Search results: Michael Pollan

The Fales Library at NYU has been collecting cookbooks and other food studies materials for the past 8 years or so, and now houses at least 55,000 books and additional thousands of pamphlets, menus, and other ephemeral food materials.

To celebrate the collection, Fales curator Marvin Taylor and food consultant Clark Wolf teamed up with Rizzoli publishers to produce a huge (5-pound),gorgeously illustrated book of descriptions of 101 20th century cookbooks, accompanied by essays on their value and maimportance by dozens of distinguished food writers.

I have a personal interest in this book. I teach at NYU and I wrote the Foreword to the book and an essay on 20th century books about nutrition.

Here’s some of what Rizzoli says about the book:

In this marvelous collection, 501 of these signature recipes have been carefully selected from 101 great cookbooks of the twentieth century—beloved tomes passed down through generations. The list of masterworks was chosen by an expert advisory committee that includes Jonathan Gold, Michael Pollan, and Ruth Reichl.

It is like having a library of culinary classics condensed into one volume. You’ll discover so many timeless gems, such as Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon, Elizabeth David’s Bouillabaisse, Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese Ragu, Jacques Pepin’s Brioche, James Beard’s Pig Hamburgers, and Irma Rombauer’s Devil’s Food Cake Cockaigne.

But you’ll also read about how these books and recipes revolutionized the way we eat. Interspersed throughout are nostalgic images from the vintage first editions. It is a fascinating culinary tour that in whole tells much of the story of American culture at large.

The book’s essays comprise a history of 20th century food.  The illustrations are magnificent.  I think it makes a splendid gift (full disclosure: I was not paid to write for the book, and I get no money from its sales).

Michael Pollan has a terrific piece in this Sunday’s Times Magazine on why the food movement needs to get behind California’s Proposition 37, flaws and all.

California’s Proposition 37, which would require that genetically modified (G.M.) foods carry a label, has the potential to do just that — to change the politics of food not just in California but nationally too.

…sooner or later, the food movement will have to engage in the hard politics of Washington — of voting with votes, not just forks.

…Obama’s attitude toward the food movement has always been: What movement? I don’t see it. Show me. On Nov. 6, the voters of California will have the opportunity to do just that.

Helping this along are two videos from Food and Water Watch, both really well done.

• The celebrity-packed “Vote Yes on 37“
• And OMG! GMO!

And then there’s this one, from a creative pro-Prop 37 individual (was he suggesting that it’s OK to give Pepsi to that baby?  Not at all—see comment below from Ali Partavi).

Enjoy!  Whatever you think of GMOs, people want and have a right to know the source of their food.

Sandor Ellix Katz, The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World, Chelsea Green, 2012.

This is a big book—498 pages—packed full of anything you’d want to know about fermented foods, not only as something healthful we seem to have evolved with, but also as something delicious to eat and drink.  Think: cheese, yogurt, sourdough, beer, kimchi, and soy sauce, but also such exotica as kombucha candy or cod liver oil.  The book’s coverage is international, the directions explicit (equipment, gear, troubleshooting), and the design beautiful.  Michael Pollan’s introduction says he found it inspirational.  Me too.

Peter Kaminsky, Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well), Knopf, 2012.

I blurbed this one:

Kaminsky’s rules for taking pounds off and keeping them off are based on a really good idea: Flavor per Calorie.  That works for him and should make dieting a pleasure.

You can eat well and healthfully and everywhere if you apply your inborn Culinary Intelligence.  Kaminsky says the CI story can be summarized in ten words: Buy the best ingredients you can afford.  Cook them well.

Can’t beat that.

Seamus Mullen, Hero Food: How Cooking with Delicious Things Can Make Us Feel Better, Andrews McNeel, 2012.

I don’t usually blurb cookbooks, but it wasn’t hard to talk me into doing this one.

Take a look at what Seamus Mullen does with vegetables, fruit, grains and everything else he cooks.  I can’t wait to try his 10 Things to Do with Corn.  His food can’t guarantee health, but it will surely make anyone happy.

This gorgeous book proves without a doubt the point I’ve been making for years: healthy food is delicious!

Mullen cooks Spanish food at Tertulia, Manhattan.  The food is delicious (but bring ear plugs!).

Staunch feminist that I am, I am greatly enjoying the fuss over the all-male judging panel for the New York Times’ contest calling on “carnivores to tell us why it’s ethical to eat meat.”  The Times’ ethicist, Ariel Kaminer, announced the contest in Sunday’s magazine:

So today we announce a nationwide contest for the omnivorous readers of The New York Times. We invite you to make the strongest possible case for this most basic of daily practices.

We have assembled a veritable murderer’s row of judges — some of the most influential thinkers to question or condemn the eating of meat: Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer and Andrew Light.

In the graduate course in food ethics I taught at NYU a couple of years ago, I had the class read:

• Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
• Michael Pollan’s critique of Singer’s views in The Omnivore’s Dilemma
• Jonathan Safran Foer’s critique of Pollan in Eating Animals.  

I also had them read a scientific paper on the nutritional benefits of adding meat to the diets of children in developing countries (Whaley et al.  J Nutrition 2003;133: 3965s–3971s).

Discussions, to say the least, were lively.

As for the other two: Mark Bittman writes eloquently about ethical issues in food choice for the New York Times.  Although I am not familiar with the work of Andrew Light, a quick Google search reveals that he writes about the ethics of climate policy.

All happen to be white men.

On her blog, the “vegan-feminist intellectual” Carol Adams,  author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, says:

Here’s the crux of the problem, our culture is heavily invested in the identification of meat eating with manliness…. How could an intelligent woman miss the fact that her own panel of “ethicists” is male-dominated and that such a choice is, itself, an ethical issue?

Michele Simon writes on her blog, Appetite for Profit:

When I asked why all the judges were male, Kaminer replied that she couldn’t find one female expert in food ethics with a fraction of the name recognition of the men. She argued that the famous male judges would bring far more attention to the contest, and in turn get more people to consider the ethics of meat eating.

Full disclosure: Michele puts me first in her list of ten women who should have been considered.

You can see why I am amused, no?

If you want to enter this contest—and please do!—send written entries of no more than 600 words to ethicist@nytimes.com. Entries are due by April 8.

It’s spring and the books about food and farms are flooding in.  I’ll start with these.

Daniel Imhoff, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill, Watershed Media, 2012.

Michael Pollan and Fred Kirschnmann introduce this new, gorgeously illustrated edition of Imhoff’s lucid explanation of the farm bill and the vast number of issues it covers.  I’m not aware of anything else that comes close to explaining this most obscure and obfuscated piece of legislation.   Congress is fussing with the bill right now.  If you want to understand what your elected officials are fussing about, start here.  I will use this book in my NYU classes and will borrow the stunning illustrations for talks.

Jim VanDerPol, Conversations with the Land, No Bull Press, 2012.

This is a book of personal reflections on farms, farming, and farmers.  VanDerPol talks about the weather, people and communities, and better ways to produce food and to live.  From his base in Minnesota, he gives his thoughts  about the way agriculture has changed and what can be done to make it better.

I’ve been wondering for ages whatever happened to the piece I wrote for Jonathan Safran Foer’s new translation of the Haggadah, the text traditionally read and debated at Jewish Passover services.

Yesterday’s New York Times style section solves the mystery.

Mr. Foer got the idea for creating a new Haggadah after a Seder at his grandparents’ house in Washington, D.C., nine years ago…So he set out to deconstruct the traditional Haggadah with analysis by 30 marquee writers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Simon Schama, Tony Kushner, Michael Pollan as well as artwork by the painter R. B. Kitaj.

He dropped the idea because the individualism of the essays distracted attention from the text.

I was one of the 30 writers who Jonathan talked into writing for this project.  I submitted my piece in January 2007.

Despite a couple of attempts to find out what happened to it, I never heard from him again (but see update below).

Ah well.  These things happen.

Jonathan particularly wanted me to discuss the non-ceremonial foods of the Passover feast, the dishes that the Hagaddah does not discuss.   Here’s what I sent him:

Haggadah: The Passover Meal

Through the rituals of Passover, we are to re-experience and honor the sufferings of the Jewish people throughout the ages.   The ritual reenactments require us to sip wine, taste bitter herbs and haroset, and reflect upon the symbolic meanings of these foods.

All of this has made us hungry.  Now, we are to eat.   But what?

The rituals say only that we must eat matzo but must not eat anything leavened (hometz).  If we follow Ashkenazi traditions, we also must not eat kitniyot, the beans, rice, or other foods that might fool us into eating hametz by mistake. 

Unlike most else in this ceremony, we are not to question these rules.  By following them unquestioningly, we reaffirm our identity as Jews and our freedom—and our conscious decision—to participate in Jewish cultural traditions.

But what of the feast itself?  On this, the Haggadah is mute.

How are we to interpret this silence?   One possibility is that the meal itself symbolizes freedom, in this case to create our own rituals.   Except for the obligatory matzo and the forbidden hametz, the menus of Passover feasts from Europe (East and West), Iberia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East could not differ more.  Each community, each family within that community, is free to interpret its own food traditions in its own way.

Chicken soup?  Matzo balls that sink or float?  Fava beans?  From one family to another, such differences may be irreconcilable.  But for those who celebrate Passover together year after year, the dishes themselves are not the point.

The point is the predictability of those dishes.   In this respect, the Passover meal not only celebrates survival and freedom from oppression, but also constitutes an oasis of stability in an uncertain and mutable world.

For many, myself included, the significance of Passover is as an occasion on which to honor the most important values of Judaism: freedom from oppression, democracy, social justice, ethical relations with others, and the obligation to transmit these values to our children.  The meal is an excellent means for doing so.

Whatever the foods served, they can inspire yet another set of four questions, these about what food means to us as moral, ethical beings in today’s world.

• Tonight we partake of this feast while others go hungry as a result of the injustices of war, famine, or social and economic inequity.  How can we improve the human condition and ensure that those who need food have enough to eat?
• Tonight we eat many foods.  How can we ensure that those who produce our food are justly compensated for their labor and are employed under conditions that provide for their housing, health, physical safety, and human rights?
• Tonight we eat foods from near and far.  How can we ensure that these foods were produced in ways that sustain our land, water, and air, and that were kind to the animals that give us meat and milk?
• Tonight we feast.   On other days, how can we choose foods that best nourish our bodies, please our senses, promote our health, and make the world a better place for all?

Let the meal stimulate as much discussion as the rest of the rituals.  Now, at long last, it is time to eat.  Enjoy!

Rejections are always disappointing but in this instance I’m in splendid company.

I’d love to read the other pieces that didn’t get published.  I’ll bet they are worth reading on their own.

In any case, I look forward to seeing the new Haggadah.

Update, March 16:  I received this note yesterday from Jonathan Foer:

Dear Marion,

I saw your piece this morning and was mortified.  I changed e-mail addresses about a year ago—this is the only e-mail I use anymore—and sent you two notes from here explaining the changes in the Haggadah…I don’t know if my e-mail went to your spam folder, or what, but the thought of you not hearing from me about this makes me very sad…To be honest, when I didn’t hear back, I feared you were pissed about the editorial change, and so after my second e-mail, I thought it best not to keep pushing.

In any case, I’m so genuinely sorry about this.  Your piece is wonderful.  (As are the others that were cut.)  But the longer I worked on the book, the better I understood that it actually just wants the editor and writers to get out of its way.  I wish I could have found you with that message a year ago…

Best, and apologies,

Jonathan

Nice, no?  Apology totally accepted.  We are exchanging books.

I’ve just received my copy of the book based on the speech given by Prince Charles at a conference I attended in Washington DC a few months ago.

The tiny, 46-page book (published by Rodale and available online and at your local Indie) reprints the speech along with color photographs and a foreword by Wendell Berry and Afterword by Eric Schlosser.

Grist asked me some questions about it.

What sticks out to you most in this speech/book? What surprised you? What do you most hope the reader comes away with?

I attended the meeting at which Prince Charles spoke and was impressed at the time by his broad overview and understanding of the problems inherent in industrial food and the implications of those problems.  He described himself as a farmer, which was not exactly how I had imagined him.  It’s impressive that someone of his stature cares about these issues and is willing to go on record promoting a healthier food system.

Most Americans are probably not aware that Prince Charles is an organic farmer and long-term advocate of sustainable food. What do you think the ultimate value of hearing such an urgent message about the need to change our food system from him? In other words: Do you think it will have more weight/reach coming from him than say Michael Pollan or Alice Waters?

Americans in general love royalty.  Whether food movement participants care about royalty is a different matter.  I can’t imagine anyone in America having more weight than Michael Pollan and Alice Waters but it’s great to have Michelle Obama and now the Prince on our side.

On a related note, the food movement has been working to free itself of the “elitist” charges for years? How do you think inviting one of the true elite (i.e. he grew up in a working castle!) to speak about these issues impacts the discussion.

I don’t know anyone in the food movement who isn’t actively concerned and working hard to make healthy food available to everyone, rich and poor alike.  I see the food movement as an important player in efforts to reduce income inequities.  People will care whether the Prince has anything to say about this or not depending on their feelings about celebrities in general and royalty in particular.

In the book, Prince Charles says “farmers are better off using intensive methods and where consumers who would prefer to buy sustainably produced food are unable to do so because of the price. There are many producers and consumers who want to do the right thing but, as things stand, “doing the right thing” is penalized.” What, in your opinion, would it take to reverse this predicament?

This is a matter of public policy.  Our agricultural support system rewards big, intensive, and commodities like corn and soybeans.  It barely acknowledges small, sustainable, and “specialty” (translation: fruits and vegetables).  Policy is a matter of political will and can be changed.

Prince Charles also suggests that it’s time to “re-assess what has become a fundamental aspect of our entire economic model…Because we cannot possibly maintain the approach in the long-term if we continue to consume our planet as rapaciously as we are doing. Capitalism depends upon capital, but our capital ultimately depends upon the health of Nature’s capital. Whether we like it or not, the two are in fact inseparable.” What role do you think can food play in “re-assessing this economic model?

Food is such a good way to introduce people to every one of these concepts: capitalism, depletion of natural resources, and climate change, for that matter.  At NYU, we explain what food studies is about by saying that food is a lens through which to view, analyze, and work to improve the most important problems facing societies today.  I can hardly think of a social problem that is not linked to food in some way.  That’s what makes it fun to teach.  It’s also what makes the food movement so important.

I get sent a lot of manuscripts to review for possible endorsements (“blurbs”).  I read them and happily agree to blurb the ones I think worth special attention.  These were recently released:

Jennifer Clapp’s Food (Polity Press, 2012).  “The global food economy may seem remote from daily experience, but it affects every aspect of what we eat and, therefore, our health and welfare.  Jennifer Clapp explains what happens when food is no longer considered a mere source of nourishment or cultural element but is transformed into a fungible commodity.  Clapp unpacks and clarifies the mind-numbing complexities of transnational corporations, international trade, and financial markets.  Best of all, the book provides precisely the information and tools advocates need to redesign the global food economy to promote fair trade, food justice, and local sovereignity.”

Tanya Denckla Cobb’s Reclaiming Our Food: How the Grassroots Food Movement is Changing the Way We Eat (Storey, 2011).  I blurbed this one: “People constantly ask me what kinds of things they can do to get involved in the food movement and where to start.  Now I can just hand them this.  The projects it describes should inspire readers to get busy doing similar projects in their own communities.”

Didi Emmons’ Wild Flavors: One Chef’s Transformative Year Cooking from Eva’s Farm (Chelsea Green, 2011).  My blurb: If you are a city person, like me, with a secret yen to forage for wild greens Wild Flavors is an inspiration.  Read it, and you will want to harvest, share, and eat everything you find…Emmon’s recipes are lovely and easy to follow.

Joel Salatin’s Folks,This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People and a Better World (Center Street, 2011).  I blurbed this one too.  “Joel Salatin says it’s high time we stopped taking our industrialized food system as a given and instead consider local, sustainable food production as the norm.  Good plan.  Whether or not you agree with this contention that we would be better off if the government got out of food regulation, his ideas are compellingly written, fun to read, and well worth pondering.”

I wasn’t asked to do a blurb for this one, but it’s well worth a mention:

Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, illustrated by Maira Kalman (Penguin, 2011).  This is an updated version of Pollan’s best seller of a couple of years ago with some new rules and delightful paintings by the creator of the famous New Yorker newyorkistan cover.  The book is a quick read and the rules are short and to the point: “Compost!”  “Eat slowly!”  “Cook!”