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 by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?That’s the sort of feeling I get often when I watch many of the recent spate of food documentaries to be released. Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system, and on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, but not their strategy.

It happened again while watching the British documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several ten-minute segments via YouTube because it hasn’t been released in the US, primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the producer Tracy Worcester by the film’s main “villain,” Smithfield Foods the world’s largest pork producer. Despite four letters threatening litigation, the UK’s Channel 4 played the film last summer. But since no US insurer would back the film’s release here in the States due to concerns over threatened lawsuits from Smithfield, it has become essentially a black market film. Thus as Americans have fought censorship by our government for more than 200 years, corporate censorship continues unabated.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly does not show their company in the most favorable light. Right off the bat the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities. We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots. When this large corporation and their methods of competition had pushed the owner of a small family farm in Poland out of business, he said, “I don’t know whether I should retire, hang myself, or emigrate.”

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Tags: Animal Cruelty, CivilEats, Food on Film, capitalism, food, food cost, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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In Sunday’s New York Times, Damon Darlin has now weighed into a debate which I am suddenly making a career of noticing, that of publicly lambasting locavores. Normally a tech writer (and perhaps better suited to it), Darlin has wheeled out some of the same tired points that others have recently, making them officially clichéd.

It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan’s name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.

I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin’s piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this:

Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. But as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s viability.

via Read the whole story in the Huffington Post.

Tags: Animal Cruelty, Damon Darlin, New York Times, Slow Food, food cost, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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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 by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Tags: Fast Food, Video, food, food cost, food politics, food security by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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There has been a cultural revolution in this country over the last 50 to 75 years, a sort of intellectual cleansing that has removed from most people’s minds any understanding of food, of cooking, of the pleasures of the kitchen and table, and replaced it with the language of the drive-thru, the shopping mall, and the convenience store. Michael Pollan recently addressed this problem well.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our schools, where our kids are not taught about food and cooking, not even the “Home Economics” of my high school years. No, instead the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) teaches something called “Family and Consumer Science.” There you have it—we are not raising citizens, we are raising consumers. Our children are being taught one way of surviving in this modern, fast-paced world: the way of conspicuous consumption.

via Let’s (re)do school lunch | Grist.

Tags: Articles, Grist.org, School Lunch, Slow Food, conviviality, food, food cost, food politics, food security, time for lunch by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Even those of us in the hectic world of restaurants must occasionally take a break, and so it is that Inauguration Day found me in the High Desert north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I took the train from my home in Iowa and am now enjoying the healing waters at Ojo Caliente and reflecting on the new world we’ve entered. Much has been said about the myriad ways this milepost in history marks profound change: in matters of state, matters of race, matters of politics and compassion; and rightly so. A new day is indeed dawning, and if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, joy cometh in the morning.

As a nation, though, there is an important aspect we still refuse to grapple with in its totality: food. Maybe because it is such an immense prospect to ponder — food is one of the very few things that we all share in common, and it touches nearly every aspect of our lives. We work in the daily grind each day, perhaps in part because of our love of the work (for the lucky among us anyway), but mostly in order to put food on our tables and nourish our families. Yet in our national discourse, the closest anyone gets to talking about food is either in considering the minutia of the farm bill or decrying the latest food-borne illness outbreak that is often brought about by that very minutia.

Read the entire post @ Grist.org

Tags: Articles, Grist.org, President Obama, Slow Food, Uncategorized, capitalism, food, food cost, food politics, food security, hunger, recipe by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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Recently, the American public was issued a challenge by the folks at KFC (formerly "Kentucky Fried Chicken," but "fried" just didn't sound healthy). The fast-food joint argues in its latest commercial that you cannot "create a family meal for less than $10." Their example is the "seven-piece meal deal," which includes seven pieces of fried chicken, four biscuits, and a side dish -- in this case, mashed potatoes with gravy. This is meant to serve a family of four.

In the KFC commercial, a mother and two kids hit a grocery store for the necessary ingredients. When they fail to get them for under $10, Mom cheerfully announces, to the kids' delight, that they are going to KFC. In these hard economic times, Colonel Sanders wants you to think that giving him your money is the cheaper way to go. I respectfully disagree.


Read the whole post at the original posting site, Grist.org

Tags: Fast Food, Grist.org, Slow Food, conviviality, food, food cost, food politics, food security, hunger, recipe by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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As Earth Day approaches this year, it seems that people are thinking more about food’s price than its ecological footprint. A simple trip to the grocery store tells the same story we’ve been hearing on the news: it’s getting more and more expensive to feed ourselves.

I’ve been thinking a lot about food prices, too. After holding off for almost a year, I raised the prices at my restaurant. I was able to avoid it longer than some of my fellow restaurant owners, partly because I have relatively low overhead: a small space and a small staff. Also, we buy all our meat and dairy — and roughly 60 percent of everything else — from nearby sustainable farms and food artisans. By buying locally as much as possible, we staved off the effects of higher fuel costs on prices. But now our local suppliers have their own rising costs to contend with, so they pass their costs along to their customers (me), and I pass them along to mine (you). Round and round we go.

All this got me thinking about an essay I read a few years back by nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow called “The Incompatibility of Food and Capitalism” [PDF]. In a nutshell, she argued that while capitalism is a fine system for creating and distributing things like cars and computers, it isn’t well designed to handle the production and dispersal of food.

Marketers work their magic to make us need (or think we need) more and more TVs, computers, cars, and snowmobiles, but they can’t make us need more food. Even on the more-than-ample diet of the average American, we can still only eat about 1,500 pounds of food per year. The capitalist solution, Gussow said, was to put less food in our food, thus necessitating that we buy more of it. This leads to things like fruit juice cans on store shelves that proudly proclaim that they contain “10% real fruit juice!”

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Tags: Earth Day, Joan Dye Gussow, capitalism, food, food cost, food politics, food security, hunger by Chef Kurt Michael Friese
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