Search Results for: food

Is ‘Trash Food’ a Thing? On Food, Stigma, Class, and Connection

A store clerk, an African-American man in his sixties, offered to help us. I told him I was overwhelmed, that plumbing had gotten too complicated. I tried to make a joke by saying it was a lot simpler when everyone used an outhouse. He gave me a quick sharp look of suspicion. I recognized his expression. It’s the same one John T. gave me when I mispronounced his name, the same look I gave John T. when he mentioned “trash food” and social class. The same one I unleashed on people who called me a hillbilly or a redneck.

I understood the clerk’s concern. He wondered if I was making a veiled comment about race, economics, and the lack of plumbing. I told him that back in Kentucky when the hole filled up with waste, we dug a new hole and moved the outhouse to it. Then we’d plant a fruit tree where the old outhouse had been.

“Man,” I said, “that tree would bear. Big old peaches.”

He looked at me differently then, a serious expression. His earlier suspicion was gone.

“You know some things,” he said. “Yes you do.”

“I know one thing,” I said. “When I was a kid I wouldn’t eat those peaches.”

The two of us began laughing at the same time. We stood there and laughed until the mirth trailed away, reignited, and brought forth another bout of laughter. Eventually we wound down to a final chuckle. We stood in the aisle and studied the toilet repair kits on the pegboard wall. They were like books in a foreign language.

“Well,” I said to him. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?” he said.

I nodded.

“I think I won’t eat those peaches.”

Chris Offutt writes in Oxford American on the concept of “white trash,” the seemingly immutable class boundaries that divide us, and food’s power to widen the chasm or bridge the gap.

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What Nuclear Winter Would Do to the World’s Food Supply

Let me take the most likely one: the nuclear winter case. Say two countries that both have access to nuclear weapons get very angry at each other, and then retaliate, destroying most of the major cities in the opposite country. The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually. Say maybe we lost 5 percent of the population. Ninety-five percent of us would still be alive. But then as those cities burned, you’d end up getting soot in the upper atmosphere that stays there and darkens the entire planet. And all the crops fail.

As the world went dark, you’d have a couple of the more hearty crops survive—the trees would last a little while. But our standard crops? Your wheat, your rice, your corn? That’s all dead. You don’t get that harvest, and that’s what we feed the world with. Vegetable gardens, everything’s just dead. You can’t grow in darkness. As those crops fail, you’ll start to get hungry; you’ll start going into your stored food supplies. The historical assumption is that’s when we all go completely crazy. It’s bad. I’m sure you’ve seen the movies. There’s no good outcome there. That darkness will basically stay for around five years, until it starts to rain out of the atmosphere and then we’ll slowly but surely [get] more and more sunlight and start to rejuvenate agriculture again.

There’d be a little bit of conventional agriculture that survives—like the grow houses. For example, in Japan they have warehouses that just have racks of lettuce growing under LED lights, and that would still work, but what fraction of the population would that feed? I’m sure that the wealthy in whichever culture would still pick tomatoes and lettuce, but the vast majority of the world would not be eating those.

Engineer Joshua Pearce, as interviewed by Yvonne Bang in Nautilus. The interview explores how we as a planet could feed 7 billion people after a global catastrophe.

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Food Fight

Longreads Pick

Chefs in Dallas are unhappy with Leslie Brenner, the restaurant critic for The Dallas Morning News, and her newspaper’s star rating system. So they’ve stop cooperating with her.

Author: Zac Crain
Source: D Magazine
Published: Jan 1, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,015 words)

The Foodbank Dilemma

Longreads Pick

What does the rise of food banks tell us about Britain today?

Source: New Statesman
Published: Oct 21, 2014
Length: 31 minutes (7,906 words)

The Therapy That’s Helping People Suffering From Food Allergies

— Is it possible to get over a peanut allergy? In Stanford Medicine Magazine, Melanie Thernstrom reports on how oral immunotherapy (OIT) is helping to fix food allergies. Thernstrom’s son Kieran was allergic to eggs and nuts before going through OIT, and now can eat the foods without his parents worrying:

“For everyone who has stayed in the study, the treatment has been 100 percent successful,” says Nadeau. “It turns out that everyone’s immune system is capable of adapting — and surprisingly, it is as true of adults as children.” She and her team now have an eight-year study of OIT — the longest record in the United States — in which they found that everyone who was compliant with the treatment and continued to eat the foods has kept their allergies from returning.

What happens if the patients stop eating the foods altogether? Nadeau recently published the results of a withdrawal study, where 20 formerly peanut-allergic patients who had completed two years of OIT and were able to eat a full serving (1 tablespoon of peanut butter or 20 peanuts) without any reaction stopped eating peanuts altogether. After three months, more than half (13 out of 20) had regained the allergy to peanuts, although their reactions were no longer as severe. By six months, almost everyone (17 of 20) had regained the allergy.

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Photo: Daniella Segura

Trafficked Into Slavery on Thai Trawlers to Catch Food for Prawns

Longreads Pick

An investigation of the Thai fishing industry, which has been built on enslaving migrant workers:

The price captains pay for these men is a extremely low even by historical standards. According to the anti-trafficking activist Kevin Bales, slaves cost 95% less than they did at the height of the 19th-century slave trade – meaning that they are not regarded as investments for important cash crops such as cotton or sugar, as they were historically, but as disposable commodities.

For the migrants who believed Thailand would bring them opportunity, the reality of being sent out to sea is devastating.

“They told me I was going to work in a pineapple factory,” recalls Kyaw, a broad-shouldered 21-year-old from rural Burma. “But when I saw the boats, I realised I’d been sold … I was so depressed, I wanted to die.”

Author: Kate Hodal
Source: The Guardian
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,833 words)

Food For Thought: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Lucky Peach, Modern Farmer, Ars Technica, The Billfold, and The Walrus.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 8, 2014

Food For Thought: A Reading List

This week, we return to your regularly scheduled Longreads programming. The theme? Food: queering food, eating Pokemon, the potential of Soylent, tasting curly fries for a living, and Canadian food trucks.

1. “America, Your Food is So Gay.” (John Birdsall, Lucky Peach, June 2013)

“It’s food that takes pleasure seriously, as an end in itself, an assertion of politics or a human birthright, the product of culture—this is the legacy of gay food writers who shaped modern American food.”

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The Dilemma the Food Movement is Facing: Can We Really Be 'Conscientious Carnivores?'

The dream of the “Food Movement” is for all meat to be humanely raised and locally sourced so we can all be “conscientious carnivores.”

In The American Scholar, James McWilliams looks at a dilemma the Food Movement is facing: Can animals be raised humanely if the end goal is not for animals to live a full life, but to be butchered for human consumption?

Research shows that veganism, which obviates the inherent waste involved in growing the grains used to fatten animals for food in conventional systems, is seven times more energy efficient than eating meat and, if embraced globally, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from conventional agriculture by 94 percent. Any pretext to explore meat eating’s moral underpinnings—and possibly land upon an excuse for pursuing a plant-based diet as a viable goal—would be consistent with the movement’s anticorporate, ecologically driven mission.

But with rare exception, those in the big, lumpy tent have thrown down a red carpet for “ethical butchers” while generally dismissing animal rights advocates as smug ascetics (which they can be) and crazed activists (ditto) who are driven more by sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed reason. It’s an easy move to make. But the problem with this dismissal—and the overall refusal to address the ethics of killing animals for food—is that it potentially anchors the Food Movement’s admirable goals in the shifting sands of an unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s call it the “omnivore’s contradiction.”

Conscientious carnivores will argue that we can justify eating animals because humans evolved to do so (the shape of our teeth proves it); that if we did not eat happy farm animals, they’d never have been born to become happy in the first place; that all is fine if an animal lives well and is “killed with respect”; that we need to recycle animals through the agricultural system to keep the soil healthy; that animals eat animals; and that in nature, it’s the survival of species and not of individuals that matters most. These arguments create room for a productive conversation. But none of them carry real weight until the Food Movement resolves the contradiction raised by Bob Comis: How do you ethically justify both respecting and killing a sentient animal?

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Photo: Jeffrey

Fast Food, Minimum Wage, and an Industry Engineered for the ‘Interchangeability of Workers’

Longreads Pick

Thomas Frank on striking fast-food workers, many living in poverty:

Now, everyone knows how poorly fast-food jobs pay. They also know why this is supposed to be okay: fast-food workers are teenagers, they don’t have kids or college degrees, and it’s an entry-level job. Hell, it’s virtually a form of national service, the economic boot camp that has replaced the two years our fathers had to give to the armed forces.

Every one of these soothing shibboleths was contradicted by what I saw in North Carolina. These days, fast-food workers are often adults, they often do have children, and I met at least one college grad among the protesters in Raleigh. Why are things like this? Because a job is a job, and in times as lean as ours, the Golden Arches may be the only game in town, regardless of qualifications and degrees.

What people who repeat these things also don’t know is how much effort has gone into keeping fast-food pay so low, despite the enormous profits raked in by the chains.

Published: Dec 6, 2013
Length: 14 minutes (3,605 words)