Kurt Michael Friese

We shake our heads in astonishment at the level of the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. We want to help, but don’t know how. Seems no one has the answers, least of all BP, who continues to whitewash the beaches in advance of the arrival of Anderson Cooper or President Obama.

Ironically the New Orleans Oyster Festival, postponed from its original 2006 premier by Katrina and Rita, had its inaugural – and likely final – run last week. No one has anything optimistic to tell us about the future of the Louisiana oyster beds. More bad news comes when you talk to shrimpers, longline fishers, trawlers, and on and on.

Soon-to-be-outgoing BP CEO Tony Hayward is saying that it will “pay all legitimate claims” made by the people whose lives their carelessness ruined, but looking at the Exxon Valdez spill for precedent, Exxon tied them up in court for 2 decades and eventually paid a mere 10% of the total claims. So no, I don’t think anyone believes Mr. Hayward.

And so it comes down, as it always does, to the strength, goodwill and generosity of the American people to try and help the victims of still more corporate carelessness.

The first of what I am sure will be many opportunities arrives this week. Jimmy Galle, owner of bay Area seafood supplier Gulfish, has organized Dineout for the Gulf Coast, a 3-day benefit at many of the best restaurants around the country. The short-term goal of The Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund, administered by the Greater New Orleans Foundation, is to make emergency grants to nonprofit organizations helping the victims of the oil spill. The long-term goal of the fund is to address the long-term economic, environmental, cultural effects of the disaster, and strengthen coastal communities against future environmental catastrophes by investing in solutions.

Maybe you can’t afford to send thousands of dollars. Maybe you can’t afford the time it would take to go down there and lend a hand. Most of us want to help in those ways, and most of us simply cannot. This is a small way you can help – go to dinner, eat some good food for a good cause.

Let the profiteers and politicians haggle over the blame game. We’ll keep taking small steps toward recovery. Only a fool fights in a burning house – it’s time to help the people.

via Kurt Friese: Dine Out for the Gulf Coast.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Gulf Coast, Huffington Post, Oil Spill, Slow Food, capitalism, food, food cost, food history, food politics, food security, wild food // 2 Comments »

No type of cooking inspires as much passion, competition, obsession, and plain old American hometown pride as barbecue. There are local, regional, and national ‘cue contests that bring together hundreds of pathologically devoted cooks and thousands of BBQ-scarfing chowhounds to debate about which wood to use and to lie about their recipes.

Barbecue may, in fact, be the original way to cook. Historians believe man’s ancestors first ate cooked meat by scavenging in the aftermath of forest fires. More recently, Spanish conquistadors “exploring” tropical islands were fascinated by the aromas coming from the small green-wood grills New World natives called barbacoa. From these origins came the huge variety of barbecue that exists around the world. No other country, though, pursues the ‘cue with such passionate abandon as the United States.

via The Secret of True ‘Cue | Nourish Network.

Tags: Articles, BBQ, Nourish Network, Slow Food, conviviality, cooking // Add Comment »

Last week an organization of retired military officers called Mission: Readiness published their findings that more than one quarter of Americans age 17-24 are “Too fat to fight.” They pinned the blame on our school food system.

Now being of the left-of-center-pacifist persuasion myself, my initial reaction was “Oh good, a little less cannon fodder.” But looking at this study with an eye toward history, it gives me great hope.

Near the beginning of the 20th century, it was military preparedness that necessitated the federal government’s implementation of physical education requirements in the nation’s schools. One can disagree with the motive there while acknowledging that the end result – active, healthier children – was a good thing. So, hopefully, this study might help push us toward a better school food system as well.

Today one in three children born after 2000 will develop early-onset diabetes before they are old enough to enlist. Among minorities that ratio rises to one in two. Even setting aside military readiness, and regardless of what health reform will or will not do, no society can support a population where one third to one half of it is diabetic.

What Mission: Readiness has demonstrated is that the need for improving our children’s diets spans all ideologies. Libertarians and some conservatives may find my ideas about real food and gathering around the table too touchy-feely-hippie for them, but it’s easy for them to understand implications to our national defense if Johnny can’t bounce out of his bunk at reveille and touch – or even see – his toes.

When he signed the School Lunch Act in 1946, which was in part explicitly “a measure of national security,” President Truman said, “In the long view, no nation is healthier than its children….” It was a simple weak-link argument that no one can deny, hawk or dove.

Since then though our nation’s school lunch program has become little more than a dumping ground for our tax-subsidized, corporate-owned, chemically-processed, fat-and-HFCS-laden surplus food-like substances.

The Child Nutrition Reauthorization now in limbo in the Senate, which is what the retired generals from Mission: Readiness were on Capitol Hill last week to address, does indeed earmark $4.5B for improving school lunches over the next 10 years. Good as that may be, it’s less than a tenth of what is needed. Besides altering the nutritional guidelines to give the district foodservice directors the freedom to use more local, fresh meats and produce, we need to spend – at a minimum – at least a dollar more per meal. That works out to about $5.4B annually.

That’s one-half-of-one-percent the US Military’s projected 2010 budget. So, seeing that we spend as much as the next 14 nations combined on our military, I suggest that we spend only as much as the next 13, fully fund our school nutrition programs, and wait to see if number 14 (Australia) tries to invade us.

via Civil Eats » Blog Archive » Why Johnny Can’t March: School Food Threatens National Security.

Tags: CivilEats, Op-Ed, School Lunch, Slow Food, food politics, time for lunch // Add Comment »

My First Hate Mail - I'm so proud

Boy, you really know you’ve arrived in the writing biz when you start drawing the whacko element out of the woodwork.  I got my first hate mail! So exciting. This unstable fellow sent this note from the QC, according to the postmark, with no name or return address. How did he know I was French-Dutch? (Especially when I’m not?). It’s all in response to this OpEd I wrote in our local paper a couple weeks back.

Just for fun, I thought I might address the guy as if I took him seriously, so…

Dear Sir,

I am in receipt of your letter postmarked 19 April, and while I agree that cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, sweet corn, watermelons, popcorn, corn and soy beans are all food, the sad fact is that most of those on your list are no longer grown in Iowa.  Cattle and hogs are, but almost entirely in CAFOs (though some good farmers are going back to grass and pasture here and there).  Corn and soy of course are, but that’s not food, that’s feed and fuel.  The rest on your list aren’t grown in Iowa outside gardens and hobby farms.

As to the rest of your points, I am not “French-Dutch,” but rather was born in Chicago to American parent with Scots and Austrian ancestry, and raised in the Heartland, and have lived in Iowa for 23 years.  Not sure what made you think this was not the case.

And I did not tell you how to farm, I stated what I believe would produce better food and a healthier community, as well as turn our farmers back into farmers (rather than sharecroppers, as Big Ag has forced them to become).

You failed to list any of your perceived “Misstatements  in [my] opinion,” and so I am unable to address any of those.

I have not bought a farm because I do not have the money, and because the farming world today is the only business where you buy at retail, sell at wholesale and pay freight both ways.  Just one of a thousand reasons why the current system is wholly unsustainable, and why I wrote the opinion I did.

And yes, I am so damn smart.

Kind Regards,

Mr. Friese

Tags: Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowa, Op-Ed, capitalism, food politics, food security // 2 Comments »

Here in Iowa we have an event called RAGBRAI – The Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa – the oldest, largest and longest non-competitive ride in the world. Simply put, roughly 15,000 of us dip our back tires in the Missouri River one July Sunday Morning, then pedaling past the cities, fields and farms we dip our front tires in the Mississippi River 6 days later, having ridden an average of 465 miles.

When the ride started 38 years ago, riders rolled past countless fields dotted with little lean-to style huts – shelters for the hogs that have been raised here since the European settlers came in the early 1800s. Since then, though, the huts have all but disappeared, replaced by long, narrow steel buildings with pairs of 6-foot exhaust fans on each end and large lagoons outside.

Now these are not lagoons like we used to see on Gilligan’s Island. These would be more properly referred to as cesspools. They are 1-acre and larger lakes of effluent from the Confined Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, that have nearly taken over the entire livestock world. The methane and ammonia fumes are gagging at the best of times. When you’re pumping 70 miles on two wheels and need the extra oxygen, they can be asphyxiating.

This of course is a relatively minuscule side-effect of these industrial methods, and in his new book Animal Factory, author and investigative journalist David Kirby details the devastating impact these methods have had, and evidently will continue to have unless some drastic changes are made. Rightfully ranking with books like Upton Sinclair’s muckraking exposé of turn of the 19th century meatpackers, The Jungle, and Eric Schlosser’s more recent look at our Fast Food Nation, Animal Factory reads like a suspense thriller.

via Civil Eats » Blog Archive » Biography of a Pork Chop: David Kirby’s Animal Factory, and the Not-So-Hidden Costs of Cheap Food.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, CAFOs, CivilEats, Iowa, RAGBRAI, food, food politics // Add Comment »

Those of you with a preference for beers measured in “drinkability,” an industry term that means (and I am not making this up) “like water,” need read no further. What follows is news for those of us who favor the big, ponderous, powerful and complex beers made by artisans with a passion for the craft.

A few weeks ago, you may remember that I reported here on the passage of legislation that changed the liquor laws in Iowa. Since that momentous day, the biggest change since the shuttering of the state stores in the mid-'80s, so-called high-alcohol beer could be imported directly by distributors rather than via the state. Previous to this action, because of an arcane twist in the law, beer with 12 percent alcohol had to be purchased through the state while wine with the same (or even higher) percentage could be obtained without disturbing the folks in Ankeny.

via Real beer makes its way here | press-citizen.com | Iowa City Press Citizen.

Tags: Iowa, Table Wine, beer, food politics // Add Comment »

An unusual study looks at the food portions in artistic depictions of the Last Supper throughout history. The apostles have eaten better and better over the years, scholars say.

Christian faith holds several acts of “super-sizing” to be miracles accomplished by Jesus Christ — a handful of fish and loaves of bread expanded to feed thousands; a wedding feast running low on wine suddenly awash in the stuff. Now a new study of portion expansion puts Jesus once more at the center.In a bid to uncover the roots of super-sized American fare, a pair of sibling scholars has turned to an unusual source: 52 artists’ renderings of the New Testament’s Last Supper.

Their findings, published online Tuesday in the International Journal of Obesity, indicate that serving sizes have been marching heavenward for 1,000 years.

via Last Supper helpings have grown – latimes.com.

Tags: Articles, food history // Add Comment »

From real Food nutritionist Marion Nestle:

Does fighting obesity also mean fighting corporations? So it seems

Corporations go to a lot of trouble to neutralize potential critics. Recent examples: two co-optations (McDonald’s alliance with Weight Watchers and PepsiCo’s with the Yale School of Medicine) and one aggression (Disney’s forced expulsion of the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood from Harvard).

Co-optation is the winning over or neutralization of opponents by bringing them into the fold. It works well.

via Food Politics » Does fighting obesity also mean fighting corporations? So it seems.

Tags: Slow Food, food politics // Add Comment »

Among the foods that gardeners and gastronomes fawn over, yet others rarely even know, stands sorrel.  An early spring green with brash lemony flavor that comes from an abundance of oxalic acid, it is a powerful addition to soups and sauces, and is tasty in salads when picked young.

Sorrel is classified in the genus Rumex, and its origins lie somewhere in what is now Russia, where the Ural Mountains divide Asia from Europe.  It was well known in Roman times, though not cultivated since it was plentiful in the wild.  Culinary historians find it falling in and out of favor throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, and it seemed to do a curious dance over the English Channel as at times the French preferred it, then the English more so, then back again.  It was popular in the court of King Henry VIII, then all but eradicated from the British Isles by the late 1800s when it had danced over to the US.

Still by the middle of the 20^th century and even today most of the time, if you want sorrel in America you have to grow it yourself.  Thankfully, very few things are easier to cultivate.  It loves this bizarre spring we’ve had, with cool sunny day alternating with lots of rain.  And it’s a perennial, so once you have it, it’s there to stay.  It has no pest problems since that oxalic acid is a great natural defense, and the yield is quite high because you can keep clipping it all spring, and harvest again in the fall.  A single sorrel planting can yield well for eight or ten years before needing to be replanted.

Plant sorrel seed in early spring in rich composted soil about a half-inch deep and six inches apart.  When the plants are seven or eight inches high, thin them to 12 inches apart, and make sure they stay well watered.  As they grow, cut the leaves for use and wait for what seems like just a minute before the new leaves jump back up.  Later in the summer, you’ll see the buds of rust-red flowers begin to appear.  Pinch these off unless you want more seed, else you’ll see little yield in the fall.

After three or four years, dig up the plants and split them at the root.  Give a few to your friends and plant the rest in another sunny, fertile part of the garden for a few more years.  It’s that easy.

In the kitchen, sorrel matches its ease of cultivation with simple versatility.  The young leaves add a potent zing to baby green salads.  As they get older, they leaves are popular in fish dishes, classically shad or pike.  Anything that likes lemon will like sorrel, so veal, chicken and pork dishes can benefit from it as well.  Perhaps the most popular use is this eye-opening chilled sorrel soup, perfect for your first lunch on the patio:

Chilled Sorrel Soup

2 cups (packed) sorrel leaves, stemmed
2 shallots, peeled
2 cups cold chicken stock (vegetable may be substituted)
8 ounces crème fraîche (sour cream can substitute)
1/3 cup heavy cream
Salt and white pepper to taste
Fresh tarragon or mint (for garnish)

In a blender or food processor, chop the sorrel and shallot to a fine puree.  Gradually add the stock and continue to blend, stopping occasionally to scrape down the sides of the bowl, until all the stock is mixed in.

Add the crème fraîche and the cream and pulse lightly until just incorporated.  Season to taste with salt and pepper, then chill one hour to overnight.  Serve very cold garnished with tarragon or mint.  If desired you could also add more crème fraîche, some croutons, even an ice cube.

Tags: Articles, cooking, food, gardening, recipe // Add Comment »

“Characteristics: Straw yellow in color with green tints, broad aromatic impact with fruity nuances. Full and dry, underpinned by a fresh acidity.”

The wine media will bombard you with empty statements like this one if you let it. While each of these points may be at least subjectively accurate, taken as a whole I've always found these “characteristics” to lack character. They always seem to me as if they were written by a chemist in a lab describing some new compound rather than by an ordinary person sitting on a deck or by the fire sipping a glass of wine.

Nonetheless, these particular attributes are the ones used by the winemaker (or at least its marketing arm anyway) to describe the 2008 Grillo-Catarratto (roughly $13 a bottle; $141 a case) from Sicilian winemaker Ajello. And they are not, strictly speaking, incorrect. Nor are they all that inviting though, and this wine deserves higher praise.

read the rest at  Iowa City Press Citizen.

Tags: Table Wine, wine // Add Comment »