Food and Books and a Few Short Musings

I just finished reading another food book: Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods by Gary Paul Nabhan. It's a book I'd bought over a year ago and which I'd had trouble getting into. I thought this would be the perfect time to try again.

It's similar in many ways to The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, whom I find to be the more accessible writer of the two. Both get into the ills and evils of industrial food production, the craziness of our over-reliance on King Corn, the process and personal moral dilemmas of slaughtering fowl, and the many benefits of eating locally. Nabhan actually does take the reader through a year of his own local eating experiment, which is very interesting and informative. I just had a hard time relating because he lives in Arizona, which is a very different geography and foodshed than my own.

I'd like to write soon about meat-eating and vegetarianism. It's been on my mind a lot since reading Pollan's book and since beginning culinary school. There's a young woman in my class who doesn't seem to be a vegetarian, although she has shown remarkable reluctance to eat animals one might think of as "cute," like bunny and lamb. She also was fairly repulsed by having to clean fish a couple of weeks ago. I'm wondering how she's going to make it through the five weeks of Butchering Seminar that follow Sanitation. Anyway, it's all gotten me thinking...and thinking about writing about my thinking...but I can't do it today, so you'll have to wait a little while longer.

I may also write here more about the Locavore movement - the movement to eat foods grown and produced within 100- (or 150- or 200-) miles of one's home. That is, after all, what Nabhan's book is all about and it is what Pollan comes to see as the most sustainable way of eating. And it's where I'm coming down, too, in terms of my own food ethic. Pollan's book really helped me make more progress in sorting out my own dilemma of whether it's better to eat "organic" or "local." So, more on that, too, coming soon...