Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Spaghetti Tacos!!!

Previously, more practical food related news has been covered in this space, however an emerging, whimsical culinary phenomenon demands attention. Spaghetti Tacos!!! It has been reported that the trend of children requesting this entree is cresting and threatening to go viral. While the library catalog has many holdings that speak to the capricious nature of the child's palate (The Star Wars Cookbook, for example), adults sometimes desire new and challenging eating experiences as well. Curiosity about food is a healthy expression for both children and adults and one could take this interest in the direction twinkies or spam, instead let's zoom out a bit and get the 30,000 foot view of how food and eating are a part of our overall experience of culture.

The chapter headings for Extreme Cuisine: The Weird and Wonderful Foods That People Eat by Jerry Hopkins read more like a taxonomy handout from a biology class than a book about food. Chapter headings for mammals, reptiles & water creatures, birds, insects, spiders & scorpions, plants and leftovers are the first clue that this will be an unusual look at the foods of the world. Closer inspection reveals separate sections for investigations into such tempting fair as; primates, guts, genitalia, birds' nests, gold & silver, kangaroos and human flesh. The foreword by Anthony Bourdain might also alert readers that this book will be a departure from the more staid style that foodies are accustomed to. Hopkins throws in some recipes (rootworm beetle dip, anyone?) for good measure. Delicious.

Where Extreme Cuisine looks outward from the food we might consider "normal" Better Than Homemade: Amazing Foods That Changed the Way We Eat looks inward and examines the science, hard work and blunders responsible for such innovations as Velveeta and Pringles. Carolyn Wyman's well researched prose is drenched in a super-sized helping of sarcasm. Her diatribes about how processed foods helped fuel feminism are impassioned but she has nothing but venom for the natural foods movement, insisting that foodies are akin to Luddites. Is her tongue firmly in her cheek? Difficult to say. In either case, trivia lovers will fall for Better Than Homemade, the perfect pre-meal read for your next dinner party.

Travel and innovation expose us to new eating experiences but so too do the people we  chose to break bread with. And sometimes the meals we share with others stay with us longer than the relationships that brought those foods into our lives. Erin Ergenbright and Thisbe Nissen came upon the idea of publishing their ex-boyfriends' recipes, and the stories surrounding them, at a BBQ. Naturally, they entitled this work The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: They Came, They Cooked, They Left (But We Ended Up With Some Great Recipes). With colorful collages and heartfelt remembrances this is much more than a simple cookbook. If sharing is caring then the authors of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook have channeled a smorgasbord of sentiment in this work and what better way to spread the love than to share a new eating experience with someone close to you.

PS: Mark your calendar. Renowned author Harold McGee will be speaking at Powells Monday, November 8th. McGee is the author of  that seminal work of food science On Food and Cooking. This is a rare opportunity to get in-person answers to your most probing and technical questions about why food is the way it is!

No More Mystery Meat

Lunch ladies with hairnets. Green beans in oily juice. Grainy lasagna. The food from my youth may not have been uniformly delicious, but it was almost entirely homemade (save those green beans). During a brief stint working at a local elementary school a few years ago, I saw kids being served packaged PB&Js on white bread with the crusts cut off. And packaged burritos, defrosted chicken nuggets, and daily servings of chocolate milk. This school did have an all-you-can eat salad bar, but many of the kids gave it a miss or slathered everything in mounds of ranch dressing. According to the Oregonian, those kids will be missing their beloved ranch dressing this year, as the District's Nutrition Services department substitutes more expensive, homemade food for the cheaper, faster junk food they have been serving. Not making the cut this year--$60,000 worth of ranch.

I am concerned for Jamie Oliver. Even though he's probably been rolling in money since his breakout Food Network show, The Naked Chef, made him a culinary star, he just can't sit back and count his piles. He has to keep expanding his mission. First, his nonprofit foundation opened a restaurant to train disadvantaged youth in London (and now three other cities) to work in the culinary industry. Second, he pushed for better school lunches across the UK, a crusade that surely improved the health of schoolchildren and their understanding of food and nutrition, but that also brought the ire of fish and chips-loving families across the nation. And now, Mr. Oliver is coming here. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution was first a book, but now is a crusade, starting in "America's Fattest City"--Huntington, West Virginia and documented on the reality show of the same name. His aim is no less than to transform the way we eat, feed our children, and relate to food and the first battlefield is the school lunchroom. This man really wants us to cook, not poke holes in the plastic film of microwave meals or order extremely out-sized fast food meals that are destined to make the current generation of American children the first to see their life expectancy decline. Even though his show just won an Emmy, I'm afraid he might have to pry the burgers and fries from our cold dead hands. Best of luck to you, though, Jamie!

One pioneer in the area of changing school lunch is Berkeley's Alice Waters. Best known as a restaurant owner, chef, and proponent of the Slow Food movement, in 1996, Waters started a program called the Edible Schoolyard to provide students at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley with a direct connection to their food. Students plant, tend, harvest and then cook the food they grow in a program that is integrated into the school curriculum. Science, Social Studies, and Humanities are represented when students observe the plants and insects in the garden, make connections between traditional cultures and food, and respond to their experiences in the garden in poems or stories. Edible Schoolyard: a Universal Idea the book is a love letter to the program, richly illustrated with photographs, a main essay by Waters, and a sprinkling of student work.

Should you want to grow your own school garden, Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Kathleen Pringle have created a comprehensive guide to all aspects of gardening on school grounds. How to Grow a School Garden: a Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers comes from two school garden veterans. They not only make the case for "Why School Gardens?" in the first chapter, but they also share recipes for using your harvest, provide tips for getting the most out of your garden, and compile lesson plans to extend the garden into the classroom. This practical book even has a chapter on fundraising and budgeting. It's so clear and helpful, you'll want to break ground immediately. Just make sure to follow their lead.

You're Allergic to All of That?

I read with interest a recent article in the New York Times reporting about a recent federal study that suggests food allergies may not be as common as once thought. According to the article, about 30 percent of us think we have food allergies, but the real number may be closer to 8 or even 5 percent. What many sufferers think of as allergies may fall into the category of food intolerances. Perhaps to avoid the image that they were diminishing the real and intense difficulties that food allergy sufferers face, the Times also ran an article that focused on the emotional and financial toll that allergies take on families. I have been known to be sensitive when I eat walnuts or to have a few digestive problems when I gorge on too-much ice cream, but I experience nothing like true allergies, or diseases that prevent me from eating anything. I count myself very lucky.

"No cupcakes." That might be the saddest combination of two words in the english language. For many people who are allergic to wheat, eggs, or dairy, those sad words may be a hard truth. But not every cupcake has to be a potent allergen-bomb. The row of cupcakes on the cover of this book lining up to join the plates of eager allergic eaters are Allergy-free Desserts: Gluten-free, Dairy-free, Egg-free,Soy-free and Nut-free Delights. Elizabeth Gordon has some experience with food allergies, being allergic to eggs and wheat herself. For novices, she provides a short introduction to some of the staples and vocabulary of allergy-free baking that you may or may not have used before, like Xanthan Gum and tapioca flour. As for the recipes, she re-imagines such classic desserts as pineapple upside-down cake, molasses crinkles, and dark chocolate fudge. I'll go get my fork.

No bread. No pasta. No beer. No cupcakes! For people who have celiac disease, even the tiniest amount of gluten can cause a host of immune responses, none of them good. When a friend of mine was diagnosed with the illness, she was having a particularly rough time. I was afraid of cooking anything for her for fear that my utensils would be tainted with gluten and cause a reaction. The tension that comes from trying to avoid foods that harm you while finding and cooking foods that you love helps drive the narrative of Gluten-Free Girl: How I Found the Food That Loves Me Back...& How You Can Too. Blogging for several years at glutenfreegirl.com, Shauna James Ahearn tells her story of coming to terms with celiac and finding a new joy in cooking and food.

What has always sounded so challenging to me about having a food allergy or intolerance is just figuring out what you can eat. A dizzying amount of products seem to have hidden soy, wheat, or eggs. I can live my life happily oblivious to these hidden ingredients, while they are poison to others. And what to do if you have multiple allergies to commonly-used ingedients? The pantry could feel more like a wasteland than a well-stocked larder. Emily Hendrix, a mom to a daughter with multiple allergies, developed this cookbook for families who need to eat nearly allergen-free. Sophie-Safe Cooking: A Collection of Family Friendly Recipes that are Free of Milk, Eggs, Wheat, Soy, Peanuts, Tree Nuts, Fish and Shellfish is a good starting place with a variety of recipes, from breakfast to dinner and through dessert (including cupcakes). The library also stocks a variety of cookbooks for folks who have various allergies and intolerances, including wheat, dairy, or eggs.

Do you have a favorite allergy-free recipe or tip?

Going Hungry

The U. S. Department of Agriculture released a study this week which reported that one in every seven American families struggled to get enough food on the table last year, and that overall, 49 million Americans suffered from "food insecurity," or the inability to be sure of adequate food to maintain healthy, active lives. These numbers don't just reflect conditions in some faraway part of the country, in fact, Oregon ranks near the top of the list of hungriest states.

Of course, hunger is by no means a new phenomenon. Nearly 10 years ago, Journalist Loretta Schwartz-Nobel took on the challenge of investigating the scope and depth of hunger in America in her book Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America. What I find most interesting is the way Schwartz-Nobel carefully examines a series of different groups – the middle class, the working poor, the military, new immigrants, etc. and explains how hunger affects them, and how public policies (even those originally intended to assuage hunger) have made the epidemic worsen. It's not always easy to read the heartbreaking stories Schwartz-Nobel has to tell, but overall the book provides a good overview of how very real this problem is, and how it's affecting communities across the nation.

Some people's reaction to widespread hunger is to get right out and do something about it. One way is to grow food – and for more than a hundred years Americans have built and tended community gardens specifically designed to feed the hungry and help people in poverty build new skills to help themselves. Laura J. Lawson's City Bountiful explains this fascinating history, along with the stories of other kinds of community gardens tended by schoolchildren, urban gourmets, and wartime patriots.

It's not just Americans who are going hungry. The international press is reporting that the United Nations Hunger Summit earlier this week in Rome was not productive, partly due to the fact that among wealthy nations, only Italy sent its leader to attend the summit. Meeting the needs of hungry people around the world can be quite a challenge, particularly when changing weather patterns, a volatile economic climate, and wars all complicate the issue. The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where, and Why can help clarify some of this complexity. Authors Erik Millstone and Tim Lang provide a wide array of maps and charts explaining various aspects of the word food system – starting with a section on challenges, from water shortages to environmental challenges to political factors that affect people's ability to get access to food.

Eating in '09

For me, December means reflecting on the year behind me and preparing for the year ahead. News has been a bit bleak of late. In particular, I'm thinking of an article I read in The Boston Globe about what a depression in 2009 might look like. One of the piece's more bittersweet observations is that folks like me (not rolling in dough and having a fair amount of free time) might save money by spending more hours in the kitchen rather than eating out. The Globe also predicts that more people might turn to urban gardening and animal husbandry, a trend I've definitely noticed both amongst my friends/peers and here at the library where books on raising chickens and composting are more popular than ever. The impact of the economy on our eating habits is also born out in the top two eating trends of 2009 as predicted by Epicurious.com. Eating well is one of life's greatest pleasures and these two new items got me thinking about books that have changed the way we eat. As well, these books might help prepare us for changes in how and what we eat.

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is quickly approaching the status of modern classic in the field of gastronomy. His work is well-informed, courageous and engaging. Omnivore's Dilemma examines the modern eating experience through several systemic prisms; industrial food, organic/alternative food and food we forage for ourselves. Through his descriptions of these food chains we learn how our eating habits are a product of our economy as much as our evolution and that what we eat is an expression of culture that merits a healthy dialog. For all his research Pollan's prose never comes across as pedantic. Instead, his writing is crystalline and inspiring in its insightfulness. Pollan's style of personal journalism is the perfect vehicle for a subject that affects us all and for which we all have an opportunity for personal expression.

Another author who is interested in issues of gastronomy and ecology is Taras Grescoe. Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood is Grescoe's indictment of the seafood industry in which he draws parallels between the over fished oceans of our world and our decisions as seafood consumers. Think of this book as the Fast Food Nation of the sea. At times stomach-churning, Bottomfeeder is a book that seeks to inspire positive change and a growth in awareness about where the seafood we eat comes from. It's clear that the author is up to the challenge of exploring his subject in depth (he even samples the pellets fed to farmed salmon) and though most of the text focuses on the perilous condition of our oceans and our current unhealthy relationship with sea life, the book does conclude with an appendix full of suggestions about how to eat seafood responsibly. [For more information consider the Marine Stewardship Council's website which maintains a list of sustainable seafood]

One of my long time favorites, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, maintains a special place on my book shelf. First published in 1984, Harold McGee's book is packed with scientific details of what gives food its foodie-ness. McGee includes plenty of historical context to compliment his discussion of chemistry and physics in the kitchen and his writing has a sense of curiosity to it that many will find appealing. For the more analytical cook, On Food and Cooking provides inspiration through explanation. Ever wonder why "mealy" and waxy" potatoes mash differently? Is there really any advantage to whipping egg whites in a copper bowl? Why and how does the application of heat (aka cooking) change the texture of meat? McGee's got answers and having that information means less waste, more creativity and better results in the kitchen.