Category Archives for food

Starving Our Future — Jamie Oliver at TED


I wish for everyone to help create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.
- Jamie Oliver, TED2010

Wie ihr es immer dreht und wie ihr’s immer schiebt
Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.
Erst muß es möglich sein auch armen Leuten
Vom großen Brotlaib sich ihr Teil zu schneiden.
- Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, 1928

TED prize-winner Jamie Oliver is mad about American obesity, and shared it freely with the audience at TED yesterday:

At one point in this impassioned talk largely about (re-)teaching kids about food, he shows a clip of school children who are totally baffled by these objects — common vegetables — that Oliver has brought into their class.

The problem is there are no food-knowledgeable people in the school system, he says, and he cites that if we really investigated what we fed kids at school, we’d find every government in the world guilty of child abuse.

Amongst his chronicles of the many terrible health affects of our country’s mainstream food, Oliver also offers hope — because this is a curable issue. “If I could come up here today with a cure for AIDS or cancer, you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me. All this bad news is preventable — very very preventable.”

Real tangible change can be had, he says, from junk to fresh food: “six and a half grand per school — that’s all it takes.”

What is $6500 to the $6K ticket-holders in the TED audience? (With all respect to TED that we can watch the proceedings for free online).

Now — what is $6500 to schools faced immediately with $113 million dollars in cuts? It’s more than a luxury — it’s an impossibility.

And what is a school without well-nourished bodies and the minds they could support? We do nothing less than starve our future by malnourishing our children.

It’s a dizzying rollercoaster ride — from Oliver’s deadly iteration of the current situation to the hope that this is curable — to the tragedy of a rich nation preventing to fulfill this hope, and somehow, back to the hope that this is solvable. “It’s the future; it’s the only way,” says Oliver.

OH TCHO


‘nutty’ has arrived!’

Originally uploaded by moyalynne

Oh! TCHO! Just like Blue Bottle Coffee, you are ruining me for all the others; you are killing me quite nicely. I received your shipment of “Nutty” today. At once, all other chocolates lapse from my mind as mere impostors — and that is a tall order.

Let me try to repeat what happened with me when I uncorked “Nutty” today:

  • (tears open unobtrusive brown paper wrapper,) MMM, smells good
  • (places square in mouth,) Smooth texture; calm silky chocolate (at first!)
  • (chews chocolate,) Wow — powerful flavor. Nutty? I don’t taste nutty. I taste — wait a minute! — An onslaught of coffee (is that Blue Bottle?) — strikes my tongue, fills my head, removes all traces of worry or care in the world — In The World!
  • (swallows,) Kazaam — I Must Always Eat This Chocolate
  • (thoughts of peanut butter well up briefly but are overcome by aroma of coffee,) I will have more — but I must wait, briefly, to assimilate this experience –
  • (lingers…,) Ahh, I taste this chocolate for a loooong time after chewing and swallowing. This is a reallllly long finish.
  • (after the finish…,) Nutty — oh, Nutty? Ahh — yes, maybe — minutes later! I Still Taste the Chocolate — is that a Nutty aftertaste? aha. aha… more, please.

more …

Sustainability and the Long Tail

It strikes me that the “long tail,” the economic model popularized by Chris Anderson, either IS or IS NOT about extinction. With the long tail, says Wikipedia, “Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes.” What this means to me is that I can find and buy whatever I want, usually on the Internet.

It’s well known around our parts that legions of bookstores have been forced to close directly or indirectly because of internet competition. No doubt this was a factor in brick-and-mortar Tower Records’ demise as well. This greatly affects the quality of life in our communities. Don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to have the choice of what I want to buy – and to be able to buy exactly what I want.

Take lightbulbs. I have a lamp that in rather ominous terms calls specifically for “Type B” lamps: “RISK OF FIRE. USE ONLY TYPE B LAMPS.” Now – I don’t even know what Type B lightbulbs are. And did I find them when I walked to the local hardware store? Nope. Did I buy the dangerous, threatening Type A lightbulbs instead? Yep. Could I have found Type B lightbulbs on the long-tail of the internet? Most certainly. Given the choice, here I am willfully risking fire over the potential closure of local hardware stores. Provided the dangerous B bulbs don’t burn our house down, this means I choose sustainability.

For local, sustainable food, the long tail might mean a species, one way or another. Oddly enough, as Barbara Kingsolver points out in her latest great book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which of course mildly ironically has a corresponding Web site), widely consuming and hence escalating demand for rare vegetable foods means they are more likely to survive as species – for instance, special heirloom vegetables such as tomatoes or potatoes. Not so for wild animals! For example, for our threatened pacific wild salmon. More consumption means more risk of extintion (though the salmon farmers would have you believe otherwise). It could be that long-tail models are both helping and hurting when it comes to sustainability.

Speaking of salmon, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s excellent seafood guides, the one place they still run abundantly free and wild is up in Alaska. And in fact I’ll be out for the next two weeks on the Dawn Princess as it leaves its long-tail wake in the oceans up towards Alaska. While I don’t expect to be twittering or flickring (well, probably flickring) nearly as much, you CAN catch a glimpse of everywhere we go with the bridge cam. I’m sure you’ll be on the edge of your seat!

We’ll try to leave a few salmon left over in the sea for everyone.