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Food & Writing: Glynn Pogue

Photo by Mia Penaloza.

 

Glynn Pogue is a powerhouse. A fellow New School MFA alum (2017), with several pieces published in reputable magazines, and named Brooklyn Magazine’s 2018 “30 Under 30,” Glynn is ambitious, eloquent, and a total bad-ass. I was lucky not only to sit down and talk over a meal with her, but in her home where she made me a delicious vegetarian dinner of tacos, beans and rice. We got to talking about her childhood in Bed-Stuy and discovered that both of us grew up with ambitious mothers who traveled a lot for work. Sated with homemade cocktails in hand, we got started with the interview.

Felicity: What’s your writing routine if you have one?

Glynn: I think I write in bursts. This is kind of a whack analogy, but it’s like a faucet. So if I start to think about something, it just continues. The faucet opens, and it continues to run and run and run all day. I might wake up in the morning with an idea, and I’ll start to jot something down as I’m walking to the train station. Then, while I’m on the train, or at work, the story is writing itself in my head, and I’m constantly taking notes. So then, by the time I sit at my desk, it’s already there.

Felicity: I’ve recently started writing in my Notes app and it’s really helpful.

Glynn: I write in my Notes. I send myself emails constantly of exact lines that I want to use, or stories I want to write so that I don’t forget, and then it’s about finding the time. But I sort of see it before it happens.

Felicity: Do you snack on anything when you’re reading or writing?

Glynn: I love gummy bears so much. Little snacks like that, that you can just constantly grab. If I get into a full meal, then there’s no writing happening probably. Maybe some takeout sushi, which is like my favorite thing to order. But usually, whiskey or red wine, if I’m honest about things.

Felicity: I haven’t heard sushi for writing before. That sounds good because it’s something you can kind of pick on.

Glynn: It can’t be something that I’m really digging into and enjoying, it has to be something kind of like mindless, where you’re biting and continuing to move. I also don’t even know how often I actually eat while I’m writing. It depends. If I’m writing a piece that’s kind of kicking my ass, and that’s usually something that I’m writing for an assignment or something, it’s just coffee and wine. If it’s a piece I’m really digging into for passion, then maybe I’m writing and then maybe I’m taking a break to go cook, which is a thing that really fills me. I love cooking. It’s a whole creative process in itself.

Felicity: What’s your favorite broke artist meal?

Glynn: Oh my god, I love this question. Literally, what we just had. I can buy five cans of beans from the grocery store for $5. So I get a black beans, a red beans, a chickpeas, a black-eyed peas, and pink beans. And I plan my whole meal around that bean, that protein, and some kale, and a boiled egg, and some tomato. I just cut up some tomatoes and put them on top. That’s my favorite.

Felicity: That’s so healthy!

Glynn: But it’s like the cheapest thing too, because it’s just all vegetables and canned goods and shit. And my favorite broke meal eating out: I love a good dollar slice, the dollar slice spot even right by The New School, right by the A train.

Felicity: What food do you think is the most fun to write about?

Glynn: Okay. I’m going to give two answers. I was actually recently working on a piece for a travel publication about the Civil Rights Trail in Alabama. It was an interesting piece to write because I was going to the south as a person with southern roots who doesn’t know a lot about her southern heritage. My grandparents were all from Virginia and South Carolina, but they lived in New Jersey and DC. The only thing I actually knew about my southern heritage was the food, that’s the only thing that had trickled its way into my history or my memories. The food was so present; the greens that have been simmering on the stove all day, and yams, and mac and cheese and, like, soul food. So I love writing about that cuisine because it’s so steeped in tradition and there’s so many memories there. And when I think about it, it reminds me of my grandparents who’ve all since passed. There’s so many stories there. As soon as I think about that food, it reminds me of being in the kitchen with my grandmother. Now I’m thinking about her and her stories and how she looked. They’re so much tied to that food. And then, in general, I like writing about food while traveling. I like the process of discovering a dish and the history of that dish. I love a food that’s steeped in tradition, that people have been making forever, that has sort of transformed as it’s been passed from hand to hand to hand to hand.

Felicity: Do have an example of a food that you discovered?

Glynn: When I was living in Cambodia, my favorite thing to eat every morning was called bor bor, which is just basically a rice porridge, like a congee. Which is crazy because I’m a vegetarian, pseudo-vegan. But they made this broth out of all sorts of bones and bits of pigs and cows and chickens—everything. And then, like, rice is in it. And they’re stewing this out all day and they’ll put some lemongrass in it and some scallions and all kinds of spices, I still haven’t determined what they were. So it’s a beautiful base of this rich, ricey broth. This is a beautiful soup basically. And then they’ll add fish to it. And then they’ll add beans sprouts. I’d always load in a ton of chili and fresh lime. And I would have it every morning. And that was really interesting to me because from my understanding it is a result of the Khmer Rouge when there was literally no food because the country was going through genocide. And it’s a country that produces a lot of rice, so rice is always the base to all meals there. I’m always interested in traditions or practices that come out of necessity that have been turned into something that people have made beautiful.

Felicity: Some of the best dishes are made that way.

Glynn: It’s interesting to think about a meal like that porridge and just talking about soul food, as well, which was also like, “We don’t have anything. These are the things that we have to make, and we’re going to pour our love into them.” Oh my god, I just connected these dots. I like food born out of “struggle” or “hardship” or something that has been repurposed and filled with love, and that has stories and tradition.

Felicity: It’s kind of like art made from hardship—that also tends to be really beautiful. What is your favorite piece of writing/art that has to do with food?

Glynn: The first thing that comes to mind is Cigarettes and Coffee. It’s this film where all these different scenes are intersecting with each other. It’s a lot of short vignettes, all these conversations that take place over cigarettes and coffee, in a diner in all these places. It’s just dope. And I think I like it partially because I create fantasies of a writer’s life, and a lot of that is always linked to black coffee and cigarettes and, like, a black turtleneck. This is my artist identity. So, I think the Cigarettes and Coffee thing kind of tells some sort of story about that lifestyle. Also, these people are in a diner and all they can get is the coffee that is, like, bottomless.

Felicity: Unlimited refills!

Glynn: I love films that are discourse-based. I think of that movie, My Dinner With Andre. It’s just a conversation. Or those films Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, they’re like movies of dialogue, which is interesting when you think about any kind of art made about a meal, because…

Felicity: It has to be around discourse.

Glynn: It has to, right? If it takes place where people are sitting down and they’re sharing a meal, then there’s conversation and that’s it. Unless something crazy inserts itself. But now that I think about it, if you choose to make a piece of art around a meal, then you want to highlight the characters that are at the table and what’s being discussed there, which makes me think about that Master of None episode, “Thanksgiving.”

Felicity: That is such a good episode.

Glynn: Really beautiful. That’s also another great one. And similar to what I was talking about earlier with the soul food. So much of the episode is all the preparations to make these dishes that they’re going to have there. And a lot of what they made is really familiar to me.

Felicity: What’s your ideal meal, finances put aside? Like, the opposite of a broke artist meal.

Glynn: I think of that guy, Jiro, the sushi guy. I’m obsessed with sushi. I really fucking love sushi so much. It’s probably one of my favorite foods. And Jiro supposedly makes the best sushi of all time. There’s a film called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Really beautiful. If you ever watch Chef’s Table, where they make food look really poetic and there are these slow shots of people cutting things and the music is really dramatic and beautiful—Jiro Dreams of Sushi is similar to that. So this guy Jiro, in Japan, it’s impossible to get a table at his restaurant. Two of my friends, when I was in Cambodia, flew to Japan just for the day to go to eat there. And it’s like the kind of thing where he’s constantly putting plates, putting plates, putting plates. He’s just there all day. You have no choice over what he’s going to give you. You just take it. I would love that. I’m bougie as fuck, even though I’m very, very poor. I’m just really trying to get to a point where money is never a problem. I want bougie-ass dinners all the time. Chef’s choice. Sitting at the chef’s table, and every dish has a wine pairing. So like Jiro, but, like, any place where I can have that kind of thing where every little bit of it is thought about.

Felicity: That sounds amazing. I want to experience that.

Glynn: In Cambodia, it’s really strange, they have a really good food scene there, and I ate at a Michelin star restaurant for, like, nothing. And it was like a six-course dinner where there was foam and random shit—you know when there’s foam, we’re doing things now.

Felicity: Yeah, things are not usually in foam form. Okay, if you had to live off of one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Glynn: I think I want to eat pasta—but then I would have problems staying snatched! I think, ultimately, pasta is my favorite thing. Damn everything’s connecting even more, talking about soul food and the congee dish. I like comfort food. I like things I can eat in a bowl, like cheese and saucy stuff and savory things. So yeah, pasta. Like a really, really good spaghetti.

Felicity: What is your favorite book and what food would you associate with that book?

Glynn: I think I’m going to say The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Junot Díaz is my favorite writer. He’s Dominican, so just literally Dominican food. When I was in high school, there was this Dominican restaurant that me and my friends loved to go to. We ate a lot of mofongo and tostones and all that kind of stuff. It just reminds me of Dominican food, in general. Mashed plantain and dark meat. All of the seafood and the good rice and a good ass bean and some fucking plantains. Perfect.

Felicity: That sounds really good—definitely, want to try that now. What do you think is the most writerly food/drink?

Glynn: Seriously, coffee, red wine, and whiskey.

Felicity: Ok. All liquids.

Glynn: Yeah! And cheese and, like, grapes, and crackers and figs. I could eat all those things at The New School’s readings and every other literary thing ever. For a while, I was just like, “I’m hanging out with the wine and cheese set,” which is the literary group.

Felicity: The snacks, the bougie snacks.

Glynn: Yeah, the bougie snacks. But also on a pseudo-budget because I buy Cracker Barrel and saltines from the corner store then eat it with cheap wine.

Felicity: But it’s delicious.

Glynn: And it fills you up and it looks fancy.

Felicity: That’s like a metaphor for being a writer: looks really fancy but is actually broke.

Glynn: That’s what I think that the cheese and wine thing is about.

Felicity: Bougie with no basis.

Since we were in Glynn’s apartment, I decided to do food associations using the books on her bookshelf. Glynn went through different books she had and discussed which foods she associated with them.

Negroland by Margo Jefferson – Immediate association is fucking cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Like a high tea, like you’re at cotillion and you’re trying to learn how to cross your legs.

Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc – Random Family is really one of my most favorite fucking books of all time. It’s written by a journalist, so it’s reported, but it’s this layered story about these people who live in the Bronx, who live uptown. It’s super New York. So let’s go with Italian ices, New York City summer stuff you’re eating when you’re out on the block, at the block party kind of thing.

Meeting Faith by Faith Adiele – This book is written by one of my mentors. She was one of the first black monks in Thailand. So let’s just say a pad thai, which is also one of my favorite things. I think Thai food is another amazing broke writers’ meal to feel bougie, too, because Thai restaurants always will have some fly-ass décor inside and it’s like super dark and moody and shit. But your meal is like $20. It’s like a good cheap date.

The Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique – I would say it makes me think of roti and escovitch fish, like Caribbean food, West Indian food. Which is another big part of my food love, being from New York and being of a diasporic black New York experience where a lot of my friends are West Indian and black American. So I was introduced to a lot of this kind of food and culture. I actually really, really, really love stories about the Caribbean. Love it.

Here Comes this Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn – That’s a beautiful book. It’s set in Jamaica and makes me think of like jerk chicken and oxtails and all that stuff.

Nancy Drew: The Secret of Shadow Ranch by Carolyn Keene – I read all of these as a kid. I read them every summer with my parents when we’d go to the Jersey Shore, where we have a bed and breakfast. So it makes me think of saltwater taffy, and steamed shrimp or, like, fresh seafood off the wharf.

All Tomorrow’s Parties by Robb Spillman – I actually interviewed him when I was at The New School, and it’s about his times in Berlin just being an artist and being Bohemian and all that shit. I was in Berlin a month ago, two months ago. So my food memories are still semi-fresh. The thing that was dope about Berlin was I didn’t eat anything that felt distinctly German. It actually felt fairly international. So I had amazing falafel but it was Sudanese falafel, I’m pretty sure, Sudanese or Somali. It had a spicy peanut sauce, and you could add halloumi to it and tofu along with the falafel. It was a really interesting falafel that I’ve had only in Berlin.

Glynn Pogue is a 26-year-old writer from Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. BedStuyBrat was her AOL Instant Messenger name back in the T-Mobile Sidekick days, and the moniker still applies, as much of Glynn’s works centers around her community of brown people and brownstones. Named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s 30 under 30, the do-or-die dreamer’s writing has been featured in Vogue, Guernica, Essence, and National Geographic Traveler, among others. A graduate of The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing program, Glynn is currently crafting a collection of essays on race, class, identity and her beloved Bed-Stuy. Find more of her work at glynnpogue.com.

Headshot by John Midgley.

Felicity is a recent graduate of The New School Creative Writing MFA program, her work has been published in Brooklyn Magazine, The Inquisitive Eater, and Enchantress Magazine. Her writing can also be seen with Barbershop Books and Healthy Materials Lab. Currently the Digital Publishing Assistant at The University of Chicago Press, Felicity enjoys writing in all its forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic

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Food & Writing: Liz Von Klemperer

Liz Von Klemperer and I met back in 2014 when we were interns at PEN America. Four years later, we’re roommates in Brooklyn, trying to make our way as writers.

Liz decided she wanted to cook us breakfast for our interview. We had bacon, eggs and home fries. I chipped in with the cooking, because I’m nosy that way, and we discussed the best ways to cook home fries—steaming them to get them soft on the inside, then frying them so they’re crispy on the outside—before getting into it.

Felicity: What is your writing routine, if you have one?

Liz: I try to write for an hour a day. It doesn’t really matter where. I can’t really write in our apartment for some reason—it depends on the conditions. I just try to do it for an hour and it doesn’t really matter where, but it has to happen.

Felicity: It’s like something that you check off your list.

Liz: Yeah, and if it doesn’t happen I get kind of sweaty and itchy.

Felicity: So you don’t have any rituals that you do to get into it?

Liz: I usually have a couple beverages. You have your tea, you have your juice, you have your water, maybe a little snack on the side. But, yeah, that’s about it. It can happen in a café or a library or sometimes the apartment.

Felicity: So, you said tea, juice, snacks. What kind of teas and juices and snacks?

Liz: So, definitely, Chai Roiboos by Yogi Tea.

Felicity: Who sponsored this interview!*

*Note: Yogi Tea did not sponsor this interview

Liz: Just gonna put out there it’s a really great tea. It’s gotten me through some tough times. So I really like that. Or just like any old water bottle, maybe spritz some lemon in there. If I’m feeling really vigorous, I’ll drink like half a cup of coffee, which usually turns me into a little bit of a mess, but I do that. I made Golden Milk recently. That was pretty nuts.

Felicity: What’s Golden Milk?

Liz: You put Tumeric and Coconut Milk and a little bit of coconut oil and maple syrup. So I did that, but it was kind of a lot of effort, so I don’t know if I’ll do that again.

Felicity: Do you have any particular snacks you like to go to when you’re reading or writing?

Liz: Well, I usually do the eating before I write, so I can get more into it. I usually try to eat a meal. Also when I go to the library they don’t let you have food in there so if I do eat something it has to be really discrete. So, although I really like Doritos or Cheetos, it doesn’t really make sense to do that in the library because it’s so loud. If I want to discretely eat something it has to be a bag of nuts or like an apple or something.

Felicity: What’s your favorite cheap meal?

Liz: A good frozen burrito is easy. And you can just shove it in your face and then it keeps you pretty good for a couple of hours.

Felicity: What food do you think is the most fun to write about?

Liz: Writing about meat is fun because it’s gross. So you get to play with how grotesque it inherently is, and then how delicious it is.

Felicity: It’s a fun dichotomy.

Liz: The only way I can write about pleasure is also writing about how kind of repulsive it is at the same time. Sex is the same way. Sexual pleasure can also be awkward. There’s a lot of fluids. Which is similar to the process of cooking meat. You’re like so into it and it’s sustaining and delicious but also you have to just sort of not think about certain things in order to enjoy it.

Felicity: What is your favorite writing that has to do with food?

Liz: The beginning of Mila Jaroniec’s Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover. The first scene starts off in a kitchen and it’s a New York City apartment kitchen, so it’s really small and it’s very dirty, and there’s flies buzzing around, and this girl goes into the kitchen to get vodka out of the freezer but she has to go past all these flies. I mean it’s not really food, but it’s about the after effects of food, and what happens when you don’t manage it properly. Things will overtake you. It’s the absence of food because there isn’t any food there. And then she opens the fridge and I think all that’s in the fridge is one moldy lemon, and the vodka. But the whole chaos of the kitchen is because of the mismanagement of food.

Felicity: That’s very Inquisitive Eater-ey. What would your ideal meal be, finances put aside?

Liz: I’d start with mini quiches that have been baked until crispy. I’m also all about fancy steak. Nothing too complicated, a little thing of mashed potatoes and then some fried onions on top the mashed potatoes to give it a little crunch.

Felicity: Like an American steakhouse.

Liz: Maybe this is just what I want right now. And then some sort of buttery green food, like broccoli rabe.

Felicity: Do you have a dessert?

Liz: You know what’s really good? A crepe cake. Simply because it’s so absurd and hard to make, because it’s like fifty individual crepes on top of each other, and then in between all the crepes is a little layer of cream. My sister made it once for me for my birthday and it took her all day. It’s just a really absurd way to make a cake.

Felicity: Yeah, it must take a lot of devotion to make it.

Liz: Yeah and then when you bite into it’s really fluffy. Once I had one that was matcha flavored.

Felicity: It’s like the deliciousness of a crepe without being like, “Oh it’s just a really thin small thing,” like, “No, we’re going to make it decadent.”

Liz: Yeah, it’s so pointless. There’s no reason to make it that way.

Felicity: If you had to live off one food for the rest of your life what would it be?

Liz: It would be some kind of casserole because casseroles are one food that is actually a bunch of other foods but smushed together. I’d choose a chicken, rice, broccoli casserole. Those are good, just to be able to, you know, sustain yourself.

Felicity: Who is your favorite author and what food would you associate with them?

Liz: I love Jeanette Winterson. She’s so cool and weird because every one of her books is so different. Sexing the Cherry is inspired by fairytales. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a tragic and classic coming out fictional memoir. Written on the Body is lyrical and sexy and playful. I associate her writing with this Vice TV Series with this celebrity chef Action Bronson. They basically just cook glorified stoner food. He’ll make a sandwich with pulled pork and then he’ll put maple syrup on it and then he’ll roast a marshmallow and put it on top and then sprinkle it with bacon bits and it’s really confusing but looks really good. If you look at Jeanette Winterson’s work as a whole you can’t really piece it together but then you read all of it and you’re like, “That’s really delicious.” But it doesn’t mean you can figure it out.

Felicity: What do you think is the most writerly food or drink?

Liz: The drink that I hear the most about when I’m reading books is coffee. Writers have such a romantic relationship with coffee and I don’t really like coffee. Bad things usually happen when I drink coffee. I always feel a little sad about that, because when I was younger I’d read On The Road and Kerouac is always stopping at a rest stop and having a cup of coffee. Or I read Imogen Binnie’s Nevada recently and she’s always on the road drinking shitty gas station coffee. That’s part of how punk she is. They’re using this substance to fuel themselves, and sometimes they’re using it as a crutch. I guess any substance can be a crutch. For me that crutch is, again, this chai rooibos herbal tea. The function of coffee is to wake someone up, but I have the opposite problem. I have a lot of pent up energy that’s knotted inside of me so in order to relieve that I have to drink some herbal tea with maybe a little bit of ginger in it.

Felicity: What is a food that you’ve read about, you can also do a movie or some art form, that you wish you could actually experience?

Liz: In a lot of cartoons, including Rugrats, they eat popcorn, and the popcorn looks so fluffy. The people who are designing it don’t draw each individual kernel of popcorn. They just draw it as this delicious fluffy lump. And then the character just puts their hand in and takes it but, again, it’s not made up into little kernels, it’s a lump. And to me it just seemed like such a supreme way of eating popcorn but it’s impossible to replicate, because popcorn isn’t like that. They weren’t trying to make the food look accurate but in doing that they made it look better than what it actually is.

Felicity: In that cartoon, Oliver & Company, there’s a part where the little girl is making food for Oliver, the cat. It looks like cookie dough but fluffy. You don’t know how she does it. She mixes it up and it almost looks like peanut butter but randomly fluffy, it has this perfect texture to it. But it’s not clear what it actually is, like what she’s feeding the cat. And it looks so delicious! My sister and I have been striving for that perfect texture our whole lives. When we’re eating certain things we’re like, “This is almost like the Oliver & Company cat food.”

For food associations in this installment, I decided to do breakfast foods and books. Rather than associating by aesthetic, Liz associated food with books by the way they made her feel, which was fun. “That’s mainly my relationship with food,” Liz said. “Whenever I eat something I’m mainly thinking about what’s going to happen afterwards.”

Sugary cereal – Nevada by Imogen Binnie, “The narrator’s voice is so colloquial and fun. It feels someone talking to you, like someone’s just confiding in you about something. I feel this way about Cool For You or Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. It’s tasty and approachable.”

Bacon – Hunger by Roxanne Gay, “The smell of crispy bacon takes over everything when you’re cooking it. It takes over the smell of the whole room. It makes everything smoky. It gets in your clothes. Hunger is a book where, after you read it, you can’t get it off of you. Bacon is delicious and so is Roxanne Gay’s writing. When you’re reading that book you compulsively want to keep going and then by the time you’re done with it, it’s stuck to you and you need to go outside or take a shower. Not in a bad way. It just takes hold of you. It colors how you see the world outside of yourself for a long time.”

Grapefruit – What Happens When a Man Falls From the Sky by Leslie Necca Arima, “Most of her subject matter is about girlhood, adolescence, or marriage, but a lot of the subtext of it is about integration and immigration. Grapefruits always take me by surprise. They shock your mouth. In the title story, for example, it is one woman’s job to remove bad memories from people’s brains. In the end, she realizes that all the memories she’s taken have been stored inside her. They overtake her, and ultimately kill her. So initially you think ‘Ok this is an alternate society with bureaucracy in place to control the otherworldly,’ but in reality there’s uncertainty bubbling under the surface. The plot twist comes up and bites you, which to me is what a grapefruit is. You can’t smell it when it’s in its skin, and then you peel it open and it squirts in your face.”

Morning cocktail – Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper, “Morning cocktails mess you up for the rest of the day. Similarly, Marbled Swarm is over the top graphic and upsetting. It’s about incest, rape, disemboweling, pretty much every upsetting thing you could ever think of. If you drink too many cocktails at breakfast, you’re going to feel pretty sick for the rest of the day. After I read that book I felt sick for the rest of the day. Your body rejects the substance because it’s toxic. Some people find value in it, though. Some people find value in day drinking, which is fine, but it isn’t for me.”

Toast – The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, “I love toast. I love toast so much. Toast is my go-to. Go-to if I’m having a good day, go-to if I’m having a bad day, doesn’t matter what’s happening. I’m always down for a piece of toast, which is how I feel about Maggie Nelson and The Argonauts. It’s just comforting. You can just open it up and get a little chunk and it’ll be reliably tasty. I think it’s partially because I’ve just read it so many times. Like the first time I read it, it felt like a weird dish I’d never had before but now it’s like a nice warm piece of toast. Because sometimes you feel like no one understands you, and then you just go home, put the toast in the toaster. Part of me always wants to find a writer who I feel like has lived through some of the things I’ve lived through. She understands me like toast.”

Liz von Klemperer is a Brooklyn based writer and succulent fosterer. Her reviews have appeared in Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Lambda Literary, and beyond. Find more at lizvk.com.

 

 

Felicity is a Second Year Creative Writing MFA Candidate at The New School. She is also the Deputy Editor for The Inquisitive Eater. Along with The Inquisitive Eater and The New School Creative Writing Blog, her writing has been published with Barbershop Books, Healthy Materials Lab, and Enchantress Magazine, where she was also an editor. Felicity enjoys writing in all forms. You can find her on Twitter @charmingfelic

 

Featured image via Pxhere.

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Food in the Circular Economy: A Proposal From the European Union

By Fabio Parasecoli, Associate professor and coordinator of food studies, New School – NYC

From the Huffington Post

Rarely, as in recent months, has the European Union been so unpopular among its citizens. In May 2014, the elections for the European Parliament, its legislative body, saw the success of political parties whose admitted goal is to reduce the meddling of the Union in the daily activities of those living across its 28 Member States. In fact, the EU is often perceived as another layer of wasteful, inefficient, and unbending bureaucracy that weighs on the already weak economic recovery of the continent.

Most Europeans have a clear sense of how much the EU regulations have influenced their food system, from safety to trade, from GMO crops to product traceability. Standardization has been a hotly debated issue. The Slow Food movement lobbied very effectively against a blind application of the HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) system, introduced in 1994 to ensure safety in food production. The organization pointed out that not all manufacturers — and especially small, artisanal ones — are well suited to adopt the same criteria as industrial enterprises. On the other hand, Europeans do appreciate interventions in the case of emergencies. The European Food Safety Authority was established as the most appropriate response to guarantee a high level of food safety.

This time, the EU is weighing in on issues of sustainability and waste. On July 2nd, the Commission approved a set of proposals to increase the recycling rate in the Union and facilitate the transition to a “circular economy,” a system where no products go to waste and materials are constantly renewed. In a Q&A memo, the Commission explained: “a circular economy preserves the value added in products for as long as possible and virtually eliminates waste. It retains the resources within the economy when a product has reached the end of its life, so that they remain in productive use and create further value … The circular economy differs from the prevailing linear ‘take-make-consume and dispose’ model, which is based on the assumption that resources are abundant, available and cheap to dispose of.” In this economic model, biological materials should always reenter the biosphere safely, while technological materials should circulate without entering the biosphere at all.

The potential impact of these theories and practices, which systemic design has embraced as its guiding principles, is enormous, including its possible influence on food systems. Some of the Commission’s proposals would have a direct influence on the way food is produced, packaged, distributed, and consumed. By 2030, the Union should reach the goal of recycling 70 percent of municipal waste and 80 per cent of packaging waste (glass, paper, plastic, etc.). From 2025, recyclable and biodegradable waste should not be allowed in landfills, to be eliminated completely within the following five years. A section of the document deals explicitly with food, highlighting record-keeping and traceability as tools to limit hazardous waste, invoking limits on the use of plastic bags, and demanding the restriction of illegal waste shipments.

Furthermore, the Commission proposed that “Member States develop national food-waste prevention strategies and endeavor to ensure that food waste in the manufacturing, retail/distribution, food service/hospitality sectors and households is reduced by at least 30 percent by 2025.” A very tall order which seems to focus mostly on the distribution and consumption side of the food system. The only explicit proposal that would directly affect production is the development of “a policy framework on phosphorus to enhance its recycling, foster innovation, improve market conditions and mainstream its sustainable use in EU legislation on fertilizers, food, water and waste.”

It is unclear to what extent the Commission will be able to bring these propositions to fruition in the present political climate, at a time when Union interventions are often met with suspicion if not outright criticism. The realization of these proposals may be perceived as entailing additional costs to producers and consumers at a time when Europe is recovering from a recession. Moreover, each Member State has a different degree of sensibility towards environmental and food production matters. However, the emergence of circular economic values in the language and perspectives of an important executive body is a feat of relevance in and of itself. It remains to be seen whether the general public, and national governments will embrace these ideas, and what policies will be adopted to make them accessible and understandable

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Italian Cuisine and Its Intricacies

by Fabio Parasecoli

from Huffington Post

Italy maintains a dazzling variety of products, now an important component of local identities. As a child, I distinctly remember that I was not aware of many fantastic products that I now love. Only later, was I exposed to the squash tortelli from Mantova, the smoked pork speck from Alto Adige, or the luscious burrata cheese from Apulia, as these specialties became readily available all over the country. At the same time, the friends I grew up with in Rome had no clue about the arrosticini (tiny grilled skewers of mutton) or the ventricina (ground pork and pork fat with spices, encased in a pig bladder) that I appreciated during my summer vacations in Abruzzo, just 100 miles away.

As I discuss in my new book Al Dente: A History of Food in Italy, culinary diversity has roots so deep in Italian culture that many wonder how to define Italian cuisine as a whole, or if it is even possible to do so. In his book Italy and its Invaders, historian Girolamo Arnaldi quotes poet Mario Luzi, saying, “Italy is an illusion, indeed, a mirage, the stuff of wishes” with a “terribly fragile” national identity. It is not easy to identify a set of ingredients, dishes, cultural attitudes and practices as generally Italian, although some items like pasta, pizza, parmigiano reggiano, and extra virgin olive oil have surpassed their geographical origins to be embraced all over the country. Rather than coherent and clearly codified, the Italian culinary repertoire is still — for the most part — a collection of interconnected but independent local traditions.

All around the world, as growing scores of food lovers are in search of novelty to express and expand their culinary knowledge and cultural capital, an establishment advertised as simply ‘Italian’ risks being perceived as passe or lacking in ‘authenticity.’ Savvy restaurant-goers, who have access to expert information and are likely to have traveled to Italy, have become acutely aware of the complexity of its local food traditions. The very existence of a national Italian cuisine is frequently called into question. In the United States, for instance, many restaurants started defining their food as ‘northern Italian’ as early as the late 1970s, distinguishing their cuisine from the seemingly old-school and immigrant-owned plain ‘Italian’ cooking, widely classified as southern Italian. In the 1980s, the craze for everything Tuscan exploded, fueled by media, travel agencies and marketing. Recently, the focus has shifted to once lesser-known culinary specialties from regions such as Apulia, Sardinia and Val D’Aosta, with renewed interest in local traditions of cities, towns and rural areas. This trend has been strengthened by the Italians’ own renewed interest in their local culinary identities, a phenomenon that since the end of the 1980s has deeply changed food preferences and practices in Italy.

The Italian-born cookbook author Marcella Hazan played a crucial role in changing the perceptions of English-speaking food enthusiasts about Italian food. When she moved to the U.S. in the mid-1950s, she found herself cooking for her husband, trying to recreate the flavors she had grown up with in her native Romagna. A biologist by training, she had never spent too much time at the family stove learning recipes from her mother or other female relatives. However, in her new environment, she rediscovered her passion for food. After The New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne noticed her work, she published The Classic Italian Cook Book in 1973 and More Classic Italian Cooking in 1978. The two books, collected in one volume in 1992 under the title Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, are still considered by many as groundbreaking.

We will discuss the work and influence of Marcella Hazan in a panel discussion at The New School on June 4, part of the Culinary Luminaries series. Panelists include Victor Hazan, Marcella’s husband and professional collaborator, Susan Friedland, former Director of Cookbook Publishing and Marcella’s editor at HarperCollins, cookbook author Michele Scicolone and the Italian chef Cesare Casella.

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Prose

TIE Poet of the Month: To Love Food Is To Love Sex

by Nathalia Perozo

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Philosophers have long chastised carnal pleasures, placing gluttony and lust in the category of sinful vulgarity.  But as many foodies (and sex addicts) can attest, in the pursuit of bodily pleasures one often finds divinity. Whether it’s buried under an Insalata Caprese or glistening in post coital sweat, there is holiness in what presents itself when we excite our baser desires. That holiness is a direct result of surrender, of embracing a joie de vivre only obtained through immoderation. I would also posit that well-earned indulgence leads to sanctity. It is that inherent tension of hunger and satisfaction that binds food and sex so beautifully.

A few years ago I read the food critic Gael Greene’s memoir,  Insatiable.  The book starts with her recounting the time she had sex with Elvis Priestly as a teenager. Further on she mentions a tryst with the lean and vegetarian Clint Eastwood. Her memoir has two themes: good food and even better sex. When I first read it, Greene appeared to me to be simply a foie gras loving nymphomaniac. But now, having been inducted into the Dionysian worship of sex, food, and wine – I understand her path of pleasure seeking.

Aside from my obscene love of buttered bread, I’ve always been indifferent to gastronomy. My cooking skills cap at my ability to boil water but I now peruse cookbooks at leisure. If nothing else, flipping through the pages allows me to gush at the mini worlds of ingestible heaven created by the high priests we call chefs.

This fall I stumbled into a love affair that began with innocence and bloomed with intensity. Amidst the pink haze of romance I developed a voracious appetite. The sex was addicting and triggered an incessant desire for gratification. Good sex is uninhibited sex, and in letting myself go I sparked a deep craving for all kinds of consumption – particularly for wine and French cheese.

My new found hunger led to a remarkable culinary awakening. I used to view my yearnings as pitfalls, after all one of the major tenants of Buddhism is that desire leads to suffering. But I’ve learned to respect my cravings. Julia Child said it best in an interview with Esquire magazine, “I’m all for hunger among the well-to-do. For comfortable people, hunger is a very nice quality. For one thing, it means you’re healthy. And I love the anticipation.”

 

Nathalia Perozo received her MFA from The New School, where she served as Co-Chair of the Feminist Writer’s Organization. Her current project is a collection of poems inspired by Marilyn Monroe entitled Divinity. Nathalia lives and works in New York City.

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Non-Fiction

TIE Poet of the Month: This Much is Mine

by Wende Crow

One night she appears at the gate in front of my apartment. Round yellow eyes glinting in the streetlight, two little lanterns of curiosity and longing. She rubs her thin body against the bars. I kneel down and reach out my hand and she meets it with the top of her head and closes her eyes and begins to purr.

I see her again and again, always at the gate, inside of which my neighbors upstairs have set out a dish of dry food and another of water—she is homeless, a stray. Everyone in the building loves her and wants her to be fatter, but no one wants to keep her. Not acknowledging that this kindness of feeding her will make her stay here, make her believe this building is home. I know not to feed her, for she will be mine if I do. This chaos, this noise, this expensive city to which I have just moved, this small apartment with cheap brown carpet, these are mine. I don’t know how even this much can belong to me. How I will keep them. How I will keep myself. How I would keep another creature.

But then coming home one night I round the corner from the avenue where the subway stops and she comes mewling up the street, having sensed me from half a block away in the dark. I put my bags down on the stoop and sit with her, stroking her gray and white neck, and she purrs and falls asleep in my lap. My thoughts move from the panic and noise of the day to her, to the steady magic motor in her throat. I leave her on the stoop and go upstairs to decide not to decide yet. To hope someone else will take her in.

The cocaine addict downstairs tries and fails to do so. She provides her food, but not a litter pan. The cat paces up and down the addict’s bed for an hour before finally releasing her bowels on the pillow. Right next to her face. The addict throws her out in the cold again. She tells me about this as we stand at the gate watching the cat eat from the dish the neighbors upstairs have set out for her again. She fails and I have been afraid I might fail. But this creature. She looks up at me and mewls and I know: this much can belong and be fed. I look at her and she knows. This much I can do, this is how I will keep myself. And the next night I buy her food and a litter pan and I feed her and she is mine.

She is inside with me and walking around on this cheap brown carpet. This much is mine. She and I keep these things, together. And she eats from her dish and drinks from her bowl in the kitchen. She spreads one forepaw to lick the crevices between the five toes and all around them, then places it on the floor and lifts the other paw. Sleeps at my side. She washes herself then jumps up to the back of the couch and licks the top of my head as I read. She dreams of running and twitches her whiskers. And when it snows I open the window out to the fire escape for her. She dips her paw in the snow and then shakes it wildly, the cold white fluff flying. She is lit from inside.

In the evening she watches me open the door and come in from work. She stands and stares at me in the kitchen. My crumbs fall in memorable patterns and she puts her nose to the floor to inspect them. She wreathes her body in circles around my shins, and then she runs to the bed and rolls around in the pile of freshly laundered towels. When I rub her she is electric and the sound she makes is electric and she closes her eyes and stretches and rolls her head back and chatters. We make little ceremonies that keep me. She grows fatter every day and sleeps wrapped tight around herself.

She sits in the sun on the windowsill and watches the leaves move around on the ground below. She chatters at birds. Never needing me to see her do this. She looks at me when I walk in out of a salty rain, close the door on a bewildering city. This much can belong to me. Mine, she says. I feed her and she is mine.

 

Wende Crow lives in Atlanta, where she teaches computer literacy to refugees. Her poems and essays have appeared in New Haven Review, Ploughshares, The Bakery, and other journals.

 

We are proud to introduce a new feature: The Inquisitive Eater Poet of the Month.  Each month a contemporary poet will present three poems and one personal essay in which food is consumed, passed over, or reckoned with.  Wende is our inaugural poet.

 

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The Tasteless Chef — Perfection on the Plate

by Anya Regelin

Let’s get this out of the way: I cook professionally and I don’t taste my food, and I haven’t, by choice, in years. Before you start thinking that I cannot possibly be a real chef, I will tell you that I have been cooking professionally for close to thirteen years, first in restaurants, and for the past seven, privately.

So how do I do this, and more importantly why do I do this? Not tasting started as a little one-time experiment “just to see what would happen.” The practice has stuck, and now, for the most part, I have not tasted anything that I have made for my clients in over three years. Hand formed chocolate tarts, homemade artichoke ravioli, cured Hamachi with preserved lemon, truffle infused custards? Nope. Chicken Soup? Occasionally. Chicken soup can be tricky.

Back when I went to culinary school, I was taught that a good cook tasted everything — all of the time. Not doing so was akin to a writer not running spell check. (I was also taught that in the culinary-world-food-chain, private chefs were one step above caterers, essentially not cut out to hack it with the big boys, the guys who toiled night after night in professional restaurant kitchens, preferably with multiple stars after their names. I later changed my opinion about this as well.)

A little over three years ago, I was in the middle of frantically preparing a four-course dinner party for fifteen. The menu was ambitious and my clients were ultra-rich and demanded ultra-fancy food that would wow their dinner guests. These clients were also ultra-orthodox Jews and all of the food was prepared under strict Kosher guidelines, a restriction that I was incredibly new to. I was constantly manipulating recipes while crossing my fingers in the hopes that things would work out as planned. I dipped and licked out of nervousness, constantly questioning if what I was cooking was any good and if my difficult clients would ever be pleased.

Private cheffing is not like restaurant cooking. A restaurant cook typically works on a station doing one of ten things over and over again. If the first batch of brussel sprouts aren’t perfectly caramelized, you might get yelled at a little bit, but don’t worry, you have forty more orders over the course of the night to make them right. Ultimately, it’s all about repetition. A private chef, however, rarely gets more than one chance to prepare a single dish.

Having worked in the type of restaurants where it is all about producing perfection on a plate, I was having a difficult time relaxing as a private chef and trusting the cooking process. Even while working alone, I demanded the same intricate, highly stylized food that usually took a small army cooks to produce. My energy in the kitchen was charged, nervous, and frenetic, and it was affecting the quality of my food. I found myself tasting everything — constantly. Was it OK? Was there enough salt? More salt. Oh no, too much salt! Add lemon. Oh no, too much lemon! I licked, smacked, and dipped myself crazy. I was so consumed with how perfect the finished plate should look and taste that I was losing my head in the process.

That day, in the middle of preparing that intricate dinner for fifteen, I decided to change the way that I worked. Over the next few hours I paid careful attention to every step of every dish. I resisted the urge to taste to just “see how I was doing.” I drizzled olive oil and looked for color and texture. I inhaled deeply to catch subtle aromas and added a bunch of thyme. I was immediately unable to multitask. A calm fell on the kitchen.

Right before the dinner party was about to start, I lined up all of my pots and armed with a teaspoon, I sampled each one. Maybe a sauce needed a little salt. Maybe. But who am I to say what the right amount of salt is? Whenever I go to a restaurant, I’m always the first to ask for the saltshaker. (In fact, it is one of my pet peeves when a restaurant makes you ask for salt, only to be met with an eye roll from a hipster waiter who just learned how to pronounce foie gras stuffed angolotti five minutes before his shift started.)

I do realize that I am no food genius, but I started to think, Beethoven went deaf at the height of his music career, yet he continued to compose music because he trusted that what he heard in his head was the same that his audience appreciated. Not that I am comparing myself to Beethoven, but what I had was a trust issue. My obsession with the perfection of my final product was overwhelming the process of cooking in the first place. And what is cooking, after all, but a series of creative, chemical, processes? When I stopped using my sense of taste to be the first and foremost judge of “good,” my food actually got better. My dishes were more dynamic and colorful; simultaneously simple yet ambitious.

Yes, but what did the meal taste like? I have no idea. But at that dinner party, the plates came back clean.

Anya Regelin is the Deputy-Editor of The Inquisitive Eater. “Perfection on the Plate” is the first installment of The Tasteless Chef, a regular column chronicling her exploits and misadventures as a freelance private chef. 

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Think Tank

Growing Food Justice in School Gardens

By Pauline Zaldonis

Upon launching New York City’s citywide school garden initiative, Grow to Learn, Mayor Bloomberg declared, “nothing is more important than the health and wellbeing of our children. That’s why our Administration is committed to helping young New Yorkers understand how eating fresh food and preparing their own meals can help them lead longer, healthier lives.”[1] In New York City and across the country, government agencies and nonprofit organizations are framing school gardens as a tool for improving the health and wellbeing of schoolchildren. In California, the Department of Education started its Garden in Every School initiative in 1995, identifying gardening as a way to increase student preference for fresh fruits and vegetables.[2] Nationally, school gardens have received the support of First Lady Michelle Obama through her Let’s Move campaign, which promotes gardening as a way for children to get physical activity while learning how healthy food is produced.[3]

While it is clear that school gardens seek to address health and educational issues in schools, it is less clear whether school gardens can be used to address social justice issues in the school food arena. The food justice framework, which recognizes the importance of structural inequalities and patterns of oppression that characterize the food system, calls for solutions to food system problems that go beyond food access and education.[4] The increasing popularity of school gardens begs the question, how can we use gardens to promote greater justice in school cafeterias?

In the literature on the impact of school gardens, researchers and program evaluators typically praise school gardens for their educational and health benefits. Questions of food justice rarely arise, despite the fact that the nutritional quality of school food is generally poor and unquestionably a food justice issue. With an estimated 32% of youth between the ages of 2 and 19 considered overweight or obese,[5] an interest in the effect school meals on childhood obesity has been growing over the last decade. School food plays a large role in the development of children’s eating habits. What is on the menu in school cafeterias can lead to positive or negative health outcomes.

Fresh fruits and vegetables are hard to come by in many cafeterias across the United States today. Since processed foods tend to be cheaper and require less preparation than fresh fruits and vegetables, most school cafeterias in the United States are dominated by processed foods.[6] Students who participate in the free and reduced meals program are typically low-income students who rely on school meals to provide them with one and sometimes two meals each day. Consequently, the abundance of processed foods served in school cafeterias disproportionately harms low-income students. The West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (or, WE ACT for Environmental Justice), a community-based organization working towards racial and environmental justice in New York City, calls the lack of healthy school food options an issue of structural racism, claiming that the quality, safety, and nutrition of school meals has an especially large impact on students of color who are more likely to participate in the program.[7]

Despite the social justice issues surrounding school food, school garden advocates tend to focus on the educational and health outcomes associated with gardening, as if growing food and the consumption of food are unrelated. Indeed, school gardens have been linked to a variety of educational and health outcomes, for example, improved performance on standardized tests in reading, writing, math, social studies, and science.[8] They also provide children with greater exposure to complex natural experiences, which many believe to be important to childhood development.[9] Furthermore, student school gardening activities have been linked to higher nutritional knowledge, more positive attitudes about food and the environment, and an increase in the consumption of fruits and vegetables.[10]

Programs like New York City’s Grow to Learn program or California’s Garden in Every School initiative share the ambitious goal of providing every student with the opportunity to participate in school gardening. While the academic and certain health benefits associated with school gardens are documented, such outcomes are not necessarily synonymous with the promotion of food justice and they do not inherently address the root causes of problems like the rising childhood obesity or the proliferation of processed foods in school cafeterias. Even the few school gardens that address food access by providing enough produce to be incorporated into school meals do not necessarily address the systemic problems in the food system. By suggesting that food system inequalities can be addressed simply by educating people about how to make better dietary choices, the deeper problems that create inequalities in the food system are overlooked and obscured.[11]

A school’s ability to maintain a garden large enough to generate produce to be used in the cafeteria is contingent on its ability to access both financial and human resources, which is typically more of a challenge for schools in low-income areas. Many schools find it daunting to start and sustain even a small-scale educational garden, citing a limited staff time and lack of funds as the primary barriers. Students’ access to garden-based learning opportunities in their schools is dependent on the ability of their school administration’s ability to gain the necessary resources to build and maintain their garden.

Despite the goals of school garden organizations to create “a sustainable school garden in every public school,” realistically some schools will not get the benefits of a garden.[12] Simply addressing nutrition or incorporating gardening into traditional academic subjects does not increase food justice. Rather, school gardening initiatives seeking to increase social justice in the food system must extend their focus beyond nutrition and academics and perhaps focus on what is actually being served to students in their very own cafeterias.

The New York City-based nonprofit organization, Harlem Grown, is an example of a school garden initiative that goes beyond classroom-based nutrition. Harlem Grown works with local public schools to create greater access to nature and green spaces, engages community members in nutritional and outdoor activities, and increases access to healthy foods while focusing on issues of food justice.[13] Currently Harlem Grown works with PS 197 in Harlem, where it has developed a school garden and has created a vegetable-based diet in the school its cafeteria. Local restaurants purchase a portion of the produce from the garden while the rest of it is given to the school and made available for community members.[14] Harlem Grown uses school gardens to revitalize abandoned community spaces and to create sites that provide both educational opportunities and fresh produce. By taking food justice issues into consideration, the needs of the wider community are met as well.

With the increasing popularity and governmental support of school gardens, there is an opportunity for schools to engage their students in projects that both provide nutritional education while addressing food justice issues. In their essay on farm-to-school programs, Patricia Allen and Julie Guthman recognize the potential for schools to be the site for challenging the structural inequalities in the food system. They argue that the public school system has the potential to be a platform for innovative school food programs that combine the practical value of universal access to fresh food combined with educational and nutritional knowledge.[15] While most school gardens do not currently address issues of food justice, there is a huge potential for advocates to use school gardens as a platform for promoting food justice alongside the nutritional and educational benefits that are already widely recognized.

Pauline Zaldonis is a graduate student at The New School where she is pursuing her Master’s degree in Urban Policy and Management with a focus on food and the environment.

[1] “Message from the Mayor.” Grow to Learn. n.d. 13 May 2013. http://www.growtolearn.org/view/messagesfromnyc.

[2] “School Garden Program Overview.” California Department of Education. n.d. Web. 18 April 2013.http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/he/gardenoverview.asp.

[3] “School Garden Checklist.” Let’s Move. n.d. Web. 18 April 2013.http://www.letsmove.gov/school-garden-checklist.

[4] Allen, Patricia. “Mining for justice in the food system: perceptions, practices, and possibilities.” Agriculture and Human Values 25:157-161, 158.

[5] Perlman, Sharon E. et al. “A Menu for Health: Changes to New York City School Food, 2001-2011.” Journal of School Health; October 2012, Vol. 82, No. 10., 484-485, 484.

[6] “Why Processed Food is Cheaper than Healthier Options.” NPR. 1 March 2013. Web. http://www.npr.org/2013/03/01/173217143/why-process-food-is-cheaper-than-healthier-options.

[7] “Northern Manhattan Food Justice Initiative,” WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Accessed 3 May 2013, http://www.weact.org/Programs/EnvironmentalHealthCBPR/NorthernManhattanFoodJusticeInitiative/tabid/206/Default.aspx.

[8] Lieberman, Gerald A. and Linda L. Hoody. “Closing the Achievement Gap: Using the Environment as an Integrating Context for Learning.” State Education and Environment Roundtable, 1998.

[9] Blair, Dorothy. “The Child in the Garden: An Evaluative Review of the Benefits of School Gardening.” The Journal of Environmental Education. Winter 2009, Vol. 40, No. 2, 15-38, 17.

[10] Atkins, Dr. Robert and Veronica. “An Evaluation of the School Lunch Initiative.” Center for Weight and Health, University of California. Berkeley, September 2010, 26-32.

[11] Allen, Patricia and Julie Guthman. “Farm-to-School”: Neoliberalization from the Ground Up.” Agriculture and Human Values (2006) 23:401–415, 412.

[12] “Mission Statement.” Grow to Learn. n.d. 18 April 2013.http://www.growtolearn.org/view/mission_statement.

[13] “About Us.” Harlem Grown. n.d. 13 May 2013. http://www.harlemgrown.org/about-us/.

[14] Laperruque, Emma “Kids Yield Crops: In the Garden with Harlem Grown,” Marcus Samuelsson, 12 July 2012. Web. 16 April 2013.http://www.marcussamuelsson.com/food-stories-2/kids-yield-crops-in-the-garden-with-harlem-grown.

[15] Allen, Patricia and Julie Guthman. “Farm-to-School”: Neoliberalization from the Ground Up.” Agriculture and Human Values (2006) 23:401–415, 412.

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