Ruth Reichl's revisions: "For You, Mom, Finally"

In April when I reviewed Ruth Reichl's Not Becoming My Mother, I didn't realize it had just been reissued in paperback under a different name: For You, Mom, Finally. With Mother's Day coming up, the publisher may have noticed that the original title was not going to get the book featured in any gift displays.

The new title is more appropriate, really. Reichl often did not understand her flamboyant, troubled mother and sometimes nearly cut off contact with her, but without a doubt she loved her. Especially after she finally got up the courage to read through a dusty old box of her mother's letters and journals.

I won't say any more about the book since I thoroughly reviewed it here, except to  note that Reichl has written a new Afterword about readers' responses to the hardcover edition. Apparently a lot of women, like her, don't want to become their mothers. Most striking, however, was a comment from a woman young enough to be Reichl's daughter: "Ms. Reichl, I don't want to become you."

Reichl and I are about the same age. I can't speak for her, but I'm guessing she might agree: I don't want to become my mother (though that would not be a bad thing), and I don't want my daughters to become me. It's challenging enough just to become ourselves.

10 vegetarian meals in pictures

A healthful diet is usually colorful. A good meal always is. Eating vegetarian does not need to be dull. And in case you were wondering, Adam did not trade Paradise for an apple. It was an avocado.

Breakfast (or lunch or dinner, for that matter)

1. Whole wheat waffles topped with slightly sweetened plain yogurt and fresh raspberries

Lunch (or dinner)

2. Salad with arugula, black beans (hidden), queso fresco, tomatoes, yellow bell peppers, and avocado

3. Avocado, cheese, tomato, and lettuce sandwiches

4. Insalata caprese: basil leaves, tomato slices, fresh mozzarella, pine nuts, salt and pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil; even better with homemade bread

Dinner (or lunch)

5. Chestnut soufflé with lamb's lettuce, apple, and pine nut salad

6. Gnocchi with tomato sauce and parmesan, white beans with caramelized onions, and - to add the necessary color - a strip of chopped spinach

7. Cheese and artichoke quiche with arugula and tomato salad

8. Orecchiette pasta with fava beans, ricotta, and mint (serve a colorful salad separately)

9. Risotto, asparagus, and tomato slices

10. Vegetarian salade niçoise: red leaf lettuce, tiny boiled onions, asparagus, green beans, boiled eggs, tomato, avocado, capers - all cold, in a vinaigrette dressing

10 spring vegetables and what to do with them

Most farmers' markets in our area (northeastern Illinois) open in June, but the one in our town brings produce from southern Illinois and southwestern Michigan in early May, and we are feasting. Here are 10 treats for vegans, vegetarians, omnivores, locavores, and everyone who likes unbelievably fresh food, even though it's still May.

1. baby lettuce leaves - no wonder the rabbits love them. The green and red leaf lettuce I've been buying is utterly delectable, dressed with just a little olive oil, a squirt of fresh lemon, and a tiny sprinkle of salt.
2. rhubarb - Barbara Kingsolver, craving fruit in April, discovered rhubarb, which Alice Waters called "the vegetable bridge between the tree fruits of winter and summer."
3. asparagus - steam* or simmer lightly, but be sure it stays crisp. Serve with a little butter and lemon juice in a separate dish for dipping. Emily Post approved of eating short, crisp stalks with your fingers.
4. baby potatoes -steam* for a few minutes, then sauté in olive oil and/or butter. Best with coarse salt and freshly ground course pepper. Add garlic during last minute of cooking, if you like. Remove from heat and stir in fresh parsley.
5. spinach - heat a splash of olive oil in a large pan over medium-high heat. Soften some garlic or green onions or shallots in the oil, if you like. Add spinach and stir until all the leaves are wilted. Immediately remove from heat. Good as is, or add a small squirt of lemon juice.
6. chard - spinach's more colorful cousin. Stalks are delicious. Chop them and cook them separately in olive oil with a little onion and/or garlic. Sprinkle with lemon juice. Leaves can be cooked however you cook spinach.
7. beets - cook the greens however you cook spinach. Stab the red bulbs several times with a fork, wrap them in aluminum foil, and bake for 30-60 minutes, depending on how big they are. Good hot, good in soup, very nice cold, sliced thin, in salad with crumbled goat cheese and orange slices.
8. carrots - steam,* boil, add to soup, grate for salad, turn into juice, or give to small dogs as treats. My dog Muffin often says "Why?" when I ask her to come back in the house, but if I say "Carrot?" she comes immediately.
9. radishes - I have never seen much reason to eat these, which is why I did not renew my C.S.A. subscription - my farmer, a wonderful lady, seemed to have a radish fetish. But you can slice the little ones on salad and stir fry the big ones, and I'm sure God made them for a reason.
10. broccoli - bring a big pot of water to a rapid boil. Drop the broccoli into it. I usually eat just the florets and a small amount of the stem. If you want to eat lots of stem, chop it up, drop it in the water first, and let it bubble for a couple of minutes before adding the florets. Then turn the heat to medium and cook for just a minute or two. You don't want it to turn sickly green. Drain and serve with melted butter, vinaigrette, or a drizzle of olive oil. Alternately, you can steam broccoli, but by the time it's tender enough, it may lose its color.

*I steam many vegetables in my Tupperware microsteamer, usually until they are about half done (this often takes only a couple of minutes). I then finish them by sautéing them in a little olive oil or roasting them in a hot oven. This is not a commercial. The steamer was a gift from my daughter Molly, who also has one and uses it all the time.

Review of "Eaarth" by Bill McKibben

A couple of weeks ago I read Paul Greenberg's excellent review, "Hot Planet, Cold Facts," of Bill McKibben's newest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. I immediately put a hold on it at the public library. It arrived yesterday, and I read it after dinner last night. I'm not an especially fast reader, but this is an especially readable book. McKibben is more than a prophet of doom; he is also a clear and witty writer who often made me laugh out loud.

Yes, there are supposed to be two a's in Eaarth - McKibben's point is that over the last four decades, "the earth has changed in profound ways, ways that have already taken us out of the sweet spot where humans so long thrived." It is so different, in fact, that "it needs a new name." And we Eaarthlings are in such denial about the differences that we probably need a global AA-style intervention, though McKibben nowhere suggests that the double-A is a pun.

Note that word already. It has become customary for the environmentally conscious to bewail the legacy we are leaving our grandchildren. "If you've got a spare month some time, google global warming and grandchildren," McKibben suggests, giving examples of "essentially identical and anodyne responses" from Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joe Lieberman, David Attenborough, Bill Clinton, and Roger Ebert, among others. As Barack Obama said in 2008, "This is our generation's moment to save future generations from global catastrophe."

Sorry, says McKibben - global catastrophe is already here. The earth bumped along quite nicely for 10,000 years with 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and then we started burning fossil fuels and the level started to rise. We'll be in big trouble when the level hits 550ppm, scientists used to say. Then they brought the number down to 450ppm - "still 15 percent above our current levels," so people continued to think in terms of future generations. In December 2007, however,

James Hansen, still the planet's leading climatologist, ... summarized both the real-world data that had emerged in recent years, including the ice-melt, and also the large body of research on paleoclimate - basically, the attempt to understand what had happened in the distant past when carbon dioxide levels climbed and fell. Taken together, he said, these two lines of inquiry made it clear that the safe number was, at most, 350 parts per million.

According to McKibben's website, 350.org, we're now at 387ppm.

The results are already devastating parts of the world. If we were magically able to turn back the clock and bring CO₂ levels down to 350ppm or lower, we would still be living with the effects of a thawed Arctic, acidified oceans, changed rainfall patterns, higher temperatures, and so on. About half of Eaarth describes these effects, and they are far more serious than most of us comfortable Americans can imagine. "We're not ... going to get back the planet we used to have, the one on which our civilization developed," McKibben writes. "We're like the guy who ate steak for dinner every night and let his cholesterol top 300 and had the heart attack. Now he dines on Lipitor and walks on the treadmill, but half his heart is dead tissue."

So do we just lie down in our hammocks and wait for the end? Not if we're anything like Bill McKibben. In the last half of the book, he tells us how we need to live in this new and terrifying earth we have created.

Unlike Thomas Friedman, who "serves as a kind of political GPS unit, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they're in the know, but never beyond the comforting bounds of conventional wisdom," McKibben does not think our salvation lies in great global projects that will allow us to maintain our faith in economic growth. Some large-scale projects -  providing alternative energy sources, for example - are necessary and good - but there's no way we can afford the number of such projects we would need in order to continue our rush to Bigger and Better.

McKibben's solution, by contrast, is Small and Local. Instead of hauling food around the world, we need to foster family farms. Instead of constant flying and driving, we need to keep in touch with the rest of the world through the Internet. Instead of building giant centralized power plants, we need to develop many local power sources. Instead of relying on the federal government for everything, we need to take back our communities.

Suddenly the left-leaning activist of the book's first half is sounding like a Tea Party libertarian, or a nostalgic flower child. As Greenberg wryly commented, "Many of these proposed solutions inadvertently resemble the list of things Christian Lander lampooned in his 2008 best seller Stuff White People Like: 'farmer’s markets,' 'awareness,' 'making you feel bad about not going outside,' 'vegan/vegetarianism.'"

True, but that doesn't distract from McKibben's message: The earth has already changed. Many of the changes are permanent. In order to thrive in this new earth - Eaarth - we are going to have to change too. Not cosmetically, not temporarily, but fundamentally.

--------------------------
Click to read Jed Lipinski's Salon interview with Bill McKibben, "'Eaarth': Earth is over."

Today's special - second-hand poop!

"You want chicken poop with that steak?"

Want it or not, says Animal Factory author David Kirby in an April 9, 2010, Huffington Post article - you're likely to get it. "Poultry excrement is loaded with urea, which bovine stomachs are adept at converting into lean, ready-to-grill protein," he writes. "We feed chicken manure to cattle because it's cheap; and because we produce far too much of it to properly dispose of as fertilizer."

In the 1960s and 70s, writes Nicolette Hahn Niman in Righteous Porkchop,  “agribusiness researchers came to regard all kinds of poop as acceptable cattle feed (and poultry and pig feed too)." The Food and Drug Administration was not especially bothered by this. Check out chapter 2 of their 1980 document Feed from Animal Wastes for a complete run-down on how to feed chicken poop to cows, cow dung to chickens, etc.

Ah, but that was 30 years ago. In the meantime we've had all kinds of scares: BSE ("mad cow disease"), salmonella and campylobacter, e coli ... surely the FDA has tightened its rules since then?

No, actually, the FDA and the USDA don't see anything wrong with second-hand poop. And if you think government regulators work hard and earn their salaries (think banking, Wall Street, oil spills, etc.), you probably feel quite confident that our food is safe. It won't turn your stomach to learn that many imported Chinese shrimp dine on chicken feces dropped from cages hanging above their ponds (see this L.A. Times article), or that after a temporary U.S. ban on feeding poop to cattle (2003-2005), the FDA concluded that the practice is perfectly safe and allowed it to continue (see  instructions, "Feeding Poultry Litter to Cattle," on the University of Missouri Extension website).

You won't be troubled by the fact that the rendering industry - the business that provides all that delectable manure to the animal feed companies - disliked the ban on bottom feeding and filed these comments with the FDA, arguing that there's no reason to lock the barn door if the horse hasn't been stolen,  providing laughable arithmetic computations to try to prove that BSE is not a danger, and engaging in a little jingoism: "It is our firm conviction that we must refrain from erroneously emulating the European legislation and instead pursue policies, which closely reflect the true state of affairs in this country." And you won't worry over the fact that the FDA listened to them.

Kirby describes the FDA response to agribusiness in 2004, and the government's lackadaisical attitude then and now:

In 2004, the FDA proposed banning poultry litter in cattle feed, to avoid the spread of BSE. It was already outlawed in Canada. But days later, the agency postponed its change, citing "troubling feedback" from the agricultural sector. Some foreign countries balked at buying US beef, but the Bush Administration held firm, refusing to commit to a deadline... 

I imagined that the Obama Administration would complete the work left undone by Bush and enact a universal ban on feeding beef products to cattle. Instead, I discovered that Obama's FDA had ratified what his predecessor proposed: Doing nothing.

You might want to check out the stats on agribusiness influence and lobbying. It doesn't look like we'll have an abundance of poop-free meat anytime soon.

Meanwhile, if you don't like the idea of eating second-hand poop, all you have to do is avoid shit-eating factory-farmed animals. The ascetically inclined may choose veganism. The rest of us can look for meat, poultry, fish, dairy products, and eggs at the farmers' market, or that bear at least one of these labels:

• 100% organic
• vegetarian-fed
• wild-caught
• 100% grass fed
• animal welfare approved

Voting with your fork -- Review of "Righteous Porkchop" by Nicolette Hahn Niman

"Are you trying to convert us?" asked one of my daughters after reading my recent posts on vegetarianism. Not to vegetarianism, I emailed back - just to mindful eating.

I like Michael Pollan's creed : "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

I also like Nicolette Hahn Niman's advice at the end of her 2009 book, Righteous Porkchop:

Do not thoughtlessly eat foods from animals. Know the source. Question the methods. There is great power in posing the following simple question to grocery stores, restaurants and farmers: “How was this raised?” Then shift your buying toward those meats, fish, eggs, and dairy products that come from animals raised in a way that you like.... It’s voting with your fork.

Voting with your fork seems like such a pathetically tiny response to the worldwide scourge of factory farms, which Niman describes in heartbreaking detail : Ecological devastation, such as the 1995 lagoon break that spilled “more than twenty-five million gallons of liquefied hog manure into the New River (more than twice the volume of oil spilled by the Exxon Valdez).” Increased poverty in areas where agribusiness, with the help of public subsidies, tax exemptions, and favored treatment, has driven small farmers off the land. Endangered public health from antiobiotic-resistant infections and poisoned air and water. And, of course, unspeakable cruelty to animals who never see the sun, eat manure-rich feed, and are dismembered while still alive.

Model farms

Fortunately, in Righteous Porkchop Niman goes well beyond exposing the evils of factory farming. As her delightful title suggests, a small but rapidly growing movement is challenging industrial food production - not only by throwing well-deserved stones, but also by modeling animal husbandry as it should be practiced. Just as Pollan praises Joel Salatin's Virginia chicken farm in The Omnivore's Dilemma and Jonathan Safran Foer extols Frank Reese's Kansas turkey farm in Eating Animals, Niman writes glowingly about farmers who treat their animals and the environment with respect: the Klessig family, who own a Wisconsin dairy farm, for example, and Rob and Michelle Stokes, who raise goats in Oregon.

Niman herself is now a rancher. Formerly a senior attorney with Robert Kennedy Jr.'s environmental group Waterkeeper Alliance, she married Niman Ranch founder Bill Niman in 2003 and got personally involved with raising cattle, an odd vocation for a woman who has been a vegetarian since college. Ms. Niman, however, is by no means opposed to righteous porkchops. Having learned that milk cows and egg-laying hens are kept in conditions as abysmal as their meat-animal cousins, she "simply couldn't continue consuming eggs and dairy products and maintain any sense of moral superiority." All foods of animal origin can be farmed cruelly or responsibly. Those who eat such foods can ignore the problems - or they can vote for change with their forks.

But does voting with my fork do any good? What is one person against the Goliath agribusiness?

Change in the air
The thing is, it isn't just one person. It isn't even just a few activists or extremists. Michael Pollan's books regularly hit the best-seller lists. David Kirby's new book, Animal Factory, is getting rave reviews (watch this interview on the Fox Business channel). Movies like King Corn and Food Inc. are making the rounds. Farmers' markets have never been more popular.

Businesses are listening. Trader Joe's and Whole Foods markets are springing up everywhere, and major supermarkets are adding an abundance of organic products.

Policies are changing, too. “To qualify as ‘organic,’ dairies have not been required by USDA to truly keep their cows on pasture,” Niman wrote last year. Beginning next month, this will no longer be true. According to a February 12 New York Times article, Department of Agriculture rules go into effect in June requiring that dairy cows be allowed to "graze on pasture for the full length of the local grazing season. The season will be determined by local conditions and agriculture authorities, like organic certifiers or county conservation officials, not by the dairy alone. While the grazing season must last at least 120 days, in many areas it will be much longer."

In the meantime
Meanwhile, of course, factory farms flourish, and their public relations and marketing departments work overtime to persuade the public that their approach is ethical, healthful, and necessary. One of Niman's best chapters, "Answering Obstacles to Reform," no doubt has its roots in the legal battles she waged - and won - against industrial agriculturalists when she worked for Waterkeeper. Read it whenever you're tempted to believe that large operations are more efficient than small ones, or that industrially raised meat is necessary in order to feed the world.

And whenever you think it's just too hard to save the world one fork at a time, read the preceding chapter, "Finding the Right Foods." Even though interest in responsibly farmed food is growing, it can still be difficult to find 100% grass-fed beef, or milk from cows who graze in pastures, or eggs from hens who breathe fresh air. Niman offer many pointers and websites to make the search less daunting.

Righteous Porkchop covers a lot of ground. It's a memoir and an exposé, a call to action and a buying guide, a good read packed with information. If I'd been Niman's editor, I might have tried to get her to narrow her focus and smooth out her style  - but I might have been wrong. She's not as well-organized as Pollan or as literary as Safran Foer, but she makes an excellent case. She's going to convert a lot of us.

How to cook for your vegetarian friends - 10 ideas

"Help! I just discovered one of my dinner guests is a vegetarian! What can I do?"

Take a deep breath. If your friend has been a vegetarian for more than a few weeks, she is already quite used to fending for herself at meals where meat is served. A new convert to vegetarianism, on the other hand (like a new convert to almost anything), may go all righteous and preachy on you. Don't argue with her. Ask questions, listen, and resolve to give her a few months to settle in before inviting her back.

We have quite a few vegetarian* friends, and they are, without exception, gracious and appreciative guests.

----------------------------------------

*Note: It helps to find out what your friends mean by vegetarian. Many vegetarians happily eat dairy products and eggs, while some (vegans) eat nothing that comes from animals, not even honey. A few people who call themselves vegetarians are actually pescetarians - they eat fish, but not meat. And some are selective meat eaters - they will eat meat only if they know it comes from a family farm that treats its animals humanely.

----------------------------------------

Here are 10 ideas for feeding vegetarians and meat-eaters together.
 1.   Do nothing. Serve whatever you were planning to serve before you knew your guest's eating habits. Just be sure to provide, alongside your steaks, plenty of side dishes that the vegetarian can eat.
 2.   Provide a selection of sandwiches, soups, and/or salads and let everybody take what they want.
 3.   Serve buffet or family style to maximize choice.
 4.   Serve pasta with a choice of sauces.
 5.   Serve pizza with a choice of toppings.
 6.   Serve tapas or meze - a wide selection of appetizers that make up an entire meal.
 7.   Ask your vegetarian friend to contribute a hot dish.
 8.   Host a potluck.
 9.   Cook a vegetarian meal for everybody (see suggestions here, here, and here).
10.  Meet your friends at a restaurant.