I went digging for numbers and found far too many. What’s the bottom line? Yes, our food is incredibly cheap in historical and global terms, but we spend more of our budgets on it than is often claimed, and we’d have to spend a lot more than that to eat healthy.
Are personal recipes more usable?
Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook uses an open, visual layout that’s a lot like my handwritten recipe cards. People like that book in part because her tone is so friendly, but does the design actually make it more usable? And if so, why hasn’t anybody emulated it?
Coffee and craft
Julian Baggini writes in a thoughtful essay that high-end restaurants in the United Kingdom have thrown out the idea of “artisan” espresso and bought Nespresso machines, which use factory-sealed capsules of precision-ground coffee and can be operated with the push of a button. In fact, as Baggini discovered in a blind taste test, Nespresso is consistently better, or at least more consistently good, than “artisan” espresso made by hand. But, he asks, is a cup of coffee just a cup of coffee — just the momentary pleasure it gives us, a mere utilitarian instrument? Or is it something more — the sum of its relationships to other things?
Putting a face on food waste
Last week I ran across, again, the figure that Americans waste 40 percent of our food, which was widely reported last summer. I got to wondering how much of that was meat, because I am (and try to remain) keenly aware that meat is not merely pounds and calories and grams of protein; it’s the body of a once-living creature. Not that wasting bread or vegetables is a great thing, but I don’t see it as the same kind of moral issue as wasting meat. So I did a bit of research, and here’s what I found.
The idea of a sandwich
The sandwich was, in short, a waste of cheese, bread, meat, and money. On reflection, though, I hadn’t nine dollars for a sandwich. I paid nine dollars for the idea of a sandwich.
Why are recipes so hard to use?
Yesterday I baked a really wonderful citrus-almond cake, and while I have no complaints at all about the cake, I found the recipe hard to use. I had trouble figuring it out initially, and it was picky without explaining anything. The more I thought about it, though, the problems with this recipe are the problems with practically every published recipe these days. They’re too wordy and dense to be skimmed or consulted quickly by an experienced cook, but they don’t give a real beginner enough help to be successful. Can’t we do better than this?
Scientifically sound? Maybe. But wise?
“Let’s start the new year on scientifically sound footing,” writes Jane Brody in the New York Times. Maybe in addition, we could all start the new year by recognizing that our food — and ourselves — are more than just collections of chemicals.
Abundance and want: A thought for St. Stephen’s Day
The beef has been roasted, the cookies devoured, the wine and the eggnog drunk. Bits of ribbon still litter the floor. But there are leftovers, glorious leftovers, and it’s nearly lunchtime on the east coast. Huzzah, indeed.
In between shopping for bigger pants, though, let’s give a thought to those who had too little, or nothing at all, to eat yesterday, and today, and the day after. Better yet, let’s actually do something. Giving money isn’t all that needs to be done, but it is one thing, and thanks to the internet we can do that one thing without even getting off our holiday-sized behinds. (As a dozen emails a day remind me, not nearly all of them charitably.)
Redistricting and electoral fairness: the view from Eno precinct
As if the election wasn’t annoying enough, I got redistricted this year here in North Carolina. I haven’t moved, but I’m in a completely different congressional district — or, rather, I will be when the 113th Congress convenes in six weeks or so. I wasn’t nuts about my future-former representative, and I like the new guy considerably less, but in the big picture, it doesn’t make much difference, because they’re both in Congress now, and they’ll both be in Congress come January.
But in the bigger picture, redistricting seems to have made a heck of a difference. Republicans won 9 of North Carolina’s 13 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives this month. Combined with the state’s vote for Romney, a newly elected Republican governor, and a re-elected majority in both houses of the General Assembly, North Carolina looks like a very red state, yes? In fact, Democrats won a majority of votes cast in North Carolina Congressional elections this year, even while winning less than a third of the available seats. Welcome to the wonderful world of partisan redistricting.
Details, research, and some history after the jump.
Walking in the hospitality of the earth
My wife bought me these shoes for my birthday:
They are minimalist running shoes from SoftStar,1 made for running trails and cross country, with simple leather uppers and flat two-millimeter soles. You can get them in colors that make them look like running shoes — black with lime green, say, or or orange suede with turquoise, or solid metallic gold if you’re planning to challenge Usain Bolt in 2016 — but this pair looks, I think, like what if wingtips hooked up with ballet slippers in a bar and had a love child, which means that even though they are essentially laced-up moccasins, I can wear them to work and nobody notices that I am not wearing real shoes. And so I frequently do, because after a couple of weeks of wearing these around my beloved boots are apt to feel like little tarsal iron maidens. In these, by contrast, ankles rotate freely, arches flex, toes can stretch and wiggle, just as with no shoes at all.
- SoftStar claims that they are made by elves. I can’t confirm this, but I suppose anything is possible. ↵