Robert Jensen : Toni Tipton-Martin and the Politics of the Kitchen

The many faces of Aunt Jemima. Image from The Jemima Code.
The Jemima Code:
Toni Tipton-Martin explores the
politics of the kitchen, past and present

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2011

AUSTIN -- In the cafeteria-turned-classroom at UT Elementary School, Toni Tipton-Martin struggles to keep six restless boys focused on hot cocoa, the day’s nutrition lesson. She starts with a store-bought cocoa mix, guiding the students through the list of “all those crazy ingredients” -- the tongue-twisting list of scary-sounding additives and preservatives -- before explaining how they will use four simple ingredients to make their own.

The students are eager to measure and mix, but Tipton-Martin is also teaching critical thinking -- and patience -- in her SANDE mentoring and training program. She has them examine various kinds of chocolate, encouraging them to “taste with your sense of smell -- the cinnamon makes it Mexican chocolate,” trying to engage these youngsters of the digital age in a more embodied way of knowing.

When she is satisfied that they understand what they are doing, the boys go to work with their measuring cups and mixing bowls, producing their cocoa creations that will go home with them in a plastic bag.

When the lesson is over, Tipton-Martin walks the students back to their homeroom, past the vegetable-and-herb garden that is also part of SANDE (the acronym stands for “Spirit, Attitude, Nutrition, Deeds, and Emotions”). She isn’t just trying to teach young people to cook healthy food and understand nutrition, but to understand where food comes from and why it all matters.

Folks in the United States are coming to understand that all this does matter very much. Industrial agriculture and fast food still dominate, but more and more people are shopping at farmers markets, seeking out healthy food, and recognizing the social costs of reckless eating habits.

For Tipton-Martin -- an African-American chef teaching mostly black and brown kids -- it’s a particularly opportune moment to be working on these issues, as Michelle Obama is using the First Lady’s pulpit to focus attention on childhood obesity. Last June, Tipton-Martin was one of the chefs and nutritionists on the South Lawn of the White House to promote Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, and this week she’s front and center at the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals being held in Austin (she’s chair of the host city committee).

So, all in all, it’s been a good year for Tipton-Martin, as her career takes a turn around another of several bends. Her resume includes newspaper journalism (a food writer/editor, first at The Los Angeles Times and then the Cleveland Plain Dealer), cookbook writing and editing, and non-profit work (a four-year stint at Southern Foodways Alliance , a center dedicated to documenting and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the American South, housed at the University of Mississippi).

Since moving to Austin in 1999, she’s created a niche for herself as a writer/activist/social entrepreneur, a status marked by the Community Leadership Award she received from the University of Texas in 2010.

Yet for all the success, the 52-year-old Tipton-Martin is a woman haunted, not by traumatic memories from her own life but by Aunt Jemima. Not just by the Aunt Jemima caricature -- the commercial persona for the “Mammy” figure from plantation life that has sold pancake mix and syrup -- but by the real African-American women in kitchens through the centuries, during and after slavery, whose work and wisdom has been ignored.

That’s why, no matter which of her current enterprises is consuming her time, Tipton-Martin is always working on cracking “The Jemima Code,” her phrase for getting past the caricature to the real lives of those women.

Drawing on varied sources -- oral and written histories from both slaves and slave-holding families, old cookbooks, and people’s stories -- Tipton-Martin has for the past two years been adding stories of those women to her website by that name, convinced that there’s a deep lesson in how white Americans, especially in the South, have dealt with these women.

In one of her blog entries, Tipton-Martin explains that “Aunt Jemima became the embodiment of our deepest antipathy for, and obsession with, the women who fed us with grace and skill.” Many white families depended on Jemima and despised her at the same time, leaving these women who cooked and cared for families on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Rather than merely pity such women as exploited laborers or romanticize them as the ultimate maternal figure, Tipton-Martin wants to tell the stories of their skill and creativity:

Why don’t we celebrate their contributions to American culture the way we venerate the imaginary Betty Crocker? Why wasn’t their true legacy preserved? Can we ever forget the images of ignorant, submissive, selfless, sassy, asexual despots? Is it possible to replace the mostly unflattering pictures of generous waistlines bent over cast iron skillets burned into our eyes? Will we ever believe that strong African women, who toted wood and built fires before even thinking about beating biscuit dough or mixing cakes, left us more than just their formulas for good pancakes?

Tipton-Martin’s interest is not merely historical; by telling the stories of these women, she hopes not only to remind the black community of their strength but also to give white people an opening for honest self-reflection.

When Tipton-Martin says she is haunted by those women, it is really the racism, sexism, and economic inequality they faced that haunt her. And it’s not really those historical forces, but the enduring presence of those inequalities in American life that Tipton-Martin can’t shake.

“These women create ways for me to interact with my own past,” she says, and struggle with the present.

Toni Tipton-Martin talks to UT Elementary students as they head to the garden. Image from UT Blogs.
Tipton-Martin grew up in the middle class in Los Angeles at a time when more opportunities were opening up for some blacks, especially those who were trained to fit into white society. Tipton-Martin was one of them, a good student who took to journalism and early on learned how to live “in costume,” offering a profile that wouldn’t scare white people.

That kind of bargain with the dominant culture can be soothing but is rarely satisfying, and Tipton-Martin’s own struggles run through “Jemima Code.” For example, she tells the story of Vera Beck, who was the test kitchen cook at the Cleveland newspaper. Tipton-Martin writes that Beck “forced me to circle back and confront [my] ‘contrary instincts’”:

I thought I was contented -- a thirty-something food editor living far away from home on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, enjoying amazing and exotic world cuisine -- the daughter of a health-conscious, fitness-crazed cook whose experiments with tofu, juicing and smoothies predated the fads. In the few short years we had together at the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Vera taught me a few life lessons while showing me the way to light and flaky buttermilk biscuits.

Among those lessons was the recognition that Tipton-Martin’s upbringing in a more integrated world also had cut her off from a tradition based on observation and apprenticeship in the kitchen, which was about more than cooking. “It was entirely possible that I would stumble blindly through the rest of my life without ever discovering the Aunt Jemima spirit living in me, if it hadn’t been for Vera Beck,” she writes.

Tipton-Martin is blunt in describing the complexity of the race and gender politics of her life. Being light-skinned with naturally straight hair -- “I look like the Jezebel house servant mulatto girls of slavery” -- made it easier to enter the middle class, she says. But at the same time, her appearance meant she had to “overcome the stereotype that I’m Barbie, too.” She speaks about the advantages she’s had, but doesn’t ignore either the racism or sexism of the culture.

As time goes on, Tipton-Martin is less willing to don the costume, less interested in presenting herself and her work in ways that make it easy for others. Rather than cashing in on the moment by writing a breezy recipe book that exploits the women of the Jemima Code -- something along the lines of “Mammy’s sassy lessons for healthy cooking” -- she wants to write a book that confronts the social and political issues. “Everybody’s intrigued,” she says, when she takes the idea to agents and publishers, but wary.

Tipton-Martin knows well how the white world rewards people of color who fit in, rather than challenge, white norms. But she finds it more and more difficult to smile away the racist or ignorant comments.

An example: At the opening event for the new Foodways Texas project (she’s a board member), Tipton-Martin said a white woman told her that this work on food and nutrition is so important because “those people” come from cultures with bad diets. “I used to just smile” at such comments, she says, “but that day I told her the problem was not ‘their’ cultures but fast food and processed food, which is an American problem."

Tipton-Martin has increasingly less patience for what we might call “the ignorance of the privileged” -- the desire of people with status and wealth to explain away problems of inequality as simply the failure of “those people” rather than think about the injustice of the system, from which the privileged benefit.

But she also recognizes that people struggling in difficult circumstances -- especially the kids from poor neighborhoods, disproportionately black and brown -- need more than political analysis. She rejects the simplistic “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” prescription of conservatives but believes that young people need role models. That’s where the women of the Jemima Code come in:

For me, they are important role models. They’re the closest I can get to saying to this [younger] generation that there are women who had it harder than you. Even though you think your life is really hard -- and it is, and there are all these forces against you -- you can persevere. The women of the Jemima Code took control of their lives under circumstances in where they didn’t even have control of their own bodies, but they were able to claim their dignity.

For Tipton-Martin, those women are not just potential role models for young people but for herself as well. She writes, “I discover that the woman I am becoming is a mere shadow of the women they were: patient and loving; smart, talented, hard-working; strong physically and emotionally, compassionate; multi-tasking.”

Tipton-Martin has a habit of engaging in the critical self-reflection that she asks of others, which leads to a professional and personal restlessness. She was raised to assimilate, to fit in, to prove to the dominant culture that she could make it under the rules written by white people, by men, by the wealthy. She was fitted for “the costume,” but found it increasingly uncomfortable.

“As long as I could just keep popping from costume to costume, I didn’t have to reconcile any of this and find out what it is that I hoped to accomplish,” Tipton-Martin says.

Negotiating life without a costume means talking honestly about a history -- collective and personal -- that the dominant culture desperately wants to ignore. That means not only highlighting the skill and accomplishments of the women of the Jemima Code, but facing the pain, anger and shame that comes with living in a system that still values white people, men, and the wealthy over others.

For Tipton-Martin, that conversation can start at dinner by giving a voice to the women who for so long put food on the table.

LINKS:

• Tipton-Martin’s website
• The Jemima Code website
• Watch Tipton-Martin’s talk on the Jemima Code to the Culinary Historians of Southern California in November 2010.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009) and Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film Abe Osheroff: One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing, which chronicles the life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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Mariann G. Wizard : You Eat Too Much!

Image from diettogo.
Stayin’ Alive:
The reason for the season is not food

If what we love becomes the act of eating in itself, we’re shortchanging ourselves on the rest of life.

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / December 8, 2010

You won’t want to read this story.

You won’t want to hear what I have to say.

Here it is anyway: YOU EAT TOO MUCH!!!

Not only you, of course, almost all adult Americans gain five pounds annually between Thanksgiving and New Year’s; five pounds that Never. Comes. Off.

The real problem, however, isn’t holiday over-indulgence; it’s the mindset that feasting and gorging is an integral, necessary part of any celebration, even the ones we have every day when we leave work.

Today the world is experiencing a burgeoning epidemic of adult onset diabetes, especially among children -- soon the old name for diabetes type 2 may be wholly obsolete. It’s been predicted that by 2020 -- in less than 10 years! -- nearly one-half of American adults will have type 2 diabetes. Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer are the three most frequent causes of human death today. While each is multifactorial, rather than having a single cause, they share one underlying risk factor above all: obesity, overweight, plain old fat.

Diet-related illnesses have been linked epidemiologically to transitions away from traditional diets in many parts of the world to a so-called “Western diet”: one heavy on red meat, transfats, carbohydrates, white sugar, white flour, and lots of salt.

They’re on the rise as well in the American heartland, where this very diet is the traditional fare. However, most Americans no longer do the farm labor or other exacting physical work that their grandparents did, yet many still “eat like farmhands."

The equation isn’t really complicated. Food intake produces energy. Energy that is not burned off by activity accumulates as mass. And mass that accumulates on your body is called what?

Our hearts are not built to carry and aerate the equivalent of two or more people’s mass. Our bodies do not produce sufficient insulin to digest heaping helpings of sugar. The stress of constantly dealing with too much food intake can contribute to chronic inflammation, communications malfunctions in cells, and eventually can lead to cancer.

While the concept of “super-sizing” junk foods, in particular, is a recipe for disaster, it’s important to understand that it’s just as possible to consume too many calories from healthy foods as from unhealthy ones. I can easily consume the same amount of calories from yogurt as from ice cream, if I just keep shoving it in the pie-hole!

Friend of The Rag Blog Frances Morey, in her book, The Skinny on Weight Loss (Xlibris, 2002), details her highly successful struggle to lose weight and keep it off for many years, in practical and hilarious form. What I use most from among her tips is the knowledge that, in its natural resting state, my stomach is about the size of my own clenched fist, and the idea that if the stomach is repeatedly stretched and distended beyond this size, several times a day, day after day for years, it loses its ability to bounce back to its natural size.

Recent evidence suggests that habitually engorged stomachs -- quite logically -- have more of the cells that signal hunger. The bigger the tummy, the more it demands.

But you don’t have to give in.

It’s important, if you want to avoid putting on that five pounds in December, or in January, to keep a few principles in mind:

Remember that food is not the reason for the season -- any season. We eat for energy to do the things we must do, the things we want to do, hopefully, the things we love. If what we love becomes the act of eating in itself, we’re shortchanging ourselves on the rest of life.

This isn’t to say that meals shouldn’t be savored! And we sure don’t want to get into the mind-set of self-denial, a damnably unhealthy emotional state in which one is divided against him/herself. That’s when you start “rewarding” yourself with “forbidden” foods. NOTHING IS FORBIDDEN. You are the boss of yourself.

But this is where the old adage, “All things in moderation” really applies. A small piece of pie is as delicious as a giant piece.

Before you go out to a party or holiday dinner, take a few moments to think about the people who will be there, what you want to discuss and do with them, and what they mean in your life. Good dinner conversation can be an effective aid to moderate intake.

Then make a fist and take a good long look at it. How much are you willing to stretch your stomach tomorrow for one more tamale today?

Now, not to claim I’m not packing some extra baggage, because I for sure am, but I’m trying hard to hold the line where the scale needle hovers. I usually have a small, healthy, low-fat snack before going to an event where food will be present, so I’m less tempted to camp out next to the buffet table.

It’s also wise to remember that, whether it’s a holiday or not, foods eaten less than four hours before bedtime are much more likely to be stored as fat than expended in activity. This is true even for items made with white chocolate and macadamia nuts.

Again thanks to Morey’s book, I’m also more conscious now of portion size. At Thanksgiving, for example, I was able to put two bites of almost everything available on my plate, and really, that was plenty. Smaller servings, eaten without haste and with conscious appreciation, let your stomach tell you when it’s getting full, so you can stop before you have to pop the button on your trousers.

These days, if possible, I like to provide myself and other party-goers with diabetic-safe sweets that don’t give a harmful “rush” of sugar in the blood, but are still rich and satisfying. Recent Food and Drug Administration approval of the South American herb stevia for use as a sweetener rather than a “nutritional supplement” is making party foods possible that, whatever their other ingredients, will at least make the dessert table accessible, and guilt-free, to diabetics, pre-diabetics, or simply careful eaters.

Alcohol intake may also rise during the holidays, and beer and mixed drinks typically contain many calories. Their use should be subject to the same considerations as food: don’t go to the party primarily to get sloshed; don’t drink alcoholic beverages to quench thirst (that’s what water is for!); do drink slowly and in moderation.

One way to get something more out of a holiday cocktail is to ask for an after dinner digestive, such as anything made with angostura. So-called “bitter principles” stimulate bile production. Bile is essential in digesting fats. High fat consumption is an underlying cause of high cholesterol and related cardiovascular issues. The sooner it’s digested and excreted, the less chance it has of sticking to your honky-tonk bedonk!

Speaking of honky-tonks, if you know you have or are about to overindulge in caloric intake, you also need a conscious plan to burn off that extra energy. Yes, this can be especially difficult during the busy holidays, and no, battling the shopping mobs on Black Friday doesn’t count.

Often, cold weather and early nightfall restrict outdoor activities as well. But the simple fact is that you have to move it to lose it. Whatever physical activity you do get in, turn it up a notch for the duration: walk a little faster, dance a little harder, drive to the hoop instead of going for the outside jumper. Take the dog twice around the park instead of once; make love more passionately. Sweat, and get your heart pumping like you mean it, several times a week.

If you’re the one throwing the party, clear some floor space and put on some dance tunes, then get out on the floor yourself and cut a rug! Your guests will surely follow, and all will be the merrier for a great cardio workout.

Need a negative motivator for movement? Diabetic neuropathy is a frequent outcome necessitating removal of gangrenous tissue or, often, entire digits or limbs. As long as you have legs and feet to walk with, take the stairs.

I can already hear some of you pissing and moaning about how your heart won’t let you “indulge” in strenuous activity -- like it’s something you’d otherwise want to do! And yes, you need to be healthy enough to exercise before you start getting carried away with activity! If you have any doubt about it, consult your health care provider.

But if you really aren’t healthy enough to exercise, then overeating is... there’s no nice way to say this... somewhat self-defeating. If your health is already impaired, what sugar-dipped or fried thing in the world is delicious enough to make you willing to hurt yourself more?

Well, maybe it’s the double-fudge brownie cheesecake with sour cream sauce. Maybe it’s the pork sandwich on fried bread. Maybe it’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted. Maybe it’s your last meal?

Go ahead, make yourself happy -- but can you maybe try to be happy eating just one? Or do you like knowing that your Higher Power is a stuffed crust meat-lover’s pizza with extra cheese? Tonight I hear homemade chocolate rugela and coconut macaroons, Hanukkah treats baked by a friend, calling me from the kitchen. I will not heed their call. I will have one (OK, two, they’re small!) tomorrow after lunch, and I swear I will walk the condo community perimeter twice in the afternoon.

Millions of words have been written about weight control. Americans spend millions of dollars a year on outrageously absurd products in hopes of dropping a few pounds at least temporarily. Yet we block out the simple, self-evident words that might actually help us: STEP AWAY FROM THE TABLE.

[Mariann Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog.]

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Foodie Friday : Bread, Puppets, and Boiled Veggies

Bread and Puppet Theater. Image from Akimbo.
Health care:
Bread and Puppet aioli

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2010

See "Boil those veggies!" by Janet Gilles, Below.

Anyone taking in the recent health care "debate" -- in whole or in part -- must surely need an antidote, and here it is: garlic! Garlic kills viruses and bacteria, supports the immune system, increases energy, lowers blood pressure, wards off vampires, and is the bane of schmoozing politicians.

You know that great yellow stuff you used to get smeared on your Bread & Puppet bread at performances* (now replaced for reasons unknown by garlic merely suspended in oil)? That stuff. What they make for the peasants in southern France and Italy: when they come in from the fields for lunch, they are handed a loaf of bread to rip apart and dip in a big, common bowl of God's gift to sweat, and a full afternoon of hard work.

Here's how you make it:
3 eggs
canola oil
1 head of garlic
salt

Separate yolks and place in large mixing bowl. Give the whites to high-cholesterol partners innocent of Lipitor.

Here's the tricky part: Pray to the aioli gods.

Add oil, A DROP AT A TIME, to the egg yolks. I'm not kidding -- a drop at a time, at least at the beginning. Bread and Puppet macho would have you whip the oil and eggs together with a fork. I cheat and use an electric mixer on low speed. Don't tell Peter Schumann.*

As the volume of oil builds up, you will be able to add it more quickly, a couple of drops, then a few, then a very thin, intermittent stream. But WARNING: if you add the oil too quickly, the aioli will not "catch," and you'll end up with an oily mess. Patience, patience. Franz Kafka wrote:

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that we were expelled from Paradise, it is because of indolence that we cannot return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were expelled, because of impatience we cannot return.

He must have been a very good aioli maker.


How much oil? Reasonable question. I'll defer the answer.

The mixing bowl should now be filled with something that looks and feels very like mayonnaise. In fact, it IS mayonnaise. This is how you make mayonnaise. The funny thing is, once you get to a certain point, you can add oil much more quickly (but not too quickly), and make as much as you like. The yellow will become more diluted, but aside from that, you can plan to feed the multitudes if you have enough oil. Add loaves and fishes if desired. That's how much oil.

Chop garlic into tiny, tiny pieces. Bread & Puppet macho insists you chop with a broad blade very sharp knife, then squoosh the pieces with the flat of the blade to squeeze out the final juice. When puppeteers aren't watching, I use a garlic press.

How much garlic? Use the whole head, or just part of it? That depends on how big the garlic is, how much aioli you are making, and how strong you want it. I've never made enough to use more than one entire head -- about half a large mixing bowl's worth.

Mix the garlic mash into the waiting bowl, and stir in thoroughly. Add salt to taste.

Eating: Although you can eat it immediately, it's best to let it stand, refrigerated for a couple of days. It mellows out into something strong and smooth, but not nastily fierce. Folks either love it or they hate it. Some stomachs can't stand too much garlic without refluxing. You can give out Rolaids with the aioli to those folks. Best on fresh-baked hearty bread.

*[Author, activist, and Rag Blog contributor Marc Estrin has been involved with the radical Vermont-based Bread & Puppet Theater -- founded by director Peter Schumann -- since 1970.]

Boil those veggies!
(Then think Aztec: add cocoa and honey...)

By Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog / March 5, 2010

The more vegetables the better is becoming settled wisdom. And my acupuncturist encourages me to boil them. The Chinese are not as dumb as everyone thinks, modern science just chooses not to investigate their methods.

So I buy whatever greens that look good at the farmers market, trim the best parts for salad, and boil the rest just until they wilt. You can bring the water or broth to a boil, turn off the fire and add the veggies. I like the bright green color the poached veggies will turn and try to catch that. Or boil them awhile if they are tough, adding some ginger if you have any.

Put hot broth and greens into a blender with some nut butter to make it milky and miso to give it body and salt; about a teaspoon of cashew, almond, or hemp butter, and a half teaspoon of miso per cup will make it really creamy, rich, and delicious.

Variations:

To make a fine soup, add some lemon juice, garlic, and parmesan and serve hot or cold, with a dash of sour cream or croutons if you like. Also good with a few shavings of nutmeg. This soup makes an excellent beginning to any meal.

For breakfast, add honey and chocolate to taste. Yes, really!!! Think Aztec. About a teaspoon of cocoa powder and a teaspoon of honey per cup make a hearty breakfast drink. Having a lot of green vegetables on hand, and recalling that the Aztecs made chocolate drinks of their food, I have begun flavoring vegetable drinks with chocolate!! Delicious.

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BOOKS/ Jonah Raskin : Michael Pollan's 'Food Rules'

We can decide what we want to eat!
Michael Pollan: America’s new Food Czar

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / January 8, 2010

[Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, by Michael Pollan. (Penguin, Trade Paperback, December 29, 2009, 112 pp, $11.00.]

A few years ago, Berkeley, California, super chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame suggested that Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser run for president and vice president, respectively. That didn’t happen, of course, and who knows what might have occurred if they had campaigned for public office. Perhaps the American public would know more about industrial farming and about the fast food industry than it does now.

Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, has largely disappeared from view for the moment. But Pollan, who has written half-a-dozen books, is more visible than ever before. In fact, he seems to have taken it upon himself to become America’s new food czar. On The Daily Show the first week of January he was certainly acting like the food czar and repeated his familiar mantra to Jon Stewart. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” he said.

In his latest book, Food Rules, which has just been published in a mass market, paperback edition, he sets out 64 rules about eating and diet. Pollan probably has as much of a right as anyone else in America to tell eaters what to put into their bodies and what to avoid.

In Botany of Desire (2001), he described the fascinating history and evolution of four plants -- apples, marijuana, tulips, and potatoes -- and their integral connections to human wants and needs. In Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), he exposed the pernicious place of corn in agribusiness, and the noxious dependency on corn syrup. He also poked holes in the halo that Whole Foods, the nation-wide food chain, was trying to wear, as though it was a spiritual institution, not a business for profit.

Then, in In Defense of Food (2008), subtitled “An Eater’s Manifesto,” Pollan took on “nutritionism,” and what he calls “the Western Diet.” At the end of that book, he offered 23 suggestions about eating properly, such as “Avoid Food Products that Make Health Claims,” “Shop the Periphery of the Supermarket and Stay Out of the Middle,” and “Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves.”

For his latest book, Food Rules (2010), he has taken his original two dozen suggestions, and boiled them down to their essence. He has also added 41 additional suggestions, such as “Serve a proper portion and don’t go back for seconds,” and stirred them all together to produce a small stew of a book. Food Rules is largely nifty packaging, or rather repackaging. It doesn’t add much that’s new. Pollan’s publisher, Penguin, has also distilled his 64 rules to 10, and has printed them on bookmarks available in stores.

It’s true that Pollan has a certain healthy sense of humor about his rules. “Food Rules” is after all a playful title, and on the last page the author urges readers and eaters to “Break the Rules Once In a While.” Still, Pollan seems to take himself much too seriously. Do Americans really need 64 rules? Probably not! Who is going to remember all 64 and abide by them? Not many people.

Moreover, Pollan doesn’t see that for nearly every one of his rules there are valid exceptions. Sometimes seconds are very much in order. Sometimes it even feels good to pig out at least once in a while. Granted, leaves -- lettuce leaves and spinach leaves -- are good for us. But so are root vegetables. Yams, carrots, turnips, and parsnips are wonderful, nutritious and tasty.

Rules, even food rules, have always been broken; perhaps they’re made to be broken. Pollan’s 64 rules surely will be broken time and again, and while some eaters no doubt appreciate guidelines, the American diet probably won’t really improve until Americans take charge of their own eating habits and don’t turn to so-called experts for advice. The country doesn’t need drug czars or food czars, whether they're self-appointed or appointed to office by a president.

Pollan can be very astute about the food industry, but at times he can also be blind, as when he suggests that Americans “buy a freezer,” and also “pay more, eat less.” The trouble with those two suggestions is that increasingly Americans can’t afford to buy a freezer or to pay more for food.

More Americans are hungry today than they have been in the last decade. Hunger is afoot in the land. More Americans are also relying on food stamps. In the light of those hard realities, Pollan’s suggestions seem like they're aimed at the middle and upper classes -- and are meant for people who can afford freezers.

He’s certainly not as oblivious to hunger as the 18th-century person who said, “Let them eat cake.” (Historians say it probably wasn’t Marie Antoinette.) But sometimes Pollan’s food rules can seem silly, and oblivious to the needs and wants of hungry Americans dependent on food stamps for their very survival.

[Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California (University of California Press).]

Find Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, by Michael Pollan on Amazon.com.

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BOOKS / 'Eating Animals' : The Beef with Factory Farms

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:
A sweeping indictment of factory farms

...what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers.

By Jessica Roy / November 8, 2009

Jonathan Safran Foer is a strict vegetarian, but his most recent book, Eating Animals, is not a screed against meat. It is, rather, an indictment of the corrupt, large-scale factory farming that dominates the American meat market.

A journalistic work with a novelistic feel, the book is the result of three years investigating the U.S. meat industry, and it weaves together animal activist and farmer interviews with statistical research and even memoir to provide a sweeping account of Big Beef and its social, economical and environmental impact. Descriptions of animals suffering on the "kill floor" are enough to incite squirms from even non-animal lovers, but cruelty is not Foer's only grievance: There are health concerns and devastating environmental damage at issue as well.

Eating Animals may be Foer's first big swing at nonfiction, but primary themes hearken back to Foer's two critically polarizing novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Family folklore and ideas about the complexity of memory permeate each; Eating Animals begins with a section titled "Storytelling," about Foer's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and passionate carnivore). "The story of her relationship with food," he writes, "holds all of the other stories that could be told about her."

The book is not without controversy, of course. Food politics gets at the very heart of what it means to be American -- alas, human -- and the subject of how and if we eat meat stirs up intense feeling. Last week, Natalie Portman kicked up a tiny tempest when she wrote about Eating Animals in a column on Huffington Post, championing Foer's argument but adding her own painfully tone-deaf riff about rape. (The controversy took place after the Salon interview but when I reached him afterward via e-mail, Foer had this to say about Portman's column: "It was such a thoughtful and generous piece of writing. I felt gratefulness more than anything else.")

I met with Foer recently in a coffee shop near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he spoke about what's wrong with PETA, how he finally went so local he ditched Amazon -- and what Americans can do to help put an end to the evils of factory farms.


This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?

It's an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it's a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force -- historically, it's unprecedented how destructive our farm system is -- has taken over America and is starting to take over the world.

And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn't require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It's not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can't stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that's as effective a rebuttal.

What if you live in a city and you don't live near a farm? I'm sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What's your suggestion for them?

Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. But you ask a good question because there are a lot of times when you don't have a choice. Like, in a restaurant, you never have a choice, with the exception of -- maybe there's 10 restaurants in New York City. In restaurants people are often faced with this problem, like, "Well, I'm either going to have to leave my values at the door and just eat this stuff, or eat vegetarian." Those are the only two choices we have.

And then people think, what does it mean to care about something if you don't act on that care? Even if it makes things less convenient, even if it makes your meal less enjoyable -- which is totally possible. But we make decisions all the time guided by our values that make our lives less convenient and less enjoyable. We do them because they're things that matter more to us than a momentary pleasure, momentary comfort. I don't know why food would be an exception.

How has writing and researching this book changed the way you and your family eat?

We were vegetarians before, and we continue to be, and we're raising our kids vegetarian. One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it's made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It's very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor.

For example, I was not a huge advocate of buying things locally, not food but like books -- anything. I would buy books on Amazon all the time. But for whatever reason, the subject does not have anything to do with that, but the process of writing it made me much more concerned about buying things locally, supporting my neighborhood stores, it mattering that I know the person who's selling me something.

That's something that's great about food is that so much intersects there. Tolstoy famously said, "If there were no more slaughterhouses there would be no more battlefields." I don't think that's true, and I don't think all battlefields are bad, but what is true is that when you start to care about food and think about the animals and how we raise them, it encourages you to have lots of other thoughts.

This is your first nonfiction book.

Well, it's my first and my last. I don't think I'll ever do it again. It's not something that interests me. I felt a little bit like dressing up for Halloween. Although, my interests at the end of the day were never really journalistic and it always did feel personal. And the themes that this book falls back on are the themes that my novels fall back on, like, how are lessons transmitted through generations and families, how do our decisions matter, how do they influence others?

So, part of what inspired me to write about this was not that I cared about it so much but that nobody was writing about it. There are a lot of things I care about, but great people are writing about them. And there hasn't really been a mainstream book about meat, despite the fact that it's everything. I mean, if it isn't the biggest, most important issue in our country right now, it's up there.

Did any specific authors or works influence your book?

Many. Of course, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer. I mean if any of them had written the thing that I wanted to read, I wouldn't have had to write my book. See, Pollan is wonderful, but he doesn't really get into meat too deeply; he sort of goes up to the edge of it and then stops. The same with Schlosser. Peter Singer writes about meat very directly, but in a way that I feel doesn't include enough of the messiness of being a person in the world and having cravings, having personal history, having family. Reason has something to do with our food decisions, but not a lot. Most food decisions are made out of emotions or psychology or impulse, and so I wanted a book that included those things.

What were some of the most surprising or disturbing things you found in your research?

The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It's a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people's exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they're the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it's still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned.

These things are not as shocking and don't work as well in a video, but they're something to be concerned with much more because they're happening to billions and billions of animals every year. It's the way that the notion that an animal is a thing has been systematized and it's part of the business model and that everyone thinks this way. That was the most surprising thing.

You also talk about your dog George, and consider why people will eat farm animals but not dogs. Can you elaborate on that?

The book in the beginning sort of presents two approaches. One is philosophical -- is it right or isn't it right? Why do we do this at all? And the other is practical. I side with the practical. I mean, the book moves in the direction of the practical because in a way the philosophical questions are irrelevant. "Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?" That's how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn't even matter.

The truth is I actually don't know what I think about that question. What I know is that it's wrong to do it the way that we're doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that's right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis. So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that's bad; I mean, those things are bad. And that conversation preempts the philosophical conversation.

Your grandmother was a huge influence on your concept of food, and you also say she's an unapologetic meat eater. How did she react to the book?



I don't think she's read it yet. I think she will agree with a lot of what I said. I don't think she's going to change. I think she's past changing. But I've had pretty frank conversations with her about what's right and what's wrong, and she'll agree -- as will everybody, by the way. There's not a reader of this interview who will say it's right to make animals suffer unnecessarily.

So then it becomes a question of what is suffering to different people and what is necessary to different people. And people can have all kinds of different, very respectable differences of opinion on this question, but I've spoken to my grandmother about why this might be wrong and she doesn't disagree. It's sad. She said in a very upfront way, "I don't think about it, I'm not going to think about it."

For someone like my grandmother -- frankly, for a lot of people -- I don't really push it. I think for people who are still forming their habits, like high school students or college students, that kind of willed ignorance is lame at best and something much worse because they're most able to change. They're the ones who are ultimately going to have to foot the bill of factory farming and are more required to do the uncomfortable thinking that a 90-year-old doesn't.

Can you talk a little bit about America's obsession with food?

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That's it. It doesn't taste good, it's not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it's cheap.

But the thing is that it's not cheap. It's cheap at the cash register, and it's sold as cheap -- that's the defense for factory farming, "Look, we're making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist." But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it's the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying.

And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness -- companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that's so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.

Aside from getting green meat and eating locally, what are things that both vegetarians and meat eaters can do to help the transition from factory farms to something better?

First of all, they just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time. I think this issue is frankly more important than our conversation about the environment, because it is the No. 1 cause of global warning. The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it's 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment.

This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we're not going to support it and we're done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don't exist or not to actively engage with them. I'm not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.

Source / Salon

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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