So I was browsing around this morning and came across A Year of Inconvenience, a blog written by a woman who manages a food co-op and yet, who after watching Julie & Julia, and reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, decided to see if she could spend a year avoiding the central aisles of her own store, the place where the “convenience” foods reside. Like a lot of these “project blogs” I would probably quibble with some of her definitions of “convenience foods.” As far as I’m concerned, canned tomatoes, canned beans, pasta, and reasonably plain crackers (I’m a big fan of…
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More news about school lunches: High School kids in Chicago protest the junkiness of their school lunches to the school board. When school officials defend serving a daily menu of nachos, pizza, burgers and fries, they often say they’re just giving students what they want. But you wouldn’t know it by listening to an angry coalition of high school students who plan to speak out on Chicago Public Schools meals Wednesday at the monthly Chicago Board of Education meeting. One of those students is Teresa Onstott, a sophomore at Social Justice High School who last week practiced a speech that…
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This morning’s Billings Gazette had a story about Senator Tester, with the help of a local slaughterhouse owner, taking on the lack of accountability in the nation’s meat testing protocols. Montana’s one of the few states where small slaughterhouses still exist, which is a good thing if you want to buy local meat. I have a friend in Colorado, for example, who has a ranch, but doesn’t raise cattle for her family in large part because they’d have to be sent to a big feedlot operation to be processed. What’s the point in that? How would you even know if…
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With the deeply-flawed but still revolutionary Health Care Reform bill on my mind, I thought I’d point folks to this terrific piece by Rebecca Solnit (for whom I have total essay-talent-envy, if only I could do what she can do). Anyhow, it ran in the Nation a while back, and it’s an eloquent rebuttal of defeatism: Six years ago I wrote a book about hope. A few years later I went to look at the worst things that happen to people and found some more hope in the resilience, the inventiveness, the bravery and occasionally the long-term subversion with which…
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I’m posting this under the “Living” category in honor of the many lives this flawed, compromised, not-as-great-as-we’d like it bill will save. As the vice president so eloquently said: “This is a big fucking deal.” Just this week I got another letter from the collection agency that is still trying to collect money from my mother for an operation she needed while she was uninsured in her early sixties. She thought she had insurance, but her employer had dropped coverage for his employees without telling them. It was a very small company, and the rates went too high (which is…
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I caught the first episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution last night (full episodes available online here). I like Jamie Oliver — I realize he grates on some folks, but he’s got great energy, and unlike a lot of “foodies” he seems genuinely concerned for the well being of people who don’t eat in fancy restaurants, for kids, and for lost adolescents. His enthusiasm, and his perennial conviction that cooking “from scratch” is a skill that anyone can learn, and that by learning and practicing it we can improve the quality not only of our meals, but our health and…
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A few items from around the intertubes: While I appreciate that Iowan’s are using the stupendous agricultural natural resources with which they are blessed to move away from agribusiness models, I do grow tired of the eternal surprise of journalists when they discover, yet again, that the midwest is full of interesting people. Here’s a French journalist who took a tour of some of the state’s more interesting agricultural entrepreneurs. Civil Eats has a terrific interview with Mollie Katzen, author of The New Moosewood Cookbook. She’s written a book called Get Cooking: 150 Simple Recipes to Get You Started in…
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There was an article in Salon the other day that I almost blogged about, but it seemed like such as setup: Hipsters on Food Stamps. The article was a profile of out-of-work “hipsters” in the Bay Area, New York, Baltimore and other urban areas who were, thanks to the ongoing recession and the stimulus package, eligible for and using food stamps. Of course, the twist was that they weren’t eating “government cheese” but were using their food stamp money to buy fruits and vegetables at small stores and farmers markets, and were gasp, cooking fairly delicious meals from them. One…
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So. Jeans. A perennial problem, the jeans. Remember when we were kids (you geezers out there like me) and there were just jeans. There weren’t five thousand different styles and different fabrics and different makes. There were jeans. Usually Levis. I gave up on jeans a few years ago. Every time I’d find a make that fit, and that was reasonably comfortable and reasonably attractive, they’d go change them on me. And yet, even a LivingSmall type like moi, does sometimes read the fashion rags, usually while the magical Dezray is doing that thing she does to my hair that…
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Over at Alternet, Kate Pickett, and Richard Wilkinson have a fascinating introduction to their new book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. It’s no surprise to anyone who has been reading this site that I think we all need to re-evaluate ideas like “standard of living” and “economic growth” — here at LivingSmall, I follow Ed Abbey, who said in all the way back in 1977, in The Journey Home that: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Picking up on this idea, Pickett and Wilkinson have done a demographic study…