Thanks in part to articles like this one from Jessa of Bookslut fame, The Second Sex, the Second Time, I’ve been keeping my eye open for the promised new translation to come out. If you want the short history of the translation issues, Maitresse has a good summary — apparently Knopf is publishing it in the US in April, but when I couldn’t find any evidence of this on Amazon US, I went over to Amazon UK and ordered a copy. (Thanks to my Aunt Daphne for the Christmas check.) I first read The Second Sex as a 21 year…
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Agriculture is a business. Farming without a financial motive is gardening. I use that line a lot when I’m giving talks, and it always gets a laugh. But it’s deadly serious. Not only do farmers have expenses to meet just like any other business, but they also need to be rewarded when they do good work. Any plan that places further demands on farmers without an offsetting profit incentive is doomed to fail. via The facts about food and farming – latimes.com.
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I haven’t written about politics in a while, but this health reform debate is making me froth at the mouth. I’ve called Baucus’s office so many times that I think I’m on the “crazy lady” list. First off, the idea that we’re going to have a public mandate with no public option is insane. Why on earth should we give huge subsidies of public money to the insurance companies who have done nothing but openly rip us all off for decades? A public mandate with no public option to keep them in check is simple collusion. Thanks Max. I guess…
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Way back in my youth I worked in New York for a company that repackaged magazine material into cookbooks — our biggest client was Gourmet Magazine. So I’ve watched with great interest as Ruth Reichel has taken that hoary old magazine, run by women from the suburbs who at least in the late ’80 were still known to come to work in plaid skirts and knee socks (knee socks! I remember my shock that grown women would go out dressed like old girls — oh, and in blouses with those big floppy bows that women wore in the ’80s in…
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There’s a vigorous and healthy debate going on in the blogosphere about school lunch. Congress is gearing up to revise the Child Nutrition and WIC act, which includes the school lunch program, and the forces of Hope and Change have ideas. (Click through to the actual essays linked, my summaries necessarily oversimplify.) Alice Waters started the debate on the NY Times Op-Ed page, advocating that we double the lunch subsidy from $2.17 to $5.00. She also, no surprise, wants a program that works with farmers to get organic local produce into schools, and advocates rebuilding school kitchens. This suggestion, particularly…
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We are flying the flag today for Barack Obama, for the restoration of the Constitution of the United States of America, for the revival of the American Dream. I hate crowds, but there’s part of me that now wishes I’d somehow managed to go to DC. What a day. What a miraculous day. I have a staff meeting that starts just when he’s supposed to take the oath and I think that I’m just going to have to call in late. I can watch the speech on TiVo, but I need to see, in real time, that this actually happens.…
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Over at Grist, Tom Philpott has a fascinating proposal for how to use the stimulus money to stimulate the local food movement. Among his proposals: reinvest in local food infrastructures: slaughterhouses, meat lockers, and school kitchens cook real food in schools again — he proposes a Cook for America program for culinary school grads mired in debt. Based on the Teach for America program, it would get real food, cooked on site, back into our schools. The comments are also worth reading because Grist’s readers have some terrific ideas. I know that I would not be able to eat as…
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I’ve been listening to a lot of back episodes of The Splendid Table lately. My local NPR station doesn’t carry it, but I’ve been downloading episodes to my iPod and listening to them in the car or at the gym. Apparently, they had a year-long listener experiment in locavorism — they selected a dozen or so readers who tried to eat 80% local food for one year and blogged about it. So yesterday I had to do some errands and I was listening to the host check in with one of the locavore eaters, this is perhaps the second one…
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“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King “We are, and always will be, the United States of America. “It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. “It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to…
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Last week at work was just insane — hence the dearth of blogging — and I spent most of the weekend in recovery-mode. I was so knackered that I totally bailed on Halloween — went to bed at 8:30 that night. But I did manage to pull together a Day of the Dead altar this year. I was in Chicago for the anniversary of Patrick’s death, and it’s been one of those years. My friend Jim lost his beloved Mari (and Isabella lost her mother), David Foster Wallace’s suicide hit me hard, there were two deaths on my dog walking…