VICTORY!!!! (garden)

So, as of now, this might not be news to everyone, but I wanted to take a brief moment to acknowledge Michelle Obama's breaking ground on the White House Victory Garden, or the White House vegetable garden last Friday, March 20. It was a pretty exciting moment for the Food Movement as we were not only getting a victory garden on the White House lawn, or as close as we're going to get, but it seems we finally have an administration that is in support of reforming our food system. From Tom Vilsack proposing cuts in corn susidies as well breaking ground last month on the the people's garden to the appointment of Kathleen Merrigan, a long supporter of reform of our food system, as the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture, it seems, a food revolution is indeed in the air, as the New York Times apply said last weekend.

In the New York Times article Michael Pollan is quoted as saying that the food movement might not be ready to go "prime time". While I do agree, that it seems that in only a few short months, a movement that was once seen, by both itself and the nation, as an underground constituency is taking the hot seat. I would like to remind Pollan, however, that books such as his very own Omnivore's Dilema have educated Americans about what is wrong with our food system, and with rising energy costs and health problems nationally, I believe our nation is in fact ready to reform. To me, it seems that it not just the food activists that are powering this movement, but rather the government and the people themselves.

Also, the layout of White House vegetable garden is pretty amazing; I was sort of drooling over just the picture.

Alice Waters on 60 Minutes

So, next week my dad is in town, and, as per his suggestion, we're going to Chez Panisse; I couldn't be more excited! I've been once before, about three and half years ago, but after living in California for almost three years (GASP, has it been that long), and know a lot more about Alice's Water's movement as well as having socially met some of the people that work at Chez Panisse, it's going to be a much more special occasion. Over the years, I've also learned a lot about Alice's mission that has made me question some of her dreamy ideals. Is it actually realistic to expect the United States to be fed on natural organic food? While her statement of "Good food is a right, not a privilege" is certainly inspiring, and in some ways true--why doesn't our government subsidize organic permaculture rather than genetically modified corn?--it's a bit unrealistic considering our economic times: People who are loosing their homes, jobs, and life savings aren't really going to care if they are eating cheetos or organic apples, nor, sorry to say, should they. I mean, if my day really sucks, I don't think an organic pink lady apple is going make it all better...maybe some Ben and Jerry's Chubby Hubby might, but I guess, even that is a bit towards to whole food side of things.

Anyways, this dialogue around Alice Waters is, I'm sure, pretty familiar to us all. 60 minutes, however, recently did a piece on her (I think it aired last week) that did show some changing of opinion about Alice, if not a glossing over of some details--that "San Francisco food stall" was in fact Primevera (local SF provider) at the Slow Food nation "Slow Food Served Fast" event, not a "friend of Alice's" who is always in that location...anyways, the excerpt is interesting, so what, and maybe get a little bit jealous of her fireplace right inside her kitchen--did she just poach/fry that egg in a spoon? WANT.


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What Foraging, Permaculture, and Dumpster Diving have in common

So I realize: I've been very, very bad blogger. I'm sorry. But, I have a good reason.
My job has changed (as in my 9-5 one), as many of you know, and I'm now working on a social networking site for professional chefs and other individuals in the cooking industry, which is called Chef's Blade. I'll write more on it later, but the transition has been a twee bit of worky work, and well, it's exciting, but it's made me a bad food blogger.

But, anyways, back to the task at hand: Foraging.

Forage SF has been organizing the Wild Kitchen, which, so far, has been a mini series of foraged meals; the first one they had was Valentine's Day and the last one they had was this past Saturday. Both were amazing amazing and delicious. Foraged food, boiled down to the essentials, is food that has been gathered from naturally-occurring places instead of, say, farms.

Forage SF is a foraged food co-operative, whose goal is to collect foraged foods both from the urban environment – for example, from fruit trees in backyards and sidewalks – but also from the surrounding Bay Area and distribute it to its members. The foraged food movement has grown out of a desire to challenge our dependence on industrial agriculture and to begin using the foods naturally available to us again. For me, what is most interesting about foraged foods is the dialogue it creates with our agricultural system, not to mention the questions it raises concerning what classifies as “foraged”.

During the first dinner I attended, Forage SF gathered the food from a variety of sources. Some of the greens – such as miner’s lettuce, mustard greens, and wild nettles – were growing naturally in the Presidio while other ingredients, like the acorns used in the acorn ice cream, were foraged by local foragers, such as FeralKevin. All of these ingredients were noticeably fresher and more flavorful than anything from the Ferry Terminal farmer’s markets. Sad. But maybe I should just "shop" at the park at the end of my block?

Personally, the most exciting aspect of these ingredients is that they grow naturally and without the interference of human cultivation. In addition, foraged foods grow sustainably in that they are part of the natural ecosystem already in place; foraging and consuming wild foods is thus part of the ecosystem itself as long as the consumption is not greater than the wild food supply.Herein, however, lies the catch: It is not possible to feed the world’s population on foraged food. Enter: Agriculture.

Currently, most of our food comes from monocultures, in which farms produce one type of crop over large areas of farmland. While agriculture’s use of monoculture has enabled us to feed our ballooning population, it has also led us to eat only a few food types. In addition, monoculture has caused massive crop failures, such as the Irish Potato famine, due to a crop becoming susceptible to a specific pathogen during a growing season. Permaculture, in comparison, seeks to design man-made systems after nature ecological systems. Polyculture, for example, grows multiple crops on the same agricultural space, mimicking plant ecosystems. While foraging wild foods will never be able to feed our large population, it does remind us of the importance of respecting the rules of the natural ecosystem.

Back to the first foraged dinner: The main course of last weekend’s meal was elk, wild boar, and venison. What I find interesting about foraged meat, besides being totally tasty, is the dialogue around foraged meat. For some foragers, foraged meat must be found already dead, while for others, foraged meat is wild game that has been killed by the forager in its natural habitat, the sum total of hunted animals never offsetting the natural balance of the ecosystem. Thankfully, the meat at this dinner was not found dead, as I’m not sure my almost-always stomach of steel could handle the extra “gaminess” (read: bacteria) that could be found in the prior type of foraged meat.

I want to take a bit of a tangent at this point to talk about freeganism, a new food movement that has arisen in New York out of a desire to “forage” for free food within the urban environment. Freegans “reclaim waste” left by the “capitalist society” from dumpsters outside supermarkets and restaurants (also known as Dumpster Diving), as well as forage for wild foods like mushrooms in city parks. The movement is centered in New York City but, with the recession, it has become more and more popular in other urban areas. To me, eating food out of a Dumpster is strange. It’s not something I would ever do; I like to know where my food comes from and diving into a Dumpster for almost expired milk and eggs doesn’t exactly fulfill my desire to know if the chicken and cows producing my food are treated well. Still, freeganism has a core value I do understand: We, as a population, are wasteful and we don’t always take advantage of the foods that are readily and freely available to us.

For me, the foraged food movement, coupled with permaculture and freeganism, teaches a lot of lessons. As I said at the beginning of this article, the world’s population could not be fed entirely on foraged foods. This does not mean, however, that the population shouldn’t be fed partially on these foods. As our food system has become increasingly complex, it appears we have forgotten that we can grow edible plants in our backyards, our fire escapes, and flower boxes and that food sources such as wild mushrooms, greens, nettles, and other edible wild plants grow naturally in our parks and are there for the free taking.

Foraging, permaculture, and feeganism produce very different food but all challenge us to consume the foods that are available to us and not to waste the foods we have. In addition, wild foods as well as foods grown in polyculture are certainly tastier than our average food source.

I find it hard to fathom, however, that freegan food has anything on wild boar.

PS. Was this post worth the wait?

Sexy Swinging Shelves Never Looked so Good...

This is a pretty hilarious video by comedians Mike Nichols and Elaine May set on the showroom floor of General Electric refrigerators; and whoever said sex, the 19050s kind, didn't sell?

PETA Makes News Again, This Time for their "Not Fit For TV" Superbowl Ad

With the Superbowl officially upon us, I thought I would share the PETA ad that was rejected by NBC from the Superbowl because of its not-fit-for-TV sexual nature and for its slanderous objectification of females. The ad is pretty gross, but what is even grosser is that PETA is actually saying their ad was "banned" so that the ad will get more free publicity. NBC told PETA that its ad could air with a few editorial changes and if they paid for the spot; clearly, since the ad time is a few million dollars, PETA wanted the free publicity without the editorial changes.


Whoopi Goldberg also does a pretty hilarious impersonation of the ad on the View; haha. See it here:

PETA Brands Fish, Sea Kittens

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has attempted to rebrand fish as sea kittens, because kittens are cute and one would never want to eat a kitten (unless you are George Bush). As we overfish our fish and our fish farms become less and less sanitary places, a movement to eat sustainably fished poisson has begun, PETA leading with its sea kitten campaign. But, hold up PETA, kittens don't like water.

Still, PETA's goal to educate fish consumers about the harm their consumption is doing to our underwater friends is well placed. Mark Bittman, in a recent NY Times article, spoke out against how we consume fish. Bittman, always an avid eater of fish and of all things really--considering his NY Times food column and cooking videos--has noticed, as has every person who reads the labels on their fish, that our fish is becoming increasingly raised on farms. As Americans and the world began to increasingly eat fish (global consumption has doubled since 1973, 90 percent of this growth being from developing countries), we also began to over fish the wild populations and had to find a solution to meat the fish consumption demand, which meant farming fish.

This movement to aquaculture, sometimes called the blue revolution, while it superficially stops us from fishing wild fish has us feeding fish with edible food that could be used to feed people; very often, farmed fish are fed smaller foraged, wild fish. What is particularly frustrating about this is that most fish don't convert a high percentage of the food they consume into edible flesh: it takes three kilograms of forage fish to produce one kilogram of farmed salmon, while it take 20 kilograms of forage fish to produce one kilogram of farmed tuna.

There is, however, some "good" aquaculture. China, which accounts for around 70 percent of the world's aquaulture, focuses on herbivorous fish, who consume water plants; this practice, which is often small scale, is not only sustainable but environmentally sound. Industrial aquaculture, on the other hand, is very different. Most fish farms use fish meal, which is made from wild-caught smaller fish, to feed the larger fish; one third of the wold's wild caught fish is reduced to fish meal in addition to a quarter of the wild-caught fish being thrown back, dead, as "bycatch." Considering the inefficiencies of farm raised fish in converting feed mass into human-consumable food mass, using wild-caught fish to raise farmed fish is terribly inefficient. In addition, farm raised fish pollute waters via their fecal waste and degrade the land near to wear they are farmed.


Still, the point is not to stop eating fish all together--sorry PETA, I like it too much and I get grumpy without it. We need to change the fish we eat and the ways we raise fish. Long term, through preservation practices, we can help wild fish populations grow to their original sizes. This means new laws reducing bycatch and regulations on how much fishermen can catch in a certain fishery, a limit which would be a scientifically determined percentage of the harvest. For consumers, this means consuming smaller, more bottom-of-the-food-chain fish, like sardines and anchovies, more frequently, while only consuming more top of the food chain fish, like wild-caught cod and salmon, once a month. Thinking of this another way, we'll be eating tastier wild caught fish while also preserving our ability to eat this fish.

Sorry PETA, your efforts to convince me to stop eating fish by dubbing them sea-kittens has failed, but your heart was in the right place. I'll make sure to only eat wild-caught fish and up my consumption of sardines and anchovies.

Alice Waters didn't vote for 42 years!

Following up on my post Art. Food. Give. there was an article in the Huffington Post this past week reporting that Alice Waters didn't vote for 42 years! In 1966, when Waters' journalist-activist friend Bob Scheer lost his anti-Vietnam primary challenge to the Democratic establishment's congressman, Waters vowed to not vote again, until this past year when Clinton and Obama came forward as two possible presidential candidates. Waters raised big money for Obama as well as some funds for Clinton and is now hosting a fundraising dinner tonight in honor of Obama's inauguration that will raise money for two D.C. soup kitchens. So, after 42 years of politic abstinence, Waters finally cast a ballot this past November for our President-elect Barack Obama and become a responsible citizen once again. While I do obviously agree with her presidential choice and her food ethos and applaud her for organizing this inauguration event, I think abstaining from voting is a pretty weak way to influence politics. So let's hope that this time, since Waters' choice candidate did get elected, she will continue to vote like I believe a responsible citizen should.