Posts Tagged ‘food writing’
The Obligation of Food Lovers
“If you are a food lover, then you have an obligation to think about what you’re eating. You have an obligation to know where your food comes from, and you have an obligation to know how the broken food system is negatively affecting so much of the population. We have to start to learn how to turn passion for food into a passion for improving the food system, taking the pleasure that we get from eating and transforming it into advocating for real food, not only for the privileged, but for everyone.”
From this week’s Foodie Underground column on EcoSalon.
Can a Non-Vegetarian Still be a Conscious Eater?
This is something that I have been thinking a lot about lately, and is the subject for this week’s Foodie Underground column on EcoSalon. An excerpt:
There has been a repetitive question in my brain for the last few months.
“Why am I not vegetarian?”
I consider myself a conscious eater. I am the kind of person that nowadays passes up fruit and vegetables because they are out of season. Certainly, I still drink coffee and eat chocolate, and by no means am a 100% locavore, but I constantly think about what I consume and what I eat.
I am however, not a vegetarian. There, I said it.
Sometimes, ethically, that makes me cringe. In fact being a person that writes about conscious eating, publicly acknowledging that I am not a vegetarian puts me in a vulnerable spot; I get nervous about the response. The internet loves to hate, after all.
But I have watched too many under cover factory farm videos and read too many investigative reports about the state of affairs for mass produced meat to be able to avoid asking myself this question.
And so my personal policy to eating has evolved. I eat very little meat (in the past month I have eaten it twice), and I try very hard to think about it when I do.
What’s so bad about factory farmed meat? A lot of things. From environmental to human health to animal rights, there are a variety of things that are wrong about factory-farmed, cheap meat. Nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the U.S. go to livestock farming. To make one hamburger, it takes more than 50 gallons of water. Around 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the global meat and dairy industry. The list goes on. And despite our awareness of how bad the situation is, we continue to become more carnivorous.
Read the full column here.
Buy a Copy of My New Book: The Culinary Cyclist
The idea for the book The Culinary Cyclist came about December of last year, so for the last six months I have had bikes and food on the brain. Well, I always have bikes and food on the brain, but this time as I wrote chapters about coffee, picnics and planning a dinner party, it was book related.
And now, after six months, the book is completely written, the illustrations are drawn (thanks to the lovely Johanna Kindvall) and now somehow in a miraculous showing of support, we managed to raise all of our printing funds on Kickstarter in the first 5 days. That’s a lot of love for food and bikes.
What that means is that the book will without a doubt be printed, and for only $12 you can get yourself a copy! So hop on over to Kickstarter and snag one.
A Cookbook Project in the Works
I never call myself a food blogger. No, really.
I have never felt that I can keep up with all of the prolific food writers and recipe developers out there. How some people manage to publish new complicated recipes ever single week is beyond me. It’s impressive, inspiring and quite honestly, a little scary. Plus we all know what taking too many photos of your food can do to you… But this year I’ve gotten a good taste of what it means to make food your profession.
Along with Johanna Kindvall, I am working on an illustrated cookbook, with stories and recipes inspired by our Swedish roots, to be published by Ten Speed Press in fall of 2014. The entire thing is certainly an ongoing process, from proposal to contract to the many moments of “I have how many recipes to finish this week??” but it’s entertaining to be working on a book project.
A Menu For When You’re Just Not Sure About Turkey
If there’s one thing I don’t like about Thanksgiving it’s the stress that goes into making the holiday “perfect.” Hint: it’s about being with friends and family, being grateful and in the process hopefully eating some delicious food. But too often we’re hung up on what has to be served.
Over on Foodie Underground, a story of why turkey will not be served in my family anytime soon inspired a full turkey-free Thanksgiving menu, complete with eight vegetarian, partly vegan, mostly gluten free recipes to get you from appetizer to dessert.
I could barely get past positioning the wings under the heavy carcass in the roasting rack. I am not a vegetarian, but I rarely prepare meat and quite frankly I was almost convinced that the thing was going to get pissed that I wasn’t treating it well, come back to life and start pecking at my face. Thanksgiving stress level successfully upped a notch.
Bringing Travel into the Kitchen
My latest over on Foodie Underground:
A freakish commitment to perfecting a recipe picked up while abroad might seem off, but don’t we all have food obsessions when we return from voyages? We come back from our travels, whether near or far with stories of “have you ever heard of [insert odd local dish here]?” and “they had the most amazing [insert normal dish] but with [insert oddball ingredient that is representative of the place traveled to here]. I wish we had that here!”
Ask someone which bus line they rode most often during a trip and you’ll get a blank stare, but ask about the best local meal and you’ll be sure to be listening to an animated story for a minimum of seventeen minutes. Food is often one of the biggest takeaways when we travel, be it just a half hour from home or on the other side of the world. That roadside diner with the house special sauce can be just as exotic as sambusas on a street corner in Kabul. Through food we experience a culture a people and a place. We are forced to stop and take things in, listen to our senses. It’s no surprise that the result is memorable.
Read the rest here.
Breaking Down Cultural Barriers with Food in Afghanistan
It should have come as no surprise that my favorite Dari word from nine intro language lessons would have been “lunch.”
The first step to traveling respectfully is to learn how to say “hello” “thank you” and “goodbye” in the local language. The second step is to learn a few things food related, because no matter where you are in the world, you are going to need to eat.
