National Corndog Day April 2, 2008

Let me begin by pointing out that this is not a belated April fools joke, this is real.

It is not often that you will visit this blog to find discussion of sports, but as March Madness is in full swing, I just couldn’t resist posting this little tidbit from a friend about one of the gleaming highlights of sports food fanaticism and marketing genius.

It turns out that there is a National Corndog Day that is designed to coincide with March Madness. If you get together with a group of friends and supple the beer and big screen TV Hormel (the makers of SPAM) will send you all the free corndogs you can eat. For those of you who are not familiar with corn dogs, picture a hotdog on a stick wrapped in a corn pancake and deep fried. A shining star on school lunch menus everywhere, these odd delicacies have spawned a slew of food knock-offs like the breakfast sausage on a stick wrapped in a maple syrup flavored pancake, or the debonair French sausage on a stick encased in a croissant. The possibilities are endless.

Here is a bit from the National Corn Dog Day website:

Wherever February 7, 2008

I stumbled upon this poem the other day and really appreciated it. While it is not explicitly about food, it touches on some of the themes that reoccur on this blog: planting, making, protest, etc… In part, it was that it reminded me of the title of a book by the democratic/radical educators Myles Horton and Paulo Freire: We Make The Road By Walking. But there was more than that. The lack of punctuation leaves every line open, full or potential and possibility. The way that so many lines end in verbs seems to fill the poem with movement and action. The fact that each person who reads it could imagine something different coming after the line “we will make,” as though they are speaking the poem themselves. It just seemed like a good reminder that every day we are moving, building, planting and making change possible.

Quick Bites: Storing Food November 12, 2007

Last winter Erica and I tried to turn our garage into a root cellar. When things began to freeze we tried putting them in the basement – but it was too warm. We tried putting our vegetables in coolers, wrapping the coolers in blankets, and hiding them in odd corners of our stairways. There are obviously some key characteristics to starting a root cellar – and we clearly were missing the majority of them.

In this blog, and on our somewhat less public dry erase board on our fridge, we have also been trying to keep track of what we have used and what we have let go to waste. It has been a humbling experience, and after three years of having a farm share we are still not professionals at storing our food. Here are some links that will help those of you who face some of the same things we do:

The Ultimate Guide to Freezing Food – By Scott Bird

Storing Frozen Foods

Handy Software: Best When Used By

How to Store Your Food So It Lasts Longer

(I found all these links through lifehacker.com – be sure to check them out)

Edible/Inedible November 12, 2007

Let’s face it  – there are millions of food blogs out there. Millions. And many of them are good. Some are great. I have to admit, I don’t have a lot of time to go trolling for new blogs, as much as I would like to. However, on occasion I do stumble upon something new and worth sharing.

Next time you are looking for a distraction, check out Edible/Inedible.

Think for a minute how often we mix these things up. I mean really… Tomatoes with fish genes spliced in: edible or inedible? Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches: edible or inedible? Corn that produces its own pesticide: edible or inedible? Protein shakes: edible or inedible? Lucky charms… anyway, you get the point.

Eating Well While Doing Good September 24, 2007

I just returned from a week of organizing in Chicago. I was working to be educate the public about media reform issues in Chicago in the lead up to the 5th of 6 FCC hearings on media ownership. This was a rare opportunity for the public to talk directly to the people who make the rules, speaking truth to power. More than 800 people attended the public hearing and more than 200 people signed up to speak.

It was an enthralling and exhausting week. Most days I worked between 12 and 16 hour days going to meetings, facilitating workshops, working with activists on turn out and helping them write their testimony. I ate when I could, and often this meant grabbing a muffin at a local coffee shop, or a sub at a mini mart. At night, when we wrapped up our various activities for the day, my colleagues and I would head out to what ever place still served food after 11pm, usuallya bar of some sort, and had a late dinner of whatever we could get – often something fried.

A Bright Idea? August 11, 2007

Simply put, we here at Kitchen Dancing are against wasting food. That said, when I stumbled upon this a few days ago, the first thought I had was, “This is what you could do with all those lame tasting, store bought, genetically modified, factory farmed, meaty, under ripe tomatoes that people buy in the winter months.

Make A GLOWING TOMATO ! – video powered by Metacafe

I could a food activism project that involved sneaking down the shopping market isles and injecting this concoction into all the tomatoes except the local or organic ones. It would make a startling point.

Food Photography, part 1 August 7, 2007

I love pictures of food. Veggies are art – that is all there is to it. I just stumbled on some wonderful food photography at this little blog. I thought I would share some here, but I really encourage you to go check it out for yourself at the photographer’s flickr page.

Zuke blossom

Food, Place, Memory July 21, 2007

My friend Abby Dallmann recently returned for a brief visit in the middle of a two year stint working and living in Hungary. My wife (and co-author of this blog), Erica lived in Hungary for a year when she was sixteen, and so the two of them swapped stories and compared notes about the area. When Erica was there, living in a small town called Szeged, it was nearly impossible to find a person who spoke English, or find many foods commonly found in America.

In contrast, Abby reported that she and her family were having a hard time practicing their Hungarian (a notoriously difficult language to master) because so many people speak English. Abby is also living in Budapest amongst a fairly large diplomatic and expatriate crowd. She said that she can find most any American food from peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to Doritos, but that it usually involves a long drive out to a oversized supermarket (often a chain which has moved in from Germany or other near-by countries).

Abby told us that the only reason she really feels compelled to track down such items is for her kids. She remarked on the profound way that kids associate food with place. Her kids are both pretty young, first grade and preschool age. For the most part they have been handling this adventure with aplomb, but when they get lonely for home it is often in the form of a desire for some familiar food. This got me thinking about the unique intersection of food, place, and memory.

Why Blog About Food? July 8, 2007

When Erica and I began talking about doing some sort of joint writing project food was a topic that surfaced fairly early. As with most things there are probably innumerable reasons why we chose food but a few key reasons pop into my mind.

For the past three years we have been members of a community supported agriculture farm (CSA) in Amherst, Massachusetts. The experience of being a member of this farm has radically reshaped our relationship to our food and has consistently pushed our thinking about food issues. It has been a wonderful experience which has made us so much more aware of what we eat and where our food comes from. At the same time, and in part due to our experiences on the farm, Erica and I have embarked on a number of other food related adventures. We have begun to do biweekly potlucks to build community and connect friends from different parts of our lives. I have been teaching a food unit for the past two semester in my writing classes which has encouraged college students to use writing to take a critical look at the personal and cultural aspects of food in their lives. Finally, in trying to make the most out of the food we get at the farm, we have begun canning and preserving food. Almost without realizing it, food has taken on an increasingly central role in the way Erica and I think about our lives, our community, and the broader world around us. I want to talk a bit more about each of these below.

Adventures in Food
Erica and I have always been crafty, and Erica has always loved to cook. Over the last three years these two predilections collided in the kitchen as we began trying to make as much of our own food as possible, avoiding the processed foods of the grocery isle whenever possible. Focusing on the staples, the things we eat all the time, we began to teach ourselves how to bake bread and make granola, muesli and yogurt. We have begun to can our own salsa, make our own jam, and pickle beets, beans, and garlic. A friend has also promised to teach me how to make cheese. I have begun learning how to brew beer, and hope eventually to make wine and cider as well. As we have embarked on these various food adventures we have been surprised how our little hobbies have caught the attention of our friends and families. While we recognized and often delighted in the fact that we were trying to revive or maintain what are considered by many to be “lost arts,” we had no idea how it would capture others imaginations. People constantly remark about our kitchen adventures and most people find something in what we are doing that they want to try themselves. We are often passing on recipes or learned wisdom, tips and tricks from stumbling through ourselves. We hope to use this blog, in part, to continuing sharing what we are doing and helping others try some of these things on their own.

Food Foundations
The other reason I wanted to begin this blog was because I am increasingly becoming aware of the ways in which food can serve as an entry point for all kinds of people to consider and confront the diverse issues facing our society today. Food is a way in to every issue I care about, be it social justice, community, the environment, politics, media reform, etc… Food touches on every one of these issues, and I enjoy looking at these diverse topics through the lens of food. However, I have also found that for many people, food is a way of making these abstract social issues real. More and more people are beginning to think about these issues through their personal relationship to what they eat. I have seen this with so many of my students who have never given much thought to farm workers’ rights, industrial agricultural, soup kitchens, or pesticides, but when I ask them to look critically at their relationship to food, these are the kinds of issues that arise. Food is at once absolutely personal and at the same time utterly cultural. When we eat we literally bring the world inside ourselves and make it part of us. I hope that this blog can serve as a hub, reaching out from the issue of food to a number of other issues and ideas that call for our attention and care today.

How is a Blog Like Cooking?
Finally, I am excited to launch this blog because I am thrilled to be collaborating with Erica, and to be challenging our own ideas and assumptions about the role of food in our lives. I think we’ll approach this blog like we approach cooking together, a flurry of creative activity that looks much like dancing. Scott Russell Sanders, writing about cooking with his wife, has said, “Our kitchen is small; Ruth and I share that cramped space by moving in a kind of dance we have been practicing for years. When we bump one another, it is usually for the pleasure of bumping.” I hope you will join us, bumping along, in this kitchen dance.

Reasons for wanting to start a food blog July 8, 2007

1. Food meet Erica, Erica meet Food –
For me much of this project is about improving the relationship I have with my food: where it comes from, what it’s comprised of, the journey it took to get to my table, how I use food, how to prevent wasting it. My wish is to have a closer connection with the stuff I’m fueling my body with. I wanted to create a space to work through and share ideas about food. My hope is that it will be very open – I’d like it to include general journaling, creative writing, responses to articles, links to food-related sites that make me happy, and recipes.

2. Eating locally –
Josh and I talked about trying to do a 100 mile diet and I feel like that’s a little too ambitious for me right now but I still really want to increase my consciousness about my food. And pay special attention to eating locally! It goes way beyond having some nice organic veggies in your stomach – it’s about enriching our communities, improving our environment, supporting the local economy, getting to know our neighbors, and a return to farming the way it should be. The first step in this process was joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm co-op two summers ago. Since then I’ve grown increasingly passionate about food issues.

3. Influential reading –
I’ve just started reading Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I highly recommend it. How can it not change the way we think about food – in our bodies, in our culture, in our communities, and in our economy? I get more and more riled up with each page I read. My first introduction to Michael Pollan was an article that appeared in the New York Times this past January titled, “Unhappy Meals.” He proposes we should: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” As a nation we have fallen victim to “nutritionism” (e.g. “eat omega-3s – you need them to be healthy!” or “eat more protein and less carbs!”) and he suggests a movement back towards “real” whole foods.  I read it and felt that he captured something I so strongly believe in and articulated things I’ve been struggling to put into words for a long time.

I also just read a book by a woman named Julie Powell who decided to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s book Mastering the Art of French Cooking within the course of one year and she blogs about it the whole way through. While her project and this one are very different, I felt inspired by her respect for food and her dedication to slow cooking.

4. Waste not, want not –
I want to be held accountable for my use of food – what better way than to do it publicly on the web. This includes our vegetables from the farm and whatever we buy at the store.

I am the queen of uneaten leftovers. Despite the fact that I know there’s only two of us I often cook enough to feed a small village. Leftovers are rarely appealing to me the next day and we often end up with mystery containers in the back of the fridge.

We get an average of 14 pounds of vegetables every week in our farm share over the summer and fall months. That’s a lot of food. We get creative and try new recipes, we’ve taught ourselves how to can, we have potlucks, we share our farm food with friends and neighbors BUT there are still times when we waste food. Part of this waste-not philosophy is recognizing that we need to exercise moderation when we’re picking up our veggies at the farm. Even though our share includes an average of 14 pounds per week doesn’t mean we need to or should take that much. The food is pre-paid for and it’s such beautiful organic produce it’s hard not to get carried away sometimes and take more than we need or will actually use. This year I’m saying no to slimy spinach and rotten carrots.