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-- Raj
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Slow Food Nation will hit San Francisco this weekend. The City's already fluttering with SFN posters, and the Victory Garden, planted on the land outside City Hall, looks very handsome indeed. To prepare for the jamboree, I thought I'd go back to Carlo Petrini's book of the same name, and to Geoff Andrews' new book, The Slow Food Story. Together, these writers offer a corrective to the hoity toity food culture that has become synonymous with the organization. Although it’s often forgotten, Slow Food’s roots are radical. ... read more »
Posted on 28 August, 2008 - 20:50
Guest Post: On The Anniversary of Katrina, Welcome Home
One of the premises of this blog is that there's a deep connection between food and poverty. So it's not too much of a tangent to start talking about poverty directly.
The question asked by my friend Dan Moshenberg, who's guest blogging with this wee article, is this: how are the poorest treated in the world's richest country and the world's most impoverished? The answer: almost the exactly same.
Here's his striking analysis, comparing the Zimbabwean Operation Murambatsvina with Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans three years ago... ... read more »
Posted on 28 August, 2008 - 20:37
Photo Credit: Limonada
I think what disturbs me about this Reuters news piece even more than the Let them Eat Mud story that I posted about mud cake consumption in Haiti, is that the government in Bihar, India, is actively promoting it.
Just to be clear. It's official government policy for people to eat rats. (The full story here and below.)
It's a useful case to ruminate over. What is it, after all, that's so appalling here? Clearly the idea of eating vermin is, by definition, distasteful, but what a culture decides is edible, and what is pestilent, isn't written in our DNA. As we used to chorus in Sociology 101: "it's a social construct". Some think pork is as dirty as rat. Some think that by renaming pigeons as 'squab', they'll taste better.
That people are eating rodents isn't the only thing that should turn our stomachs, though. The Bihari government endorsement of rat-eating is simultaneously a sign of defeat. They've given up on fighting poverty so that people can afford to eat. Given up on trying to protect the grain harvests with decent infrastructure. Given up, almost, on their people.
In a time of scarce resources and rising hunger, rat-eating becomes a handy technical fix. After all, what is rat-eating but a technology to increase nutrition and eliminate the use of pesticides and the need for secure grain storage?
And if we're appalled by this, and we should be, then how different is this from the logic that justifies Golden Rice? After all, doesn't golden rice become useful only when governments have resigned themselves to the fact that the only thing people can afford to eat is rice? That the healthcare system can't be resuscitated? That the best technology to fix the problem is one that doesn't address it?
_______________________ ... read more »
Posted on 20 August, 2008 - 15:27
Does your Embassy Walk the Talk?
While this post isn't exactly about food, it is about the hypocrisy with which developed countries pretend to fight hunger on the one hand, and cause it on the other.
This is a graph of what embassies pay their security staff in Zambia. In none of the cases does the pay meet the requirements to feed a family of six in Lusaka, according to a union report. Predictably, at the bottom of the list, paying six times less than what a family needs to survive, is the World Bank. The full list, from best paying to worst, below the fold. ... read more »
Posted on 20 August, 2008 - 14:53
Everybody Poops (edible edition)
Photo Credit kylita
I've just finished reading an excellent book on shit. Entitled
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, and written by Rose George, it's an investigation of the ways in which humanity does, or doesn't, clean up after itself. The book is a splendid blend of anthropology, sociology, economics, and toilet humour, written in a style that, above all, is clean. It's tremendously readable, highly recommended, and after reading it, your porcelain throne will never seem the same again.
What's the connection between food and what food becomes when we're done with it (other than the obvious one)? ... read more »
Posted on 18 August, 2008 - 15:07
Apologies for the hiatus in blogging, which this post will do little to remedy.
I'm in Delhi at the moment to launch the Indian edition of Stuffed and Starved. If you're nearby (and I know a few visitors to this site are in and around Delhi), do think of dropping by. Details below.
For everyone else, I promise to get back to writing about the food crisis - here's a piece that just came out in the Sunday Mail - and about other nuggets of hope and dismay in the long fight for good food. ... read more »
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Posted on 10 August, 2008 - 02:59
I'm not at all used to the world of punditry, even though it is increasingly what I find myself doing these days. And the confines of soundbites in short mass-media-segments are something I've had trouble with before and no doubt will again.
Take today, on the Jim Lehrer News Hour. I wanted to make the point that while the rhetoric of the WTO talks was about 'access to markets', farmers in developing countries would love to have access to their own markets. But they can't because the WTO rules allow them to be driven off the land by subsidised imports grown on mega farms in the EU and US. ... read more »
Posted on 30 July, 2008 - 23:55
The blamestorming and name-calling has begun around the WTO collapse. I'll post more about that particular storm in a teacup soon. Update: Here's a swift thinkpiece on the WTO.
But regarding the insults that have been hurled across the playground of the Atlantic, it's amusing to see that Europe has increasingly been calling America, in print, art and cinema, a "big fat meanie".
There's more to be said about the politics of flab, who has it, who doesn't, and what it means, but while I assemble the argument, I thought I'd share a couple of bits of evidence.
The first came via email with the caption After a two year visit to the United States, Michelangelo's David is returning to Italy
Posted on 30 July, 2008 - 18:10
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