ‘Busting the Big GMO Myths’ by John Fagan, Michael Antoniou, and Claire Robinson quotes Oliver De Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, “yields went up 214 percent in forty four projects in twenty countries in sub-Saharan Africa using agro-ecological farming techniques…far more improvement than any GM crop has ever done.”

The editors Sheldon Krimsky and Jeremy Gruber, choose articles that exhibit how large agro companies such as Monsanto hide behind the intellectual property rights laws to keep impartial studies regarding their GMO products behind locked doors. The over-arching theme that unifies each of these pieces: how can a conscious consumer blindly take a company’s word on the safety of a product when the company’s goal is to sell you the product in question?

The GMO Deception’s argument is clear: unless the public takes a stronger stance on this issue, we may have no choice in the matter. It presents well-rounded, researched articles on the issues surrounding GMOs and why society must question their use in food products. “We have literally hundreds of commentaries that bear witness to the deceptions associated with the promoters of GMOs.” It offers arguments and insights into the realm of GMOs that are hard to attain due to corporations’ strangle hold on their intellectual property rights.

While full of insightful material on the subject matter, this book was not a page turner. It consists of short, individual articles by varying authors that, while interesting, did not lure me in enough to make the rest of the world stop in its tracks. It was more of the type of book that one would read a few chapters of and then put it away to thoroughly digest the material before reading on. Each author had such different writing styles that it was difficult to get into a steady rhythm. The articles are fairly academic in content. Therefore if the intention was to spark a wider discussion among the general public the information may fail to reach that audience. I also would have like to have more explanation of why these particular articles were chosen for each separate section of the book. Some of them were written back in the 1980s and, while important in the discussion, it would have helped to outline why they thought each of the articles were worth having in the book because often there was significant overlap in the general information.

Having grown up in a strictly organic and vegetarian household, my stance on GMOs is pretty clear cut. I want them to have absolutely no part in any aspect of my food. For most of my life this has been based on an intuitive hunch that no part of my food should ever set foot in a lab. Now, having read The GMO Deception, I take further comfort in my stance and feel content in backing up my choices with the science discussed in the book. I would recommend this book to anyone with a curiosity about GMOs. Its inaccessibility is worth penetrating for the information therein—just don’t expect to consume the information all at one time.


HeadshotMaeve McInnis is currently pursuing her Masters of Science in Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management with a specialization in Food Policy at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy at the New School. She is the President of the Sustainable Cities Club and a member of the Student Advisory Committee with the Dean. She is an avid traveler and lover of food, culture and social justice. 

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Fashioning Appetite: A Review

by Samantha Felix

In the three years my husband and I have owned and operated a small neighborhood restaurant in the East Village of New York, I have found that the single most important thing I can do to ensure our success is to properly train the front of house staff. But shouldn’t the food be the most important aspect of a restaurant? Well, yes. The food needs to be good, if not great, but the experience is what keeps people coming back. It is the job of the front of house staff to make sure diners leave not only pleased with the food, but pleased with themselves.

Joanne Finkelstein’s latest work, Fashioning Appetite: Restaurants and the Making of Modern Identity, seeks to understand this contradictory restaurant phenomenon through a study of the origins of restaurants and restaurant patronage. Finkelstein reveals society’s public/private relationship with eating establishments and the surprising role these establishments play in defining Western identity.

Within this framework, I like to think of the dining room as a stage. The service staff is the stage crew. And, the diners are our unpredictable cast of characters. It is our job to finely tune the restaurant atmosphere to allow diners to perform their private desires in a public setting. “The restaurant engineers circumstances,” explains Finkelstein. A statement that could not be more true. Even in a small neighborhood restaurant like ours, staging this intricate performance is integral to our success.

Finkelstein draws the reader into a world where restaurants are more than just the brick and mortar houses of food: she sees them through a social scientist’s lens. She wants to know why society is so attached to participating in this public display of private moments. In other words, how and why do restaurants “bring strangers together to pursue their own private desires”?

Everything from birthdays to engagements to funerals are acted out in front of a room of complete strangers. Diners are willingly manipulated by the orchestrated world of the restaurant, because, Finkelstein says, the act of eating out has been redefined as a form of “consumable entertainment.”

Finkelstein covers a lot of area in this book from history to obesity to social norms. In terms of both the breadth of information and the complicated sociological terminology, the book can at times be daunting, even to those of us who live and breathe the restaurant industry. But, Fashioning Appetite reminds us how intricately laced our happiness as diners is to the success of a restaurant. “The private and public are inseparable, and the personal pursuit of pleasure, as in dining out, regulates broader ideals of personal pleasure, happiness, a sense of virtue and success.” In other words, as consumers we have fetishized what it means to dine out to the extent that in order to be pleased with our evening and, frankly, ourselves, our restaurant experience needs to be stellar. Not just good, but exceptional.

As a restaurant owner, I can vouch that we willingly participate in this game too. Our identity and livelihood is dependent on our customers’ enjoyment, and we will do just about anything to make sure they have a great time. While gazing out over a dark dining room, packed with expectant faces and grumbling stomachs we take on the responsibility of confirming everyone’s happiness. There is a special pleasure in watching a patron depart drunk, happy, and full—but there is also the inevitable bad experience that leaves both restaurant and guest deeply unsatisfied and with a little less money in their pocket.

By applying new research on emotional capitalism to popular culture’s collective understanding of the dining-out experience, Finkelstein believes we have crafted a socio-economic understanding of restaurants by assigning meaning to each bite and sip consumed. We have essentially “aestheticized food” and molded it into a source of understood “entertainment and novelty.”

This original and inventive interpretation of how modern Western cultures experience restaurants gives a balanced description of society’s pursuit of collective experience through food. The prose is at times dense and a challenge to decode, but it is worth the work. Deep within these pages is a thoughtful and important narrative about the journey society has taken over the centuries to create a shared identity, and how food has delightfully punctuated that journey through moments of public solitude and entertainment.


 

Sam PhotoSamantha Felix is a freelance writer and the community editor for Substance.com. Her work has appeared on Huffington Post, Alternet, and Business Insider among others. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at The New School. 

Nicole Brownstein

As a vegetarian, owning a book about edible entrails may seem unusual, but nonetheless, Nina Edwards’ Offal – a Global History rests conspicuously on my bookshelf. This book is hardly a tome at 108 pages, yet it manages to give a very comprehensive history of one of the world’s more controversial cuisines.

The book begins with the definition of the word offal.  Rhyming with awful, it’s classified by Edwards as “organ or variety meat, entrails or viscera, innards and extremities…it can be brazenly meaty or subtle and refined. Consumed all over the world, it exists both as a staple food and sought-after delicacy”.  In regards to pronunciation, Edwards says, “it could be said to make a seductive shape in the mouth: the open vowel; the gentler sound of the ‘ff’; the pleasing closure of the ‘l’”. I feel I need a cigarette after sounding that out loud.

But this sexy definition is where the author stops complimenting offal and starts assuming that the readers are, despite their interest in the topic, actually disgusted by the very idea. Westerners, especially Americans, are the “least enthusiastic” consumers of offal. In modern American culture, lovers of offal are apparently a very special breed of people with “rural roots”. After reading that, I wondered if I should tell my Brooklyn-born grandmother that her appreciation of tongue and chopped liver could be attributed to her country lifestyle. I think she’d laugh at me and would go back to playing canasta on her iPad.

On the other hand, the religious ties to offal are strong and may be why it sits so conspicuously at the same grandmother’s Passover seder every year. Offal is prominently featured in the diet of many religions: it was a gift to clergymen, a staple for both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, and on the table at the Muslim Eid feast.

On the flip side of the table, Edwards claims the other big offal eaters are those who feel a strong need to assert their masculinity by eating so-called disgusting things. In the 1980s, Regional Testicle Festivals began popping up in the United States, but sadly this is as far as Edwards goes in describing these festivals.

This lack of elaboration is a trend in this book, which is Offal’s biggest drawback. One sentence about impregnating a cow just to slaughter it when its udders swell is not enough. And learning that Liberian culture suggests there is value in sacrificing a child and eating its brain for strength is not sufficient either.  Why touch upon these juicy anecdotes without getting to the meat of the issues?

The main point of the book seems to be the food’s social balance between the highbrow and low brow—simultaneously regarded as a delicacy for the very wealthy and respected, as well as the caloric grist for the ultra-poor. I think this book should have been marketed more as a comment on the edible class system (using offal as an example) and less as a comprehensive history. At the same time, I would definitely read a sequel solely on the various pseudonyms people have given offal, like prairie oysters or headcheese. Even sweetbread is an interesting twist on inner organs.

So, would I recommend this book? Yes, but with a pinch of salt. And also probably with a brown paper bag, if you’re queasy.

Nicole Brownstein is a Milano Urban Policy and Management student with a passion for food. When not in school, she works as an Education and Farm apprentice at the Battery Urban Farm and is constantly found with dirt on her knees and radishes in her pockets.

Book Review: The Cassoulet Saved our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family & How We Learn to Eat

By Caroline M. Grant & Lisa Catherine Harper
Publisher: Roost Books
Released March 2013

By Larissa Zimberoff 15797796

There are books of essays that are meant to be picked up and put down, up and down, slowly turning the pages and taking time to stop along the way. Then there are others that are the exact opposite, where you’ll want to keep reading late into the night, when you really should be asleep.  The Cassoulet Saved our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family & How We Learn to Eat, a new book from Roost Books, is wonderfully in the second category. The bright pink cover, featuring a line-art drawing of a steaming pot with curly-cue swirls floating upwards, beckoned me like a favorite dish. I couldn’t wait to open it up.

The collection of essays, sourced by “Learning to Eat” blog authors Caroline M. Grant & Lisa Catherine Harper, is a balanced mix of names I recognized and those I had yet to know. Gleaning the histories of these writers made me feel as if I were standing in their kitchens, leaning against the counters with a glass of wine in my hand as I nodded my head along in an I-know-exactly-what-you-mean way.

The essays are grouped into three sections: Food, Family and Learning to Eat. In “Food” there are stories of  ties to one’s culinary past. In an essay by Sarah Shey, we travel from the memories of her mother cooking on a farm in Iowa, to the present-day where Shey does the improbable: she cooks for the Polish construction workers outside her apartment in Brooklyn, savoring the joy when they return with an empty plate. Keith Blanchard writes of his painful junk food addiction, which left him with a smile littered with cavities, “a double-strand necklace of silver and gold beads draped over a few remaining stalactites and stalagmites of original tooth enamel.” It made me recall those crinkly candy wrappers, hidden and stuffed in my own pockets. The section closes with an essay by Phyllis Grant with prose alive in its urgency: I wanted to be her, I wanted to be the asparagus tips she was cooking, and the poached egg she’d just speared with a fork.

In “Family” we find the eponymously titled essay of the collection—a series of letters between a husband and wife. There was clearly an argument, a stalemate of sorts, but we’re not let in to that part of the drama. Instead we learn of their annual cassoulet parties and what they mean to each partner. The most affecting of the essays is by Karen Valby, who writes of going hungry as a teenager, and of the envious pain she felt in the cafeteria every day at lunch. She writes: “If I want your food, I want more than your lunch. I want your life.” When I read that line I had to stop. This vulnerable essay of need and want will make you look at food, and hunger, in an entirely different way.

The book closes with a set of essays about “Learning to Eat,” many of which center around how we pass down our history of food to our children. New York Times writer Jeff Gordinier writes of wanting his son and daughter to eat foie gras, not for the thing itself but for what it signifies: the desire to try new experiences. Gregory Dicum, a mostly-vegan vegan, writes of feeding his new son things he does not eat, and the personal dilemma of watching his ideas of food evolve along with his son’s growth. And Edward Levine writes of anxiety in an age of over-cautious, over-educated, danger-averse parents––PTA parents like himself––who become embroiled in email threads in a “throbbing symphony of food angst.”

I liked reading the essays and, in the back of my mind, wondering what recipe the author would select to share. I didn’t necessarily want to make any of them. But as my eyes scanned the details I thought about where each had come from, feeling the nostalgia from just a few pages back, and I quickly stirred up the ingredients, making the whole thing virtually in my mind.

The Cassoulet Saved our Marriage makes you feel like you’re in your favorite restaurant, the one with the black-and-white checked tablecloths, narrow tables, mirrors reflecting the room, waiters who know your name, and a seasonal menu that includes an ingredient you don’t know yet. It’s not a book I need to read again, but it certainly begs to be shared. These days, when everything is documented digitally or featured on television in 30-minute battles, is there anything better than reading a good story?

Larissa Zimberoff is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. She has an MFA from The New School. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Untapped Cities and The Rumpus.

by Alex J. TunneyAlexTunney-Book_Review-_Raising_the_Bar-raising-the-bar

The second section of Raising the Bar: The Future of Fine Chocolate by Pam Williams and Jim Eber, opens up in November 2010 with Art Pollard, of Amano Chocolate, a waking up in the passenger seat alongside his friend as they traverse the mountainous region of Venezuela’s Henri Pittier National Park:

The road narrowed as they climbed. Tight hairpin turns and blind curves seemed barely big enough for a single car to pass. And now it was raining. Torrentially. Rivers of water ran down the road and soon small landslides followed. The road doubled back on itself revealing a deep mountain chasm. Art looked to the bottom: a bus.

Gripping stuff, right? I thought so. A following paragraph continues on with the travelers as they approach the town of Choroni and sets a beautiful scene:

[…] As the rain diminished to a drizzle, the mountains and the Caribbean Sea expanded before the windshield. Huge strands of bamboo planted years ago to keep the original dirt trail from washing away lined the road. Tiny shops appeared selling arepas…

Why are Art and his friend making such a dangerous trek? To meet the farmers in Chuao village who have helped grow and develop cocoa beans, and to present one of the products of their labor: Amano chocolate bars. This a great way to start off the section—mostly concerned with the labor that goes into creating the fine chocolate, including the current economic, social and political situations concerning farming and the cocoa farming population—by hooking the reader and giving the topic a human face.

However, the book only stays with Art and the members of the Chuao village for a few opening pages.  Then, the reader is moved on to another story. Introductions to the other three parts begin like this as well: a brief narrative hook focusing on a person that quickly transitions to a discussion of issues on a broader and more abstract level. The book uses Art for a quote or two but doesn’t return to his and villagers’ story. (Readers will be introduced to many people that are only used for quotes or brief narratives, so much so, that it gets distracting trying to keep track.)

Similar books intertwine narrative with knowledge, but Raising the Bar places information over story. It does so to its detriment, as evidenced in the first part, “Seeds of Change: Genetics and Flavor.” There, after the narrative hook is finished, the reader is thrown into a sea of acronyms and science with little way of understanding what it all means. Perhaps the reason for this can be found in the notice, prior to the book proper, in which the authors ask readers “looking for motives, morals and plots [… to] stop.” The authors, a veteran chocolatier and marketing writer, may have tried to avoid accusations of bias, but they also eschewed a narrative that would have given context to the information they provide and a forward momentum for the reader. The book is supposed to be a short overview, but it might take readers far too long to get through.

It also seems that Williams and Eber were somewhat unsure of the book’s intended audience. Instead of starting off with more accessible topics such as marketing and flavor—the topics of the latter half of the book—it starts off of by discussing genetics. There is also an inconsistent tone to the book: while it avoids a dry presentation of facts, the voice occasionally gets too informal—the occasional swear or a meta-reference to writing the book—that doesn’t gel with the rest of the writing. I began to wonder if the book was better suited for a niche blog than for a mass audience publication.

The presentation of the book aside, the information presented is invaluable not only to the avid chocolatier but anyone interested in food studies, or concerned with how and what they eat. It captures a spread of interesting trends in contemporary food culture: the increasingly curious consumer, alternative ways of farming, flavor experimentation and the application of genetics in food production.

There are stories to be told about the pursuit of better chocolate, better ways of making chocolate and narrowing down the definition of fine chocolate. But the authors could have gone deeper and further with these stories; they only hint at them. As a result, Raising the Bar is a great resource; unfortunately, though, it is not a very entertaining book to read.

Raising the Bar: The Future of Fine Chocolate was published by Wilmor Publishing Corporation on October 22, 2012.

Alex J. Tunney recently received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Non-Fiction) from The New School. He lives and writes on Long Island.

by Susan Marque 

Cooking shows have replaced soap operas, and chefs have become celebrities.  Perhaps the next big thing will be a Drunken-Botanist-Cover-low-resgame show with spirits.  If that were to happen, then The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks, would be the contestants’ bible.

Amy Stewart, author of the New York Times bestseller, Wicked Plants, has turned her fun-filled horticultural knowledge on what is inside your barkeeper’s bottles.  You might never look at a Manhattan or martini the same way again.

“Warning: Do Not Add Water” the author warns on page 59:

During Prohibition, enterprising California grape growers kept themselves in business by selling ‘fruit bricks’- blocks of dried, compressed grapes that were packaged with wine-making yeast.  A label warned purchasers not to dissolve the fruit brick in warm water and add the yeast packet, as this would result in fermentation and the creation of alcohol, which was illegal.

This is just one of the antidotes Stewart has sprinkled into the text, as she highlights each of the herbs, fruits and plants that make up spirits, highlighting their history and horticultural makeup.  Grape wine, she informs the reader, almost never came to be:  “The fossil record shows that grapes were established in Asia, Europe, and the Americas fifty million years ago.  But when the last ice age, the Pleistocene epoch, began about 2.5 million years ago, vast sheets of ice covered much of the grape’s range and nearly drove it to extinction.”

Stewart showcases the perfectly intertwining realms of botany, booze and history with engaging tales (George Washington’s farm “was one of the largest distilleries in the country, producing over ten thousand gallons of alcohol in a single year”) to recipes (for a twist—no pun intended—on the original Manhattan, she suggests: “replace the rye with Scotch and you’ve got a Rob Roy; replace the vermouth with Benedictine and you’ve got a Monte Carlo; or just swap sweet vermouth for dry, and garnish with a lemon twist to make a Dry Manhattan.”) She has included over sixty recipes along with botanical illustrations and cleverly placed antidotes that break up the text.

It’s no surprise that Stewart is a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship recipient.  The Drunken Botanist is a well-researched and curated portrait of alcohol and the plants that create it, shared with a lighthearted voice to make the historical facts inviting.  You don’t need to be a drinker to enjoy it, perhaps just lover of life.

The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks will be published by Algonquin books on March 19th.

 

Susan Marque is an M.F.A. student in creative writing at The New School.  Her work has appeared in the NBCC awards website, The Brooklyn Rail, Petside.com, Gotham magazine, The Resident Magazine, Yogi Times and Fit Parent.

Book Review: Consider the Fork, A History of How We Cook and Eat

By Bee Wilson
Publisher: Basic Books
Released October 2012

by Larissa Zimberoff

“There are fork cultures and there are chopstick cultures; but all the peoples of the world use spoons.”  And so, after an introduction on the usefulness of wooden spoons, we dive into Consider the Fork, A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson. In this book, Wilson, a food critic and historian, tackles what she calls the technology of the kitchen; namely why we use what we use to prepare, cook, and eat, and how that has evolved both our cultures and our diet over the past centuries.

But before we talk spoons, let’s dish about knives. I had never given much thought to the utilitarian utensil before reading this book, but knives are inherently dangerous. In fact, as Wilson points out, they are tools of violence. In medieval and Renaissance Europe you carried your knife on your body at all times. Wilson tells us, “Almost everyone had a personal eating knife in a sheath dangling from a belt.” These knives could be used to eat as well as, perhaps, pin someone against a wall. Yet times began to change, knives got duller, which both altered social skills (no picking food out of your teeth with your dagger) as well as the food (the duller the knife, the softer the food). What were these knives made of?  Metal, of course. However, most metals have adverse reactions to certain foods, namely fish. This wasn’t resolved until the advent of stainless steel, in the twentieth century, which Wilson calls “another step towards domesticating the knife.”

The chapter on knives is an excellent example of the breadth of research that Wilson brings to her subject, as well as her knack for storytelling and her ability to take us through the history of a tool along with its impact on the world around it. We’re given this same comprehensive treatment in all eight chapters in the book: pots and pans, knives, fire, measure, grind, eat, ice, and kitchen. At the end of each chapter an implement is highlighted for its key stakes in the category. Such as the toaster, which was invented by Charles Strite, a mechanic from Minnesota who was fed up with the burned toast he was served at his work cafeteria. His patent, issued in 1921, introduced one of the first tools into the American kitchen that allowed you to turn your back on the cooking at hand.

The curious facts we learn throughout the book are worth the price of admission alone. Like did you know that before kitchen timers people used different songs (think Ave Maria) to judge how long a dish needed to cook? Or that a fourteenth-century advice book instructed a chef making pancakes to beat the ingredients “long enough to weary one person or two.” Two! And that sugar used to come in solid lumps or loafs, and were cut up into smaller bits using sugar nippers. Let’s not forget our namesake: the fork. Did you know that the first true fork, a two-pronged gold version was used by a Byzantine princess and possibly harder to believe, that it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that forks were considered anything but odd. The Italians of course were the earliest adopters. I mean, who eats pasta with spoons?

Wilson’s voice throughout, both light and engaging and educational, draws you along the history at a nice clip. She’s at her best when sharing historical stories, as seen in a delightful exchange about kitchen and communism between Nixon and Kruschev in 1959. While her movement through the subject matter felt too brisk at times, and in others a bit repetitious, her prose will certainly keep you engrossed. This sweeping book covers a great deal of ground and I could envision Wilson tackling a similar book with as many pages about one item: fork, spoon, knife, you name it. While reading the book you’ll find you want a pen handy to underline quirky and interesting and unique facts of our culinary history, maybe to look up later or maybe to dazzle dinner guests at your next meal. You might also want a snack within reach.

Larissa Zimberoff is a freelance writer living in Manhattan. She is currently working towards her MFA at The New School. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Untapped Cities and The Rumpus.

by Jane Moon

When Toby Sonneman, the author of Lemon: A Global History, began suffering from migraines, she started eliminating foods from her diet to find the cause. Certain fruits, such as figs, papayas, and plums can trigger severe headaches, but she was relieved to discover lemons were not the culprit.  Through the process, she gained a newfound appreciation for the citrus. In fact, Sonneman found the lemon so intriguing she travelled to Italy to visit the Lemon Riviera in Sicily and spent several days working at a lemon orchard. She continued to the Alps in northern Italy to see the restored lemon greenhouses, and went on to the Southern Amalfi Coast to view the ancient lemon gardens embedded into the hillsides.   She became a lemon expert and in Lemon: A Global History, we have her there to guide us.

Lemon: A Global History, discusses the origin of the lemon, its contribution to history, and its place in the world today. Starting with the citron – a fruit with a leathery rind containing sweet tasting white flesh but bitter pulp – the reader follows this ancestor of the lemon and its trip originating from the Middle East, continuing into Europe and ending in the United States. We learn tidbits about the yellow fruit: Citrus fruits were such a luxury during mid-17th century London that a dozen lemons cost three shillings while in comparison, the average laborer earned a shilling a day. Or how Sicilian immigrants arrived in New Orleans and took advantage during the hot weather months to sell granitas, a confection created in Italy, which was made from shaved ice, sugar and lemon juice. This evolved into the treat we know today as “Italian ice.” Sonneman’s account of the lemon is also filled with fascinating historical details: Prior to representing the well-known citrus fruit company, the Sunkist logo was used to indicate top quality lemons being sold to the public.

The book is completed with a guide on the uses of lemons in the kitchen and includes the very first lemon recipe ever written which gives detailed instructions on how to preserve lemons. This was useful for a time before refrigeration was available and is now utilized in many ethnic dishes. The book also contains over 40 illustrations and color photographs depicting the importance of the lemon in history.

The book was a quick and easy read, but held a good amount of information. I would recommend Lemon: A Global History to anyone who has even the slightest interest in the lemon’s role in history. This book is a reminder of how something as simple as the lemon can have quite a complicated past.

Jane Moon received her MFA in Creative Writing at The New School. She is currently writing her first novel.

by Mandy Beem-Miller

French Kids Eat Everything is a journey: part memoir, part research analysis, with a touch of “self help” mixed in, following author Karen Le Billion and her family as they relocate to France. The one-year experiment begins with a self-admitted romantic vision of French life and a legitimate desire to expose her young family to a new cultural experience. But, it quickly becomes apparent that fresh baguettes and butter -while enticing even to her young daughters, is not solely what the French experience is made of. Vacationing is not the same as living in her French husband’s quaint seaside home town. The reality sets in when the children are enrolled in school. Seven year old Sophie and three-year old Claire are faced with an entirely new set of standards in their French classrooms, the most challenging of which involve an unspoken list of food rules. Starting as early as pre-school, the French, both at home and in the classroom, spend a great deal of time and effort dedicated to ensuring young people develop healthy eating habits, in addition to proper manners surrounding meal times.  As Le Billion tells us, “The French think about healthy eating habits the way North American parents think about toilet training or reading.”  The result is, the author noted in her year abroad, a society in which even the youngest citizens recognize the importance of eating well. The underlying concept of the French food education model stems from an adamant respect for food. Respect not just for the ingredients, but for the mealtimes themselves.

As Le Billion tells us, “The French think about healthy eating habits the way North American parents think about toilet training or reading.”

Le Billion’s own two children are, much to the chagrin of her French husband and his family, particularly picky eaters. While this type of behavior is quite common among American children, their finicky eating habits are not well received in France. In addition to being expected to eat whatever is put in front of them, the girls are faced with new meal-time etiquette. At social dinners with their parents they are expected to sit through long meals.  In school the many snack times often afforded American children, are unheard of in their new country, but for one late afternoon gouter, usually consisting of fresh fruit. This seemingly stringent new policy is not a welcome challenge, for either Le Billion to enforce or her daughters to follow. As the mother herself confesses, one way to ensure the girls were getting enough calories was to supplement their meals (and refusal of certain healthier foods) with mid morning, mid afternoon, late afternoon and bedtime snacks. Before coming to France there was lots of “short order cooking” to please her daughters, and very little, if any, of the “gentle authority” Le Billion observes in France, at getting the kids to eat the items they were refusing.

The distance from her comfort zone allows Le Billion a fresh perspective, and with new eyes she begins to re-examine the relationship her own family has with food. Ultimately she realizes that beyond being unacceptable for cultural reasons in France, the eating habits they have become accustomed to are detrimental to the health of her family. Snacking, in place of being expected to eat what was on their plates at meal times, was only giving the girls an opportunity to fill up on less healthy foods.  Le Billion jokes that before their year in France, Gold Fish Crackers were considered a food group in her family. More broadly, she surmises, some of these behaviors are likely contributing factors to the obesity crisis we as a nation face in the US.

In concert with the inclusive French education model, the Le Billion and her husband are determined to “reeducate” their children, French style. Accordingly, the family embraces a set of “French food rules” constructed by Le Billion herself, attempting to qualify and quantify the many universally accepted French cultural norms.  With much protest from Claire and Sophie, Le Billion attempts to adopt this new way of eating. She swears off short order cooking for her fussy eaters (the kids will eat what the adults eat), she puts a kibosh on the incessant snacking, and she attempts to enjoy first cooking, and then eating, the dinner meal, as a family, every night.

In the meantime, Le Billion comes to terms with her own particular eating habits and how these behaviors affect her children. Before her French experiment, she tells us, she too had many foods she refused to eat, she also snacked between meals and rewarded her children with sweets for good behavior.  Likely in an effort to avoid a condescending tone when harping on all of the “bad American habits” she reminds the reader that she, too, is guilty on all accounts. The self-deprecation becomes tiring, even coming off somewhat fabricated, but ultimately does not detract from the underlying message: quit snacking so much, eating so fast, refusing to try new things, eating alone, and missing family dinners because we “just don’t have the time.”  We can always make time, we just have to prioritize.

We learn from Le Billion’s book it is not common for the French to snack, or eat meals alone. They generally don’t eat in their cars or on the train, or drink coffees on the street. The families in the Le Billion’s adopted village eat long meals together, at both lunch and dinner, and their kids join them and eat everything on their plates. There are no specials meals for the youngsters or kids who will only eat pasta or cheese.  But the French work hard at achieving this. As humans we all have a penchant for the salty, the sweet, the fatty.  But in France, they start from a young age, instilling a few basic tools to help navigate the food world. The official food guide for the country warns against snaking, and snack food ads on French TV come along with banners warning against eating between meals. The French emphasize restraint. Simplicity. Enjoyment. The children are encouraged to try everything and given no alternative options. Additionally, they get support- from school, from home, from society- to enjoy meal times. To savor their food. To slow down and just eat. The average lunch period in American schools is 30 minutes.  In France, it’s a full hour, sometimes more.

Though Le Billion is met with resistance from her children at every turn, the girls do eventually slowly become more open to vegetables and trying new foods. With some parental enforcement, the kids learn to sit through family dinners together, and even enjoy this new activity. The book is encouraging: here is a “regular” North American family able to alter their bad food habits: couldn’t we all learn from them?

Perhaps with an altered view of food, and consumption, we could steer ourselves away from the cliff, shrink our collectively expanding waistlines.

We hear about the obesity crisis a lot these days. But maybe we don’t need to create laws taxing sugary beverages or banning particularly unhealthy oils, as some health advocates are pushing for.  Perhaps with an altered view of food, and consumption, we could steer ourselves away from the cliff, shrink our collectively expanding waistlines.  Food behaviors, like other good and bad habits, are learned. We do have some modicum of control over what our kids do (and don’t do), will and won’t eat. Still, as the author herself admits, the French “rules” do not always translate well back home. Short of some type of cultural revolution, complete with education reform and the restructuring of the American work/school schedules to include time for longer French style lunch break, many of the French food rules become difficult to comply with. But Le Billion makes it clear: there is an art to raising healthy eaters, and you can never start too soon. Our nation’s children are becoming increasingly overweight and French children are not. In 2008, the CDC reported that more then one third of American children are obese, a number that has more then tripled in the last three decades. These troubling statistics are inspiring the re-introduction of scratch cooking in many school districts, a Farm to School movement, and legislation like the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act, which aims to improve the quality of the National School Lunch Program. Still, what Le Billion’s book reminds us is that the food education of our children needs to be comprehensive. It must start at home, around our own kitchen tables.

If, like myself, you too have fantasies of living abroad, French Kids Eat Everything may revitalize your own dreams of becoming an expat.  Along with the author and her family, you may picture yourself eating fresh warm baguettes with butter and mussels caught that day and bathed in little more then a crisp white wine. At the same time it could make you think twice about this romantic notion , exposed to the possible isolation of a big move. Though the book is centered on kids and nutrition, the take away is something more. At the core it discusses is “mindful eating”- a practice that both the author, myself, and undeniably many other Americans do not always adhere to. While the book, in title and content, will undoubtedly appeal to parents of young children, the message is ultimately universal: it’s hard to deny that we could all benefit from snacking less and eating together more, essentially practicing the ingrained cultural idiom, long one of the stalwarts of French culture, of enjoying, savoring, and truly appreciating the food we eat. In this fast paced world sometimes a good meal is the best way to slow down. And I for one, am OK with that.

Mandy Beem-Miller is a recent graduate of The New School where she took classes in the Food Studies Program as well as several in the Writing Program.