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Book Review 
Thu Aug 12, 2010 at 15:33:30 PM PDT
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Today's the day for our big Mexican fiesta, but I did a little cooking yesterday. My inspiration is the cookbook Viva Vegan! by Terry Hope Romero, which encompasses all Latin food and not just Mexican. You can read Part 1 here (with my first impressions, shopping experience for the ingredients, and my experience making tortillas from scratch).
This diary includes: Finding and buying organic blue corn masa harina for tortillas and two recipes from the book: horchata and roasted tomatillo salsa.
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Wed Aug 11, 2010 at 01:00:53 AM PDT
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I've barely been back from Mexico for a week and already I'm jonesing for the amazing food I ate there. I decided that now is a perfect time to pick up the Latino vegan cookbook Viva Vegan! by Terry Hope Romero, and get cooking. This will be a multi-part series because there is so much in this book I want to eat, I can't fit it all into one meal. Or, as the case may be, fiesta. Today's diary covers first impressions of the book, grocery shopping, and making homemade tortillas.
My very own made-from-scratch tortillas!
Tortilla soup (my own recipe, since it wasn't in the book)
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Mon Jun 21, 2010 at 13:00:49 PM PDT
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When I finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, I felt sick to my stomach. And that's the way one should feel about any accurate account of the way most meat is produced in this country. That said, I don't want to lead would-be readers of this book to say "I don't want to know" and then avoid reading such a complete and nauseating account of where most meat comes from. If you eat meat - especially if you eat meat you didn't raise and slaughter yourself - it is your responsibility to read this book.
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Tue Mar 16, 2010 at 23:59:45 PM PDT
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The basis for this book was one of the most amazing speeches I've ever heard. You know the type I mean - presentations like Al Gore's powerpoint on global warming that became An Inconvenient Truth. The speaker may have nothing more than a microphone and perhaps a Powerpoint, but the audience is transformed. Suddenly, an idea that the audience did not understand (and perhaps did not even know they were interested in) becomes so clear that everyone in the room feels like they can see it, hear it, and touch it. In this case, that speech was given by Eric Holt-Gimenez of Food First in October 2008 and it was about the global food crisis. I guess I was not the only person who was so deeply touched because Holt-Gimenez went on to turn the speech into an entire book with co-author Raj Patel and help from Annie Shattuck. The full title is Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice.
That said, the book is quite academic, and reading it does not compare to the transformative experience of hearing the authors speak. (Patel and Holt-Gimenez can go head to head in a public speaking contest any day and I really don't know who would win. Both are amazing.) But the book does provide all of the facts underlying the amazing speech in a logical and readable format.
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Mon Mar 15, 2010 at 22:20:41 PM PDT
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Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine by Andrew F. Smith was the third of three books I recently read that trace American food and agricultural history (the other two are The War on Bugs by Will Allen and Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis). As I said before, the three books provided complementary information to give readers a full picture of how our food and agriculture came to be as they are today. That said, if you have to skip one of the three books, skip this one.
The 30 turning points chosen traced several different plotlines - manufacturing, packaging, and transportation advances; war; the making and defining of gourmet food in America; the roles of nutrition reformers; and the role of marketing. Surely those broad categories leave out many of the 30 chapters in the book, but they also encompass quite a few of them. In some parts, the book reads like the TV show "Unwrapped," and it's written from an impartial point of view (thus not criticizing a number of developments that play roles in making food less healthy). In most cases, I feel that it was probably just fine to provide an unbiased view (as the book is intended as a history book, not a call to action), but in the section on genetically modified foods, "unbiased" turns into "overly favorable" and in fact, wrong.
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Fri Mar 12, 2010 at 14:15:21 PM PST
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I've got a problem. I'm here in Berkeley, not far from where Frances Moore Lappe (mother of Anna Lappe) originally found the inspiration for Diet for a Small Planet and I'm supposed to be promoting my own book. Except what I really want to do is promote Anna Lappe's new book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It. I've been gushing about it since I first opened it and read the introduction a few days ago. I brought it here as plane and BART reading, and to be honest, I didn't have great expectations for it. Food and climate change has been an obvious and open and shut matter for me for a long time - so why would we need an entire book on the subject?
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Fri Feb 26, 2010 at 22:47:04 PM PST
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Kitchen Literacy was so good that I am embarrassed I did not read it before now. The full title is Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes from and Why We Need to Get It Back by Ann Vileisis. It came highly recommended by several people I trust (including JayinPortland) and now I know why. But by a lucky accident, I read this in conjunction with two related books that also trace U.S. agricultural and food history - The War on Bugs by Will Allen and Eating History by Andrew Smith. I HIGHLY recommend reading the three together as they build a brilliant synergy in tracing developments in science, public opinion, government regulation, and propaganda. I feel like now I really understand how we got from a sustainable, local, organic food system back at our nation's founding to where we our today.
I am also amazed at how connected my own family's history is to the food and agriculture history of our nation. If you trace the development of our family farm from 320 acres to 13 times that in the span of 50 years (while labor needed went down from 5 people to 2) and our ultimate abandonment of the farm in the 1990's, my grandfather's career as a soil scientist with the USDA, my great aunt's career as a Home Ec teacher, and even my mom's love of the Food Network, and my own work as a promoter of sustainable food, we are all inextricably linked to America's food history.
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Sat Jan 30, 2010 at 12:36:39 PM PST
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I just finished reading The War on Bugs by Will Allen (not the Will Allen of Growing Power - a different Will Allen) and I can't recommend it highly enough! This was a book that Allen was uniquely qualified to write. He grew up on a farm, and then went into the Marines where he was an atomic, biological, and chemical warfare paramedic. Following his years in the Marines, he went to college and - as part of his education - did research in the tropical forests of Peru, living among forest farmers. He says, "The ability of these [Peruvian] farmers to produce surpluses without chemicals in an environment ravaged by pests started me thinking that maybe the miracle chemicals that the sales men pushed were not so necessary after all." After college, Allen went back to farming. Upon taking a pesticide and fertilizer applicator's course at a local college, he found out that the chemicals commonly sprayed on farms were "modified versions of the nerve poisons and antipersonnel weapons that I learned about when studying chemical warfare in the Marine Corps."
So - with his firsthand observations of food grown without chemicals and his knowledge of the toxicity of common farm chemicals - Allen went to work finding out where our dependence and trust of pesticides came from in the first place. His findings actually surprised me. I knew part of the picture, which I wrote about in my own book. I don't think my book was inaccurate, but Allen fills in a lot of details and really makes it clear what happened and how.
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Mon Dec 28, 2009 at 21:51:59 PM PST
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One word: yum. When I was offered a copy of this book, Vegan Cookes Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, I said yes mainly because I love one of the authors (Isa Chandra). She's done a few other cookbooks but she's also got several free recipes online at The Post Punk Kitchen and I've tried a few. It's not for no reason that she's a bit of a cult favorite among vegans.
So here's the review: The book's great. I love it. The cookies include all of the classics plus innovative varieties like Tahini Lime Cookies and Sweet Wine Biscuits with Sesame. Plus it starts with sections on ingredients and equipment that make clear what you need, why you need it, and when and how you can substitute. They even include a gluten free flour recipe that you can use to replace regular flour. That's wonderful because, let me tell you - if one dietary restriction is harder, once you start mixing and matching dietary restrictions you're really screwed. Vegan cookies? Sure. Gluten free? No problem. Vegan and gluten free? Umm, eat some fresh berries for dessert. So I like it that this book actually provides an option there.
Tonight we used the book to make brownies. I thought about doing it together with my boyfriend's kids but I didn't want them to catch me putting tofu in the brownies. I made a few substitutions. I used applesauce instead of canola oil to reduce the fat and 1 tsp arrowroot powder instead of 1 tbsp corn starch because we didn't have any corn starch. The result is fantastic. They are a bit fluffier and more cake-like than I'd like in a brownie, but they are better than ANY boxed mix you will ever find. The only way to beat them would be to use a from-scratch recipe with tons of eggs and butter. Or maybe they would be better if you follow the recipe as written instead of substituting like I did. And I have a hunch that with some experimentation, you could find a way to make them denser and fudgier using avocado.
UPDATE: One more thought: You don't need to be a vegan to use the recipes in this book. You can't taste the tofu in the brownies. And most people don't eat bacon-flavored cookies, so it's not like any meat eater would be giving something up by eating a vegan cookie. All in all, it's a painless way to cut down your carbon footprint without noticeably giving anything up. The only aspect that might be annoying to non-vegans is that the recipes call for ingredients you might not keep in the house (like soy milk).
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Thu Dec 24, 2009 at 16:59:05 PM PST
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This is coming a little bit too late, even for you last minute shoppers. But maybe you can go hit the after Christmas sales, or exchange all of the Chia Pets and Snuggies you receive for some of the books on this list.
If you haven't read them:
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
These are the first two books ANYONE should read about food. They make so many points so clearly. It's not just about the information that is in them, but about how well they are written and how the reader feels as he or she reads them. These books make people "get it." If you're trying to "convert" a difficult relative who keeps serving you cranberry sauce out of a can at every holiday, buy them these. And if they aren't the reading type, get them a copy of Food, Inc. because that's kind of like these two books in one, except in movie form.
After someone has read those, here are the next 8 books that should be on their bookshelf:
3. The War on Bugs by Will Allen: Where did industrial ag come from, REALLY? And why DO we use pesticides? This book traces it all the way back to late medieval Europe, and then very carefully chronicles the rise of pesticide use in the U.S. Whereas other books (including my own) go back to World War 1 or 2, Allen goes back to the 1800's by reading farm journals from those times. Totally fascinating, and mandatory reading.
4. Teaming with Microbes: A Gardeners Guide to the Soil Food Web: Why does organics work? What is happening, from a scientific point of view, in the soil and above ground? This book tells it all in such a clear way that even non-scientists and non-gardeners can understand it. If you're giving a book as a gift, give this to a gardener. Non-gardeners really just need the Cliff's notes version of this info.
5. Bottomfeeder by Taras Grescoe: Want to understand seafood? Read this. The book was described to me as "The Omnivore's Dilemma of Fish" and it truly is. If you eat fish or shellfish AT ALL, read this book. It will make you mad though. It will also put a serious crimp in your ability to enjoy seafood.
6. Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel: Patel is one of my absolute favorite speakers and writers. He's been all over the world and he clearly shows what's going on not just in the U.S. but around the world. Why are a billion people starving and a billion people overweight? What's the cause of such inequality. That's what this book explains.
7. Appetite for Profit by Michele Simon: Read this one no matter what, but ESPECIALLY read it if you have kids. And give it as a gift to anyone you know who has kids. Simon tells exactly how marketers and food companies are screwing us while simultaneously trying to look like the good guys. Much of the book's content focuses on children, although the book is not exclusively about kids and marketing to kids.
8. The End of Overeating by David Kessler: Why would an intelligent adult who wants to be attractive and healthy binge on an entire pint of ice cream or bag of chips, despite a strong desire not to? Why do some of us just totally lose control around junk food? Kessler goes into the actual neuroscience behind this and then tells exactly how the food industry exploits that. Amazing!
9. Recipe for America by me: I can't help adding this to the list even though it's probably a taboo to do that. But the book will give you a basic understanding of the legal system that governs food and what is already happening (or isn't happening) to try and change it.
10... What do you recommend? Please add your own favorite foodie books in the comments!
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Wed Nov 18, 2009 at 23:03:50 PM PST
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Food, Inc. the book (by Peter Pringle) has nothing whatsoever to do with Food, Inc. the movie - other than that they are both about food. The full title is Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto - The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest. I highly recommend the book, with a caveat. The book covers the debate over GM crops with a reasoned, science-based analysis. Often it seems that rather than giving you his own point of view, Pringle describes the arguments and actions of both sides of the debate and allows the reader to decide for him or herself who is right. However, some conclusions are impossible to avoid. For example, in several anecdotes, the U.S. government is caught entirely with its pants down, totally failing to adequately assess the safety of GM crops before allowing them to be grown. Furthermore, Pringle often provides adjectives to describe the players in the debate, making his own point of view very clear. He calls the biotech firms (particularly Monsanto) "arrogant" but then paints anti-biotech activists as radicals.
Here's my caveat though: I believe the content of this book is essential reading, but I disagree with the author's ultimate assessment of biotechnology. In the tail end of the book, Pringle says:
[GM foods] are scientific creations full of both promise and potential hazard. These experimental foods deserve respect from those who discover them, call for more caution from those who regulate them and grow them, and finally, at the end of this real food chain, demand close study by those of us who eat them.
My main critique here is that, from reading the book, I do not believe Pringle has an adequate background in the science of sustainable agriculture (or perhaps ecology or agriculture in general) and thus, I believe that he overestimates the promise of GMOs. Assessing GMOs also requires assessing alternative solutions to the problems GMOs are intended to address. The question is not only "Do GMOs solve a problem?" but "Do GMOs represent the BEST solution to the problem?" This book makes it clear that the science of genetic modification is not quite ready yet for prime time. I am all for science for science's sake, but I believe that agroecology is the best and fastest way to solve the world's food problems at present. If, some day, biotech presents a better, safer solution than agroecology, then I will revise my point of view. In the meantime, those who want to solve the world's problems will get their best bang for their buck (and their fastest results) via agroecology, not biotech.
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Tue Oct 06, 2009 at 16:14:17 PM PDT
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Christine Heinrichs is an expert in rare breeds of chickens, and her book How To Raise Chickens: Everything You Need To Know shows it! She gives you the basics of chicken housing, feed, and health care, but she also provides in depth history of chickens, descriptions of seemingly every breed known to man, and how-tos for breeding and showing chickens. I'll be honest: my favorite part of the book was the pictures. The book's large, glossy pages are covered in the most gorgeous pictures of chickens you could ever hope for. Long before I finished reading the entire book, I paged through it looking at the pictures, periodically stopping to show my boyfriend my favorite breeds. I jokingly referred to the book as "my chicken porn."
As for how the book rates for guiding a first time chicken owner through the process, it covers a number of basics that you (or I) will need to know. The book brings up a number of incredibly valuable issues, but does not necessarily tell the reader that one way or another is correct. For example, do you want a chicken tractor (movable chicken housing without a bottom) or will that leave your chickens too vulnerable to predators? Perhaps instead you should use the deep litter method of raising chickens - keeping chickens indoors during hot or cold months, with several inches of litter underneath them that will compost with their manure and allow them to forage for bugs and take dust baths as well. Because chicken housing is partially influenced by the amount of space you have available and the predators and climate where you live, it may be best to read through the options and then ask a neighbor who has chickens to weigh in on what's recommended where you live.
The book is much more instructive when it comes to subjects like food and hatching chicks. Heinrichs specifically tells you what to feed the birds when, and how to care for eggs and chicks before and after birth. She provides information for those who wish to make their own chicken feed, as well as recommendations for when and what types of commercial feed your chickens should eat. She does not take a stance on subtherapeutic antibiotics, merely mentioning that they are used in raising chickens and that some people oppose their use.
For those who are not serious chicken breeders or who don't plan to show their chickens, the details on breeds, breeding, and showing chickens may be too much. (Furthermore, I wonder what information important for a newbie chicken owner was skimmed over or left out while the book focuses on preserving rare breeds.) Still, it's nice to have as reference because you never know if or when you might need it. For city dwellers where roosters are not permitted, breeding chickens is more or less off limits. However, you might wish for your small flock of chickens to double as pets and in that case, some of the less common breeds described in the book might appeal to you.
Overall, this book is a great fit for those within the food movement who would like to preserve rare varieties of food, including livestock. The commercial chicken industry shows no sign of moving away from Cornish/Rock crosses for meat and Leghorns for eggs, so it really is up to the backyard chicken owner and small farmer to preserve other breeds of chickens. Genetic variety is nature's insurance, so this important task should not be overlooked.
Heinrichs is a blogger at The Official PoultryBookstore.com Blog, so if you're interested in learning more from her, check it out.
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Fri Sep 18, 2009 at 19:13:45 PM PDT
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Today I posted a piece on the food blog Zester Daily called "Trained to Get Fat." In it, I focused quite a bit on David Kessler's new book The End of Overeating. Kessler goes through the biological reasons WHY humans overeat, and then explains precisely how food companies and marketers exploit that tendency to ensure that we frequently DO overeat.
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Tue Sep 15, 2009 at 23:23:43 PM PDT
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Think back to earlier this year when numerous emails were flying around about the evils of H.R. 875 and the government takeover of food. If this is the first you're hearing on the matter, consider yourself lucky. It was a lot of noise over what turned out to be nothing. Those of us who were watching Congress were baffled by the outrage expressed about the bill.
According to the rumors, the bill was secretly sponsored by Monsanto and it was going to ban backyard gardens, farmers markets, and organics. Yet, Consumers Union strongly supported the bill. I read through the bill text and didn't find anything that would possibly ban organics or farmers' markets. Most of the bill had nothing to do with farms - it covered "food facilities," a term that exempts farms and restaurants. Oh - and the Monsanto claim? Totally false. A look at Monsanto's lobbying records shows they had nothing to do with it.
According to the rumors from DC insiders, H.R. 875 was basically dead on arrival. Its sponsor, Rosa DeLauro, was not on the committee that would ultimately pass a food safety bill, the House Energy and Commerce Committee. One of the most powerful men on that committee, Henry Waxman, had also proposed a food safety bill. His bill would be the one that moved forward, not H.R. 875. Then word came down that there would be a NEW bill put forth by Dingell that combined characteristics of his previous bill and H.R. 875. That turned out to be H.R. 2749, which ultimately passed. So why the hysteria over a bill that ultimately went nowhere? And why are people so suspicious of giving the government more power to keep our food safe when clearly we have a major food safety problem in this country?
Once H.R. 2749 came on the scene, opposition started up again, although this time it was quite a bit more grounded in reality. Still, what gives? If people are dying from peanut butter and spinach, shouldn't the government have the tools to keep us safe from foodborne illness?
Throughout this time, I kept in touch with my friend Judith McGeary, who understood the opposition to the food safety bills very well (in fact, she had a hand in writing some of the action alerts... the sane, reality-based ones, that is). At the core of much of the opposition was raw milk. Through Judith, I navigated what would otherwise be a very confusing headache of food safety bill opposition.
This week, I've read through an advance copy of David Gumpert's upcoming book The Raw Milk Revolution. I can now say: I GET IT. I might not agree with it 100%, but I get it. If you want to understand the vocal opposition to food safety laws, you should read Gumpert's book too. That's not the only reason to read it though. Even if you have little interest in raw milk, I think this book is a key piece in the puzzle to understanding the backwards priorities in America's food safety system.
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Wed Aug 12, 2009 at 15:11:07 PM PDT
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Saying that Mark Bittman's cookbook is fantastic feels about as silly as saying that Hawaii is a wonderful vacation spot. Of course it is. Duh. And yet - the obviousness of it does not diminish how truly GREAT of a cookbook it actually is. It's not for nothing that he's a bestseller and at the top of the cookbook and recipe world. Bittman actually lives in the real world, the same world that the rest of us live and cook in, unlike the authors of so many other cookbooks.
I find most cookbooks very frustrating to use because as you flip through them, it's hard to find a recipe that you've got all of the ingredients for on hand. Page after page, you think "Oh that looks good" and then realize "Wait... I've got everything except for the bell peppers. I can't make that unless I go to the store." That's fine if you're planning a meal in advance, but what about when you want to just cook something NOW? And how far can you deviate from the recipe before you ruin the dish? They never tell you. But Kitchen Express addresses these common cooking dilemmas - and THAT in particular is what I find so appealing about Bittman's book.
Bittman starts off by giving a list of what to keep on hand and how to store it. He tells you straight up that he doesn't care how much garlic you use. If it ever does matter how much of an ingredient to use, he'll give an exact quantity. Otherwise, he's more vague. And that's nice because you no longer have to fret about whether your potatoes are medium size potatoes or whether the onion you have on hand will equal 1 cup when chopped.
Another thing I like is that he gives lists like "The Best Recipes for Reheating" and "The Best Recipes for Picnics." He also divides the recipes seasonally (101 recipes per season) to make it easy to spot a recipe that contains seasonal ingredients (and to hit the spot in hot or cold weather, like a chilled soup in summer or a hearty pasta in the winter). And he gives you a list of substitutions, so you know that if you don't have broccoli in the fridge, you can make the dish with cauliflower instead, no problem. Another thing I like is his consciousness of environmental issues - something that is rare to find in a mainstream cookbook. He tells readers to check out the Monterey Bay Aquarium's list of sustainable seafood to pick out a fish.
Last, I should say that the recipes look absolutely scrumptious. I think I had a few orgasms while flipping through the book. I may be a vegetarian, but I haven't been veg so long that I don't realize how amazing the Prosciutto, Peach, and Mozzarella Salad would taste. And I cannot WAIT to try making the Microwaved Honey Eggplant. Another winner is the Arugula with Balsamic Strawberries and Goat Cheese (although I can assure you I am NOT going to use arugula because I hate the stuff, and Bittman clearly states on his substitutions page that leafy greens can be swapped out for one another).
All in all, this book is very exciting. No wonder the chef I'm currently dating tells me he doesn't use cookbooks, but he uses Mark Bittman's cookbooks.
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