Ah, if only it were that easy. But let’s face it: we’re recovering addicts. Processed food is deliberately loaded with brain-pleasing salt [...]]]> Ok, so you’ve read your Michael Pollan, bought The Art of Simple Food, and now you’re dedicated to the proposition that home-cooking is where it’s at. No more processed food for you. No, sir.

Ah, if only it were that easy. But let’s face it: we’re recovering addicts. Processed food is deliberately loaded with brain-pleasing salt and sugar. It comes in pretty packages and needs only to be emptied into a pot or warmed in the oven. Instant gratification never felt so good.

Hi, my name is Paul and I’m a junk-foodaholic. I fondly remember childhood buckets of KFC. Half the stuff I ate as a kid came from a can. In university the heady aroma of an Egg McMuffin seduced me on many a hungover morning. Junk food still tempts me, as does any sort of processed, packaged, preserved, bottled, instant food that is going to save me precious time in the kitchen.

So what are some possible coping strategies for recovering junk-foodaholics like me?

1. Be nice to yourself. If you made one fabulous, home-cooked dinner this week and ate crap the other six days, don’t beat yourself up. Instead, try saying: “Well done, me. I could have eaten crap all week long, but I didn’t. I made that one great meal.” Prepackaged, processed foods have been such a marketing success in recent decades because people are busy. It’s really, really hard sometimes to make the time to cook. So pat yourself on the back when you do. Emphasize the positive and don’t be rigid about those resolutions.
2. Keep it fun. I don’t love cooking all the time. Which is why I usually try to emphasize meals that are dead simple and easy. By not boring or exhausting myself on a daily basis, I find I’m much more likely to go for that genuinely entertaining feast once and a while. You know, the kind where you try something new (occasionally requiring exotic ingredients or a new kitchen toy) and impress whomever you’re sharing it with. Those memorable occasions are the ones that keep me coming back for more. Last summer, for example, I made cherry pie from fresh, whole organic cherries. Pitting the cherries by hand made it an epic five-hour undertaking, which I’m not likely to repeat, but I can still taste that pie, and it still makes me happy to think about it.
3. Stick to it and gradually learn. Everybody can follow a recipe, so it’s sometimes easy for me to forget what a complex skill cooking is. In the early days of my effort to do more home cooking I had the added stress of not knowing anything about anything. Didn’t know what ingredients or spices to use. Didn’t know what any of the kitchen gear was for. Total ignorance. My only hope was to follow a recipe the way a contractor follows a blueprint. I know now what a drag that was. I couldn’t do anything quickly, and I couldn’t improvise. The point is that it gets a lot—a lot—easier to make good food from scratch over time. Eventually, you’ll be doing everything unconsciously and it’ll be almost as fast and easy as dumping the canned soup in the pot. So stick with it.
4. Get inspired. Inevitably, there will be times when enthusiasm wanes. Watching hilarious old Julia Child clips on YouTube or picking up an entertaining food book are great ways to rekindle interest. Here are three titles (we’ll take Michael P. as read) I can suggest off the top of my head: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Swindled by Bee Wilson, and Kitchen Literacy by Ann Vileisis. If you’re a twitterer, following the @Jambutter/ProFood list will provide you with interesting food and food politics links. Feed your mind and the stomach will follow.

It’s become an axiom of food politics that progress in a free marketplace is going to require a resurgence in home cooking. The dollar-votes of people who know how to cook are what we’re all counting on to help reform our entire food system from the laboratories of Monsanto to the farmer’s field to restaurants, to distributors and grocery stores. Good food has always been a pleasure. Now it’s a cause as well.

It’d be nice if cooking became something we all encouraged each other to do. It’s good for our health, good for our relationships, and good for the planet. How many pleasurable activities are there that you can so readily say that about? I don’t know about you, but I like the chances of a political movement that’s solidly based on hedonism.

Now…what am I going to make for dinner tonight?

…So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, [...]]]> The need for more home cooking has been a basic ingredient of The Food Movement for a while now. Here’s Michael Pollan on the subject:

…So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. [NYT July 29, 2009]

Many discussions on the subject of the great North American food problem—what you might call crappiness in the midst of plenty—have ended with the observation that what is most wrong with food on this continent is food culture. Food isn’t loved, respected, honored or enjoyed the way it is in many other cultures. Americans are notable for their eat-to-live outlook on life: zipping past drive-throughs in microseconds, stuffing the gob with the left hand while the right hand feverishly works the mouse button, and just generally dosing up on cheap calories as quickly as possible before getting back to their real love: work and money. The person who invents the intravenous cheeseburger might just have a hit.

So it hasn’t escaped the notice of the food-politics set that fundamental change must be accompanied by a change in personal habits, specifically, by a resurgence in home cooking. As my interest in all things food related has increased over the years, I’ve changed many habits. I definitely cook more. I’m a much more informed shopper, and I know I get better value for my grocery dollar as a result. I haven’t bought Coke in years. The Egg McMuffin holds no real temptation for me anymore, not even when I’m hungover. Food politics has made me a happier, healthier person.

Having said all that, I had a very busy week last week, and I noticed myself returning to the grazing, insta-meal behavior of old. I was doing work that required a lot of concentration and I just didn’t feel as though I could afford to step away for an hour in the middle of the day to make myself some “real food.” This got me thinking about fundamentals. If it’s become a foundation of food reform that we need to start by doing more home cooking, than the bedrock under it must be less busyness.

We must love work less. We must not allow business culture to trump food culture.

Corporate types should set the example. The next time somebody in your office suggests a working lunch, or a short lunch, or, God forbid, skipping lunch altogether, consider it your moral duty to look at them with horror and disgust, as if they had just let out a really loud fart. Politely inform them that you would never under any circumstances be distracted from the leisurely consumption of your home-prepared meal in a nearby green space. Arch a brow, snort derisively, and just walk away.

It will take a generation of small acts and subtle shifts in personal priorities, but with patience we will get there.

[If you missed Part 1, go here.]

The Organic Movement

Most people are vaguely familiar with the counterculture roots of the organic movement. It’s a success story (perhaps too much of one for those who believe that small is beautiful). A couple of decades ago, the organic section of the average grocery store consisted of a bin [...]]]>

[If you missed Part 1, go here.]

The Organic Movement

Most people are vaguely familiar with the counterculture roots of the organic movement. It’s a success story (perhaps too much of one for those who believe that small is beautiful). A couple of decades ago, the organic section of the average grocery store consisted of a bin of small, knobbly, expensive apples at the very back. Since then the “organic” brand has become a multinational hit. Many little mom-and-pop food processing and retailing businesses, launched by people who were motivated more by ethics than cash, have long since been acquired by giant food companies who recognized the value of this new label.

There was a time when going organic meant making a deep commitment to an alternative way of farming and living. It was about much more than pesticide-free food. An organic farm was one which certainly avoided the use of industrial pesticides and fertilizers, but which was also dedicated to soil conservation, small-scale polyculture, good treatment of workers and relentless innovation.

The advent of industrial organic farming and the marketing practices of food processors (and even shampoo makers) has destroyed the once broad semantic domain of the term “organic.” Organics have sadly become an upsell opportunity as much as an ethical alternative. Label the shampoo organic and, presto, the price goes up 30% and people are still willing to pay. I like to think the broader food movement is at least partially a reaction to the usurpation of organics by salespeople. Marketers may have cut off the hydra head of the organic food movement, but a dozen other movements have sprung up in its place.

The Local Food Movement

Originating with The 100-Mile Diet by fellow Adbusters alumnus, James MacKinnon, the locavore craze is stronger than ever. Why local? In two words: climate change. Environmentalist David Suzuki has indicated that given a choice between organic food and locally grown food, he’d choose the local stuff. All those food miles racked up by your imported dinner in our globalized economy arguably have more of an impact on carbon emissions than the fossil fuel inputs going into your non-organic dinner. Amazingly, you will still find apples from New Zealand in the bins of major grocery stores in North America in September. That is pretty crazy when you think about it.

Locavorism has other dimensions too, such as making and benefiting from a deeper commitment to neighborly provender. Going to that new farmers’ market in your neighborhood and meeting the farmer who grew your tomatoes or peaches or garlic, is not only fun, it often results in better value. So much of what passes down the industrial food supply system these days is insipidly mediocre. The locavore trend also includes a renewed interest in urban vegetable gardening and, of course, the whole backyard chicken thing.

The Sustainable Food Movement

This is a vague, catch-all term, synonymous with the “good food” or “real food” movement or just plain old “food movement.” (Some people in the agricultural community don’t like terms like “real food” because of the inference that large-scale biotech crops result in something like “fake food.”) Sustainability is a concept that gets so much play that it starts to lose meaning after a while, but in the context of agriculture it often means, “not dependent on oil.” It’s closely associated with organics because the mass production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in industrial agriculture is very much dependent on using lots of fossil fuel.

#ProFood

If ever a man has used social media to pick himself up by the bootstraps and create something out of nothing, that someone is Rob Smart, or, as he’s better known, @jambutter of the twittersphere. I should know, because I had a front row seat from the beginning. Almost a year ago, before Twitter hit the headlines as the next big thing, a web developer friend convinced a very reluctant me to pay attention to Twitter. “It’ll be huge,” he said. I lifted a skeptical eyebrow in response. But I joined anyway and looked around for food tweeps, one of whom was Rob.

Rob was an amazingly active twitterer and he had a plan. He engaged both the food activists and the mid-western cattle ranchers in fierce, often entertaining debate. Rob worked hard and put in long hours. Six months later he had carved out a hashtag principality of his own: #ProFood.

ProFood has its own special niche in the food movement: finding entrepreneurial solutions to the serious problems facing America’s food system. But it has also served as a meeting place and organizational tool for a diverse group of twittering foodies. The success of ProFood has shown that the food movement is still young and opportunity abounds.

The Whole Is Greater Than…

I’ve described a few of the components. So what the heck is the food movement en masse then? Admittedly, it’s partly epicurean. Opponents love to exploit this angle as a vulnerability, to dismiss the food movement as the playground of brandy-sniffing, souffle-nibbling elitists. But the pleasure principle is actually one of its strengths. Learning about food leads very quickly to a more pleasurable, healthier life, regardless of your means. A little education results in more discrimination in the grocery store, which leads to better value for your grocery dollar. The fast and universal payoff of an interest in food politics is one of its most potent engines for growth. Broadly speaking, the food movement is a consumer movement.

Shoulder to shoulder with the consumers you have political activists, entrepreneurs, farmers, environmentalists, journalists, chefs, designers, and philosophers, all taking a mutual interest in the future of food. The movement is emanating from America, because the land of junk food and all-powerful lobbyists needs it the most, but it’s global in reach. It is fundamentally progressive and interlinked with the trend towards more sustainable forms of manufacturing, transportation, and energy production. Although food is a universal concern, the movement’s attention to government policy and criticism of industrial agriculture has the potential to change the way business is done and profoundly affect paychecks and pocketbooks, and so the movement is attracting its share of conservative opposition. So it goes.

The pursuit of change has already borne fruit. Farmers’ markets are popping up all over North America. Michelle Obama has become the First Lady of food reform. Campaigners are taking on the obesity epidemic, and making explicit the doubtful role of big business in it. The lost art of cookery is reacquiring a little of the old respect. Entrepreneurs are busy finding ways to satisfy the growing demand for alternatives. And perhaps most importantly, awareness that there is such a thing as a “food movement” increases every day.

If you’re looking for ways to get on board, you’re faced with an embarrassment of opportunity. It would probably be harder to avoid getting involved at this point. If you’re truly a novice, just start with the basics. Start reading one of Michael Pollan’s books. Wipe the dust off the pots and pans. Head to the farmers’ markets next spring, and take a moment to rethink every purchase you habitually make at the supermarket.

Proponents of the food movement have the easiest sales pitch of all: learn more about what you’re putting in your body and you will live longer, more happily, and get better value for your money. Guaranteed.

For those of you who haven’t been religiously hanging on my every tweet (shame on you), I should start by mentioning that my wife and I recently took the plunge. No, we didn’t sell all our earthly belongings and go a-wandering in India.  We merely moved from the city to the hinterland. We rusticated ourselves. [...]]]>

For those of you who haven’t been religiously hanging on my every tweet (shame on you), I should start by mentioning that my wife and I recently took the plunge. No, we didn’t sell all our earthly belongings and go a-wandering in India.  We merely moved from the city to the hinterland. We rusticated ourselves. In short, we are now a couple of bumpkins, catching our eggs as they fall from the chicken and raising our eyebrows disparagingly at the goings on of those dens of iniquity called cities.

On the off chance that you might want to tear yourself away from the gogglebox, the Playstation 3, or the interweb long enough to read about our experience, I’ve set down a few highlights for you.

The Luscious Silence

Living in the city, I had no idea what silence is. Yeah, sure, I’d been on vacation, hiked into the mountains, sipped the pure air, listened to the faint rustle of the wind in the trees. But the moment I got back to the city all that instantly faded from memory. All I really had was the memory of a memory of true quiet.

When we first arrived in our new home, the silence in the country was shocking—as though for twenty years someone had been standing behind me blowing a kazoo in my ear and then suddenly stopped. Maybe the best way to describe the silence is to say that it feels not like the absence of noise, but like the presence of something—something peaceful and good.

Economies of Space

The silence is mostly a consequence of a vastly different human-being to square-footage ratio. Ask yourself what causes all this magnificent silence and the answer comes back, space.

Turns out having space is easier on the pocketbook too. You can have a big garden for one thing. You can keep chickens, ducks, goats, and so on. Even better: you can make stuff. I now have room for work benches and belt sanders and such things. I’m about to turn a piece of discarded cedar into a crude table. It is exactly, precisely in every way not like taking a trip to Ikea. You can even make rooms. Need an extra bedroom or a workshop? There’s a nice spot right there. Start hammering.

People: Fewer, Nicer

Like most people who have had to deal with Vancouver traffic, I had a spring-loaded middle finger. On any given drive across town, the odds were pretty good that someone was going to behave like an asshole. We Vancouverites may not have invented road rage, but we’ve made decent strides in the development of it. Plenty of jerks to deal with off the road as well, whether it’s the gang of drinkers smashing a bottle outside your bedroom in the middle of the night, the leathery dude drowning out your music with his Harley, or the young woman chain-smoking just upwind of your apartment on a breezy day.

Of course the city is filled with a plenty of good folks too. The problem is, so many people are smushed together in so tight a space, you get daily exposure to the full range. This arrangement is infinitely worsened by the fact that everybody is mobile. The people you see are mostly strangers, and the ones that aren’t are likely to be moving somewhere else within a couple of years. To go along with all of our disposable products, the city has given us disposable relationships.

Moving to the country involves two important changes: first, you see a lot less of your fellow human beings on any given day. Maybe that makes some people anti-social, but not me. In the city solitude is precious and rare. Here I get my fill, and that has already made me more smiley and more inclined to want to have nice slow chats with friends and neighbors. Second, many of the people you meet, you’re going to continue to meet for the next ten, twenty, or thirty years. That adds a very un-urban dimension of responsibility and trust. You find you just don’t need as much of that edgy, dog-eat-dog attitude anymore.

The Food

If you live in the big city (or big shitty, as we salt-of-the-earth, hayseed, peasant folk like to say), happily for you, farmers’ markets have closed the gap between town and country foodwise. The excellent, farm-fresh comestibles I was scoring at the f.m. in Vancouver were almost as good as the stuff I find on the island.

Let me explain the “almost.” People have been farming on Salt Spring for a long time, well over a hundred years. The island’s agricultural land is well-stocked with ancient and non-commercial species of fruit tree. The smaller, more diverse farms on the island also allow for a much greater range of veggies and livestock than you find in the urban food supply chains. For me it’s definitely added-value to have, for example, easy access to fresh-picked apples I’ve never tasted before. Galas aren’t bad if you get ‘em straight out of the cooler, but you should try a Gravenstein. Yum.

Another advantage is that out here you can easily form an even more direct relationship with farmers than you can at the farmers markets. The farms are only a short ways down the road. Last week I spent a morning at an island farm seeding a field and picking berries. It was easy to do and it felt pretty good.

The Virtues of Urban Life

Having said all these nice things about my first encounter with rural life, I must add the usual caveat. It’s been pointed out by various eco-people that urban living is a necessary part of the modern world. You couldn’t spread the seven billion human beings alive right now smoothly over the countryside like butter on toast without smothering it. Like it or not, there are energy efficiencies to be achieved by packing ourselves tightly cheek by jowl into giant, insect-like colonies. So, if you live in a city, you can truthfully claim that you are doing your bit for Mother Earth and world peace right where you are. You might even like it.

If, however, you are tempted to go back to the land, the usual advice is: don’t get too hung up on the practicalities of it. There’s no question that cities are where all the action is when it comes to career advancement. A move to the country is a statement about what matters to you. If you’re sincere in your desire, I like to think things have a way of working out. My wife and I made the choice not because we had a million dollars to smooth the path, but because we wanted to do it, and we wanted to see if it could be done.

We’re about to find out.

If you haven’t read about Norman Borlaug you can get quickly caught up here and here and here. I’ll extract a key bit from the article in The Age:

”Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the Earth, but many of them are elitists,” [Borlaug] told the [...]]]>

Norman Borlaug

If you haven’t read about Norman Borlaug you can get quickly caught up here and here and here. I’ll extract a key bit from the article in The Age:

”Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the Earth, but many of them are elitists,” [Borlaug] told the Atlantic Monthly magazine.

”They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertiliser and irrigation canals, and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”

Sound familiar? Sure. This is the typical refrain you hear from the folks at Monsanto, etcetera, when they are wiffle-batting criticisms of biotech back at “environmentalists.”

So an obit of a man who died at the age of 95 has very modern political relevance in the food world. And, hey, who wouldn’t want a Nobel Peace Prize winner backing up his side of the argument? But it would be a mistake for those advocating sustainable agriculture to react defensively to references to elitists, or to deny Prof Borlaug his due.

Things have changed in the decades since Prof Borlaug struggled to save millions from starvation as the world population exploded. His Nobel Prize, it’s worth remembering, was awarded in 1970. Population growth is still an issue, but now so too is climate change.  A modern Borlaug, striving to feed the world’s poor in the coming century, certainly could not and would not dismiss the “environmental lobby” as elitist.

Sustainable agriculture is modern, hi-tech agriculture, even (and perhaps especially) when it is critical of chemical inputs and the use of genetic engineering for profit rather than for people. Almost all organic farmers these days, for example, are innovators, entrepreneurs and developers—nothing like the caricature of a back-to-the-land, hippie Luddite. It is safe for progressives to acknowledge Borlaug’s legacy while continuing to reflect on the defects of the “Green Revolution” and without worrying too much about the way his words and experience may be taken out of context by some people to push product.

Has Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, been demonized by the left? (Bonus question: has this picture been Photoshopped?)

Lots of copy has been spilled [...]]]> If you’ve been watching the food news this week, then you know all about the Wall Street Journal op-ed of Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, and the boycott that resulted from it.

Has Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, been demonized by the left? (Bonus question: has this picture been Photoshopped?)

Lots of copy has been spilled over this, and it falls neatly along partisan lines. The Democratically inclined are horrified by what seems like a rather crackpot, libertarian contribution to the health care debate, while Republicans are disgusted that the lefties appear to be attacking one of their own for merely exercising his freedom of speech.

Titillating stuff. The food beat is usually not so nipple-tingling.

Let’s take a step back and have another look at the Mackey affair in the light of branding, the business world’s favorite art, science, and religion. Branding is, after all, the final platform of marketing wisdom to which you ascend after you’ve…well, you know, slain all the evil marketing wizards and mastered marketing karate from the strange but powerful old Okinawan man who speaks in riddles.

The marketing department at Whole Foods has spent millions building the Whole Foods brand, and that brand is the company’s public persona, the totality of how you perceive Whole Foods. Marketing people sometimes ask questions like, if Whole Foods were a person, what kind of person would it be? They’ve done a pretty good job of convincing you that Whole Foods is a friendly, middle-aged hippie, who cares a lot about Mother Earth, goes to yoga classes, buys only organic, and whose forward-looking, right-thinking attitude has also made him prosperous enough to be able to afford his own high-priced, gluten-free, dolphin-friendly goodies.

Enter Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, who, like a nincompoop, busts out the keyboard and raps to the world: branding is all 100% fake! It’s total bullshit. Hey, you there! Yes, you. You know, you’d really have to be an idiot to believe all that copy our marketing people spit out about Whole Foods and what it stands for.

Forget about the health care debate for a second and consider the fact that by publicly espousing a right-wing political position (extremely right-wing outside of the U.S.A.), John Mackey is laying bare a truth that makes people deeply uncomfortable. The truth is that our culture, values and beliefs are mixed up with brands, and those brands are artificial constructions whose purpose is to sell stuff. The customers of Whole Foods really, really didn’t want to know that Whole Foods is actually John Mackey and not that friendly, compassionate hippie guy. This flap was over health care, but any political issue would have served just as well.

The CEO of Whole Foods, in effect, just mounted a highly successful attack on his own company’s marketing position.

The Economist weighed in pragmatically with the suggestion that, politics aside, John Mackey owes it to the shareholders to keep his mouth shut. The less customers know about a CEO’s personal views the better. The Economist is right. Mackey should have just kept his lips zipped. But the cynics are also probably right. It would be surprising if the boycott had any significant effect on Whole Foods’ bottom line.

Everybody in this story is free. John Mackey is free to say whatever he wants. Whole Foods customers are free to boycott Whole Foods. What will be the end effect on the company and the health care debate? Sadly, the outcome is usually determined by the large number of people who aren’t paying any attention to any of it.

Quick background for non-British Columbians: We BCers, though no longer hewers of wood and wrestlers of bears, still love the outdoors for the most part, and the noble salmon—especially the delicious sockeye—are a keystone in [...]]]> Lots more in the papers today on what the Globe calls “the near total collapse of the Fraser River sockeye run.”

Quick background for non-British Columbians: We BCers, though no longer hewers of wood and wrestlers of bears, still love the outdoors for the most part, and the noble salmon—especially the delicious sockeye—are a keystone in the natural archway of our wilderness. (We have salmon art, for God’s sake. Do you have fish art where you live? Probably not.) There used to be countless millions of salmon swimming up the Fraser River alone in spawning season. It’s a big river, and you could practically walk across their backs to the other shore there were so many. The bigness of the river also means that the tributaries of the Fraser extend deep into the hinterland, formerly providing plenty of fishy food not only to wildlife on the coast, but in the interior as well. It was an almost Edenic food supply: free, abundant, fairly easy to collect, and self-renewing. Salmon, or “river chicken,” as it is sometimes lovingly called by local yokels, isn’t just something we toss on the barbecue; it’s part of our culture and heritage.

So now, after decades of declining numbers, comes the news that this government-managed fishery has catastrophically collapsed. 1.7 million sockeye will return this year instead of the predicted 10.6 to 13 million. And no one knows why. There are theories, but, you know, it’s a big ocean. It isn’t easy to count and follow fish.

Environmentalists, government bureaucrats, and various interested groups such as salmon farmers and fishermen, have been squabbling over conservation/exploitation issues for years. The usual response given by opponents of the environmentalists has been that their concerns are “alarmist.” It’s a familiar, paternalistic refrain: serious people, they seem to be saving, who have to deal with serious, practical issues, needn’t take these environmentalists seriously.

Well, now the alarm bells are ringing about as loudly as they possibly could be. It’s a regular Seussian band of bells, clangers, clappers and cymbals—enough to wake the dead, or the merely bureaucratic. The question is, what will change, if anything, now that opponents of a truly conservative conservation strategy no longer have the “alarmist” card to play?