Most of the talk about reducing food waste focuses on big solutions and improving efficiency, but big solutions tend to create waste; in fact the pursuit of efficiency itself can create new kinds of waste even while limiting other kinds. Let me give just one example of why: Chickens.
How much do Americans actually spend on food? (And how much should we?)
I went digging for numbers and found far too many. What’s the bottom line? Yes, our food is incredibly cheap in historical and global terms, but we spend more of our budgets on it than is often claimed, and we’d have to spend a lot more than that to eat healthy.
On the propriety of urinating in the dining room
On the screen the Regency period of Jane Austen’s novels always looks so prim, but in reality it appears not quite to have lived up to our expectations of public-broadcast propriety. Louis Simond, a French-born American who traveled through Britain in 1810–11, some (to his mind) shocking practices of the English aristocracy at table — practices, as he said, “not quite consistent with that scrupulous delicacy on which the English pique themselves.”
Juliet Corson teaches the poor to cook, 1877
It’s the birthday of Juliet Corson, Gilded Age cooking teacher who gave free classes and free books to poor women and children in hopes that teaching them to cook would improve their lives.
Are personal recipes more usable?
Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook uses an open, visual layout that’s a lot like my handwritten recipe cards. People like that book in part because her tone is so friendly, but does the design actually make it more usable? And if so, why hasn’t anybody emulated it?
Coffee and craft
Julian Baggini writes in a thoughtful essay that high-end restaurants in the United Kingdom have thrown out the idea of “artisan” espresso and bought Nespresso machines, which use factory-sealed capsules of precision-ground coffee and can be operated with the push of a button. In fact, as Baggini discovered in a blind taste test, Nespresso is consistently better, or at least more consistently good, than “artisan” espresso made by hand. But, he asks, is a cup of coffee just a cup of coffee — just the momentary pleasure it gives us, a mere utilitarian instrument? Or is it something more — the sum of its relationships to other things?
Putting a face on food waste
Last week I ran across, again, the figure that Americans waste 40 percent of our food, which was widely reported last summer. I got to wondering how much of that was meat, because I am (and try to remain) keenly aware that meat is not merely pounds and calories and grams of protein; it’s the body of a once-living creature. Not that wasting bread or vegetables is a great thing, but I don’t see it as the same kind of moral issue as wasting meat. So I did a bit of research, and here’s what I found.
The idea of a sandwich
The sandwich was, in short, a waste of cheese, bread, meat, and money. On reflection, though, I hadn’t nine dollars for a sandwich. I paid nine dollars for the idea of a sandwich.
The dangers of eating hot bread
One of the perks of baking bread at home — maybe half the point of baking bread at home — is the privilege of hacking off the crust while it’s still hot, slathering it with butter, and eating it messily over the sink. Cookbooks will tell you that bread only develops its full flavor after it cools, which may be true. They will also tell you that if you slice bread while it’s hot, you’ll crush it, which is definitely true. But I do it anyway. Damn the torpedoes and all that.
Thank God I didn’t live in the nineteenth century, though, because then, it would probably have killed me. Or so people said…
Why are recipes so hard to use?
Yesterday I baked a really wonderful citrus-almond cake, and while I have no complaints at all about the cake, I found the recipe hard to use. I had trouble figuring it out initially, and it was picky without explaining anything. The more I thought about it, though, the problems with this recipe are the problems with practically every published recipe these days. They’re too wordy and dense to be skimmed or consulted quickly by an experienced cook, but they don’t give a real beginner enough help to be successful. Can’t we do better than this?