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Book Review 
Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 09:25:43 AM PDT
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My experience with our country's drug policy (and I expect yours too) is like the story of the blind men touching the elephant. Each man touched a different part of the elephant, and when asked to describe it, one described the elephant's side, one described its tail, others described its ears or its trunk, but none of them were able to understand or describe the entire elephant. Ryan Grim's new book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America is the tool you need to understand the entire elephant of America's drug history and its drug policy.
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Fri Jul 17, 2009 at 06:07:18 AM PDT
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Cracking open the long-forgotten files of a never-finished / never before published Works Progress Administration project from the 1930's, Mark Kurlansky brings us a fascinating snapshot of the way America ate circa 1940 with The Food of a Younger Land. This collection of pieces takes us back to a time, not too long ago, when every meal we ate told us who we are and where we were; just prior to our transformation into a nation where distances are measured by cheap highway signs and billboards telling us exactly how many miles there are between the McDonald's we just passed and the upcoming Applebee's or Burger King a few exits down the road.
Review below the fold...
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Wed Jul 15, 2009 at 13:43:30 PM PDT
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Paula Crossfield posted a review of my new book, Recipe for America on Civil Eats. She's given me permission to post it here, so you will find it below. And, not to beat this point to death, but you can purchase a signed copy of the book using the Paypal link to the immediate right of this post.
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Tue Jun 30, 2009 at 21:46:10 PM PDT
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My book received one of its first reviews today. It was from the lovely folks at the production company that gave us Food, Inc. They say:
These days it's hard to pick up a fork and not wonder if you're making the best choice for you and the planet, which is why Jill Richardson's new book, Recipe For America, couldn't have arrived at a better time. An incredibly thorough, yet accessible guide to the complex issues surrounding the food we eat, Jill shows us how our food system is broken, and perhaps more importantly, guides us towards sustainable solutions. You may already be familiar with Jill's entertaining and resourceful, all-things-food blog La Vida Locavore, and if you aren't, I suggest you bookmark it immediately.
You may also be familiar with some of the issues that Jill address in Recipe for America if you've read Omnivore's Dilemma, watched Food, Inc. or paid remote attention to the multitude of recent news stories that reveal ugly truths about where our food comes from. But even if you have been keeping tabs on the issues, Jill breaks them down in a succinct, digestible (couldn't resist) way and then arms you with the tools to take action. From industrial farms to farmers markets and from school cafeterias to Capitol Hill, Recipe For America deftly covers the issues that affect us all, and whether you consider yourself a food activist or just a concerned eater, I highly recommend you order yourself a copy.
The book ships from the printer on July 14. As I've noted here before, you can use the PayPal link in the Ads column of this site to pre-order an autographed copy.
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Tue Jun 16, 2009 at 10:02:34 AM PDT
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I just got a copy of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly by James McWilliams in the mail. I wasn't sure if they were going to send me a review copy. After all, sending an anti-locavore book to a blogger on La Vida Locavore would be like me sending a review copy of my own book to Ann Coulter. I'll read it with an open mind (OK, that's more than you can say for Ann Coulter) but there's a pretty good chance I'm going to rip it a new one when I review it.
As for McWilliams, I've seen some of his writing in the NYT and the Atlantic recently - one was the piece calling out free range pork as bad (that relied on a study by the National Pork Board) and the other was about how GMOs could help hangovers. Except he meant migraines - but he called them hangovers. I guess he didn't research the piece well enough to know the difference, he was just busy being a contrarian.
Since the NYT piece came out, I've been in several discussions about McWilliams, and others feel that he's not necessarily against ethical eating (or what we would consider to be ethical eating) - he just wants to make a reputation for himself as a contrarian (the anti-Michael Pollan). Which he is doing quite successfully. Oh god, I look forward to reviewing this book. I'm gonna go make myself a nice bath and pour a cup of some non-GMO wine and just ENJOY reading this book.
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Fri Jun 12, 2009 at 05:48:22 AM PDT
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I just finished Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice by Alissa Hamilton. The book was rather academic in its nature, but I did learn a LOT about orange juice. I'll share the cliff notes version of it with you below, and you can decide if you want all the dirty details divulged in the book.
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Fri May 29, 2009 at 15:20:40 PM PDT
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One word comes to mind to describe this book: Delightful. It's a guide to planting, harvesting, and eating (or otherwise using) grains, but it's chock full of philosophy and it paints a picture of a simpler, and perhaps better lifestyle.
Small-Scale Grain Raising: An Organic Guide to Growing, Processing, and Using Nutritious Whole Grains for Home Gardeners and Local Farmers by Gene Logsdon is first and foremost a no-nonsense guide to small-scale grain raising (as the title says). He tells you exactly how to rotate your crops, how much to plant, how to plant it, which seeds to use, which pests and diseases to watch for, how to harvest it, how to store it, and how to eat it. And if you've got an acre or two of land and perhaps a few animals (or even just some human animals who enjoy eating whole grains), it's a fantastic instruction manual. If you're totally green, like me, you'll probably need to find a local farmer to show you in person how to use some of the tools mentioned in the book, but you'll more or less get everything you need to know from the book. There is no question about Logsdon's expert mastery of his topic.
But there's more to the book than that...
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Wed May 20, 2009 at 13:54:48 PM PDT
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The food industry pissed off the wrong Mommy of Four. Sarah Palin might call Robyn O'Brien (author of The Unhealthy Truth) a pitbull with lipstick. She might be blond and pretty, but when her youngest child, Tory, had an allergic reaction to eggs, she didn't take "Don't worry your pretty little head about it" for an answer. Why are allergies and asthma on such a rise in America?
The answers were largely: We don't know and we're not really studying it. Better yet, there were two competing camps that each thought the other one's strategy would harm the kids. One thought you should expose your kids to the foods they are allergic to in small doses to see if the allergy would go away, and the other thought you should totally avoid any contact to the allergic food at all to see if it would go away. Riiight. It's nice to have theories, it's nice to do research, but what happens if you have kids, they have allergies, and you have to feed them NOW?
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Sat May 09, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT
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I thought I knew how to eat a healthy diet. I thought I knew why certain foods cause heart disease and others do not. And then I learned the full story. Or at least, as full of a story as science has revealed to date. While I was on a long road trip recently, I picked up my iPod and randomly selected a podcast of a Canadian show about food with an interview of Susan Allport, author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them. And... wow!
I knew almost immediately that I had to read her book. I **thought** I knew a lot about nutrition and food. I thought yeah, yeah, blah blah, Omega-3s are good. I know enough. But that's like wearing a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription and thinking that your blurry view of the world is crystal clear.
This diary will summarize the info in the book, explain why our current "knowledge" about nutrition is flawed, and then explain how government policies encourage unhealthy diets (beyond the detail you and I already knew) and what should be done to fix it.
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Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PDT
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Jill Richardson has a Recipe for America; and I suggest we read it, hop on into the kitchen and get to cooking!
I recently had the great pleasure of reading Jill Richardson's soon to be released book, "Recipe for America" (available for pre-order now!), and my only fear is that I'm not a good enough writer to get across just how wonderful this book is. But I'll try...
Disclaimer: Jill wants me to mention here that this will be a very "biased" review, since she and I are good friends and all. BUT! I'll add my own "disclaimer" here, and make it very clear that this was really one of the most fun reads I've ever had. On to the review, below the fold...
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Sat Apr 11, 2009 at 09:29:37 AM PDT
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To be more exact, the LAST weight loss book you'll ever buy was the one you bought BEFORE you picked up a copy of Linda Bacon's Health at Every Size. And perhaps, as you read her book, a cynic would say to you what my mom once said to me, "What, so you're just going to be fat and happy about it?" YUP - THAT'S THE POINT. Summed up very briefly, the point of the book is to be healthy. And if you adopt healthy habits and you're fat, so you're fat. Learn to love your body and reject the fat-phobia of our culture. Or perhaps you'll adopt healthy habits and you'll end up losing a few pounds. But that's not the point. The point is health and happiness. You work on those two goals and your body will figure out what size it's supposed to be.
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Wed Apr 01, 2009 at 15:24:12 PM PDT
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A few days ago I wrote up a review of Bryan Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen. I made one of the recipes (Citrus Collards with Raisin Redux) and received a request to share another recipe: Sweet Sweetback's Salad with Roasted Beet Vinaigrette. So here goes.
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Thu Mar 12, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT
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Several months ago I received a copy of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. Then my brother died. I didn't read the book. Recently, I picked it back up and... it's great!
I can't call this a book review because I haven't read most of the book even. But I can say that I have started reading it and I like it a lot.
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Thu Nov 06, 2008 at 08:05:54 AM PST
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I've been reading Vandana Shiva's new book Soil Not Oil and I LOVE it! She presents MANY statistics about the effects of industrialization and a fossil fuel driven economy and agricultural system on our world to drive home the urgency we need to place on a transition to soil, not oil. I'll write more about it later, but I wanted to share a fantastic quote with you for now.
The imposition of the mechanical-industrial paradigm for production and distribution of food, clothing, and other basic needs in the South was initially carried out by the World Bank and IMF through "development" aid. It is now imposed through World Bank/IMF structural adjustmant programs (SAPs) and the WTO rules of so-called free trade, which are, in effect, rules for the freedom to destroy resources, deplete energy, and pollute the atmosphere.
Globalization is, in effect, the globalizatino of energy-intenseive, resource-wasteful, fossil fuel-driven industrialization of our production and consumption pattersn. Globalization forces non-sustainability on the world. The players are neither individual citizens nor individual countries. The players are global corporations who move production of goods around the globe to where they can obtain the highest profit margins by bearing the lowest costs. - Soil not Oil, p. 15
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