I've been following the dust-up over Paula Deen finally coming clean about having diabetes after her drug endorsements were in place. I'm not keen on tearing up Deen over this, because if it wasn't her, it would just be another person holding down the extreme end when it comes to junk food and celebrity chefs. What I do find interesting is that her story seems to fit right into the standard American way of handling the problem of diabetes, which is to deal with after the disease has developed, and not a minute before. 

Now Deen is jumping on board the health-advice bandwagon. Three batter-dipped years after her diagnosis — and after three years of silence about her condition — she’s teamed with diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk to promote the company. She and her two sons, Bobby and Jamie, are appearing in a new campaign that includes “diabetes-friendly meals” and Deen’s genteel admissions that she’s walking more and cutting back on sweet tea.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is understandably angry that it took Deen three years and a drug company endorsement deal before she started down this path, but I think it's interesting how she and we all assume that the natural rhythm of these things is to make the switch to healthier eating after you've already started to suffer problems, often incurable ones like diabetes. We don't think much about how ingrained that mentality is, but I see it all the time. For instance, I can't tell you how many times I've been drinking a Diet Coke and had someone say to me, "You don't need to drink Diet; you're not overweight." Now, I have a lot of reasons for picking Diet Coke over regular and certainly don't think it's some kind of health food, but the underlying assumption---that we should only watch what we eat if we're trying to lose weight or control a chronic condition---stuns me. I see the same thing with people taking a pass on dessert or eating something healthy; if you don't frame it as an attempt to lose weight, you often get aggressive questions. That's getting better as initiatives like Michelle Obama's are getting the word out about nutrition as prevention instead of just management, but still, this mentality persists. 

I think it's another example of American all-or-nothing thinking. The trajectory is to overeat without thinking about for years, until it catches up with you and then, as a corrective, your doctor puts you on a strict diet where you can't eat any of your favorite foods at all. There's no room for the "take two bites and leave it" mentality that allows you to have the food you like without putting yourself in a position where you're forbidden from ever touching it again. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of structural incentives to promote the moderation mentality. At every turn, capitalists profit off this trajectory. The fast food companies make a mint of Americans in their eating years, and then the drug companies make a mint off them when they're trying to control their various diseases. (Indeed, I think Deen makes everyone uncomfortable because she's profiting from both sides of the equation.) The problem with all this is that we're the ones paying for it. Diabetes and heart disease are two of the major reasons that our health care costs are skyrocketing, for one thing. But even if that could somehow be erased from the equation, the human cost in struggling with these terrible diseases is far too much for us to bear. 

I have a theory about the Spiderman musical, and its inexplicable popularity despite being the most hated piece of pop culture in 2011 (people's loathing for "Friday" is mixed with giddy affection, taking it off the list). It's a combination of two things. One, the amount of bad press it got raised its visibility, so when tourists come in and are looking for a show, they latch on to Spiderman because it's a known quantity. Of course, that's not enough to push it over the top. If you go to Times Square and take in the ads, you'll see Broadway is awash in known quantities to appeal to incurious tourists, revising all sorts of classic movies and TV shows to reel them in, plus Mamma Mia. No, I suspect what's helping Spiderman out is backlash. This is just a theory, but I suspect that this scenario plays out over and over again: A Fox News-loving  family is planning their trip to the Big Apple, and they want to see a Broadway show. They look over the list of available shows and Spiderman sticks out. They heard a lot about it this year! Of course, it was all bad reviews. But hell, those reviews probably came from those elitist liberal snobs who want their Broadway shows to be nudist interpretative dances about the deaths of animals from oil spills, so fuck 'em. They bet Spiderman is great, because those reviewers hate it so much. And another batch of tickets is sold. 

If this theory seems a little far-fetched, I invite you to read Media Matters' end-of-year round-up on the right wing war on health. Health is a thing those elitist liberals like, with their jogging and their fiber. The liberal associations with health grew stronger because of the health care reform battle. Now healthiness itself is suspect. Some of my favorite highlights:

Fox & Friends Attacked HPV Vaccine Law While Promoting Teenage Tanning. During the October 11 edition of Fox & Friends, the co-hosts attacked a California law that will allow adolescents as young as 12 to receive the HPV vaccine, which can protect against cervical cancer, without parental consent. They also juxtaposed this law with a California provision that restricts those younger than 18 from using tanning salons, but failed to note that tanning beds increase the risk of skin cancer by 75 percent.

I liked this one, because it not only touches on the hostility to health, but also encompasses the creepy right wing obsession with the sexy virgin. Jessica Valenti wrote about this in The Purity Myth, but to recap: the right doesn't just want young women to be virgins. They want them to be sex object virgins: slender, beautiful, preferably buxom, apparently super-tan, and compliant. The virgin's value is ratcheted up dramatically by how sexy (by the most conventional standards) she is. It's like objectification on steroids. Thus, the constant churning out of one blonde sex symbol after another who puts on a faux-modest look while bragging about her virginity. And, of course, the inevitable fall.....

Fox's Gutfeld: "Why Are Health Food Freaks Always So Sickly Looking?" On the August 23 broadcast of The Five, Gutfeld said, "Why are health food freaks always so sickly-looking?" Co-host Andrea Tantaros replied, "They're unhappy, because they're not eating any fat."

Projection is the favoritest of all right wing neuroses. This is the war on health equivalent of when a guy hits on you, and when you shoot him down, he calls you ugly and denies that he had any interest, due to the ugliness.

Right-Wing Media Freaked Out Over Red Lobster, Olive Garden Decision To Shrink Portion Sizes. In September, after Darden Restaurants Inc., the parent company of Red Lobster and Olive Garden, announced it would shrink portion sizes and reduce sodium in its meals, right-wing media responded by attacking the decision and claiming the company was "bending to the whims of Michelle Obama." In a blog post, Malkin claimed that Darden was "strong-armed" into "re-designing meals" by Michelle Obama, while the Drudge Report linked to the story with a picture of Michelle Obama and the words, "Adult Supervision for fries."

Fox Promotes Hypothetical Junk Food Tax, Responds With A "Cultur[al]" Defense Of Macaroni And Cheese. On the July 26 edition of Fox & Friends, Carlson discussed a hypothetical junk food tax, beginning the segment by saying, "Do we really need the government ... policing this?" Her guest, Robert Ferguson, then claimed that "[n]o one has ever really talked about" "what makes foods healthy." He also said that a person needs to "tak[e] into account different cultures" in order to calculate nutritional value, then concluded: "In my world, I like mac and cheese. ... I'm going to eat it."

Right wing media has quite literally cast its audience as belligerent, picky children and Michelle Obama as Mom standing over them telling they they can't have any dessert if they don't eat their vegetables. One could argue the facts on this until the end of time---do they seriously believe the First Lady has such all-encompassing powers that Olive Garden would rather cater to her than make money?----but I'm more interested in the psychology of this. Why are so many conservatives eager to imagine themselves not just as children, but as annoying, picky children? You'd think a bunch of authoritarians would at least prefer the image of well-behaved children who politely eat what's served, but their hatred of the Obamas runs so deep that they are willing to cast themselves in the role of the pointlessly petulant child.

Of course, it probably runs deeper than that. The truth may be that they don't realize that they are casting themselves in that role, but are just naturally drawn to it, because they are petulant and childish. That's probably the better explanation, since it also goes a long way towards explaining "Wah! I don't want to play nice with others!", the lavish worship of the bullies who steal other kids' lunch money, and seeing people in distress, such as the unemployed, and wanting to give them wedgies instead of help them out. 

Now that the CSA is over, I may not be food blogging as much, and I'm definitely going to take a break from chronicling what I cook. But I still have thoughts and ideas on food and figured this would be a fun space for others to continue sharing ideas. I realized one thing I want to do now that the CSA isn't dictating what I cook as much is spend some more time making vegetarian or vegan versions of some of my favorite Tex-Mex. I mean, I make a lot of beans and tacos as a general rule, but there's some more specialized things that fall by the wayside during CSA months that I can spend some time on. 

Tex-Mex has a lot of dishes that are surprisingly easy to make meat-free, or even animal product-free. For instance, one of my favorite dishes growing up, posole, which is a Mexican stew you eat with tortillas. There's a number of ways to make posole, but the traditional versions tend to be based around pork and hominy. I make a version that replaces the pork with red beans, and it's insanely good. Turns out that the hominy was really the key to making posole work. I googled around and found a version of posole that's a lot like mine. Take this recipe, remove the cheese, and replace half the hominy with red beans. I prefer this vegan version, because getting the cheese out of the way allows you to really enjoy the spices and the hominy. You can serve it with either steamed corn or flour tortillas. On the whole, I prefer corn over flour tortillas, but tonight we're going to go with flour, just to mix it up. (Though the new rice cooker/veggie steamer my mom bought me for Christmas is the perfect shape and size to steam corn tortillas, so perhaps I'll be doing that more often.) While I won't deny that my mom's posole made with pork is some great stuff, I really do feel that the vegetarian version stacks up nicely, and it doesn't have that grease that floats to the top and can make your stomach feel less than pleasant if you're like me and tend to woof it down. 

Do you have a favorite dish you successfully converted to vegetarian? How did you do it, and how do you feel it compares to the meat version?

Well, the CSA (for those who don't know, that stands for community-supported agriculture) ended last week (sorry I forgot to mention that in the post), and I'm a little bereft. It's funny. A lot of people fear getting into a CSA because they worry about getting "weird" vegetables they don't know how to cook, and fear they'll fail at meal planning. But once you get into the swing of it, a CSA actually makes meal-planning easier, because it narrows your options down. You're standing there saying, "Well, whatever I do, I have to make something with this kohlrabi." When it ends is the hard part. Now you're standing there having to plan meals and you have no guidance whatsoever. Sometimes I go to the farmer's market and buy up a bunch of random stuff, but it's not the same. Part of it is that I'm trying hard to strike a balance between eating the seasons/eating locally and not spending way too much time on meal planning, and that can get hard. 

One thing that helps is the internet. The internet helps when you're in a CSA, because you can just plug ingredients into a search engine---often just Google---and get tons of recipes back. It makes it fun to mix and match stuff, just to see if it'll work. (Do a "let's see, I have some apples and some sweet potatoes, now voila! I have a casserole.) But without the CSA, I find myself spending more time reading blogs and bookmarking stuff I can shop for. Since blogs are trying to be relevant, they often fall into seasonal recipes, even if they're not trying to do a local/seasonal thing. Because they're foodies, they can often push you towards cooking with unusual ingredients that you might not have tried on your own, just as a CSA does. 

Here's some of my regular go-to places for recipes:

Simply Recipes: the best for diversity, ease of use, and comprehensiveness. Elise Bauer also updates regularly, so you're never wondering if she's got something new to be inspired by. It's not vegetarian, but it has a lot of vegetarian recipes. At the top is a post praising fennel, so you know she's not screwing around.

A Veggie Venture: More sporadic, but when they do post, it's usually got tons of useful information. They are also just seasonal-esque by habit, like Simply Recipes. Right now, the top post is a list of sweet potato recipes, for instance. 

Chop Bouie: Friend of the blog Jamelle Bouie has a Tumblr where he records some stuff he cooks. It's less a traditional recipe blog, and more just a matter of inspiration, but I find it very inspiring. He's not a vegetarian, but he does the sometimes-vegan thing, so there's some ideas there.

101 Cookbooks: A vegetarian blog that updates infrequently, but when they do update, it's a doozy. The blogger loves offbeat recipes, and has been known to cull them from vintage cookbooks. Good times.

Recipes for Health: One of the NY Times food blogs, but don't let the mainstream nature of it cause you to back away. Martha Rose Shulman is an adventurous cook with an eye towards health, ease, and often the exclusion of meat. She tends to put up five or six recipes linked by a single ingredient at a time, and it's usually at the height of the season. So perfect for seasonal/local eating.

Smitten Kitchen: Being a some time vegetarian is all the rage now that foodie-ness is overlapping with environmental concerns about sustainability. It used to be hard for vegetarians to read recipes from non-vegetarian sources, but a lot of food blogs now will go weeks at a time just putting up vegetarian recipes (or ones that can be tweaked easily). Bloggers are taking to heart Michael Pollan's food rule: "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants." I find that's the case with this marvelous little blog. 

Post-Punk Vegan Kitchen: The world of vegan cooking and vegan products puts me off, because a lot of it violates the "eat food" rule. Since the principle is to avoid animal products, concerns about overly processed or junk food tend to rate second, if they register at all. Too many fake meats and sweets, for instance. While this blog falls into that trap on occasion, however, she's really been moving away from that and towards a form of cooking that emphasize ingredients and de-emphasizes trying to mimick the toxic standard American diet. I get a lot of ideas from here.

What are some of your favorite food blogs?

CSA Week #23 & #24

Because of all the traveling last weekend, I didn't have a chance to update the CSA blogging, so this is two weeks squished together. Unfortunately, I only have the food listing for one week, but for the other, it was the same sort of thing: fall veggies, apples, eggs.

Dinner #1

Roasted the squash and the garlic. Used it with some pearl barley, some of the parsley, chives, green onion, salt, pepper, saffron, water, and some white wine to make a barley risotto. While that cooked, I sautéed the greens and then added them to the risotto. Topped it off with Parmesan cheese.

Made a salad with spinach and apple to go with it.

If you skip the cheese and use a vegan wine, this recipe is easy to make vegan. Otherwise, vegetarian.

Dinner #2

Took one of the sweet potatoes and used it to make sweet PLTs, one of our very favorite recipes.

I also decided to use the potatoes and some of the marinara in my freezer to make this grown-up alphabet soup recipe. I used fresh tarragon and thyme from my garden, and added parsley from the CSA. I also used frozen corn instead of peas, since that happened to be what I had.

Vegetarian.

Dinner #3

I made mashed kohlrabi, using buttermilk and what was left of the parsley, as well as salt, pepper, and a bit of garlic.

Made cornbread.

Took some black beans and grated sweet potatoes, and stir-fried it with onion, garlic, cumin, oregano, chili pepper, salt, pepper and beer.

Dinner #4

Had lots of leftovers of the black bean and sweet potato mix, so put two cups of it in the food processor with half a cup of oats, an egg, a tablespoon of cornstarch, and a bit of smoked paprika to make a mushy mix that I then shaped into burgers. I baked it at 375 for 15 minutes on each side and served it topped with yogurt and kale I had sautéed with garlic.

Made a lentil soup with lemon and dill using this recipe.

Used the lettuce and a bit of apple to make salads.

Vegetarian.

Thanksgiving

Friends invited us over for dinner, and so I made a soup from CSA ingredients. I used this recipe for butternut squash apple soup, but added more apples than it calls for and roasted the butternut squash first. I wanted it be a bit sweeter than the recipe called for, because hey, Thanksgiving.

Vegetarian, though if you used olive oil instead of butter, it would be vegan. 

CSA Week #22  

Dinner #1

We had carnival squash! Carnival squash is the best. So I decided to make stuffed squash. I ground together some stale bread ends, ricotta cheese, an apple, a couple of eggs, herbs from the garden, chickpeas, and roasted garlic, and used all this for stuffing. When they came out of the oven, I topped them with marinara sauce.

Took the dill and made a yogurt sauce with it. Steamed the broccoli and served this dill yogurt sauce on it.

Made a couple of dinner salads with an apple and some of the lettuce. Dressed those with the dill sauce as well.

Everything got a heavy dose of salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese.

Vegetarian.

Dinner #2

Made cornbread.

Took the collard greens and the carrots and cooked them with green onions, garlic, thyme from my garden, salt, pepper, paprika, and pinto beans. Used some veggie broth to help it along.

Made a salad with the lettuce and a tomato from the farmer’s market. There was a little tomato left over, so I tossed that in to cook with the beans and greens mix.

Dessert was apple crisp, using what was left of this week’s apples.

Vegetarian. 

Reason links to a new study purporting to show that increased fast food consumption is not linked to poverty. 

Unfortunately, the study uses consumption figures from 1994-96. That wouldn't be a big deal, except that McDonald's didn't launch its Dollar Menu until 2002, at which point McDonald's consumption skyrocketed.

Reacting to the success of McDonald's Dollar Menu, Wendy's and Burger King both started promoting their versions of low-priced deals. Wendy's, which in 1989 was the first burger chain to experiment with menu items for $1, lowered prices on its Super Value Menu to 99 cents in January. And in February, Burger King started offering its own version of a dollar menu, including the Whopper Jr. and cheeseburgers.

The Dollar Menu became a permanent part of McDonald's menu in the United States in late 2002. It offers items like a double cheeseburger, the fried McChicken sandwich, French fries, a hot fudge sundae, pies, a side salad, a yogurt parfait and a 16-ounce soda.

Since McDonald's started advertising the Dollar Menu nationally, the double cheeseburger has become the chain's most ordered item. Even priced at $1, double cheeseburgers bring in more revenue than salads or the chicken sandwiches, which cost $3.19 to $4.29.

McDonald's executives say the Dollar Menu has driven enormous additional traffic into the stores, primarily young men and women aged 18 to 24. "The Dollar Menu appeals to lower-income, ethnic consumers," said Steve Levigne, vice president for United States business research at McDonald's. "It's people who don't always have $6 in their pocket."

You would think that a study analyzing the consumption of fast food by poor people would take into account a massive sea change in the way fast food was consumed by poor people.  But then again, I'm not a science-type person.

UPDATE: Jacob Sullum notes my objection, and also points out that the upward tick in obesity predates the advent of the Dollar Menu.  That's true, but not particularly relevant.  The purpose of the study (and the Reason post) was to point out that fast food didn't contribute to the rise in obesity because of consumption patterns when fast food was relatively more expensive. We live in a different environment now where consumption patterns for the poor have shifted toward fast food.

The other issue is that the advent of the Dollar Menu reflected a wider societal move toward cheap, crappy convenience food that predates 2002.  My wager is that fast food post-Dollar Menu supplanted other junk food choices - chief among them the recent McDonald's decision to sell 44 ounces of soda for a buck, which is a way better deal than buying a 20-ounce bottle for $1.50.  Fast food is the current culprit, but it's not like there haven't been other ones.

CSA Week #20

I had two weeks worth of vegetables, basically, because I had been out of town for a week. But I wasn't going to just let that food disappear, having pre-paid for it, so Marc picked it up. Most of it was in good condition, since our fridge is pretty cold, but some of it was a tad soft and required creativity. The older broccoli was the only unsalvageable thing. I try not to feel too bad about tossing it. Americans toss about 40% of food they buy, and we probably toss 5% at the most, and even then, I doubt it's that much. Not wasting food is really important to me for two reasons: 1) I don't like waste and 2) I don't like taking out the trash. So I make it a priority. 

Tips below on how not to waste food much appreciated!

Lunch

Took the eggplant, some greens from last week, some hot peppers, an onion, and tofu and made a basic garlic/ginger/soy stir fry with it. Added fresh basil, since I still have tons. Served over rice.

Dinner #1

Shredded apples and carrots in equal parts. Made a basic dressing using this recipe, and tossed it. Didn’t bother with raisins, which I’m sure some people would find scandalous, but I don’t like them enough to care. I don’t hate them, but not going out of my way is all.   

Roasted potatoes with thyme in the dutch oven inside my oven.

I had some black beans and greens in the freezer, and I defrosted them, nuked them, and served them on the side.

Vegetarian.

Dinner #2

I had radishes and cilantro, so clearly the thing to make is this delicious radish salsa, a recipe I’ve made before and absolutely adore. I like to fold leftovers up into omelets, especially. This stuff does not go to waste in my house.  

I made one of my faves---kidney beans with red wine---but instead of carrots, I used roasted sweet potatoes, I used cumin and chili powder instead of thyme and rosemary, instead of red wine used beer, and instead of serving with corn bread, I served it as if it were tacos on steamed corn tortillas, with the radish salsa and some goat cheese.

Used the mesclun mix from the CSA and the pears to make a pear salad, with sesame dressing from the fridge.

Vegetarian.

Dinner #3

Tons of apples, seriously. So I made this chickpea and apple curry and served it over rice. I didn’t use canned chickpeas, though. It’s cheaper to use dried beans that you cook beforehand, and it makes a lot less waste.

Vegetarian.

Dinner #4

I had a very serious “sad carrot” situation in the refrigerator, as well as tons of apples still. So it was clearly time to make some apple carrot soup.

Dark Avenger sent me this recipe for a kale/squash “lasagna”, so I made it with a couple of modifications. I had a lot of broccoli, so I chopped it into bits with my mini-chopper, and I mixed it up with the herbs, some ricotta instead of the recommended cheeses, and the diced tomatoes. Put that on top of the squash/kale layers.

Made apple muffins with the Simply Recipes zucchini muffin recipe, but with apples instead of zucchini. Since apples are sweet, I was able to cut the sugar in half.

Somehow, miraculously, I used nearly every single ingredient from two weeks worth of CSA pick-ups.  We still have apples, but they do tend to last. The one exception was that some of the broccoli that was nearly two weeks old went bad. But on the whole, not bad!

Vegetarian.

With all the traveling I've been doing, I haven't kept up with the CSA blogging at all. I have been cooking with it, but everything's been so rushed that I haven't written much down. Here's some of the last things I logged in:

CSA Week #17

Dinner #1

There’s a million variations on dal (here's a typical recipe), but I used Bittman’s recipe because I have his cookbook.  His is not spicy enough, however, so I chopped up some hot peppers and put it in the dal. I also chopped up the radishes and tossed them in there.  And even though it’s unorthodox, I tossed the broccoli in there, too, because there wasn’t really enough of it to justify serving it on its own. Towards the end of the cooking cycle, I added parsley.

You usually eat dal with rice or naan, but I served it with leftover cornbread muffins, due to my “waste not” philosophy. This worked out well; it was delicious.

I served it all with a pear and spinach salad that had goat cheese sprinkles and the leftover basil dressing from last week.

For dessert, I made these pear cookies.

Vegetarian

Dinner #2

It was a super orange dinner. I looked for savory pear recipes to use up all these pears I have and found this amazing one that also uses butternut squash.  So I made a ton of butternut squash/pear soup, since soup is a perfect food to have around for lunches as well as quick dinners of the sort I often eat at home. Because I have an immersion blender, it was a lot easier than the instructions on this page.

I also made one of our favorites, sweet PLTs, a delicious variation on the BLT that uses backed sweet potatoes with smoked paprika instead of bacon, and goat cheese instead of mayo.   

Vegetarian.

Lunch stuff

I roasted the beets and cooked the collard greens in a skillet with garlic and salt, put it all in the fridge, and used it to dress my homemade veggie burgers that I ate alongside the soup for lunches. 

The next week will be, by my count, week 20! This week will be an interesting challenge, for two reasons. One, we're deep into fall vegetables right now, and there are simply fewer recipes for localvore-leaning recipes for these vegetables. In fact, one reason to have this project is to explore that issue and find solutions. Two, I'll basically have two weeks worth of veggies to cook instead of one. Marc collected the CSA last week and I'll collect this week's. I suspect I'll be making a lot of stuff for freezing. And soups/sauces, to work through some of the sad vegetables that have been sitting in the fridge for a week. The good news is I'm unlikely to run out of onions. In fact, in a minute I'll be going into my kitchen and pursuing what we've got, since last night all I wanted to do was crash out on the couch after flying all day. 

What are some of your favorite recipes for fall vegetables such as squash, greens, turnips and radishes?

It's still warm and rainy, so it's slightly weird to see so many fall veggies showing up at the CSA, but it is what it is. The good news is a lot of them go well with the still-thriving summery herbs like basil that are growing on my patio. And I'm still getting plenty of tomatoes from the farmer's market. 

The fruit share is really working out well, I've decided. We sometimes get overwhelmed by fruit, but it's really fun finding creative uses for it.  There are also non-creative uses that are equally excellent. Say I have to meet people for a late-ish dinner; on the walk to it, I can eat an apple to keep myself from getting faint and crabby, as is my unfortunate habit when I'm hungry. (Always has been. I don't know what that means, if anything.)

As you can see, I have a new photo filtering system called Be Funky. I'm breaking up with Instagram. 

CSA Week #16

Dinner #1

I had to do something with all these pears.  So I started by making this pear bread recipe.

I was feeling casserole-y, and I had eggplant and corn left over from the week before, so since I had the grating mechanism on the food processor out, I went ahead and grated the eggplant, some well-pressed tofu, and an onion, mixed it with garlic and the corn and some parsley and thyme (and salt and pepper).  I greased a lasagna pan, spread the mix around, mixed an egg with some milk, and just juiced it up with that.  Tossed it in the oven with the bread for 45 minutes. This is a technique known to home chefs everywhere known as “see what you need to use up before it goes bad, and cook with that”. Anthony Bourdain would sneer, I’m sure, but it’s quite economical.

I also like making breads and casseroles when I’m going out that night for a party or whatever. While it’s in the oven, I get a chance to shower and do my hair, and also to get most of the dishes done before we eat. Time economical! Plus, this recipe made two loaves of pear bread, so I was able to use one as a host gift. /thinking I’m turning into a housewife, except one who doesn’t have time.

After doing the dishes, I took the lettuce, cut up a pear, and made a green salad that I served with some sesame dressing I had in the fridge.

Vegetarian. 

Dinner #2

I had some mozzarella left in the fridge that I wanted to use up so I wouldn’t mindlessly snack on it, so I decided to use it with the potatoes.  I sliced up the potatoes, laid them in the Dutch oven with a little butter, salted and peppered them, added some various herbs, and then baked them for like 30 minutes with the lid on at 475.  I pulled them out, sprinkled the cheese on them, and put them in for like another 5 minutes to melt it.

I had a ton of broccoli from both having some already and from the CSA, so I decided to compress it all into broccoli soup.  I browned the broccoli and an onion, and then poured enough veggie broth to almost cover it.  I wanted it spicy, so I put a whole head of garlic, some ginger, turmeric, chili powder, and cumin, and the two jalapenos from the CSA.  When everything was good and soft, I blended it with the immersion blender, and added yogurt to make it creamy.

Served it all with some of that leftover pear bread. 

Vegetarian.

Dinner #3

Made kohlrabi puree using this recipe.  Added basil, but left out the cream.

Cut up an onion and the carrots and sweated them a little with salt and pepper.  Added kidney beans, a bay leaf, veggie broth, and tomato paste.  Put in some thyme and sage from the garden.  Added wine and balsamic vinegar. Let it cook until the flavors married well.

Sliced some apples from last week, put them in a pan with cinnamon and honey, added a little water and lemon juice and cooked it until it was soft.

Vegan.

Dinner #4

Made cornbread. I’ve been using Bittman’s recipe, which is dry, so I added like a ¼ cup of applesauce in it to juice it up.

Took the rest of the potatoes and the kale, cut it all up and put it in the skillet on the stove with some salt, pepper, garlic, chili powder, and thyme.  Cooked with veggie broth.  Added some leftover kidney bean mix from the last dinner.

Made a salad with spinach, some of the pears, and goat cheese.  I made a dressing based off this recipe, but added chives.  

Vegetarian

People in the thread below---I suppose this was inevitable---were reverting back to the liberal argument that fast food's popularity is mainly a labor issue, as in people work too hard and resort to fast food (against their will, no doubt!) because they have no options. This argument is juiced up by anecdotal evidence of this one woman you knew once who really did save an hour a day eating fast food or that college aged service worker who could only eat a burger during lunch.  These arguments bother me for a couple of reasons. The first is they are throw-your-hands-in-the-air-and-give-up arguments. There's a whiff of making excuses for fast food's grip on America in lieu of trying to understand it so that solutions become evident.  Since we all agree---right?---that policy should be aimed at improving the nutrition of all our citizens (not just those who can afford it), we can agree---right?---that merely biting on the corners of the problem by getting rid of food desserts and perhaps even having government programs to make sure there are workable kitchens in every home aren't enough.  These are good things and will help people who are the percentage of fast food customers who are more desperate than really into the food.  

But the problem is that if the fast food industry's marketing strategy was to sell only to people with no other options, they would go bankrupt.  Kit-Kat in comments put it well:

Look, I believe people when they explain why it is they eat fast food, or imagining why someone else might prefer fast food. I don’t think that everyone who eats out is a lazy moron. But I think that we can over-excuse. There are some people for whom cooking at home is not a possibility. But all the fast food in the country is not being eaten by service industry workers who get off work at midnight and lack a functioning kitchen. A lot of it is being eaten by people who *do* have the time to cook at home and have access to a Safeway. Understanding why they choose not to is an important part of addressing the issue.

I'll point out that quite literally, if speed were the only consideration in buying fast food, most of it would not be so bad for you.  (In fact, there's only whole chain that has dedicated part of its menu to catering to people who want something fast that isn't going to wreck them---Subway. But even then, most of their menu is crap.)  The fast food industry would like us to believe that they can't help but serve mounds of grease and sugar and that this aspect of their business is unchangeable, but the reality is they sell mounds of grease and sugar because they know that's how you get more customers.  We either deal with that problem, or we continue to pretend it's not there, which is basically giving up and deciding that we accept escalating rates of diabetes and heart disease. 

I'll reiterate my points: a comprehensive understanding of why fast food sells so well involves accepting that people eat to relieve boredom and people eat to relieve stress, and fast food is perfectly pitched to achieve these ends. 

I will also point out something I pointed out in comments.  People who ride the extreme "fast food only sells because it's easy" argument tend to oversell how hard it is to cook and undersell what a pain in the ass it is to go to McDonald's. I used to eat out at fast food places (albeit, locally owned ones based in Austin that emphasized healthier choices than the major chains---but they will never get any bigger than they are because of this choice) a lot more because I bought the whole line about how eating out is easier. But gradually it dawned on me that it really wasn't.  The time spent getting dressed, driving, waiting to order, waiting for food, and driving home would have been more than enough time to cook something simple. So I started cooking more.  Which, in turn, turned on my no-doubt genetic predisposition to love cooking (or wevs, both my parents cooked at home a lot when I was a kid, so I think I was lucky to have those role models), and that's why I'm a more elaborate cook ofttimes than you need to be.  But not always. I'm the queen of the stir fry when I have work to get done. (Which in turn causes people to yell at me in comments on CSA posts for being a boring cook.  Oh irony, since the series was started in part to encourage people to talk more about simple, everyday cooking. It's worth wondering if this pressure to put out a 3-course meal every meal isn't what intimidates a lot of people out of cooking.) 

One thing that I really do think is overlooked at lot---again, because it requires acknowledging the darker aspects of daily life we prefer aren't a problem---is the whine factor, aka the emotional labor of getting the members of your family who are unashamed about their preferences for grease and sugar to sit down and eat a healthy meal without whining about it.  I got some emails from people complaining that Bittman overlooks how cooking is women's work, and I think that's somewhat unfair, for two reasons: 1) Bittman is one of the biggest voices out there encouraging people to learn how to cook 20-minute meals and if you actually listen to what he's saying, you can reduce your "women's work" workload by a lot 2) I really do think he imagines a more egalitarian distribution of work than most households enjoy.  The latter is a bit of blindness---from what I understand, he does most of his family's cooking, so he's not seeing that most men don't help much, if at all. (And this is a complex problem. A lot of women, and I include myself in this category, are so incredibly possessive of the kitchen that men can't help if they want to.) But what he's absolutely overlooking in his claims that cooking and eating are fun, communal activities is that this is only true if your whole family is on board. I think that's big time male privilege. It's much easier if you're a man who's cooking to get everyone to be supportive of your work. But women tend to have their work taken for granted, and in real world terms, that means the whine factor. 

I grew up in an extended family of people who love cooking. Even my dad cooked all the time.  And yet, we still ate plenty of shitty fast food, as did my relatives. The reason isn't that they were too overworked to cook, per se, but some times they were too overworked to tolerate us kids pulling faces and saying, "Not THAT again, we ate that LAST month." The most brilliant aspect of fast food is it's basically whine-proof---it hits you on the "comfort food" level, and everyone is going to eat it and like it. We eat to feel pleasure. McDonald's is the masturbation of food.  For the same reason someone might find that they increasingly prefer to masturbate than have partner sex---the latter takes coordination, everyone has to be on the same page, it's a lot of emotional work---someone might start making more and more of their diet fast food. 

If fast food were only about speed, then 7-11 would put Burger King and McDonald's out of business. We have to think of the problem as more complex than that, even if doing so brings up uncomfortable solutions, like demanding a redistribution of agricultural subsidies and taxing fast food so that it's not so much a cheap pleasure as it used to be.  

Erik at LGM captures some of my growing discomfort with Mark Bittman's political approach to the question of improving national nutrition.  Bittman has taken to scolding people for being lazy more than looking at the underlying reasons people don't cook more.  I somewhat agreed with a rant he had a few months back about oatmeal, but in retrospect some of my concern is that liberals are too quick to seize on excuses that sound good---saying, for instance, that oatmeal at McDonald's is cheaper and easier than store oatmeal when it's objectively not---because they have the correct instinct not to assume the worst about people's motives when making food choices. It's a combination of over-reliance on a simplified version of rational actor theory and a rightful rejection of conservative assumptions that people's sufferering is a direct reflection of their lack of merit. But the problem is Bittman is erring too far in the other direction, and assuming that the reason people don't cook more is that they're just lazy and that a good scolding is what's going to get them on the other side of it. 

For instance, this critique of the common liberal arguments about why people eat more fast food than they should is a sound one:

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)

He points out that the "calorie needs" argument falls flat, because the problem now is an excess of calories in relation to other nutrition that we need, not a lack of them. Again, true, and I have to wonder if the people making the "calorie needs" argument are being flown in from the early-to-mid-20th century, when there really was a problem where people living in poverty were likelier to be underweight, whereas now they're liklier to be overweight than people who have more money. It's important to be cognizant of the flaws in these arguments, not only because it makes liberals sound stupid when they're trying to explain why people with low incomes aren't eating better, but also because, you know, having an argument is about more than winning.  The idea is that we legitimately want to improve this country and people's health outcomes.  If you're just trying to score points in an online debate, I guess stick with these bad arguments.  But by striving for better arguments and a better understanding of the issue, we get closer to reaching a solution.

The problem is that Bittman's response is to be a bit Pollyanna-ish and assume the entire reason people prefer to eat out instead of stay in and cook is that they don't appreciate the joys of cooking. Bittman still has one foot in the "policy" corner, so he's not a lost cause, but this emphasis on culture is worrisome, because if you start to become consumed by the idea that only cultural shifts will fix the problem, you start to overlook important policy and activism approaches that can do tremendous good. I think Erik makes some good points about why choosing to eat out instead of cook after a hard day's work is so appealing:

Bittman dismisses the idea that we don’t have time to cook because we spend an average of 90 minutes today watching TV. But if you are working 2 jobs or are depressed or are stressed out by your troubles, watching some TV after a long, hard day is simply more enjoyable than cooking. Even after I get home from the office, and my job is far less difficult than blue-collar or service labor, I usually don’t want to spend 90 minutes cooking. I want a quick meal, a beer, and a baseball game.

But he falls into the liberal trap of trying to juice up argument by not admitting to any real weakness in the human spirit that causes you to order pizza instead of make a sandwich. It's not just that after a hard day's work, you want a quick meal! It's that you want a greasy meal that is designed to hit all your pleasure centers.  It's that you work really hard and experience very little pleasure, and so the cheap thrill of fattening food is comforting.  It's no surprise to me that people who need more eat more comfort food.  They don't call it "comfort food" for nothing. I'll add that people often overeat in part because they go hungry; if there's big gaps in your income where you don't have enough money for food for days at a time, when you do get that money, you're going to do the human thing and buy yourself something high calorie and overeat the hell out of it. That's one reason that nutrition advice aimed at the more comfortable suggests small snacks throughout the day---if you eat when you have low blood sugar, you are pretty much guaranteed to overeat. 

Few people want to talk about this because there's no obvious fix for the problem. Bittman chooses to pretend that the solution is a cultural shift where we agree that cooking and eating home-cooked meals is more satisfying than gorging on restaurant food---and it is, for those of us who have lives that have enough pleasures and stress relief that the temptation to gorge on comfort food is muted. But his solution to enjoy cooking more is probably going to elide a lot of people, for the reasons Erik cites plus the fact that fast food rushes your pleasure centers in your brain more rapidly than pretty much anything but probably mind-altering substances.  (Sex is, I have to point out, more work and is more time-consuming. TV is less sensual.) But more liberal sorts like Erik breeze past the problem of "fast food is being applied to stress because it's designed to set off all sorts of pleasure centers", I think in part because it seems like it undermines the "rational actor" model that would allow us to create policy solutions to the problem.

But I really don't think it does. I think a huge part of America's problems is that we, as a culture, are suspicious of pleasure. We talk around it, at best. We refuse to admit some of our baser pleasures, which I think is one reason we also tend to over-indulge them at the expense of our health. If we do admit that they're a factor, we pull a Bittman, and assume that other people who indulge are just simply weaker or haven't been properly educated. But if we accept that fast food is eaten a lot because a lot of people feel it's a treat, and they have legitimate needs to treat themselves and few other options, I think we can start to have a real conversation about this. I want to offer a third way of looking at this: maybe it's that people who have access to more and more diverse treats (and the time to enjoy them) eat less fast food?  Obviously, money plays a big role in this, but it's also worth pointing out that people from similar backgrounds and income brackets are less likely to be fat if they live in more interesting places with more shit to do. Bittman and Erik are both halfway there to saying that eating is a form of entertainment. For people who may not have a lot of entertainment options, fast food may loom larger in their lives as a source of pleasure. If we want to counter the health effects of that, we need to start thinking in terms of genuinely prioritizing entertainment in our culture, and trying to find ways to alleviate stress and boredom for everyone, not just those who have the money (or the lifestyle---we not-rich but childless folks have similar privileges to people with more money than us because we have more time) to pay for more intersting shit to do than just eat cheap but fun food. 

Of course, we also need to make it our first priority to restructure agriculture subsidies so that crappy fast food isn't a cheap form of entertainment.

Okay, I suck: For some reason, many of the pictures didn't take, so I just deleted them all and figured this could be a picture-free week.  Additionally, I didn't keep good track of what I cooked this week, because I was playing catch-up, so most of this is just from the last CSA that I didn't post because I was traveling in Baltimore.  But I will mention one thing I did make with week 15's CSA, which was the transition from summer to fall veggies.  This list is from week 14, which I picked up, but I had to have Marc pick up week 15, so didn't get a picture of the veggies listed.  Needless to say, apples are beginning to show up. 

CSA Week #14

Dinner #1

At the farmer’s market, they had tomatillos on  sale, so I bought some and decided to make enchiladas.  To make the sauce, you roast tomatillos, cook ‘em on the stove with onions, green peppers, jalapenos, garlic, oregano, and veggie broth, and then use the immersion blender to turn it into a smooth sauce.

This is what makes the mini-chopper so awesome, as well.  I then used it to shred some zucchini, and pinto beans, and mixed that in with some corn for an instant filling.  This gave it a nice mushy-to-firm consistency you really want for enchilada filling.

I’m a big fan of New Mexican-style enchiladas, where you stack instead of roll.  You take each corn tortilla, lay it flat on an oven-proof plate, cover with sauce, lay down  filling, pour some more sauce (and cheese, if you’re using it, which I wasn’t), repeat until you have a stack as high as you want.  Cooking in the oven for 30 minutes at 350.  Pull it out and serve directly, being careful not to burn anyone.  Traditionally, you can also finish off with a fried egg on top, but I didn’t do that.

The reason I kept the enchiladas light is that we had a dessert of peaches and vanilla pudding, which is quickly becoming our favorite thing in the world.

Vegan dinner, vegetarian dessert.

Dinner #2

My tarragon in my garden had finally come back, so I decided to use the potatoes and fennel to make this.  I roasted it in a Dutch oven; I’ve found that keeps more of the moisture in.

I still had a lot of the zucchini/corn mix from the night before, so I made some barley, mixed that in, and then cooked up the kale with a pepper, garlic, onions and mushrooms in red wine with salt, pepper, and thyme from the garden.  Mixed it all together.  We ate only a bit of what I made, because it was so much, but I had tons of leftovers for lunches.   

Vegan, if you use vegan wine.

Dinner #3

It was our farewell night to the bar we would go to periodically for grilling food and drinking and hanging out with good buddies.  They’re going condo which means they’re going away.  So for the occasion, I took the last green chilis I had and roasted them to make green chile cornbread.

Cut up the eggplant and watermelon for the grill.  Watermelon goes on directly, but I did rub olive oil, salt, and pepper on the eggplant.  

CSA Week #15

As I mentioned before, I've been scattershot, just tossing food together instead of being careful about it. But it was getting late in the week, and I realized I still had zucchini and broccoli from the store, and onions, squash, hot peppers and a shit ton of carrots from the CSA left in the fridge.  Clearly, the solution was squash tagine. There are a million ways to make it, but my preferred method is to cut all the veggies up, put them in a dutch oven (or a tagine, if you have one) with garlic and ginger, sprinkle them with turmeric, cinnamon, cumin, and chili powder.  Let that take a little, add some broth, put the lid on it, let that cook a bit, add a can of diced tomatoes, let that simmer longer (you really want the spices to marry each other), add some cooked chickpeas (I'm really an eyeball-it sort), and then you serve it over couscous.  Or, if you're me, you serve it over quinoa, because it's more bang for your nutritional buck than couscous---lower in calorie, but higher in protein and fiber.  And I just like it better. 

Cord at GOOD has a post up about this visualization of your average American's food consumption in a year. 

I'm genuinely surprised at how much dairy we consume.  What's that about?  Do people just straight up drink milk?  That's really weird. 

Anyway, Cord's big concern is the amount of high fructose corn syrup people are consuming, which some studies indicate may be even worse for you than other sugars.

The American Heart Association recommends that women consume no more than six teaspoons of added sugar per day and that men consume no more than nine, which amounts to about 100 and 150 calories, respectively. Forty-two pounds is the equivalent of 3,865 teaspoons of corn syrup, or almost 11 per day. Nobody should be eating that much added sugar.

Exacerbating the problem is that high-fructose corn syrup has been shown to be worse than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain. Last year, researchers at Princeton University discovered that rats supplied with corn syrup got significantly fatter than rats fed regular sugar, even when caloric intake between the groups was the same. What makes that particularly frightening is how frequently food brands have begun using corn syrup in place of real sugar, which is more expensive.

I'm somewhat skeptical about the research, because it's only been done on rats.  But I do think there's reason to believe a person who eats something sweetened with HFCS might eat more of it than something with the same amount of sweetener that is in sugar form, because HFCS just tastes less substantial, causing you to eat more in hopes of feeling satisfied.  

Regardless of where the sugar is coming from, however, it's just way too much damn sugar.  What's particularly troubling to me is that the "average" amount of sugar eaten doesn't even tell us enough about the problem.  There's a lot of people who don't really eat that many sweets and they're pulling down the average.  What these numbers say to me is that a lot of people are eating a lot of sweets---I'm guessing the average person who eats more than the recommended maximum of sugar on a regular basis is getting way more than 11 tablespoons.  I'm guessing a lot of people are getting a shockingly high percentage of their calories from processed sugar, especially since it's cheap and easy to get.  No wonder diabetes rates are soaring. 

CSA Week #13

Dinner #1

It was just me, and I needed to have a bunch of leftovers for lunches during the week, so I decided to make polenta.  After putting the polenta in the oven, which is the lazy way of making it that I highly recommend, I chopped up the eggplant, some green onions, a red bell pepper, the corn, and some of the CSA hot peppers.  Threw it on the stove with salt, pepper, and garlic.  Threw some chives in from the garden, added some already-cooked kidney beans, cooked it in a little white wine, took it off the heat, and put some chopped up garden basil on it.   Poured that over the polenta, and a nice, simple meal for me, with lots of leftovers.

Vegan.

Dinner #2

I cooked the green beans with some onion, garlic and a hot pepper, plus salt and pepper.  Took it off the heat, added balsamic vinegar and some basil. 

I had cooked the chard earlier with some garlic and so I warmed it up, and served it with goat cheese from the farmer’s market, homemade beer bread, and sliced pre-cooked beats I bought on sale. 

For dessert, I made this recipe, but with raspberries instead of cherries.

Dinner #3

Made this salsa with the plums and the cucumber and hot peppers.  However, I’m lazy, so I just threw it all in the food processor and made something more smooth and less chunky.

Cooked some black beans, onions, garlic, what was left of the hot peppers, and eggplant, which I browned some, then added chili powder and oregano, and then touched up with some tomato paste and a bit of veggie broth.  Served it on tortillas with the salsa.

Vegan.

As promised, a bonus cat picture: