Need A New Year's Resolution? Save Money! Cook.

By way of saying farewell and adieu for another six months (at which time I surely will have written "The End" to my work-in-progress), allow me to get on my  high horse for a moment about one of my favorite subjects: food.

As food relates to money. Which, yes, it does. Consider this:

Several years ago, I was in Oregon visiting family and had dinner with my cousins at a "nice" restaurant: entrees in the $25.00 range. Good food. I enjoyed it. Drinks, dinner, wine, dessert. 

Expensive? Yes, it was. But my cousins ate there often. If I remember correctly, they'd already been there once that week. (This was, for them, a "neighborhood" restaurant.)

During the course of the conversation, one of the cousins complained about money, or the lack thereof. In his words, it was hard to "keep the wolf from the door," and if only he could earn about $10,000 a year more, he said, everything would be just dandy.

Being a polite midwesterner, I refrained from pointing out the obvious: He already HAD that "extra" $10,000 a year. Indeed, he was chowing down on part of it that moment.

Namely, all that money he spent (or threw away) every month going out to eat. I did a rough mental calculation and concluded that he and his family spent in the neighborhood of $800 a month going out to eat. By my math, which admittedly sucks, 800 times twelve equals $9,600 a year. Pretty damn close to ten thousand.

So. Looking for a new year's resolution? How about saving yourself some money (and time!) by doing some basic cooking?

That's the point of a lovely and practical essay by Mark Bittman in this week's New York Times Sunday opinion section.

Bittman writes about food for the Times and is the author of a number of cookbooks. His take on food is basic and practical: Cooking is not rocket science. Pretty much anyone can make a good meal.

EVEN WHEN YOU THINK YOU'RE 'TOO TIRED' TO DO SO. (In all caps because I want to make sure you get the point.)

He's dead right. When I'm tired at the end of the day, the last thing, and I mean the. last. thing. I want to do is drag my tired ass out to a restaurant. Get in the car or walk to a place, wait to be seated, wait to order, wait for the food, etc.

It's sooooooooooooooo much easier on my tired body, and so much more relaxing, to fix something at home. And, yes, it's cheaper!

What I especially appreciate about Bittman is his non-preachy approach to the matter: Keep some basics on hand. Learn a few (basic) skills. You're good to go!

(Unlike, in other words, the approach taken by the Food Scold In Chief [aka Michael Pollan], whose idea of cooking begins with a trip to the back yard to plant your garden. "It's not a meal, you fool! It's a political statement! Save the fucking planet first! And THEN you can eat.")

So. Do yourself a favor: read his essay, try one of the recipes. Please.

Here's my addition to his message: The smartest purchase I ever made (well, okay, the husband paid for it) was our small freezer. (If I remember correctly, it's ten cubic feet.) At any given moment, it's full of food I've cooked. Which means that at any given moment when I don't feel like cooking, well, hey, all I gotta do is trot down to the basement and pull something out, let it sit on the counter for a few hours, and voila! Dinner.

Whaddya waitin' for? Get cooking! Your brain, and your bank account, will thank you.

Yet Another Rant About Bad History

Oh, good grief. Check out this statement in a piece about grass-fed beef in today's New York Times:

Today all cattle are typically raised on grass in the early months of their lives. But in the 1950s, cattle raisers hoping to cut costs and improve efficiency of beef production began to ship the animals to feed lots, where they could be fattened more quickly on inexpensive and high-calorie grains.

Sort of true. Kind of. IF we change "1950s" to, oh, I dunno, 1820s? 1780s? How about 1720s? (The use of "feed lots" dates at least to the 1840s, if not earlier. Feeding corn for fattening, however, goes back at least a century earlier.) And, more to the point, if we delete the word "Today" and instead note that Americans have "started" beef on grass since, oh, the 1820s. (The first great utilization of the prairies and plains was grazing cattle on its grasses.) In fact, as these two sentences read they a) don't make much sense (since we don't know at what point the "cattle raisers" allegedly began shipping the animals to feed lots; and b) is riddled with inaccuracies. Flip snarkiness aside, a minimum acquaintance with facts would have been useful, especially since the piece is about a  fundamental --- and contentious --- subject: food. As a result, what we got with this bit is yet another hunk of misinformation with which to cloud the debate about food. Just sayin'.

School Gardens, The Future of American Education, Bush-Cheney, and My Husband

Trust me. This is all related. Lex, who blogs at Scholars & Rogues, posted a thoughtful comment in response to the Caitlin Flanagan garden brew-haha (is that how that's spelled). See it here. One of his points rang true at our household this week. Lex writes that

But given the economic reality of America, very few of these children will actually better their socio-economic situation by really cracking the books. The private sector hasn’t created a job in a decade now; recent college graduates are looking at massive unemployment numbers; and the jobs generally available can be done by trained monkeys.

I've noted here my concerns about the future of the American economy, especially the fact that in terms of research and intellectual development, the U. S. is being out-paced, quickly, by other countries, most especially China.

That concern came home --- literally --- this week. Unless you've been lost in space for the past year, you know that the "economy" is in trouble and that's especially true at the state level. Eg, California teeters on bankruptcy, Utah has put some state workers on four-day weeks, and so forth. One institution that's taking a hit these days is the "state" university. When times get hard, state legislators cut university budgets.

My husband is on the faculty at the state university here in Ames (Iowa State, to be precise). Last year, university administrators were told to cut the budget and this week they finally released the plan for Round One of the cuts. (They were just told to expect millions more in cuts, so presumably Round Two is not far behind.)

The deans in the College of Liberal Arts, the school that houses my husband's department, decided to divide its departments into four groups. One group --- consisting of sciences --- will continue to function as conventional research departments. (The faculty will be rewarded for its research and, to a lesser extent, for its teaching.) The other three groups contain the departments that have been "demoted" to a mostly or a strictly teaching function. Two groups will still be allowed some research time.

But one group gets none. Those departments will function as strictly "service" departments. No more new faculty. No research. Most likely no majors or upper level courses. My husband's department --- philosophy --- falls into that group.

He's trying to be, um, philosophical about it. But he places the blame not on bureaucrats, not on state legislators, but on George Bush and Dick Cheney. He argues that during their eight years, they sold off the country's future, got us into horrific debt (which, obviously, we were already in before GW was elected), and created today's mess: We're abandoning substantive education, ceding a future of intellectual development, inventions, technology, and so forth to, mostly, the Chinese.

Leaving us to squabble over things like whether kids should spend a half hour a day planting tomatoes and pulling weeds. 'Cause that's what people do when all the important stuff's been decided: fight over the crumbs of pie, while the winners feast on the pie itself.

Sam Fromartz on Caitlin Flanagan

Sam Fromartz, author of the excellent Organic, Inc. (which I've mentioned here before and plan to keep mentioning until I can persuade everyone to read it) has weighed in on the anti-Alice-Waters essay I mentioned in my previous post.

You can read his take at his blog, Chews Wise. Definitely worth reading. He and I land on opposite sides of the fence on this issue, but I think his critique is more pointed than others I've read. Oddly, he criticizes Waters for precisely the same reason I criticized the essayist at Civil Eats. (Eg, let's not confuse food policy with educational policy.) I think we can conclude that using gardens-in-the-school as either a route to or criticism of educational policy in general doesn't work.

Or something like that.) (Not being terribly coherent here: am trying to keep my brain focused on writing the  middle third of the new book. That means not letting myself get distracted by other juicy brain-fodder.)

Food Fight Over School Gardens

The current issue of Atlantic magazine has a fascinating essay by Caitlin Flanagan who criticizes the "school garden" movement launched by restaurateur/food "guru" Alice Waters. (*1)

The whole school-gardening thing has bugged me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on why, until I read this essay. And then I started nodding my head. Yep, that's the problem. Yep.

In the interest of fairness, of course, I also direct you to a thoughtful, smart rebuttal at the website Civil Eats. And make sure there to read the comments. I think the essayist at Civil Eats (an Iowa chef named Kurt  Michael Friese) makes good points.

But I also think his own critique smooshes the dividing line between Flanagan's critique of the garden movement with his own critique of the current educational system in the United States. He'dve been better off sticking to one topic. In any case, both essays are worth reading.

Although, cough cough, both of course manage to take a fairly tiny part of the "food debate" and inflate it into Something Monumental. In the general scheme of things, Waters' idea is fairly small potatoes (no pun intended). Still, it's indicative of the extent to which there is a debate and there is conflict about food in America that such a seemingly small matter can take on a life of its own.

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*1: Full disclosure at the outset: I'm not a big fan of Waters, if only because of what I think of as nearly narcissistic hypocrisy on her part. She claims to care about food, nutrition, etc. But according to everything I've ever heard and read, including an adulatory biography (*2) that came out a few years ago, waste is no problem with her. If a bunch of spinach, for example, is not perfect --- and I do mean perfect --- it gets tossed. Not just the bad leaves; the entire bunch. Hello? I mean, I could see not serving squished leaves on a plate when the restaurant is charging $30 for the plate of salad, but to toss the entire bunch? Hello??

*2: The biography, written by Thomas McNamee, is quite good: well-written and researched, lively, engaging. But it does lean toward the adulatory, so much so that the irony of Waters' attitude toward wasting food is lost on McNamee. Still, it's a good book and I recommend it.

The Food Fighters' New Year Resolution? Aim for Civility

There was a nice piece in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, in which food writer Russ Parsons urges both sides of the "food fight" to aim for civility (which is only another way of saying "Could ya stop yammering and start listening?).

I'm sure he's not the only one hoping for more discussion and less lunacy, but unlike others, he offers a specific, practical list of assumptions both sides need to dump. It's worth reading, if only because it's more pragmatic and substantive than most of what's out there.

Not, mind you, that I see much hope any time soon for a) civil debate; or b) informed debate. Sadly, most of those doing the talking (shouting? yammering?) argue (if you can call it that) their case based on muddle-headed assumptions, which (you can see this coming, right?) stem from lack of knowledge about the history of American agriculture, and especially the history of federal farm policies.

Anyway, worth a read if you have the time. Tip o' the mug in this case to Tom Philpott, who blogs at Grist and who wrote his own response to Parsons' essay. (Also worth reading if only because it's a near-perfect example of the "Big Ag is the devil" side of the debate.)