Bibliodiet

Surprisingly the last few books I read haven’t been about food, cooking or any tangentially related subject – nutrition, farming, etc. Mary Karr’s Lit and yesterday’s reading marathon polished off Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – who knew Swedes could be so exciting, so dangerous, so resourceful – well who knew anything at all about Swedes. I hope the three novels get an episodic HBO Wire like treatment rather than a Brett Ratner directing Ben Affleck as Callie Blomkvist.

Although I am on a bibliodiet, I have been keeping up with the food world on an article-by-article basis – British superstore Sainsbury’s is shelving its tomatoes in cartons. Apparently, cartons are the wave of the future, easier to display, less space wasted in shipping + lower shipping weight. According to the report called “Beverage Packaging Market Assessment - A Benchmark Study”, single serving pouches are the wave of the future for beverages. An ice-cold lager from can is very nice on a hot day but I cannot wait to drink a beer out of a juice box during a backyard cookout.

Also from the UK, the multinational Kraft is set to buy chocolatier Cadbury despite Warren Buffet's warnings. People are really, really upset over this sale – fearing loss of British jobs, diminished quality of Cadbury products – Can milk chocolate get worse? I suppose Kraft taking over Cadbury is the equivalent of Brett Ratner directing Angelina Jolie in a remake of Chocolat.

Another worrisome story about international takeovers, Asian Carp are poised to takeover the Great Lakes. You can sign an online petition here.

Finally, Caitlin Flanagan takes on Alice Waters Edible Schoolyard’s initiative in her column on the pages of this month’s liberal Atlantic Magazine. The opinion piece can be read here. Basically, arch-conservative Flanagan is very concerned about the rights of illegal immigrants and first generation Americans being forced to work for their lunch:

If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was   espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

If politics, policies and perspectives are to be argued, hopefully they can be discussed without going for some of the outrageous opinions that are presented as facts in her case against school based gardening. There is so much wrong with this article: The Dave Barry/Jay Leno quality ‘zingers’, little mention of how mostly large corporations provide occasionally unsafe and decidedly unhealthy food to students in a form of government welfare, the abandonment of the conservative principle of local schools make local choices, the unvarnished assertion that the only people who count in society are the university educated and that the only way to learn is in a classroom – a single monk breeding sweet peas is the foundation of modern genetics, just sayin. 

What is under attack is the ability to make improvements in the status quo, what I call the Power of No - Ms. Flanagan blasts the belief that a person and by extension collectively together through the institution known as the government -  can’t improve anything at all ever through the power of doing. Ms. Waters set out to make an improvement by planting a garden – a single individual making a difference through action and vision. It is a shame that someone as smart as Ms. Flanagan makes specious intellectual constructs to win an argument instead of using that formidable brain to improve a situation.


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