Food Books I'm Not Going to Read

The <span style="font-style: italic;">Atlantic</span> has a review of several recently-published foodie books: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/the-moral-crusade-against-foodies/8370/">The Moral Crusade Against Foodies: Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism is still gluttony</a> by B. R. Myers. The author is very turned off by the foodies and their poses, as the article's title suggests.<br /><br />A few of the many foodie-writer crimes attested:<br /><ul><li>First: "these people really do live to eat" -- and often to overeat, writes Myers.</li><li>Despite lip service to the contrary, they are often cruel to animals, and go as far as to participate enthusiastically in cruel slaughter of animals they are about to eat. One example: "Steingarten tells of watching four people hold down a struggling, groaning pig for a full 20 minutes as it bled to death for his dinner."</li><li>Foodies don't respect food traditions of others, especially when the traditions involve avoidance of specific foods: "Most of us consider it a virtue to maintain our principles in the face of social pressure, but in the involuted world of gourmet morals, constancy is rudeness. One must never spoil a dinner party for mere religious or ethical reasons."</li><li>Moral or ethical consistency is lacking, despite professions of same. An "affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals—but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction." They nevertheless claim moral superiority to those who merely eat to live: "the guilty smirkiness that once marked [their] default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing."</li></ul>There's lots more. I accept the conclusion that foodie writers are a sorry lot. I'm not a big fan of most of these writers anyway -- though I think the author is too hard on Michael Pollan and maybe Alice Waters. I think that the interesting writing about food these days is in blogs and in fiction. I've tried some of the reviewed writers' earlier books or articles (Steingarten, Severson, Bourdain), and for the most part had already lost interest in what they have to say. Now I feel really free to skip them.

Food Books I'm Not Going to Read

The Atlantic has a review of several recently-published foodie books: The Moral Crusade Against Foodies: Gluttony dressed up as foodie-ism ...

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Sunday Afternoon Tea

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5444008248/" title="bkclub5057 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="bkclub5057" height="480" src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5097/5444008248_b5093cc51e_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12003515@N05/5444007962/" title="bkclub5056 by mesander2000, on Flickr"><img alt="bkclub5056" height="480" src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4118/5444007962_a7e3766a31_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br /><br />My book club's meeting this afternoon was a semi-planned meal. Nine of the ten of us brought food and drink -- I was the odd one and brought the plates, napkins, etc. The combination of sandwiches, hummus, deviled eggs, vegetables, fruit, and sweets was wonderful. We also created our book list and meeting schedule for the next year. I'm looking forward to reading <span style="font-style: italic;">The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven</span> by Sherman Alexie, <span style="font-style: italic;">Just Kids</span> by Patti Smith, <span style="font-style: italic;">Cleopatra: A Life</span> by Stacy Shiff, <span style="font-style: italic;">I Capture the Castle</span> by Dodie Smith, and eight more.

Sunday Afternoon Tea

My book club's meeting this afternoon was a semi-planned meal. Nine of the ten of us brought food and drink -- I was the odd one and bro...

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Happy Birthday Alice!

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPqnT6P3ehG7H49WdkVhcdQ7VResysImXdLSphN6rY-nNWBaj2aVF2O5EAvJfvI2PPeTogV7jvnjYXKZyDOpHlQWJtDyAs8t_patruT_9Vgd4RDEI5RoNbqykK9ZiIbOkRPa_vqQHQ-p0/s1600/abcake2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPqnT6P3ehG7H49WdkVhcdQ7VResysImXdLSphN6rY-nNWBaj2aVF2O5EAvJfvI2PPeTogV7jvnjYXKZyDOpHlQWJtDyAs8t_patruT_9Vgd4RDEI5RoNbqykK9ZiIbOkRPa_vqQHQ-p0/s320/abcake2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />From the Harry Potter cookbook: the cake Hagrid made Harry when he was eleven. Converted to a cake for Alice the Harry Potter fan:<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihWnXEPvoEICZ94elKKL2XUwAksjbgLVo_pke9lHL4rJYL2HrEFSxHU-IERhqr0RjCSUHF1oznkCaWKz364rTP_pk0ECZeoa8jOncVmIFva0M3ExxhwmmMA4JbRg9BmyWBFwfyqRW7obY/s1600/abcake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihWnXEPvoEICZ94elKKL2XUwAksjbgLVo_pke9lHL4rJYL2HrEFSxHU-IERhqr0RjCSUHF1oznkCaWKz364rTP_pk0ECZeoa8jOncVmIFva0M3ExxhwmmMA4JbRg9BmyWBFwfyqRW7obY/s320/abcake.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>

Happy Birthday Alice!

From the Harry Potter cookbook: the cake Hagrid made Harry when he was eleven. Converted to a cake for Alice the Harry Potter fan:

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Pamuk's "Museum of Innocence"

Orhan Pamuk's most recent book, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Museum of Innocence</span>, is the complex story of a man's obsession with a woman and all objects that he associates with her. It is also a very revealing exploration of Turkish life in a modernizing world -- the action takes place between 1975 and about 1985, before the current Islamist political success (and in some ways indirectly comments on this trend).<br /><br />The story is told by the obsessive central character, and is entirely from his perspective. For him, ideas from Europe and old behaviors from the conservative past complicate the relationships between men and women as well as the function of family life. The narrator and his friends and family enjoy wealth, education, European fashions, and the results of the 80 year modernizing tradition of reform dating back to Ataturk. They look down on backwards and unsophisticated (and often poorer) families in which women still cover their heads.<br /><br />However, the narrator senses in himself and others a tendency to want women to be both modern and sexually liberated and at the same time to be willing to play more traditional roles as wives, mothers, girl friends, and even as workers. The women in his view are aware that some men, having slept with their fiancees prior to marriage, never really respect them after marriage, and in condemning them find an excuse to bully them later.<br /><br />They discuss a variety of such ideas. "Do you people know why boys in this country never learn how to flirt with girls?" asks the narrator's brother. "There's nowhere to flirt. We don't even have our own word for 'flirt.'" (Kindle location 2491)<br /><br />The narrator has both a fiancee and a beloved. The beloved is a poor family connection whose reputation was ruined by her having participated in a beauty contest; she works selling imported clothing and other stylish items in a fashionable boutique. Her job further reduces her status in the world of wealth and class to which the narrator belongs; when he wants to insult her he refers to her as a "shop girl." His fiancee, however, is beautiful, has studied in Paris, and has a very wealthy family. Through weakness, he lets both affairs proceed, until the beloved runs away from him and marries in desperation.<br /><br />The narrator's obsession first leads him to hole up in an old wooden vacation house on the Bosphorus with his fiancee, and finally leads him to spend virtually every evening for 8 years having dinner at the home of the beloved along with her parents and her husband; occasionally he also eats with his own widowed mother or in a restaurant. The plot is complicated -- but through these dinners we get a picture of Turkish family life even in such a strange and fraught relationship. (There's no question that this triangle is disfunctional, not a cultural thing.)<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/89/2828/1600/istanbulhotelview.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/89/2828/400/istanbulhotelview.jpg" style="cursor: pointer;" /></a><br /><br />As usual, I paid a lot of attention to the many precise descriptions of the menus at the homes and restaurants. I'm a lover of Turkish food, so I especially enjoyed the food details, as well as enjoying the memories of my own trip to Istanbul: above, a photo of the Bosphorus from our hotel window.<br /><br />From the old house with his fiancee, the narrator could see the ferry boat on the Bosphorus leaving the dock, "and there at the wheel we would see the mustached captain with his cap; so close that he could see the crackling mackerel at our table, and the eggplant puree and fritters, the white cheese, the melon and <span style="font-style: italic;">raki</span>, he would cry, 'Good appetite.'" Then, in the morning "we would go to the Ferry Station Coffeehouse for tea with <span style="font-style: italic;">simits</span> -- sesame rolls --- ... we wold cultivate the peppers and tomatoes in the garden; toward noon we would rush over to the fishing boats just returned with fresh fish to buy greay mullet and sea bream...." (Kindle location 3785-96)<br /><br />Or later, at dinner with his beloved and her family "we ate macaroni with meat sauce, yogurt with cucumbers and garlic, tomato salad, white cheese and then the ice cream I'd brought ... and put straight into the freezer on arrival." (Kindle location 7810)<br /><br />The boutique where his beloved once worked becomes a food import shop: "coils of Italian salamis were now hanging, and wheels of hard yellow cheese, as well as the European brands of bottled salad dressings, the pastas and soft drinks just entering the Turkish market." (Kindle location 8477)<br /><br />The long tale of the narrator's obsession builds up by way of details about many things; the varied choices of food descriptions illustrate how this story is told. I can't begin to do justice to the depth and complexity of the author's presentation of a singular character in a setting that's so familiar to the author but so exotic to the reader. I think I found it more readable than any of Pamuk's previous books, which I have always enjoyed.

Pamuk's "Museum of Innocence"

Orhan Pamuk's most recent book, The Museum of Innocence , is the complex story of a man's obsession with a woman and all objects tha...

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Analyzing the New Food Guidelines

More and more critics and writers are commenting on the new food guidelines, some constructively, some not so much. I haven't read them: they are enormously long. However, I found this article on the constructive side: <a href="http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/71280/">The War on Pizza<span style="font-weight: bold;">: </span>The federal food police single out the sacred slice—and pick a smart fight</a>.<br /><br />Author Jane Black points out that "pages 25 through 27 of the USDA’s report" explain that pizza "is Americans’ No. 2 source of saturated fat and solid fats, .... Pizza is also the No. 3 source of sodium, beating out cold cuts and even bacon. After 'grain-based desserts' like cakes and doughnuts, it’s the second-biggest source of calories for children and adolescents in a generation that has so far distinguished itself only on the scales."<br /><br />So, she concludes, pizza deserves to be criticized, and it's far from unamerican to suggest that we could do well to reduce our pizza portion size. Her conclusion: "This isn’t a White House plot to take away your pizza. It’s an effort, and an uphill one at that, to save us from ourselves."<br /><br />Lenny has been making a delicious version of pizza with thin crust, feta cheese, and just a smear of tomato paste and olive oil on the crust. It's closer to the yuppie pizzas that were at one time trendy in LA -- I think originally introduced by Wolfgang Puck when he was more a chef and less a big-food personage. Sadly, even this delicious though spartan version has loads of calories.<br /><br /><blockquote>Dear government,<br />It's just too easy to eat more pizza instead of less.<br /> Respectfully, Mae</blockquote>

Analyzing the New Food Guidelines

More and more critics and writers are commenting on the new food guidelines, some constructively, some not so much. I haven't read them:...

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Chicago: Hog Butcher and Stacker of Wheat

<a class="title" href="http://www.amazon.com/Natures-Metropolis-Chicago-Great-West/dp/0393308731/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297003131&sr=8-1">Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West</a> <span class="ptBrand">by William Cronon is a long but very readable book about the economic history of Chicago. The author documents many innovations that arose in Chicago between its founding in the 1830s and the end of the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the interaction between the city and "the Great West." The central theme of the book is the unity of urban activities in Chicago and the agricultural development of the plains, woods, and farms that produced the raw materials.<br /><br />Two sections of the book, concerning the grain trade (including the invention the grain elevator and the development of a futures market at the Chicago Board of Trade) and the meat trade (including the creation of the Chicago stockyards and the meat packing industry), were especially interesting. Railroads and the telegraph contributed to the development of nationwide markets by speeding up communication as well as transport of commodities. This discussion illuminates the early development of what's now viewed as industrialization of the food industry.<br /><br />A romantic view of the life and productivity of the farmer as contrasted to the rapacious and perhaps parasitic role of wholesalers was at least as common in the nineteenth century as it is now. Cronon makes clear that the efficiency of the markets and inventions of the nineteenth century were essential to enable the farmers to get their produce to consumers. He constantly points out how the word "natural" was used to mean a wide variety of things, many of them far from the usual meaning of the word.<br /><br />The railroad was one of the central enablers for this agricultural industry. Cronon writes:<br /><blockquote>"Railroads were more than just natural; their power to transform landscapes partook of the supernatural, drawing upon a mysterious creative energy that was beyond human influence or knowledge." (Kindle location 1697)</blockquote>In the case of the grain trade, efficiency came from the combination of grain elevators near the lakefront where boats left for the East, railroads that stopped near to farms to pick up the grain, and the Board of Trade's development of a grading system to ensure quality of grain; these elements allowed wholesalers to combine the same grade of wheat from many farmers. Rail transport replaced wagons quickly. By 1852, twice as much wheat came by rail than by wagon.<br /><blockquote>"In 1860, Chicago received almost a hundred times more wheat by rail than by wagon; ten years later, no one even bothered to keep statistics on the latter." (Kindle location 1764)</blockquote>The resulting stream of grain could be loaded from the steam and gravity-powered grain elevator onto rail or water transport with far less human labor than had been required to handle separate bags of grain. Instead of using their horses to pull wagons to market, farmers could use them to increase their production of grain. Improved communication let farmers know when the grain might more cost-effectively be fed to cattle instead of sent to market. And the cattle market, including the Chicago stockyards and meat packing plants also emerged with added efficiencies due to rail transport. Cronon documents the changing meat trade just as interestingly as he did the grain trade.<br /><br />Of course I was thinking of the Carl Sandburg Poem:<br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b>HOG Butcher for the World,</b></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b><br />Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,</b></span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b> Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;</b></span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b> Stormy, husky, brawling,</b></span><br /><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;"><b> City of the Big Shoulders...</b></span><br /></div><span class="ptBrand"><br />Paul Krugman recommended this book; in fact, he mentioned that he was reading it on a Kindle, as I did. I'm glad I took his advice. However, the Kindle edition has quite a few unfortunate errors in the text due to (I suspect) careless checking after it was scanned. Also, the Kindle edition retains the placement of illustrations in two groups as is always done with hardcopy books; the handling of the captions for these illustrations was also very awkward. Maybe eventually electronic books will take advantage of their potential to more logically arrange illustrations.<br /><br /></span>

Chicago: Hog Butcher and Stacker of Wheat

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon is a long but very readable book about the economic history of Chicag...

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More Statistics

I'm really interested in understanding why world food prices have gone up, as I've read in several news articles in the last few days. Paul Krugman's blog today offered an economics explanation. He writes:<br /><blockquote><span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0);">"Overall grain production is down — and it’s down substantially more when you take account of a growing world population. Wheat production ... is way down.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0);">"You might ask why a production shortfall of 5 percent leads to a doubling of prices. Part of the answer is that some kinds of demand are growing faster than population — in particular, China is becoming a growing importer of feed to meet the demand for meat. But the main point is that the demand for grain is highly price-inelastic: it takes big price rises to induce people to consume less, yet collectively that’s what they must do given the shortfall in production.</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(51, 204, 0);">"Why is production down? Most of the decline in world wheat production, and about half of the total decline in grain production, has taken place in the former Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And we know what that’s about: an incredible, unprecedented heat wave."</span> --<a href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/soaring-food-prices/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Soaring Food Prices"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span>Soaring Food Prices</a></blockquote>

More Statistics

I'm really interested in understanding why world food prices have gone up, as I've read in several news articles in the last few day...

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