Author: Julia Childless

Pointer of the Day

Then, of course, there are migrant workers, who live an average of 49 years — sacrificing almost three decades compared to “normal” lifespan to bring us the endless bags of veggies and fruits we demand to keep our middle-class bodies all healthy and stuff. Parasite, meet host. I swear, the next snotty yuppie who has the guff to go on and on in my presence about how “those people” (i.e. people who have the gall to earn less than $50,000 a year) Eat Soooo Much Junk is gonna get a fair trade banana stuck in hir ear. Which sie will have to go to an emergency room to remove, and thanks to down-triaging will have to sit there in the waiting room with a banana in hir ear for five hours while everyone else points and laughs. Especially migrant workers’ kids.

What Does Health Care Reform Really Mean to American Fatasses? Part 2: Working Us To Death « fat fu (via amberlrhea)

So originally this just made me laugh—the only part I saw via Tumblr was “the next snotty yuppie…is gonna get a fair trade banana stuck in hir ear.” But then I went back in and read the whole thing (which is mostly about health care, actually, and is an interesting rant for other reasons) and realized the whole paragraph is worth citing—because it’s not only funny, it’s righteously pissed off. A 49-year lifespan?

Once again, your semi-humorous reminder that it’s not just the pesticides on your food you should be thinking about.

The Food Police

Food policing is an area in which all sorts of assumptions are made about class and ability status. It goes hand in hand with the idea that people have an obligation to be healthy, that all bodies are the same so there’s only one way to be healthy, and that there is virtue in eating “right” as dictated by current authorities in the food world. Like, say, Michael Pollan, who is editorialized fawningly in numerous publications all over the planet for his “simple” and “helpful” food rules.

this ain’t livin’ » Blog Archive » Before You Criticize the Food Choices of Others…

This is a pretty interesting post about what it may be like to prepare a “simple” meal a la Michael Pollan—if you’re a person with various disabilities. I’ve criticized the class assumptions of the “cook-it-yourself” lectures, but being an able-bodied person myself I never thought of it this way. Worth a read.

Shutterbugging

Some cameras, dear diners, now have a built-in “food” mode.

Alinea chef Grant Achatz, one of the nation’s most influential chefs, wrote in an online forum recently about the lengths diners will go to document their food — increasingly, with video cameras. He told of one diner whose camera was set on a tripod at the table.

Eye candy: Behind the lens with a food photographer :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Food

Shoot your own food porn! The Sun-Times is hosting a contest: if you take really really good pictures of your own food, then you can enter to win a half-day in the studio of another food photographer, watching HIM take pictures of food!

My head hurts. I think there’s probably a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too joke in here somewhere, but I’m missing it.

-Julia Childless

Around the Blogs with Julia Childless

Earth Day is a good opportunity to remember the tremendous discrepancies in who has access to fresh fruits and vegetables — and thus, who has the luxury of eating a healthy, balanced diet — in this country. My fellow bloggers and I have written extensively about so-called “food deserts,” where the number of grocery stores are dramatically insufficient for the number of residents. Too often, people in these neighborhoods rely on corner stores, where a bag of Doritos is cheap and available and a container of strawberries may not fit either criteria. As a result, federal, state and local governments have pushed to make healthy food more accessible. It’s a major part of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” anti-obesity initiative, and her husband’s proposed budget for next year would dedicate $400 million to bringing fresh food to corner stores. But such efforts don’t do much good if the produce that makes it to poor neighborhoods is close to spoiling or has the potential to make people sick. A new study from Drexel University researchers published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine shows that when stores in poor neighborhoods do get fresh produce, it poses both of those risks to buyers. After buying salad, strawberries, cucumbers and watermelon repeatedly over 15 months in the Philadelphia area, the scientists found that mold, microorganisms and bacteria were all more likely to be present on produce purchased from stores in poor neighborhoods than in wealthier ones. In other words, if you are a poor Philadelphian buying fruits and vegetables in your own neighborhood, chances are your produce will spoil faster and may give you food poisoning. How appetizing.

In Poor Neighborhoods, “Fresh” Produce Isn’t Always What it Seems | Poverty in America | Change.org

Yet another obstacle to getting fresh food into underserved neighborhoods.

-Julia Childhood

Around the Blogs with Julia Childless

Food is never just food. Food is love. Food is solace. It is politics. It is religion. And if that’s not enough to heap on your dinner plate each night, food is also, especially for mothers, the instant-read measure of our parenting. We are not only what we eat, we are what we feed our children. So here in Berkeley — where a preoccupation with locally grown, organic, sustainable agriculture is presumed — the mom who strolls the farmers’ markets can feel superior to the one who buys pesticide-free produce trucked in from Mexico, who can, in turn, lord it over the one who stoops to conventionally grown carrots (though the folks who grow their own trump us all). Let it slip that you took the kids to McDonald’s, and watch how fast those play dates dry up.

The Way We Live Now – The Fat Trap – NYTimes.com

Peggy Orenstein—she of the Femivore’s Dilemma—has a pretty good piece on rethinking her relationship to food as she raises daughters.

-Julia Childless

Around the Blogs with Julia Childless

The question now is, what to do about this great withering away of the means of food production? The response from conventional economists is: Let the market fix itself. If people want local, pasture-raised meat and dairy, they’ll flock to the farmers market to buy it, and farmers will take their extra profits and invest in their own facilities. But people are flocking to farmers markets; the problem is, profit margins on small-scale farming remain so tight that few farms have cash to spare on such investments.

We’re moving towards a classic market failure: We see increasing demand for locally and sustainable grown farm products, increasing desire among farmers to meet that demand— and an infrastructural gulf separating them.

Time for the public to reinvest in food-system infrastructure | Grist

This sort of crystallized for me what bothers me about the idea that you can locavore your way out of food issues. The demand IS growing—even shutupfoodies folks like me prefer to hit the farmer’s market instead of the grocery store. But what happens when the local farmer can’t produce enough to feed the folks who want to eat the good stuff?

-Julia Childless

Cooking with WoW!

World of Warcraft Cooking!

I stumbled upon this bit of hilarity today: Need Food Badly? Cooking With WoW! which combines foodieism with online video gaming in a pretty amusing way—creating recipes for the things that characters eat. But then, they linked to The Tauren Chef (don’t ask me what a Tauren is, I don’t play WoW) that not only cooks like they do in the game—but sells you the privilege of doing so yourself.

Now you and your gang of raiders/pirates (say, “Arrr!”,) your guild, or your favorite Elite Chef can dine IRL (In Real Life) on all your favorite MMO foods like Beer Basted Boar Ribs and Spellpower Cookies.

Just picture it- your brave crew of weary warriors, casters, and cannon fodder gathers around the campfire after slaying that boss and his horde (again,) and what do all of you want? Some limp wimpy green salad? NO! You want comfort food! Hot and tasty DragonBreath Chili, Seasoned Wolf Kabobs, or Roast Raptor are just the stuff these crusaders need to banish the fatigue and get back to slaying!

Epic cooking, indeed.

-Julia Childless