Currently browsing posts about: Books

Larissa Zimberoff.  Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat.  Abrams Press, 2021.

This is Zimberoff’s account of her personal conversations, meetings, visits, and observations of the people and venture capitalists behind today’s versions of techno-foods constructed from algae, fungi, peas, plants, and cell cultures.

She comes at these foods from a skeptical standpoint, but gamely tastes everything, judging some of the products delicious despite concerns about their greater meaning for health, the environment, and humanity.

Almost everyone she meets in this business is mission-driven, convinced that their products will help feed the world’s growing population at less cost to health and the environment.

But, as she puts it, “The tension of my health being tied to capitalistic companies that want to make a profit is growing” (p. 3).  Mine too, even after reading her book.

One concern is lack of transparency.  Nobody she met wanted to tell her what’s in the products they are producing or give details on how they are made.

Zimberoff likes some of what she sees, but not all.  She finishes up her discussion with a call for continued skepticism: “Like me, think before you eat.  Don’t believe the hype” (p. 190).

She ends the book in an odd way.  She asked a bunch of people to speculate on what we will all be eating in 20 years.  I was one of the people who commented, and I wish I had been given the opportunity to read my section before it got printed: some of it seems incoherent and I would have appreciated the chance to edit it.  [I just checked, which I should have done earlier.  I was given that opportunity and OK’d it.  My bad.  Culpa mea].

More careful editing would have helped throughout.  For example, I was startled to read this statement about the effects of climate change on algae:

This increase in CO2 leads to a rise in pH levels called ocean acidification, which can harm many creatures in the water.  Algae, on the other hand, may benefit from increased levels, and there are studies looking into whether growing seaweed can slow this rise in pH levels  (p. 10).

Oops.  Rising CO2 levels reduce pH.   Lower pH levels are acidic.  Algae do better at neutral or lower pH levels.

Jessica Fanzo.  Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021.

This is a small book, 4′ x 6″ format, 214 pages.  I did a blurb for its back cover:

Jessica Fanzo argues that dinner not only can fix the planet, but must.  The cutting edge of nutrition policy today is to promote diets that simultaneously achieve three goals–reduce hunger, prevent chronic disease, and protect the environment—and this means those lower in meat and higher in vegetables and other plant foods.  Read Fanzo’s book.  It is beautifully written, authoritative, and utterly convincing—essential reading for anyone interested in food system approaches to world food problems.

A couple of excerpts:

The foods we eat are much more than just a source of sustenance.  They have direct and substantial impacts on the nutrition and health of individuals and populations, the planet’s natural resources and climate change, and structural equity and social justice challenges of societies.  Food connects us to the world.  It also dictates (to a degree most people don’t realize) the kind of world we live in today and the kind of world we will occupy in the future (p. 3)

Do animal-source foods support or harm sustainability and health outcomes?  In reality, they do a bit of both.  Climate change is not the only measure of sustainability.  Sustainability also describes human and animal health outcomes and well-being, equity, and security.  Often, discussion about the sustainability of animal-source foods neglect to include the effect that low consumption of animal-source foods has on the lives and futures of nutritionally vulnerable populations, women, and children.  Moving forward, we’ll have to combine more sustainable livestock production practices with increased access and moderate consumption (p. 108).

Michael Pollan.  This is Your Mind on Plants.  Penguin, 2021.

This book is a great read: informative, smart, hilariously funny on occasion, and wonderfully written, as is only to be expected from anything Pollan produces.

The book is about three plants that are sources of mind-altering drugs, poppies (opium), tea and coffee (caffeine), and peyote cactus (mescaline).

The tea and coffee bring it into the realm of food politics, and I’ll stick to them for the moment (but the poppies chapter is particularly riveting, tough, and timely).

An excerpt beginning on page 99:

Most of the various plant chemicals, or alkaloids, that people have used to alter the textures of consciousness are chemicals originally selected for defense. Yet even in the insect world, the dose makes the poison, and if the dose is low enough, a chemical made for defense can serve a very different purpose: to attract, and secure the enduring loyalty of pollinators.  This appears to be what’s going on between bees and certain caffeine-producing plants, in a symbiotic relationship that may have something important to tell us about our own relationship to caffeine…[in an experiment] even at concentrations too small for the bees to taste, the presence of caffeine helped them to quickly learn and recall a particular scent and to favor it…Actually we don’t know whethe the bees feel anything when they ingest caffeine, only that the chemical helps them to remembe–which, as we will see, caffeine appears to do for us, too.

Another from page 145:

Would people have ever discovered coffee or tea, let alone continued to drink them for hundreds of years, if not for caffeine?  There are countless other seeds and leaves that can be steeped in hot water to make a beverage, and some number of them surely taste better than coffee or tea, but where are the shrines to those plants in our homes and offices and shops?  Let’s face it: The rococo structures of meaning we’ve erected atop those psychoactive molecules are just culture’s way of dressing up our desire to change consciousness in the finery of metaphor and association.  Indeed, what really commends these beverages to us is their association not with wood smoke or stone fruit or biscuits, but with the experience of well-being—of euphoria—they reliably give us.

Peter Hoffman.  What’s Good: A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients.  Abrams Press, 2021.

Peter Hoffman, the chef-owned of the much loved and late-lamented Savoy restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo has written an account of its rise and fall along with a close examination of what went into it, foods, ingredients, and emotions.

As I read it, this is two separate books joined together.  One is his version of how he got interested in food, learned about it, trained to cook, and started, ran, and eventually closed the Savoy.  This is a compelling narrative, despite its sad ending.  Full disclosure: I loved the Savoy.  The food was always interesting, the ambiance lovely, and the service warm and welcoming.

The second book is an almost academic discussion of specific ingredients and how Peter used them in his cooking.  These are fascinating and I learned something about every one of the ingredient chapters.  These are followed by a recipe using that ingredient.

The book’s overall structure joins them together in sequence: memoir chapter, ingredient chapter, recipe.  Repeat.

In the midst of writing a memoir myself, I wanted more of the memoir and a faster moving narrative, but also greatly enjoyed the ingredient chapters.  These cover such things as maple syrup, garlic scapes, rosemary, and ice.  I particularly loved the chapter on garlic scapes because there is a large patch of wild garlic growing near my house upstate in Ithaca.  Now I know what to do with the scapes when they appear.

Peter writes well.  Here are a couple of excerpts.

From a memoir chapter: My Spring Awakening:

With Bocuse as a beacon to steer towards, I devised a plan of escape from the tyrannical narrowness of high school.  I’d test the culinary waters by taking a year off—now called a gap year—and get a cooking job.  My parents were supportive, some of their friends mortified.  I remember fighting back tears of fury at my dad’s best friend;s insistence that I’d never go to college if they let me take a uear off, a slippery slope into hell, implying that my parents’ permissiveness was a grave mistake.  I persisted with my plan, doubling up on core requirements, taking English literature in summer school, and graduated a year early.  I moved to Vermont, worked construction in a hotel renovation, and parlayed that into my first kitchen job in the hotel’s kitchen as a dishwasher and prep guy, at a place called Topnotch, where the food was anything but.   (p. 49)

From the ingredient chapter, Garlic:

Keith’s garlic was different.  At the cutting board I immediately noticed that there was less surrounding leaf paper; the cloveswere generally all the same size, a single row circulating around a hard inner stem, the hard-neck; and easy to peel, maybe even pleasurably so, especially after countless instances of having my fingers gummed up with garlic oil and lots of thin clove paper confetti.  Roasted, the flesh was creamy and sweet; rubbed raw on some toasted bread for bruscchetta it was delightfully pungent, not at all acrid; and tossed into a mushroom sauté with chopped parsley and oive oil, Italy’s culinary holy trinity, it rounded out the perfect balance of earthy, herbal, and fruity flavors.  This wan’t just well-seasoned food, this food sang.  (p. 137)

I enjoyed reading this, but it made me hungry.

Note to email recipients: I am still having technical difficulties with getting posts mailed out on a regular schedule.  I meant this one to go out today, not yesterday.  Apologies for the duplication.

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Alice Waters with Bob Carrau and Cristina Mueller.  We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto.  Penguin Press, 2021.

This book is about the harm caused by fast food culture, and why it needs to be replaced by slow food.

I particularly like the way this book is organized.

The first section has chapters about the characteristics of fast food culture that get us into trouble: convenience, uniformity, ubiquity, more is better, speed, cheapness.

Chapters in the second section explain why the values of slow food culture are so much better for us and the planet: beauty, biodiversity, seasonality, stewardship, simplicity, interconnectedness.

If you have been paying attention to food issues, none of this will be new.  But it is well said, and from the heart.

It is also from Alice Waters’ experience running Chez Panisse for—can this be possible?—fifty years.  Its anniversary is this year, and well worth celebrating.

The academic in me wishes this book had included references and an index, particularly because there were a few things I wanted to follow up on.

Otherwise, it’s a well written delight and people new to these issues will finding it eye-opening and convincing.

A sample from the chapter on convenience:

The fast food industry certainly wants us to believe that all the laborious work of cooking is drudgery—indeed, that cooking is just that, work—so they can sell us their labor-saving products.  And they’ve been very successful at convincing us.  We have become more and more impatient when we choose what to cook—we want it as easy and simple as it can possibly be, if we’re going to try to cook something at all.  To relieve of of the “work” of cooking, enterprising companies have produced countless gadgets and packaged foods over the past sixty years to streamline the process of cooking at home.  When I was growing up in New Jersey in the 1950s, we didn’t have too many labor-saving “convenience” appliances, except the electric blender we used for making banana milkshakes.  But there were definitely convenience foods in our house: Jell-O, Junket, frozen fish sticks.  And my mother absolutely used them for convenience’s sake; she had six people to cook for, and she was pretty overwhelmed with the washing the drying, the ironing, the housecleaning.  Crucially, she had never learned how to cook when she was young. (p. 19-20)

From the simplicity chapter:

I use the phrase “less is more” all the time.  I don’t like to be served more than I can eat, and when I’m at Chez Panisse I often ask for half-size portions because I don’t want to waste food.  At the Edible Schoolyard, we do serve dishes family style, but our objective is to teach students a lesson in portion size and consideration for others.  That one bowl has to be enough to feed the whole table.  When students serve themselves from the bowl, it is also a lesson in conservation; they are learning that resources are not unlimited, and it helps them appreciate what is on their plate.  I’m sure they take that lesson home with them. (p. 168)

Jocelyn C. Zuckerman.  Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World.  The New Press, 2021.  

Here’s my blurb for this book:

I’ve always thought of palm oil as just another best-to-avoid food ingredient for its high level of saturated fat, but can never look at it the same way again after reading Planet Fat.  I now understand that oil palms represent the darkest underside of late-stage capitalism, responsible as they are for land grabs, forest devastation, peat burning, greenhouse gases, loss of biodiversity and orangutan habitat, junk food, chronic illness, and food insecurity, all accompanied by unthinkable levels of corruption, criminality, and violence: accidents, thievery, arson, and murders.  This is an ugly story, compellingly told.  It needs to be read. 

And here are a few short excerpts.

The first:

In 2019, the World Health Organization compared the tactics used by the palm oil industry to tose employed by the tobacco and alcohol lobbies, no slouches when it comes to playing dirty…Across the globe, those who’ve dared to speak out against the industry, whether laborers, peasant farmers environmental activists, or investigative journalists, often ave been met with violence [p. 17]

With reference to a “technically safeguarded” national park in Indonesia:

The past decade and a half have seen roughly five thousand acres of its park converted to oil-palm plantations.  Today, only 4.5 million acres of the ecosystem remain forested.  Here as elsewhere in Indonesia, palm oil companies have secured permits through backroom deals with local officials or have simply pad others to clear the land illegally [p. 116]

One reason for concern:

While it’s true that many of the world’s people could use more calories…the global glut of palm oil is in fact diminishing food security, in a fairly drastic way.  It’s common to blame sugar for the world’s weight problems, but in the last half-century, refined vegetable oils have added far more calories to the global diet than has any other food group.  Between 1961 and 2009, for example, the availability of palm oil worldwide went up a staggering 206 percent [p. 162]

Danielle Dreilinger.  The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live.  WW Norton, 2021.  

I was particularly interested in this book because I came to NYU in 1988 (with a doctorate in molecular biology, no less) to chair a department of home economics and nutrition.  I was hired explicitly to get rid of home economics programs (25 of them, none with more than a few lingering students) to bring the department—now Nutrition and Food Studies–into the 20^th  (if not the 21^st) century.  This book was a revelation about what I had gotten myself into, and I wish I had known this history at the time.

I did a blurb for the book’s back cover:

This book tells the unexpected story of how home economics began as an intellectual haven for smart women–Black as well as white–who were otherwise blocked from studying science, but ended up as a field less rigorous and more conforming.  Black women were at the forefront of this history, and their role is a revelation.  Dreilinger makes a convincing case for bringing back the skills that home economics alone could teach.

There is plenty more to be said about this history, and here’s where to find it.

Home economics started out as a hard-science field that women were permitted to enter.  The earliest home economists were serious scientists with professorial jobs at places like MIT, Berkeley, Cornell, and, in the case of Black academics, Howard.

Two excerpts:

Home economics has been a back door for women to enter science; part of a surprisingly large government-backed movement; a guilt trip for women left cold by the household arts; a trap or a springboard for women of color; a sometimes ironic, sometimes nostalgic preoccupation of third-wave feminists; a conservative calling card; an aesthetic obsession for the Instagram set; a feminist battlefield; and the locus for countless anxieties about women’s lives. A revival seems bewilderingly overdue (p. x).

Once home economics had been a way for girls to study in women-created labs that were as serious as the men’s…home ec became a way to bar women from science.  Advisors pressured women away from majors such as chemistry into home economics…With pressure coming in from all sides—students who felt nervous about taking science, alumni who said their undergraduate chemistry classes didn’t help on the job, and college presidents who sought someplace to put less-serious students—home economics administrators cut hard-science prerequisites from the requirements for a home economics bachelor’s degree (p. 191).

The New Yorker reviewed this book in April.  I particularly liked the review because it refers to Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad, an earlier and much loved history of the field.

Gina A. Warren.  Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement.  University of Washington Press, 2021. 

I did a blurb for this book:

Hatched is Gina Warren’s exceptionally thoughtful account of raising backyard chickens from chicks to dinner, with dumpster diving in between–actions that reflect her deep respect and care for the animals we eat and her profound commitment to living ethically.

Here’s what she says it’s about:

Backyard chickens are still on the rise, partially because the style of living they exemplify rebels against modern metropolis ails; in the wake of stresses about increasing urbanization, environmental collapse, GMO foods, and kids growing up with their fingers on screens instead of in the dirt, chickens are an all-inclusive reprieve.  Chicken people tend to have concerns about the environment, industrial food, and the economy of commercial agriculture.  By owning chickens, people perform a feat of micro-resistance against society’s dominant forms of consumption and production and create a counter-narrative to the story that food, something we all require on a daily basis, can only be produced by certain industries in sequestered places.

This book is a welcome addition to others about the backyard chicken movement, a subset of the greater food movement.

It extols the pleasures of getting to know the hens that produce daily eggs, and those of hens scratching around in the grass as compared to those raised in enclosed barns housing 50,000.

Backyard chickens are a privilege.