Michael Pollan has connected the dots for us all once again. Health care reform is about more than the insurance companies, it’s also about what you ate for lunch.

We have the highest health care costs and the fattest people. This is not a coincidence. Americans spend twice as much on health care compared to most European countries and the majority of treatment is for preventable chronic diseases. These lifestyle diseases have everything to do with our food system and our perverse system of subsidizing unhealthy food. High-calorie low-nutrient over-processed foods are cheap in America like no where else in the world.

Pollan makes the argument that comprehensive health care reform would create incentives for the health care industry to encourage healthy lifestyles and food system reform. Our preventable chronic diseases would reek havoc on a their bottom lines and increasing access and interest in healthy foods will be in their best interest. If everyone has to be covered, prevention pays and the movement for food system reform might receive a new strong voice of support.

It sounds strange, but reform might actually encourage the health insurance companies to promote something new for them: health.

Columbia Professor and Vertical Farm Entrepreneur Dickson Despommier wrote a interesting op-ed for the Sunday paper of New York Times. I’m glad his ideas are getting attention, but this whole vertical farm business elicits strongly divergent feelings in me. I want to support it but I’m still not sold.

The premise is right on. We are losing topsoil, farmable land, natural resources, etc at disastrous rates. Traditional methods need be revitalized, but at his point – with humongous urban populations and a ravaged environment – we need innovation. Something needs to be done and Despommier’s Vertical Farms are the type of ideas that we need to bring healthy food systems back into our lives.

Let’s look at the positive:

There are already plenty of urban farms in New York City. From Added Value in Red Hood, to ENY Farms, to Backyard Farmers and Community Gardeners, it is more than possible to grow food in this city. Urban farming is the key to a revitalized food system. Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint is an example of innovative growing that adjusts to the requirements of the city.

It seems like a natural progression. On the road to revitalized food system, we started with community gardens and moved to neighborhood farms. We raised our vegetables up higher with raised beds and then too them out the ground entirely and put them on our roofs.

Is the next step a high-rise farm? Maybe.

Brooklyn and beer used to be the best of friends. We had over 100 breweries and once even produced more beer than Milwaukee. But times change and that was a long time ago.

There’s been a resurgence of breweries in Brooklyn over the past few years. The Brooklyn Brewery has led the charge and much of the cultural recognition, but there are a number of other hoppy upstarts blessing our borough with some delicious brews. Once again people are starting think of Brooklyn when they think of good beer.

Couple that resurgance with our prolific DIY food culture and its a huge surprise that up until recently Brooklyn has had no homebrew supply shops. Brewing beer is simple and in line with the Brooklyn food aesthetic, but it still requires some specialty equipment and access to special ingredients. This lack of access is the easiest way to explain that while your friends have been at home making their own breads, pickles, kombucha, and other fermented goodies, there’s been a dearth of Brooklyn home brewers. It was not just Brooklyn though. There was no beer brewing supply shop in NYC that could be accessed by public transit!

Thankfully this is the year of change! This year has seen the emergence of two new homebrew supply shops in Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Brew Shop and Brooklyn Homebrew.

The Brooklyn Brew Shop has no retail location yet but you can find them at the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene on Saturdays and DUMBO on Sundays. They have a limited selection at their tent, but are happy to source other ingredients if you email them beforehand. There’s something nice about the shop’s transience.

Brooklyn Homebrew opened this year as well and has a retail location in Sunset Park. The project of two New York City chefs, the shop will hopefully be a home for a new community of homebrewers.

Let’s get to brewing Brooklyn!

It’s summer time and that means tomatoes. But this summer there has been an HUGE outbreak of Late Blight, a fungus related to the one that caused the Irish Potato Famine with similar disasterous results. Not a small matter at all! It’s a huge blow to small organic farms, because tomatoes are such a huge and integral part of their yearly revenue and they are helpless against such outbreaks. Normally proper farm management will protect against such outbreaks, and with millenia of experience tending the soil and with farmer oversight through State Agriculture Schools, many of these types of outbreaks have been avoided,

So what happened this time?

“Professor Fry, who is genetically tracking the blight, said the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April.” Yes, Wal-Mart is attacking small farms! Not intentially, of course, and not directly, but their large scale agricultural incompentence is reeking havoc on our food system! Nationwide distribution of agricultural products by agriculturally illiterate companies is the worst thing for food system as whole, because it not only affects the customers of sub-par produce, but everyone, all farmers and all eaters. It is a ticking time bomb. All of the food system is deeply interconnected and so, like it or not, we are all in this together. What an individual person and company contributes to the food system has the potential to affect the entire system.

Please let this remind you that your role in the food system is important. What you eat and who buy from is important. No one is an island and your contibution can be a positive one. Celebrate your local bounty with a organic feast amongst family and friends. Eat beautifully and protect our food system!

Late Blight Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop

It’s a sad state of the world when it takes a court ruling to decide that Pringles, the plywood of snack foods, are potato chips or “similar product.” Britain’s Supreme Court has ruled that Pringles are legally potato chips.

Now if it weren’t for the context, I would stand firmly on the side that Pringles are not a potato chip, nor “similar product”. They are a “similar product” by sheer marketing force having nothing to do with ingredients. Made of potato flour, corn, rice, wheat, “taste enhancers,” (read: MSG) and “flavorings,” they are the sawdusts of the processed food world molded into something resembling real food.

Procter and Gamble, Pringles manufacturer, made a variation of that argument to Britain’s Supreme Court to avoid a 17.5% VAT tax of potato chips and similar products. The argued that that Pringles were ‘unlike anything found in nature’ and therefore not subject to the tax. In that sense they are correct.

Part of me would even like for the ruling to hold that Pringles are not potato chips or similar product. And then it should be enforced that they can’t advertise their products as such and might have to sell their product as the industrial amalgam that it is. The fact that they have to pay millions in back taxes is the only thing that makes the decision worthwhile to me. That a natural product – however fatty potato chips are and as industrially processed as they are capable of being – is taxed heavily, while an industrial “food” product can escape the tax is unacceptable. It encourages a food system based on flawed assumptions about the definition of food.

The precedent is dangerous. It legally recognizes food-like products as the very foods they are mimicking… at least in Britain. Unfortunately its something we did long ago in America.

Canada’s Governor General Michaelle Jean has caused quite an international stir in the past couple days by eating raw seal heart on her tour of Canada’s Nunavut Province. The whole hubbub is extremely interesting because the conversation is contained mostly amongst progressives: supporters of indigenous solidarity and supporters of animal rights.

Governor general Jean is currently on a tour of Nunavut, Canada. The province was officially created in 1999 and is over 80% Inuit. Living in such harsh arctic conditions over the past few thousand years has created a unique cultural landscape with food, like most cultures, at its center. Given a climate with little agricultural hope and cold enough to naturally preserve meat, raw meat plays a large role in the culture. So much so that the word eskimo is commonly - althogh incorrectly – held to mean ‘eaters of raw meat.’ Seal meat is both a livelihood for many communities and a way of life.

In this regard, the act of eating raw seal heart is an act of solidarity with an indigenous and oft oppressed culture. The Inuit culture of Nunavut deserves the support.

On the opposing side stands the image of the commercial seal hunt. On its face, it appears atrocious. The image is akin to killing kittens for sport – there’s really nothing worse. As a strong proponent of the ethical consideration of animals myself, I understand the gut reaction. The EU recently banned Canadian seal products in protest to commercial seal hunting and a little tasting seems to be a direct protest of that action. I believe they are justified to do so and can even go so far to say that I support the ban. In the delicate arctic ecosystem, large scale commercial seal hunting for export seems not only cruel, but extremely unsustainable. This was different though. This was about a sustainable and local food culture. I would be more bothered if the Governor ate a mango in the arctic, something that definitely doesn’t belong.

I can’t speak for the Governor General’s intentions, but I don’t see the big deal with her action. The real story for me is the world’s misguided response. The otherness of this exotic culture is being demonized and its strikes me as incredibly racist and rooted in a deep misunderstanding of one’s relationship to a food system and geography. It might be a bit much to pull the racism card, but its hard not to have that reaction. (And isn’t the EU the home of Fois Gras?). I can understand and support a ban on commercial seal hunting for export, but that is starkly different from the continued preservation of a beautiful, unique and environmentally sustainable culture.

When in Italy, you eat the pasta; when in Nunavut you eat the raw seal heart.

I’ve been thinking about the particular geography of fermentation. More specific than the differences between fermentation cultures (truly meant in both senses), I’ve been thinking about the differences between starting a sourdough culture in New York as opposed to New Jersey, Manhattan as opposed to Brooklyn, this block as opposed to that one.

The differences between wild yeasts and bacteria are greater, and perhaps more complete, across larger divides. Milk left to culture can become kefir, or yogurt, or cheese or, well, a lot of different things. The types of decay and fermentation are so beautiful in there distinctions and characters.

Can the diversity of fermentation be taken to a more micro level? Will a sourdough starter created in Central Park be noticeably different than one created in Fort Greene Park? What about one created at the bottom of and the other at the top of the Empire State Building?

I hope so!

There is definitely a difference in the environment conditions between the two, however subtle. The terrior is unique in subtle ways. I would love to be able to taste that difference, make it tangible.

Visual-Music Marathon

Watch a the preview on their website HERE!

It made me think of other natural artistic pairings, especially for the culinary arts.  Music and visual art are natural complements to beautiful meal.  It would be natural to count these artistic mediums as an influence on a culinary presentation, but how could they be integrated in such a way to become indispensable to the presentation? Can food art be created and presented as part of a larger artistic experience?

The Peradeniya Botanical Gardens in Kandy, Sri Lanka is an oasis amidst a crowded and bustling city.  Its full of an incredible diversity of plant life and quite a few botanical curiosities.  The most curious, most wonderful to my eye was he Coco de Mer, or Double Coconut Palm.

The coconuts of the Double Coconut are huge,  like 60 lbs huge.  And for a seed that’s pretty huge.

To demonstrate:

My Mother vs Double Coconut

The plant, native to formally uninhabited islands in the Indian ocean, was a mystery to those who found the humongous seeds washed up upon the shore or floating in the ocean.   Without any other explanation, it was a commonly held belief that the seed grew from a plant at the bottom of the ocean.

From Wikipedia:

Legend has it that sailors who first saw the nut floating in the sea imagined that it resembled a woman’s disembodied buttocks. This association is reflected in one of the plant’s archaic botanical names, Lodoicea callipyge Comm. ex J. St.-Hil., in which callipyge is from Greek words meaning ‘beautiful rump’. Other botanical names used in the past include Lodoicea sechellarum Labill. and Lodoicea sonneratii.