Hannah Wallace

A Home Ec Class for the 21st Century

Home economics, which was a fixture in secondary schools throughout the 1950s and 1960s, has all but vanished today, but there is a steady rallying cry from pediatricians, nutrition educators, and food justice activists to bring it back. Helen Zoe Veit, an assistant professor of history at Michigan State, recently wrote an impassioned Op-Ed in the New York Times in which she championed home ec and asked, “What if the government put the tools of obesity prevention in the hands of children themselves, by teaching them how to cook?” In a May 2010 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Alice Lichtenstein, DSc and David S. Ludwig, MD argued that any long-term solution to the pediatric obesity epidemic will need to include a re-introduction of home economics in public high schools—"a version of hunting and gathering for the 21st century." 

A new class called FoodFight, which I wrote about in the New York Times yesterday, aims to be just that. Founded by two former public school teachers, FoodFight has a lofty goal: to change the way teenagers think about food. The class, which is currently being taught at 15 public high schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, combines media literacy, food politics, nutrition education, and cooking. 

Students taking a FoodFight class learn how to deconstruct advertisements, critically inspect food labels, and shop for and prepare nutritious meals like vegetable stir-fry with brown rice. But that’s not all: they read about the political and economic forces that have shaped the food system, making fast food artificially cheap. They enact a mock senate hearing about the soda tax, watch documentaries like Food, Inc., and Super Size Me, and some even get to go on field trips to urban farms, food co-ops, and a 400-acre farm upstate. The students in Ms. Sarah Katz's class at the Essex Academy have started tending a rooftop vegetable garden.

 

Cory Carman: how grass-fed beef saved the family ranch

When I heard Cory Carman speak at Ecotrust's food hub conference last spring, I knew I had to write about her. Her story, of taking over her family's ranch out in eastern Oregon and converting it to a 100% grass-fed operation, interested me for at least three reasons. First, ever since reading Michael Pollan's the Omnivore's Dilemma, I've been convinced of the environmental and nutritional superiority of grass-finished beef. (That is, beef that hasn't been fed corn for the last few months of its life.) So I'm always thrilled to discover ranchers and companies who are producing it. Second, Carman is part of a growing movement of educated young people who are choosing to make a living off the land. (For more evidence that this is, indeed, happening, check out the Greenhorns documentary.)

Finally, the challenges Carman spoke about that day—her struggle to find a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse that would take her business, finding an efficient way to get her beef to Portland eaters—illustrated logistical hurdles that small and medium-sized farmers and ranches face all over America. Sadly, our dominant food system is not set up for small, family-run ranches like Carman Ranch. That one plucky woman (and her other half, Dave) could tackle these challenges with creativity and perseverance, gives me hope that we can eventually change our food system.

Grass-fed beef is more popular than ever, but will it ever make up more than a tiny percent of the U.S. beef market? Americans have grown accustomed to marbled, corn-fed beef. Bringing grass-fed beef to the masses would require a major paradigm shift—not just in the eating and spending habits of the average American, but in the meat industry itself. We’d need to retrain ranchers in how to pasture cattle—how to keep them away from wild onions, bitterwheat, and forages that impart an off-flavor—and train them in the art of management intensive grazing. We’d need to give economic incentives for mobile slaughterhouses and smaller USDA-inspected facilities. We’d also need to end corn subsidies, which keeps the price of corn-fed beef artificially cheap.    

For Carman and her cow-share customers, though, all this is, in a way, irrelevant. Waving a hand to members who are lingering to divvy up their meat, she says, “They know where their meat comes from and know the cows have never left the ranch. They’re eating whole animal quantities. This is totally representative of how our food system should be.”

Read more about Carman in the November issue of Portland Monthly.

The Crème de la Crema

When I travel, one of the first things I do is seek out a local coffee shop. It must have character and a sense of place, of course. But equally important to me, it must source fresh beans (and pay farmers more than Fair Trade prices for them) and employ baristas who know that a small latte is made with two shots, not one. I suppose I've become a coffee snob—I want pour-over instead of drip coffee; I turn up my nose at over-roasted blends, preferring instead the tea-like qualities of a medium roast from Guatemala. How disappointing is it to pay upwards of $4 for a limpid latte?

Life is too short.

To help you in your quest for the best coffee, I singled out eight superb cafés—from London's Prufrock to Copenhagen's Coffee Collective—for an article in this month's issue of travel magazine Endless Vacation. This is by no means a definitive list. I have many other favorites—like Third Rail on Sullivan Street the West Village and Crema in Southeast Portland. But it's a good list. What are some of your favorites and why?  I'd love to find out.

TFT Interview with Josh Viertel

 

When you hear the words Slow Food, do you conjure up a multi-course locavore dinner with wine pairings?  If so, think again. Over the past three years, Slow Food USA president Josh Viertel has hammered home the mission of Slow Food: it's about advocating for food that is good (healthy), clean (i.e. no pesticides), and fair (farmers and workers get paid a living wage). As Viertel makes it clear in this interview I did with him for my column at the Faster Times last week, Slow Food is at heart a social justice organization that's rallying members to be politically engaged, whether that's by taking up the $5 challenge or pressuring Congress for changes to the 2012 Food and Farm Bill. Taking pleasure in food—and in cooking—will always be inextricably linked to the organization's larger goal of ensuring that, "Everyone can eat food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it." For inspiration, here's a video of a group of farmers who took the $5 challenge.

 

 

Farmers Film Week 9: The $5 Local Meal from cinnamon Kennedy on Vimeo.