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Marty Gitlin and Topher Ellis, The Great American Cereal Book, Abrams 2011.

I love cereal boxes, especially ones with egregious health claims, and I have a small collection dating back ten years or so.  I also, courtesy of Kellogg, have facsimiles of the complete set of Rice Krispies, All-Bran, and Froot Loops, dating back to the first year they were produced.   So I’m delighted to find this history of U.S. breakfast cereals, organized alphabetically by era starting in the 1860s, illustrated with pictures of each.  A encyclopedic nostalgia trip!

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Beacon Press, 2012.

Bobrow-Strain organizes this books by dream categories: dreams of purity and contagion, control and abundance, health and discipline, strength and defense, peace and security, resistance and status.  White bread does all this?  Indeed it does in this story of how “white bread became white trash.”  He begins by asking, “Is this stuff even food?”  He ends with the whole wheat phenomenon and “yuppie bread.”  This is entertaining history and an example of food studies in action: using food to talk about important issues in history and contemporary society.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Beacon Press, 2012.

Jane Brody, Personal Health, March 20: Calories are everywhere yet hard to track

The human body has a very complex and redundant system to make sure the brain gets the sugar calories it needs to function, Dr. Nestle and Dr. Nesheim explain in their book. At least 100 different hormones, enzymes and other chemicals — with more likely to be discovered — act to regulate appetite and to assure that people eat enough to maintain brain function.

But it is these very systems that go into overdrive during starvation (translation: a reduced-calorie diet), making it so difficult for people to lose weight.

Mark Bittman, Opinionator, March 21: Is a calorie a calorie?

Ultimately, the calorie is political: marketing affects instinct, and Nestle and Nesheim really shine in their analysis in this realm. (Their slogan: “Get organized. Eat less. Eat better. Move more. Get political.”)

When I asked Nestle what she would do, given that people in the United States were obviously eating too many calories and that the resulting excess weight was costing all of us life years and money, she answered quickly: “We need a farm bill that’s designed from top to bottom to support healthier diets, one that supports growing fruits and vegetables and making them cheaper.

We need to fix school lunches so they’re based on fresh foods, and fix food assistance programs so people have greater access to healthier foods.”

Every Tuesday I answer a question about food or nutrition in NYU’s student newspaper, the Washington Square News.  My deal with the dining editor is that she sends one question a week and I do the best I can with it.  The questions reflect the kinds of things that NYU undergraduates want to know.

This week, the question is about cooking chicken:

Q.  What are the more cheap and healthy ways for students to buy and cook chicken? What are the health differences between chicken breast/legs/etc.?

A.  Let me answer your second question first.  Chicken is a good source of protein and other nutrients.  Most of the nutritional differences between one part and another are too small to bother mentioning.  The one useful difference is that dark meat has a bit more saturated fat and cholesterol than white meat.  Even so, most of the fat in chicken is in the skin.  Worried about fat?  Remove the skin.

The important nutritional differences result from preparation.  If you add fat during preparation, you are also adding calories (fat has 9 calories per gram as compared to 4 for protein or carbohydrate).

The healthiest way to cook chicken is to bake it in the oven or stir fry it with vegetables.  Put the parts in a baking pan, rub some olive oil on them, and surround them with plenty of garlic, lemon, carrots, or whatever you like.  Bake at 350° until brown.

Buy whole chickens so you aren’t paying someone else to cut it up for you.  Cutting a chicken is easy and YouTube has plenty of videos that explain how to do it.

The cheapest chicken is industrially produced, meaning that the chickens are raised in huge flocks indoors under crowded conditions, treated with antibiotics to prevent illness and promote rapid growth, and are ready to slaughter six weeks after hatching. 

If you don’t want to eat chicken raised this way, you should look for birds that were raised free-range without antibiotics and are Certified Organic, kosher, or halal—if you value such things.   You will have to pay more for such meat but it will taste better. 

You will be supporting a food system that is healthier for chickens, people, and the planet.

Jonathan Deutsch and Natalya Murakhver, editors, They Eat That?  A Cultural Encyclopedia of Weird and Exotic Food from around the World, ABC-CLIO, 2012.

The editors, both graduates of my NYU department, got their students, colleagues, and friends to write short essays about nearly 100 foods considered weird, at least by someone.  The list includes foods that are anything but weird in other cultures—seitan, durian, nettles, haggis, huitlaloche, vegemite, but also those hardly ever available to even the most serious eaters.  On that list I would put camel, cavy, iguana, and walrus flipper.  As for what I would eat, stinky cheese, yes.  Urine, no way.  The entries put the foods in cultural context and provide references.  Most come with recipes.  This book is fun.

Tracie McMillan, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table, Scribner 2012.

McMillan followed the footsteps of Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and went to work at low wage jobs.  She has plenty to say about how hard it is to do them and how little they pay; she provides balance sheets to prove it.  Like Ehrenreich, she’s a good writer and her stories are compelling.  Eating well in America, she says, is difficult—bordering on impossible—for people who don’t have much money.

Atina Diffley, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

I blurbed this one, with much pleasure: “Turn Here Sweet Corn is an unexpected page-turner.  Atina Diffley’s compelling account of her life as a Minnesota organic farmer is deeply moving not only from a personal standpoint but also from the political.  Diffley reveals the evident difficulties of small-scale organic farming but is inspirational about its value to people and the planet.”  The book comes with an insert of glorious photographs illustrating the history she recounts.  The political?  The Diffley’s fought to keep an oil company from running a pipeline through their property—and won.

David Hanson and Edwin Marty, Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, University of California Press, 2012.

Wonderfully photographed visits to a dozen urban farms all over America from Seattle (P-Patch) to Brooklyn’s own Annie Novak’s Eagle Street.  The authors asked hard questions and got honest answers.  This is a great resource for anyone who wants to get started, and the beautiful farms and farmers are well worth a look.

Jennifer Cockrall-King, Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution, Prometheus Books, 2012.

Cockrall-King went international.  She visited cities in the U.S., England, France, Canada, and Cuba to see what urban farmers were doing to create alternative food systems.  They are doing plenty.  This looks like a great excuse for ecotourism, dropping by, seeing for yourself, and getting to work.

It’s spring and the books about food and farms are flooding in.  I’ll start with these.

Daniel Imhoff, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill, Watershed Media, 2012.

Michael Pollan and Fred Kirschnmann introduce this new, gorgeously illustrated edition of Imhoff’s lucid explanation of the farm bill and the vast number of issues it covers.  I’m not aware of anything else that comes close to explaining this most obscure and obfuscated piece of legislation.   Congress is fussing with the bill right now.  If you want to understand what your elected officials are fussing about, start here.  I will use this book in my NYU classes and will borrow the stunning illustrations for talks.

Jim VanDerPol, Conversations with the Land, No Bull Press, 2012.

This is a book of personal reflections on farms, farming, and farmers.  VanDerPol talks about the weather, people and communities, and better ways to produce food and to live.  From his base in Minnesota, he gives his thoughts  about the way agriculture has changed and what can be done to make it better.

I’ve been wondering for ages whatever happened to the piece I wrote for Jonathan Safran Foer’s new translation of the Haggadah, the text traditionally read and debated at Jewish Passover services.

Yesterday’s New York Times style section solves the mystery.

Mr. Foer got the idea for creating a new Haggadah after a Seder at his grandparents’ house in Washington, D.C., nine years ago…So he set out to deconstruct the traditional Haggadah with analysis by 30 marquee writers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Simon Schama, Tony Kushner, Michael Pollan as well as artwork by the painter R. B. Kitaj.

He dropped the idea because the individualism of the essays distracted attention from the text.

I was one of the 30 writers who Jonathan talked into writing for this project.  I submitted my piece in January 2007.

Despite a couple of attempts to find out what happened to it, I never heard from him again (but see update below).

Ah well.  These things happen.

Jonathan particularly wanted me to discuss the non-ceremonial foods of the Passover feast, the dishes that the Hagaddah does not discuss.   Here’s what I sent him:

Haggadah: The Passover Meal

Through the rituals of Passover, we are to re-experience and honor the sufferings of the Jewish people throughout the ages.   The ritual reenactments require us to sip wine, taste bitter herbs and haroset, and reflect upon the symbolic meanings of these foods.

All of this has made us hungry.  Now, we are to eat.   But what?

The rituals say only that we must eat matzo but must not eat anything leavened (hometz).  If we follow Ashkenazi traditions, we also must not eat kitniyot, the beans, rice, or other foods that might fool us into eating hametz by mistake. 

Unlike most else in this ceremony, we are not to question these rules.  By following them unquestioningly, we reaffirm our identity as Jews and our freedom—and our conscious decision—to participate in Jewish cultural traditions.

But what of the feast itself?  On this, the Haggadah is mute.

How are we to interpret this silence?   One possibility is that the meal itself symbolizes freedom, in this case to create our own rituals.   Except for the obligatory matzo and the forbidden hametz, the menus of Passover feasts from Europe (East and West), Iberia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East could not differ more.  Each community, each family within that community, is free to interpret its own food traditions in its own way.

Chicken soup?  Matzo balls that sink or float?  Fava beans?  From one family to another, such differences may be irreconcilable.  But for those who celebrate Passover together year after year, the dishes themselves are not the point.

The point is the predictability of those dishes.   In this respect, the Passover meal not only celebrates survival and freedom from oppression, but also constitutes an oasis of stability in an uncertain and mutable world.

For many, myself included, the significance of Passover is as an occasion on which to honor the most important values of Judaism: freedom from oppression, democracy, social justice, ethical relations with others, and the obligation to transmit these values to our children.  The meal is an excellent means for doing so.

Whatever the foods served, they can inspire yet another set of four questions, these about what food means to us as moral, ethical beings in today’s world.

• Tonight we partake of this feast while others go hungry as a result of the injustices of war, famine, or social and economic inequity.  How can we improve the human condition and ensure that those who need food have enough to eat?
• Tonight we eat many foods.  How can we ensure that those who produce our food are justly compensated for their labor and are employed under conditions that provide for their housing, health, physical safety, and human rights?
• Tonight we eat foods from near and far.  How can we ensure that these foods were produced in ways that sustain our land, water, and air, and that were kind to the animals that give us meat and milk?
• Tonight we feast.   On other days, how can we choose foods that best nourish our bodies, please our senses, promote our health, and make the world a better place for all?

Let the meal stimulate as much discussion as the rest of the rituals.  Now, at long last, it is time to eat.  Enjoy!

Rejections are always disappointing but in this instance I’m in splendid company.

I’d love to read the other pieces that didn’t get published.  I’ll bet they are worth reading on their own.

In any case, I look forward to seeing the new Haggadah.

Update, March 16:  I received this note yesterday from Jonathan Foer:

Dear Marion,

I saw your piece this morning and was mortified.  I changed e-mail addresses about a year ago—this is the only e-mail I use anymore—and sent you two notes from here explaining the changes in the Haggadah…I don’t know if my e-mail went to your spam folder, or what, but the thought of you not hearing from me about this makes me very sad…To be honest, when I didn’t hear back, I feared you were pissed about the editorial change, and so after my second e-mail, I thought it best not to keep pushing.

In any case, I’m so genuinely sorry about this.  Your piece is wonderful.  (As are the others that were cut.)  But the longer I worked on the book, the better I understood that it actually just wants the editor and writers to get out of its way.  I wish I could have found you with that message a year ago…

Best, and apologies,

Jonathan

Nice, no?  Apology totally accepted.  We are exchanging books.