Buying Food: The Motion Picture

Welcome to 1950! This lovely Young Americans film (from archive.org, a site you really should be familiar with) details how to spend your time and money wisely while in a grocery store. Yes, there are the unintentionally funny moments, but the basic information is still pretty good.  Avoid impulse buys, understand labels, buy bulk according to what you can use and store, these aren't bad lessons for any of us to take away from this short film.
One of the things that fascinates me is that this film talks about the difference between three different grades of food available for sale. To see cheaper Grade "C" tomatoes for sale--"just as nuitritious, but more broken up"--just made me think "Wow! Cheaper tomatoes for saucing!"
My mother grew up on this type of home economics information, and you could see how it informed her cooking for the rest of her life. There were a lot of less expensive cuts of meat prepared according to recipes from magazines and cheap cookbooks over the years. (I wish I had her copy of the Mennonite Cookbook from back in the early sixties!) Fish was only prepared when we caught it or when her wise-ass son (yes, me) stumbled on a recipe he wanted to try. Roasts were reserved for Sunday or special occasions. Ground beef was a staple.
Growing up this way has given me a lasting appreciation for what I call "subsistence" or "Bachelor" cooking; the kind of cooking done with a mix of prepared, frozen, and fresh ingredients. Ramen noodles with a handful of frozen diced veg tossed in. 15-minute chili made from canned beans, both spiced and plain. Meatloaf that's more filler than meat, but still feeds you two or three times. Lord knows, I respect Jamie Oliver, but  it's not always possible to do the best you can in the kitchen. The goal, as I see it, is to try and do better than takeaway more often than not, and for less money.
Food is a lot of things; cultural signifier, social lubricant, palate tickler. But cooking happens three times a day, 365 days a year, and sometimes it's just a chore you have to do when you're tired and hungry. And that's a good reason to have a well-stocked pantry for those days when you just want to eat and sleep.

A Quick Round Up

Over in China, flooding has innundated over 1 million acres (just over 404 thousand hectares) of farmland, raising local food prices by a minimum 20%. Flooding has been bad this year pretty much everywhere--like southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Warm air holds more water than cold, and the steady upward drift of average global temperature means we're going to face more of this. There's a short article on the China flood in The Guardian.

In an op-ed piece in the NYTimes, Patricia McArdle writes about how the US is destroying one of the last locavore cultures with foreign aid. No surprise there. This has been the role of foreign aid since the mid-sixties and the birth of the "Green Revolution." That the US is still pursuing a policy decades after it was shown to be misguided and wrong isn't much of a surprise either; the US is a ship that may no longer be able to turn. Oh, and the locavore culture being destroyed? Afghanistan.

Verlyn Klinkenborg writes a very short piece (A Welcome Silence) on the joys of leaving the hearing protection on when working. It echoes one I read in Harrowsmith a decade or two back that suggested that rather than using hearing protection, one could just give up the chainsaw....

Blueberries and the Bigger Question

     I would have preferred to  have embedded this, but there you go. It is worth watching, though.
Blueberries faked in cereals, muffins, bagels and other food products - Food Investigations - NaturalNews.tv
     The point of the piece is pretty good; you may think you know what you're buying, but you really don't. Of course, glancing at the ingredients list would have told you that. Or the fact that you're already buying a processed food-like substance rather than, you know, food. But nevertheless, there is a lot of marketing money being spent to ensure that you are mislead about what it really is that you're buying.
     This is the reason that Michael Pollan and others suggest that you simply skip the inside of your local supermarket. If you must shop there, minimize the damage by shopping the outer edges rather than the centre shelving. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it as food, don't buy it.
     This does show one of the reasons that farmers are getting less than ever of each food dollar spent these days: most of the "food" being sold isn't food, but manufactured edible food like products. And thankfully, vegetables are still vegetables, fruit is still fruit, and we can still recognize them as such.