My new column at Bookslut, After Julie/Julia: The New Generation of Food Blog-to-Books, is up: I take on The Foodie Handbook: The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy, Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.
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In farming news, I was heartened by this editorial by Tom Vlisak, Secretary of Agriculture about his plans for revitalizing rural America. There’s still more in there for Big Ag than I really like, especially the biofuels stuff (we still haven’t figured out a way to make a biofuel that doesn’t require more fuel to grow, harvest, ship and process than it generates), but this point cheered me up: Third, link local farm production to local consumption. Investments in local processing and storage facilities will allow for large scale consumers in rural communities to buy locally produced goods from smaller…
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It’s Sunday, which means the intertubes are full of book reviews. Here are a few links to things I’m thinking about or wanting to read. Patti Smith: Just Kids: I’ve been really riveted by the press for this one. I love Patti Smith — she’s so absolutely who she is and she’s so relentlessly followed her dreams. This Fresh Air interview is incredibly touching The Guardian UK review And a Guardian UK interview A slightly snarky review from the New York Times Amy Bloom, one of my all-time favorite writers has a new collection of short stories: Where the God…
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I haven’t read No Logo yet, but like Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, it’s going on my list of interlibrary loan requests. I found this a couple of days ago, and in light of the forthcoming State of the Union, toward which I wish I was feeling less jaded, it’s an interesting take on what’s been frustrating some of us on the progressive side of the political spectrum. Enough with the task forces, and the pronouncements, and all of that. Just DO Something. Like ram health care through. I was thinking last night while…
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Elizabeth Gilbert is interviewed at Jacket Copy, the LA Times book blog, where among a number of interesting things, she has this to say: You said before that it’s a youthful impulse to think of oneself as exceptional. You’ve traveled a lot — is that also an American trait? Very. Very very very very. That’s something I’m seeing more and more, being married to somebody who is South American versus North American. He marvels at it. And he thinks, as many people do, it’s the best, and most shocking, thing about Americans. That sense of exceptionalism, and the honest and…
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Your Tuesday round up of interesting bits and pieces I’ve been finding online: Why Big Ag Won’t Feed the World – The Atlantic Food Channel Why are libertarian right wingers defending a dysfunctional, state-engineered food system? | Grist Destroying Sustainability along with Inventory (This one really stings. Not only did my publisher “pulp” the paperback copies of Place Last Seen when it went out of print, they screwed up my order and damaged the copies so badly that they never even sent them. I have one copy of my own paperback. Sigh.) Saving Michigan With a New Green Industrial Revolution…
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Bob Herbert nails what’s been making me so crazy. How can they not get it? Do they really think everything is going to magically go back to how it was? Op-Ed Columnist – They Still Don’t Get It – NYTimes.com. A new study from the Brookings Institution tells us that the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. is in the suburbs. You don’t hear about this from the politicians who are always so anxious to tell you, in between fund-raisers and photo-ops, what a great job they’re doing. From 2000 to 2008, the number of poor…
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what to do with LivingSmall. While the practical posts on cooking, gardening and chickens will, by no means be going away, the focus will be shifting a little bit. There’s been a lot of discussion chez LivingSmall about the recession/depression, and how it’s not going away. Every morning, the newspapers are full of stories about “recovery” and no one seems to be discussing the fact that we can’t go back, we can’t have a recovery that is predicated on the same boom-and-bust cycles fueled by easy credit and that aren’t backed by anything…
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Seems we’re all still reacting to the Flanagan piece slamming school gardens. Here’s a piece from Civil Eats that quotes Booker T. Washington on the value of physical work. The contempt shown by so much of the middle and upper-middle classes for people who work with their hands is, I’m convinced, partly responsible for the devastating loss of manufacturing jobs here in America. When you believe that work is only something other people do, and when you believe that those others, because they work with their hands and bodies must necessarily be inferior to you in your nice clean office,…
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There’s no such thing as a jobless economy. And really? As a nation do we want to be dependent on others for everything? for glass? Glassmaking Thrives Offshore, but Is Declining in U.S. – NYTimes.com “Imagine China,” he said in an interview, “building a huge structure intended to be an important national symbol and importing glass from the United States to build it. There is no way the Chinese would do that.”