Month: March 2010

"Femivores"?

Peggy Orenstein had a piece this weekend in the New York Times Magazine, titled “The Femivore’s Dilemma.” She starts her article by talking about all her hip friends—cracking wise about “the Vatican of locavorism” and laughs, “Apparently it is no longer enough to know the name of the farm your eggs came from; now you need to know the name of the actual bird.”

Her feminist friends are now not just staying home to raise the kids, but finding liberation in raising chickens, growing food, and making other necessities. But her casting of backyard hobby gardening as fulfilling the holes in the lives of feminists who wanted to work, as is usual for middle-class feminists, leaves out the fact that fighting to get jobs was a goal of the privileged. Other women were already working, not for fulfillment, but for survival.

In the same way, backyard gardening, in Orenstein’s view, is a new way for feminists to find fulfillment, a way to do more work than just the housework but less work than a full-time job. Meanwhile, Warwick Sabin points out:

“It used to be that keeping a few free-range chickens, tending some grain-fed hogs, and raising a small vegetable garden was how people simply survived. Now these are often vanity projects for young hipsters and retired hedge-fund executives who have discovered the forgotten pleasures of “heirloom” tomatoes and artisanal sausage. Incredibly, we’ve reached a point in our society where things that humans have done for thousands of years—grow a vegetable, smoke or cure a piece of meat—now provide the grounds for smug satisfaction.”

via Global Comment.

-Julia Childless

NYT Profiles a Man’s Tea Party

In these “trying economic times,” the term tea party has come to represent a bunch of racist political hooligans ISO 1776.  However, The New York Times reminds us, that yes, there are some real tea parties out there, focusing on snacks and tea.  And they are for men.  Men of wild indie cred, of art cred, of knitting cred!

Read more:  Noble Savages: A Men’s Tea Party

Gross.

I’ve always been fascinated by ortolan eaters, who are so ashamed of what they are doing that part of the ritual involves eating with napkins or masks covering their faces. Ortolans are tiny birds, which are captured alive, force-fed, drowned in brandy, and then cooked and eaten whole. It’s kind of sick and gross (and illegal) , but the birds are at least dead.

Dead isn’t good enough for the cutesy New York Gastronaut© society, whose members get together every once in a while to eat “live octopus, live lobster, and other aquatic unmentionables.”

Other members of “Adventurous Eating Clubs” do things like organize human placenta dinners. The AP reports on a Denver chapter:

The group’s next meal at Opus restaurant will include frog curry, pork brain lettuce wraps and balut — a fertilized duck egg, poached or deep-fried, that contains a partially formed embryo.

One attendee, upon reading the menu, sent a message to Emanuel: “You had me at embryo.”

While some may find the eating of brains and embryos unsavory, Emanuel said the point of adventurous eating for many is to try something new, not to get involved in the ethics of eating.

“It’s not for me to judge whether or not it’s right or wrong,” he said. “How else are you going to be exposed to these bits and pieces of culture?”

Really, how else? I hate them.

—Snacktime

I’ll Be Your Huckleberry: Luxury Foraging

Link: I’ll Be Your Huckleberry: Luxury Foraging

Val Kilmer“Is there anything better than playing hooky on a Thursday to forage wild huckleberries in the mountains?”

Why yes there is! Foraging with “great wines, dill-grilled prawns, pumpkin spice bread, Tom Douglas’ Tuscan bread salad, line-caught home-smoked coho salmon spread, lemon orzo, and vanilla bean crème anglaise (with two ice cream machines whirling away).”

—Snacktime

Case in Point: Salt

Link: Case in Point: Salt

Complete with English-major-turned-foodie descriptions:

“Master In-Shan’s Oyster bamboo salt 9x smells like something dragons must use to season their victims before eating them”

And one that must be quoted in its entirety:

If salt were beer, Murray Darling finishing salt would be the frothy head of a crisp Lager. It starts as snowmelt from the Australian Alps descending to the Murray Darling basin, where a combination of low rainfall and high evaporation have created high concentrations of salt in the groundwater.

Murray Darling Australian finishing salt’s pink-tinged crystals (much peach-rose-pinker than in the photo!), which gain their color from carotene produced by algae that lives in the underground brine, have a cotton-candy texture that imparts a sense of ineffable lightness. The flakes have a note of sweetness, and are uncannily un-salty. This, together with the low moisture content and fine texture, position Murray River as more of a topping than a salt.

Unless used on a dry surface, such as goat cheese or scantily dressed greens, Murray Darling finishing salt should only be applied at the table, just before eating. Strangely, given its superlative subtlety, it is unabashedly elegant on that rare caprese salade made from explosively ripe back-yard garden tomatoes, sweet basil, and springy-yet-yielding bufala mozzarella.

—Snacktime

Seasoned with Dogma and Self-Righteousness

Link: Seasoned with Dogma and Self-Righteousness

“Food is so many things: it is vital to life, it is a source of nourishment and of pleasure as well as an outlet for creativity. It fosters cultural identity and comforts those far from home. But no matter how ethical it may be, or how many antioxidants it contains, it will not save us. When we season our food with dogma and self-righteousness, we give it an unhealthy power over our ability to rationally consider its already vital place in our lives. If what you eat has become your religion, take care to serve up your message peacefully and palatably.”

From Grist

—Snacktime