The Case for Taste

Tom Philpott over at Grist gives us one more reason to eat and savor a Louisiana Heritage strawberry, say, rather than an industrially grown big red thang.

Not only are the industrially grown strawberries pretty flavorless, but they struggle to survive in soil that hasn't been sterilized by methyl bromide or methyl iodide, 2 compounds that are proven to cause cancer.

Older, heirloom varieties of strawberries do well in regular old soil, soil that doesn't need cancer-causing agents to keep it going. And also: they TASTE better.

but what if I eat it slowwwly?

This bit of news is too ridiculous to pass up:

Around 40 McDonald's restaurants in the UK are imposing substantial fines for motorists who linger too long in the parking lots eating their meals. Apparently parking spots are at a premium and it's the chain's way of keeping people from abusing the lots. One man, The Guardian reports, took nearly an hour to eat his meal and drink his coffee.

Perhaps, in those forlorn parking lots, in those grease-filled, fry-smelling cars, the Slow Food movement is taking root…maybe it starts with eating your value meal realllly slowwwwly…(while the restaurant writes you a ticket).

Slow Reading

A kindred spirit in Southwestern Ontario named John Miedema has a blog called Slow Reading. There he mentions his affection for Slow Food and local eating, based around a wonderful book called The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating

It was the kind of meal that, when the plates were clean, led some to dark corners to sleep with the hushing of the wind, and others to drink mulled wine until our voices had climbed an octave and finally deepened, in the small hours, into whispers.

I am just finishing The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Smith & MacKinnon (2007). The couple tells of their year of eating food only grown within a hundred miles of their home. I'll be reviewing it here soon. The quote above is about the meal that inspired the effort. The 100-Mile Diet is not so different from the Slow Food movement that encourages local cooking and eating. There is something about slow food that satisfies on multiple levels.

He has a cool graph too (really). Check it out here.

(Food and) Farm Bill Update

After a giant log-jam, as of yesterday, things are finally moving in the Senate again. This means that the (Food and) Farm Bill has a shot at getting passed before the Senate takes its holiday recess. Of course, many speculate that the President will veto the passed version, but we'll try not to get ahead of ourselves.

In the meantime, 260 amendments to the bill are going to be up for debate (that's a lot of amendments to get through in just a few weeks!) and we'll be highlighting some of them in upcoming posts. Stay tuned…

good, clean, and yes, FAIR

You might know Eric Schlosser best for Fast Food Nation, and the subsequent movie version, and the subsequent for-teens book called Chew On This. It turns out that his muckraking about the food system created an itch to uncover food worker abuses, an itch he's been scratching for the past few years. After exposing the horrific conditions of immigrant workers in the beef slaughterhouses that supply our nation's fast food restaurants, he next turned his pen on the abused hog slaughterhouse workers at the Smithfield plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

For his incisive and hard-hitting 2006 piece called "Hog Hell," in The Nation, click here.
For ways that you can help take action against Smithfield's treatment of workers, and in particular their treatment of workers who try to unionize, click here.

Next up for Schlosser? The plight of egregiously underpaid tomato pickers in Southern Florida, whose tomatoes end up on the burgers at all of the major fast food chains. In 2005, the Coalition of Immokalee workers (Immokalee is a small town in Florida) succeeded in getting Taco Bell to agree to a one cent per pound increase. Sounds like a pittance, and to Taco Bell it is; to the workers, it's a colossal difference. When Erika Lesser, our Executive Director, met members of the Immokalee Coalition at the Kellogg Conference last Spring, the news was good–they had their sights set next on the other big chains.

In his recent NY Times opinion piece, however, Schlosser documents the glitch in their plan–the Florida Growers Exchange's threat to growers who pay this extra penny per pound. Schlosser pulls no punches in his disgust for the greed of Burger King and one of its top shareholders–Goldman Sachs. To read all about it, click here.

Mesquite Gathering

by Gay Chanler

I celebrated the New Year twice in 2007. The first occasion was on January 1st, in the tradition of the western world. In the second instance it was July first, when I was a guest in the Seri Indian village of El Desemboque, a desert community on the east coast of the Sea of Cortez in Sonora, Mexico. There, the New Year begins with the start of the wild mesquite pod harvest, in early July. I had come to witness and record the celebration and the harvest in preparation for launching the Fire Roasted Mesquite Presidium.

The Seri New Year celebration is linked with the harvest because mesquite is one of the most important traditional staple foods of this hunting and gathering people. Rich in protein, minerals and other nutrients, it was a significant part of their healthy, natural, Native diet. Today, however, as the traditional diet erodes from the onslaught of packaged, processed, non-traditional foods, and children are growing accustomed to sodas, chips, and commercial sweets, there is a dramatic deterioration in health. Many Seri suffer from diabetes and its side effects, and restoring mesquite to their regular diet would make a significant difference in preventing this problem.

The goal of the Mesquite Presidium is to sustain this food tradition and keep it viable by generating income from selling the surplus flour not consumed in the community. The nutty, sweet, gluten–free flour is already gaining popularity in the United States, and interest is growing in Mexico. Marketing part of their mesquite harvest to Mexican neighbors and communities across the US border promotes not only economic gain, but also a cross-cultural exchange that will bring recognition to the value of their food traditions in a larger world.

Teaching us their mesquite harvest and roasting practices, and sharing their tortillas, atole, and tamales with us, infused the New Year celebration with enthusiasm for the Presidium project. In this New Year, fire-roasted Mesquite flour from Seri is coming to market. Look for it at the Center for Sustainable Environments, Prescott College's Crossroads Café, Tucson Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian/National Museum of the American Indian's Mitsitam Café.

Read more about the Seri Fire Roasted Mesquite Presidium on the Slow Food USA website and the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity website.

Mesquite pod flour is also on the US Ark of Taste. Click here to learn more.