before you give your thanks, read on

i told you i'd be writing about eating animals soon enough, and here it starts—and not at a more opportune time.

first off, check out the book's site. for those with time to kill, especially those of you at work, the site's a good way to kill it. it's interactive, smart, and honestly, kind of fun. obviously though, i'm encouraging you to read more about this book.

but while you're there click on the graphic that says "talk turkey." and if you don't, well, you're gonna get it here, cuz this is what you'd find:

this year as you plan your holiday meal, consider the animal that is so often at the center of the table. what do we know about it? how was it raised? what was it fed? how was it killed?  is it even possible to find these things out?

are the answers to these questions in line with your values, your family's values and the values we are celebrating during the holiday season?

if our holiday meals are supposed to serve as a reflection of our gratefulness, can a turkey that spends its life crammed by the tens of thousands into giant warehouses, on antibiotics, that has been bred to suffer—as is true for more than 99% of turkeys sold in america—be the choice we feel best about?

this holiday season, consider the turkey. take this conversation in any direction you'd like. the most important thing is that our choices be deliberate.

there's nothing more powerful than an informed conversation.

that's when a list of links will follow.

do me a favor—give me just one more thing to be thankful for this thursday. click on them.

      resources:
    * what is a turkey?
    * what is factory farming?
    * find a locally raised turkey
    * meat-free holiday meal recipes

i'd love to hear how many have ever given thought to how our farmers are able to make so many turkeys available for a day when so much of the country will be cooking and eating them. think about that. how do they do it? as the book exposes, they've got it down to a science, which really takes any semblance of the word farm out of the picture. the turkeys come from what are called factory farms, but it's hardly fair to leave the word farm in there—because as you'll learn, the turkeys we eat today are so far removed from the turkeys of a hundred years ago, that something else all together is going on with this foodstuff, so much so that i really think it is fair to question if these producers and suppliers continue to mislead the public into thinking their birds are coming from farms, how it's anything other than downright criminal?

or maybe you don't want to know or even think about where your food is coming from? that's fair, right? if the farmers are giving us product that is affordable and fresh, who cares how they do it. it's feeding our families, right? i completely empathize with that perspective—and when i'm with my family this thursday, it's probably why i won't be able to pass on the carved bird from the resort buffet we feast on annually in channel islands. but then again, maybe i will. in that moment, it's my choice, isn't it?

but if you have thought about it, and i'd shared this information with you sooner, would this have changed things? there's a link above to localharvest.org, which is a site that specializes in locating organic and nearby farmers for the everyday jane doe. from that link, you could find a turkey farmer that raises birds humanely, and i'd hope find one who isn't raising these genetically modified birds humanely, but rather offspring of the birds we'd farmed before factory farms ever existed. would you have put in the extra work, and most likely the extra cash, to feed your family one of these birds?

jonathan safran foer is a vegetarian. for him, writing the book was illuminating, but illuminating to a way of eating that he has given up. if nothing else, what he discovered further solidified his eating stance. for me, a downright meat-lover, reading those same discoveries has majorly shifted my views on the food i eat. people say the body is a temple, and though it's cliché, isn't there something to the saying? shouldn't i have to work hard to find foods that are worthy of feeding me, if my body is indeed a temple?

the sad thing is, in essence, i'm working hard to reverse and deter all of the opposite hard work that's produced a multi-billion dollar industry of genetically modified and scientifically controlled food production.

and i'll simply ask this, how in the world does a brief—and i promise dead-on accurate—description of our food systems like the one i just made make eating poultry appetizing?

i'm aware my writing comes across as preachy, almost rant-like. that's because it's spontaneous, which in turn captures whatever emotions i might be feeling in the moment. usually, with something like this, i'd imagine the writing reflects something like anger, which i realize isn't always affective. i apologize for this, but it's the nature of the format i'm writing within.

as a side note, the picture i pulled from thewe.cc at the top is a modest snapshot of factory farming, a visual that doesn't represent anything close to what the industry actually gets away with, largely because i didn't want to subject anyone involuntarily to something i'd imagine a lot of people never want to see.

but again, please, if you've read this far, read further on about this book. and for those that do, i'd love to hear further thoughts on this mess...

that's what a hamburger's, all about

 i leave for california tomorrow night, and the first thing i'm gonna wanna do is hit up in-n-out burger at some point before i turn in. i left california more than four years ago and the more that number goes up, the more i miss certain things about the place—or i guess another way of looking at it is, it's become pretty clear what i need to squeeze in while i'm home. in-n-out is the obvious destination, but then i have other spots like adagio, which is a small italian restaurant my parents have been going to for years, and yogurt delite, which outside of dole whip floats at disneyland, serves the best soft-serve i've ever had (banana cream pie). the point is, in so many ways, food really defines the places we've been, doesn't it?

home to me is a double-double animal style with a chocolate shake for a nightcap and the seafood tacos at howdy's in malibu for lunch the next day.

fair haven, ny, which is where i've spent summers for almost twenty years, is rudy's, a burger-flippin'-fish-fry on the shore of lake ontario.

boston is oysters from neptune or b&g or legal, the prosciutto and pesto sandwich on baguette from darwin's in harvard square, and the keith lockhart from mr. bartley's.

for my friend erika, summer after summer—and weekend getaways, too—is washing down new england seafood on the screen porch with pbr (nothing better for a byob) at moby dick's to the backdrop of a cape cod sunset and an ice cold goombay smash from the beachcomber in wellfleet after a day in the sand.

and the list goes on and on. i've been in chicago for five months and already birchwood kitchen is my go-to when i'm too lazy to make a sandwich, and though it opened a couple weeks ago, know that big star is gonna trump bluebird for the local watering hole (the pork belly tacos kinda give it the obvious leg up). and the longer i'm here, the more the food i eat will define the place i am.

but what do you think? am i just some food obsessed nut attaching everything important thing in life to what he eats? or, do you do the same? even though they've never left, i know everybody back home holds in-n-out in the same esteem i do—it's sacreligious not to. but what else? think of the places you've been. it's obvious that different foods define different regions of this country, and i can't forget the world kinda-sorta-maybe-definitely fits that mold too, but when it comes down to it, doesn't the food you eat, decided by the places you've chosen to go, define where it is your shoes have tred?

i hope so, because for me there's nothing more comforting than that first bite of something nearly forgotten after it's been left behind.

dishing it out for food and wine

i've been busy working on a few things, and the posting has taken a hit because of it. so, for the sake of something, here's something:

monday night i worked with steph and the crew at the food and wine entertaining showcase. grant achatz from alinea was there, art smith and graham elliot bowles also were there (both on top chef masters this past summer), and more than fifteen other chefs joined in, inlcuding paul virant who came within a point of knocking off chef morimoto on iron chef a couple weeks ago. it's fair to say this thing was packed with star power. and the best part? we were the only table serving their dish up in the patron lounge, which was literally pouring free patron cocktails the entire night (even before the doors opened in our case...)

on the plate: pan seared nantucket bay scallops (so awesome to see a new england product make its way to the midwest), pancetta, braised pistachios, a sunchoke puree, preserved lemon, and pomegrante seeds. with all the p's, we had a few laughs over how hard the dish was to describe throughout the night when the rush hit. not so easy a thing to say ten times fast...

here's steph's write-up on the night, too.

aside from this, news broke early in the week on the state of the bluefin tuna, and i wanted to post on it first thing. npr and other news outlets have already broken stories on it, but here's hoping i can get something up tomorrow. things are very, very bad on that front.

(photos thanks to steph and tommy blue)

guy walks into a bookstore

i haven't finished a moveable feast, and now i can't find it. this is a bad habit of mine, starting a book and setting it aside to finish later. i'm still just a couple hundred pages from finishing up tree of smoke, which i started two years ago. but over the last week or so i've been thinking about this blog and whether or not it's a bunch of babble and kicking around the usual prodding of self-doubt, as writers tend to often do. just like his work, the writer never seizes to be a work in progress. so i took a page from hemingway and made a trip to the bookstore.

hemingway wrote that rather than purge his writing and carry on and on, as soon as he stopped writing, he also stopped his thoughts on his work, which i think any writer will tell you is practically impossible. but he had a remedy to help achieve this, and that remedy was to read. to read and read and read.

a few days ago the la times published a q&a with johnathon safron foer, whose everything is illuminated achieved someting of a cult following amongst my peers when i was an undergrad at usc. i read his second novel (extremely loud and incredibly close) in my first weeks as a grad student in boston, so when i found out his new book was in fact non-fiction, taking aim at factory farming and so many of the issues i've tried to bring to light in this blog, bringing the book home was a no brainer. i started it today and have already found thoughts and facts within its first pages that i'll more than likely reflect on here. the book is called eating animals.

i also came home with this year's edition of one of my favorite books from the past year: the 2009 edition of best food writing.  for fiction writers, this series is known as best american, or in long form, the best american short stories. i first read a best american collection as an undergrad, which for any writer is a goldmine of proof for what editors are buying in the small and grossly competetive short fiction market. the best food writing series is no different. represented this year are publications like gourmet and saveur and various city papers, but so too are small press pubs like gastronomica and even trend-driven sites like chow.com. point being, the book is a serious effort to find the best on food that writers had to offer from the past year. these aren't restaurant reviews and apple pie recipes, but rather the true grit of what's going on with our foodstuff. these are stories that would grab anybody's attention.

 

and then i saw this:

since the eighties, charlie trotter has been one of the world's best chefs. his restaurant is in nearby lincoln park and dinner there will set most people back a week's income. i haven't yet met the man and at this point in my life, he's one of two chefs who, having managed to stay safely away from the public eye, i view as something of an immortal—a status achieved solely through professionalism and reflected reputation (the other is thomas keller, who i was bummed to see will be on a certain bravo tv show next wednesday night). the book pictured above is his first cookbook, its influence stemming from his restaurant up to the early nineties, which is when the book was published. what i walked out with was one of three autographed first-edition copies of the book that were just hanging out on the bottom of a promotional cookbook endcap, the covers on the books with enough wear and tear that they easily could've been sitting unsold in that store for several years (as it was, they'd been published  fifteen years ago).

alicia thought buying that book was a pretty stupid thing to do, and maybe it was, but i drove home with a big ol' grin slapped across my face.

i definitely think there's redemption to be found when reading a book. whether it's to deter the mind from a fight with a friend or to keep busy on a snowed-in saturday in the middle of winter or, in my case, to find that spark a writer needs to keep on going, it's there in so many ways. this is a different kind of redemption, though. one that doesn't blow holes in the ground nor draw blood from the wounds of war. at least for me, when i read, i'm finding a way to redeem those demons inside of me that keep me from getting where i want to go.

perk those ears: a conversation with wendell berry

in the grassroots shakeup of our agricultural systems that's slowly creeping up on this country, michael pollan receives a mainstream sense of praise, or to say, is a household name, at this point of the movement. undoubtedly, he is its poster boy. but even pollan looks up to another man. wendell berry.

in yesterday's post i linked to an interview hosted by kqed public radio with mr. berry, but that wasn't enough for me. i wanted to bring this man directly to you as best i could.

i promise you, at one point or another, you've read this man's words.

he is a celebrated and decorated poet; he is, like pollan, an essayist of extreme wisdom and insight on the socioeconimic and cultural doings of our country; and, as goes in hand with his writings, from poetry to prose, a man who is in the business of agricultre, if not the business of improving of such.

for more than forty years mr. berry and his wife have tended to their kentucky farm, backing by practice what the words he writes implicitly preach.

i was first touched by this man's words in an undergraduate poetry workshop a few years back. several months ago, i was inspired again when i went at his groundbreaking book, now over thirty years since first printing, the unsettling of america.

play this while cooking dinner or folding laudry or sitting in traffic because now, it's your turn.

what's beneath the whispers

the sole reason i have content to post on this blog is because our food systems are in bad, bad shape. over the past months i've hit on everything from the disappearance of aquatic species and the fall of the fisherman to the criminal practices of the major meat processors to the need for cooks to reemerge within the home kitchen. well, the thing of it is, there's more and more to go off on every day.

take a look at these stories in major, national publications over the past few days:

ny times, november 3: fighting child obesity and nutrition
- a white house chef who wears two hats

ny times, november 3: the push for local and organic, even in our schools
- someone's in the kitchen with michelle: the secret ingredient is politics

la times, november 4: challenging the home cook
- chefs thomas keller and mark peel take on home cooking

boston globe, november4: again, more on child nutrition
- kids' menus should grow up to be as interesting as their parents'

food on the food, october 29: sustainable seafood (from a blogger who gets it)
- something's fishy around here

the atlantic, november 4: more on seafood and the sputtering way of life of the fisherman
- saving seafood from extinction

slow food los angeles, november 3: the man who reopened our eyes to agriculture
- wendell berry on kqed

and i could go on and on. the thing of it is, that's sad, don't you think? the slant of the hill for this battle is so steep, the issues so many, that it seems impossible to actually win. we have to worry about eating beef that's been to pasture, eating seafood that's on the current sustainability card, figuring how to feed our children the right foods, eating local, cooking more in our kitchens, and on and on and on... how does one do it all? even one who cares and wants to do it all, is it possible?

it sure makes the task of reform, of convincing the rest of the country to follow suit, a complete joke, right? but then again, who would've thunk a thrown together band of farmers and masons and skilled craftsmen would've ever defeated the army of the farthest reaching empire the world has ever known... these are the united states after all, aren't they?

with enough conviction, and the smallest of possible steps, taken slow bit by slow bit, i think we might just get there.

but you have to put in the effort. it starts with that, with clicking on just one of those stories above. with absorbing what people are trying to say. and call me crazy, but my gut's saying you just might end up reading more and more.

the thing of it is, don't stop there. spread it. talk about it. challenge your friends. ask if they know where that cheeseburger they're eating came from; how that fish they're eating is helping kill off a species, and a way of life; and why shopping at the major grocery chains is only further fueling the danger we face in climate change.

the ball's in your court, now.