Kurt Michael Friese

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience.

Mr. Hurst was among the earliest vocal detractors of Mr. Pollan’s work, as well as that of anyone who might find flaw in agroindustrial model.  His essay last summer, titled The Omnivore’s Delusion, did an excellent job of exploiting Pollan’s success to rally the big corporate agriculture interests against the perceived threat of critics both in the media and in the field.  It’s natural: he felt attacked and he responded, and has now done so again.  Unfortunately Mr. Hurst’s vitriol, then as now, only serves to fan the flames of a fire that needn’t be burning.  Individuals on neither side of the debate are inherently evil, in fact both want the same thing: healthy food for all.  Since our ideas for how to accomplish this differ, we are immediately cast into the right and left corners and told to come out fighting when the bell rings.

Read the whole essay @ Civil Eats

Tags: Articles, Barack Obama, Blake Hurst, CivilEats, Iowa, Michael Pollan, President Obama, Slow Food, capitalism, food, food cost, food politics // Add Comment »

One of the advantages we enjoy here in Iowa is that we get to see our presidential candidates and their families up close and personal during our caucus process.  While I had seen then-Senator Obama give that stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, it was really a speech here in Iowa by his wife Michelle that made me a fan of his.  I figured if a lady this smart and classy married him he must be worth a look.

Many of us foodie-activist types were excited when Barack Obama was elected because we believed that maybe finally something could be accomplished for our agenda of “Good, Clean, and Fair” food for everyone.  Sure enough, that first spring there was the First Lady out there planting an organic garden on the White House grounds.  Say what you will about their former opponents, no one could imagine Cindy McCain doing anything even remotely similar.

So now a year has gone by and Mrs. Obama is launching a childhood obesity initiative the way such things get launched these days, on NBC’s Today Show.  It’s tradition for FLOTUS to have a cause such as this, and these causes are almost always worthwhile: literacy, homelessness, “Just Say ‘NO!’” etc.

Ms. Obama’s initiative is no exception.  The statistics are alarming – 1 in 3 American children born in 2000 or after will develop diabetes before they are old enough to vote.  Among minorities that ratio rises to 1 in 2.  There is no health system that can hope to cope with the implications of that no matter what her husband and Congress manage to accomplish.

Whole post an video clips @ Civileats.org

Tags: Articles, Barack Obama, CivilEats, Health Reform, Michelle Obama, President Obama, School Lunch, Slow Food, food politics, hunger, school gardens, time for lunch // Add Comment »

The knife: No other tool is so elemental, so representative of the cook than the well-honed blade. They are, in essence, the extension of a cook’s hand and in every culture a kitchen is simply not a kitchen without them. Yet few tools in the contemporary American home are treated so casually. If you’re one of those home cooks who has a handful of knives, purchased God-knows when, stored in a drawer with the can opener and that gadget they got for Christmas, it’s time to change your ways.

Let’s get over the first hurdle right off the bat: yes, good knives are expensive. I suggest, though, that unless you happen to be a carpenter there will be no tool in your life that you will use more often, and that your knives should command a certain respect, even reverence. A well-made knife, well-cared for, is something you will leave to your grandchildren and they to theirs – a once in many lifetimes purchase.

Read the whole story @ Nourish Network.

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In the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine, Caitlin Flanagan has written a surprisingly harsh critique of the popular and growing movement to include gardens in our public schools. In a nutshell, she states that pursuing this activity over and above the three R’s will turn our children into illiterate sharecroppers. Right from the start, though, she gets it wrong.

She has the reader picture the son of undocumented migrant workers entering his first day at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, home of the well-known Edible Schoolyard project, “where he stoops under the hot sun and begins to pick lettuce.”  Her callous disrespect for labor only begins there, but the real problem with her argument lies in her stubborn refusal to accept that a good idea may have sprouted from an ideology other than her own.  She goes so far as to describe it as:

…A vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt)

Ms. Flanagan has chosen to ignore the core purposes of these gardens, only one of which happens to be cultivating a respect for hard work, and only one other of which is a healthy respect for real food.  While she notes that the work of the garden has migrated into each of the classrooms, she ignores the obvious point that this demonstrates: There is nothing taught in schools that cannot be learned in a garden.  Math and science to be sure, but also history, civics, logic, art, literature, music, and the birds and the bees both literally and figuratively.  Beyond that though, in a garden a student learns responsibility, teamwork, citizenship, sustainability, and respect for nature, for others, and for themselves.

Read the whole post @ CivilEats.com

Tags: Articles, CivilEats, Health Reform, food politics, food security, hunger, school gardens // 1 Comment »

Just west of Healdsburg, CA, about 80 miles north of the Golden Gate in Sonoma County and protected from the Pacific winds by a rugged range of mountains, sits the winegrowing region known as the Dry Creek Valley. The valley runs two miles wide for about 16 miles, with the Alexander Valley just east on the other side of the 101, and the Russian River Valley to the south. It has been a preferred viticultural area since the end of the Civil War, and today is one of California's top producers of Zinfandel, Sauvignon Blanc and Merlot.

The first commercial vineyard in the DCV was called Bloch & Colson (after its founders) and opened in 1872. Six years later, in the Healdsburg Enterprise dated Oct. 17, 1872, a reviewer stated: “The wine produced by Bloch and Colson has finer flavor than from almost any other winery in the country. It has none of the bitter taste found in many wines.” Apparently the flowery, adjective-laden prose of today's weighty wine journals was a 20th-century innovation.

via Dry Creek Valley a top wine producer | press-citizen.com | Iowa City Press Citizen.

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For a special treat this holiday season, try looking into the wide world of mead.

Sometimes called “honey wine” despite the fact that most varieties have no grapes, mead is a fermented beverage made from honey that predates even beer or wine. It is the original ambrosia — not that marshmallow fluff stuff at your Aunt Mabel's potluck — but rather the food of the Olympian gods. Later the Vikings and Celts believed their gods to subsist on the stuff as well.

Though its popularity has declined in the modern world, mead is still made in almost all parts of it, in lands and cultures as disparate as Ethiopia and Poland. The varieties are almost as wide as beer or wine, with some 20 types generally recognized. The names can be confusing, and require a certain amount of study if one wishes to be proficient — what the heck could “metheglin” or “rhodomel” possibly mean, anyway?

via A honey of a mead | press-citizen.com | Iowa City Press Citizen.

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Episode 1: Heritage Turkeys

Download: Edible Radio, Episode 1, 11/18/09, Heritage Turkeys.
Read more…

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Edible Iowa River Valley, Edible Radio, Foundation for Biodiversity, Tracey Ryder, food, food politics, food security // Add Comment »

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. ~Cicero

Celebrations of the harvest have existed for as long as civilization, for indeed it was agriculture that necessitated both. But Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday; a celebration of the bounty shared by the native inhabitants of this land with foreign pilgrims. While Judeo-Christian prayers before a meal give thanks to God and Native Americans thank the very animal on which they feast, each are also a recognition of our own place in the world.

Giving gratitude for the bounty we enjoy demonstrates respect not only for nature and God, but for ourselves as well. And so, while gratitude should be acknowledged, felt, and practiced every day, we set aside one particular day each fall to celebrate the harvest and pay special attention to that which makes it possible for us to do everything else we do in this life. To recognize that food transforms us even as it is transformed into us.

via Gratitude | Nourish Network.

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By Columbia nutritionist and real food advocate Marion Nestle:

Pushback against food advocates

My latest column in the San Francisco Chronicle deals with an issue I discussed earlier on this blog: the ways in which agricultural and food interests are pushing back against advocates for a healthier and more sustainable food system.

Frank talk about food sometimes quashed

Marion Nestle, Sunday, November 1, 2009

Q: It must take courage to criticize the marketing practices of food companies. Doesn’t it get you into a lot of trouble?

A: Trouble? That depends on how you define it. Some pushback has to be expected as a normal consequence of advocating a food system that promotes better health for all and more sustainable agricultural production.

My latest experience with pushback occurred on World Food Day, Oct. 16. I had been invited by the U.S. Embassy in Rome to give the annual George McGovern lecture at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. After my talk, our new ambassador to U.N. agencies in Rome, Ertharin Cousin, thanked me but told the audience that the opinions they had just heard were mine alone and did not represent those of the U.S. government.

What did I say that required a disclaimer?

via Food Politics » Pushback against food advocates.

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