Archive for the ‘food’ tag
It seems today that people are more interested in their food than ever. How it’s raised, how it’s harvested and how it’s prepared are questions that more and more people are asking about what ends up on the dinner table. The meat industry in particular receives heightened scrutiny, both in regards to whether its treatment of animals is ethical and also for its impact on the environment. The proliferation of organic meat and other schemes like cow shares, wherein a number of families will together purchase sections of a cow that was raised and butchered according to their specific preferences, all point to a growing attention to where our food comes from.
But these new food options only go so far. While an individual consumer may have more choice when it comes to purchasing meat at the end of its life cycle, there are few options for the most conspicuous of meat consumers to have a direct hand in, and thus direct knowledge of, the entire process of getting an animal from the farm and into their bellies. This gap creates a golden opportunity for a new kind of farm tourism.
The idyllic rolling green hill of rural Wisconsin would provide the perfect backdrop for a family vacation or romantic get-away. Guests would have the chance to explore the farm and surrounding woodlands, sample the locally grown produce, and most importantly, pick out their own dinner.
Waking up bright and early on their first full day on the farm, they would be instructed in the proper technique for slaughtering their chosen animal using traditional and ethical procedures. They would then be shown how to correctly butcher the animal into all the different cuts and varieties of tasty meat. Finally, at the end of a hard day’s work of preparation, experienced gourmet chefs would help them select a menu composed of their cut of choice paired with vegetables grown on the property, bread baked at the farm house and wines grown and produced locally. The day would culminate with eating the fruits (and meats) of their labor, soaking in the sunset over the small duck pond around back. The remaining meat would be frozen and packed to take back home to enjoy similarly delicious meals for months to come.
What better way to not only sustain disappearing family farms, but feed the appetites of the world’s gastronomes who hunger for a little adventure.
Even if you are not a sports fanatic, you have to give credit to ESPN for building one of the most successful media franchises around today in little over 30 years. In addition to their flagship ESPN cable television channel, they have about 15 other stations and affiliated networks,
ESPN.com, local market ESPN radio stations, ESPN mobile,
ESPN The Magazine, and perhaps the most innovative platform in their portfolio,
ESPN3.com, which lets people who get their internet from any one of about two dozen service providers access live streaming games for free. Given the
enormity of the ESPN franchise and sporting media in general (which is owned by Disney), there are probably a few things I’m missing, but you get the idea.
For those who
are sports enthusiasts, its not just the deluge of coverage that makes ESPN in particular such an appealing channel. Despite being entirely dedicated to sports, it manages to keep itself
fun,
hip,
accessible,
almost nerdy by not taking itself too seriously and
actively ditching a lot of the ‘machismo’ that might come along with this sort of thing. That SportsCenter commercial with Star Wars characters captures in its entirety the brand that ESPN has built and why its so successful.
Compare that with the few hours of The Food Network that I recently and somewhat accidentally watched. They still of course have shows like
cooking with fat, Italian, George Bush (BAM!). But the format of these shows is a little bit outdated, something that The Food Network has clearly realized as evidenced by the
line-up of shows promoted on their website.
Unfortunately for us the viewer, it seems the network executives decided the best way to put a fresh new face on food was a super-sized dose of reality T.V. The show I forced myself to struggle through was
Chef vs. City, which watches like an attempt to wed The Amazing Race with No Reservations, but falls short of both, especially Anthony Bourdain’s fantastic No Reservations.
The best example of The Food Network’s “Dancing with the Stars”-like approach has to be their show
What Would Brian Boitano Make, which
has to be a conscious reference to
South Park: The Movie. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, despite being on ABC and not The Food Network, is another good example of this. It reminds me of that show where they make surprise renovations of peoples’ homes who’ve been through some sort of tragedy. Both feature traveling do-gooders with spiky hair, although Jamie’s revolution has been known to famously
blow up in his face from time to time.
Now, The Food Network and similar programs have (or could have) a fairly noble purpose: to better educate people about their food and make healthy eating a realistic goal for a wider audience than your typical Whole Paycheck shopper. From my experience watching this channel though, I didn’t learn anything about my food, where it came from, or how to prepare it in a way that would help me to easily eat healthier. In large part I think you can attribute this to the nature of the programming – you don’t pander to the lowest common denominator of society when you are trying to radically change the way that society uses media to engage with a certain topic, like ESPN has with sports.
I’ll admit that athletics lends itself to this kind of presentation a little bit more easily than food does, but that doesn’t mean that some of the same principles couldn’t apply. Lets see a food network that is funny and does not take itself too seriously. Wouldn’t it be great to see Rachel Ray in the same kind of self deprecating commercials that SportsCenter puts LeBron James in (“Chosen one, huh?”)?
Lets also see something that’s a bit more intelligent too. I honestly do not and will never care what Brian Boitano would make. As hilarious as it is to watch “Emeril, Live” and realize that he looks like a fat, Italian George Bush (if you don’t believe me do an image search for Emeril, its uncanny how much he looks like a young “Dub-ya”), it hardly inspires me to lift a finger to make anything remotely close to what this man is cooking up. A better understanding of how people consume media these days wouldn’t hurt either. ESPN does a great job of putting non-stop sports coverage at your finger tips.
Above all make it fast paced, high energy and fun. What if there was a show called “WineCenter”, which each day broke down the best recipes cooked on the food network that day and had experts picks on which wines to pair with them, and combines that with web based content that gave you links to clips of all the dishes being prepared along with instructions for the recipes and a google maps link for where to buy the ingredients in your neighborhood.
Now that would be a food channel to change the game in as many ways as ESPN has.
People make bad decisions about their health. Some of us are quite lazy and do not exercise. We ingest in excess. American society in particular is so dysfunctional about reinforcing good health habits that many schools nutritionally poison students, as highlighted in
this TED Talk by Jamie Oliver.
The most striking features of our self-destructive behavior are that we either transgress in the face of our own cognitive dissonance, or we are ignorant of the very processes and materials which keep us alive and healthy. Universal healthcare can meet a baseline of society’s needs, but it is still expensive because healthcare itself is expensive. Even the government cannot get at the foundations of our obstacles to good daily health, like the school systems that focus on food affordability over balanced nutrition. Stronger action must be taken.
Individuals must take charge over their own health, but the health landscape is not simple. Healthy food costs more, the poorest and unhealthiest communities often lack affordable access to nutritional food and health information, and intense pressure from social groups and media can keep people from making clear-headed decisions.
Mobile communications devices, the falling cost of personalized medicine, and social networks can help people make smart health decisions with precision-targeted information. Let’s combine a few key ingredients to deliver a revolutionary platform that looks as simple as a fortune cookie slip to 95% of users and stands on the best the past generation’s technical advancements.
When these systems work together, a person could avoid bad health decisions before they are made. They could learn more about the choices they can make regarding food safety by simply scanning a food’s bar code with their mobile phone and displaying its nutritional information (
and competing prices with other nearby similar items). GPS location pinging could deliver highly relevant health warnings about disease outbreaks, heat waves, contaminated food sources, fresh food providers and air quality. A running tab of one’s daily nutritional intake could be easily kept by scanning foods at home, or even food names at restaurants. Have you got a peanut allergy, or do you avoid pork? Spectrographic chemical analysis with the same camera you use to post photos to
Twitpic can show what you’re really eating.
Emergency response and mitigation would be more effective. By making part or all of your health records available to health institutions on the Internet, you could deliver an emergency text coupled with GPS location and your problem to emergency medical systems instead of, or before, explaining further in voice over the telephone – which could be a
video call at the press of a button. Armed with this information, help can reach you faster and with all the right equipment to save your life before you get to the hospital.
The greatest aid in making good health decisions may be much simpler than all of that. Every day, when you wake up and as you sit down to a meal and when you pass the swimming pool, a simple health fact or tip could appear on your mobile as a gentle reminder about the choices you can make to live a healthier life. Your social networks can power this: relevant stories your friends share about their health or the decisions they make and their consequences can populate some of these messages. Think of these as targeted health-related aphorisms: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” transformed into “This gym is offering a three-month promotional price for membership. Click here for more details about the offer. Click here for details about the benefits of exercise.”
Foresight and good design, by working with what we have, can transform the well-being of all people by empowering them to make smart choices.
In studying history, I find the complex “green” movement of 300 years ago interesting. As most historians now assess that time, one of the major problems with the movement was that in trying to make the word mean something, it wound up meaning nothing at all – it was co-opted by marketers, governments, and do-gooders who broke any ability to trust that the label had any association with sustainability.
Climate change – “global warming” – was the great evil that would require all sectors of global society to band together and conquer. However, climate change is not like an asteroid headed for Earth; it is always far-away and is easily left to someone else to either blame it on or deal with it. There were other major problems the world was facing too – a major loss of habitat for many species and as a result ecological destabilization, pollution of water sources around the globe, and major religious and ethnic tensions that found safe harbor in central Asia which forced powerful states to focus their attention on controlling terrorism. Of course, all of those were only the symptoms. The real problems were plain for everyone to see, but since they were so embedded in the human psyche since we first began to bend Nature – and each other – to our will, they were almost never addressed.
That is, not until a coalition of several non-governmental organizations, activists, and certain government officials from several countries formed in the late 2010s to publicy declare their intent to steer global efforts towards solving the “crimes of human nature:” overpopulation and overconsumption.
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” This is what God told the first human beings in Genesis 1:28. Evangelical Christians of the time called it the “cultural mandate,” that it not only justified but demanded humanity to live not as a part of the natural ecosystem, but as its puppetmaster.
If we mined the resources of the Earth like a quarry, we should have remembered that quarries get used up. If we cut quickly and fuirously from the Earth’s forests as from a single grove, we should have remembered that groves can be felled before the seeds of what trees remain before the axe can grow into new wood. We should have remembered, anyway, that the Earth isn’t an infinitely vast place. It is only a much larger place than a grove or a quarry. And we became much larger than a town or a village. We became ants crawling over the seeping face of a dropped fruit.
When that grouping of advocates and policymakers formed, they stated without hesitation and fear the logical answer to solve the problem of overpupulation: reduce the population and keep it from growing too large. For overconsumption: consume less, and what we do consume, consume in a way that is completely sustainable. This not only went against most of humanity’s fast-held beliefs on their own privileges in the world, but it clearly went directly against every growth-oriented business and political interest. For a very long time, growth was the rule to prosperity, growth at all costs. Even when it caused chronic short-sightedness and deeply shook the global economy several times, dropping the growth-centric model was not even possible to think of to the major stakeholders of the world’s economic and social order. Even though the entrenched interests arranged for quite a few astroturfing campaigns, riots based on false information, and more than a few assassinations, the coalition of sustainability managed to convince a few key European NATO governments of the need to focus all efforts on developing a way of life that was sustainable for the Earth and the human race’s place in it. The United States, weary of interventionism, did not muster up the political will to attack its NATO allies and sink the planet into a world war. Although it did not join the European countries’ development of plans to solve the crises of overconsumption and overpopulation for over a decade, it eventually capitulated after the effects began to coalesce into a perfect storm with food riots in overseas interests severely damaging its economy while floods all over low-lying coastal areas of the world caused tremendous mass migrations, notably from Central America up to the Texas border.
The key part of the solution for overpopulation lay in food production. A global regime of trade control was implemented to either prevent or severely limit food importation and exportation. It was laid out in stages lasting about a decade or two each. Every form of food but staple crops was immediately banned from general trade; not even a small quota of luxury foodstuffs could be legally moved across state borders in order to prevent a massive rich-poor health gap from forming. Of course, illegal production still managed to make it smuggled across, but nations were bound to use complete trade sanctions on all forms of trade, including energy, raw materials and production goods, if a country was caught not enforcing the food embargo. After fifteen years of this passed, enough for the effects of family planning to take serious hold due food availability, the amount of staple crop that could be exported or imported was reduced by 50 percent. This forced each to develop food production methods that could be essentially self-sufficient for its own population. After fifteen more years of this, all imports and exports of foodstuffs were banned for a full thirty years.
There was of course massive economic upheaval, in the form of destructive development. The old supply lines and order of things was radically shifted as net exporters had to find new ways to fill the economic gap left from the trade restrictions, and net importers were forced to develop a self-sustaining system of cultivation for its own population. In some areas there was mass starvation, but not orders of magnitude greater than previous starvations caused by chronic poor weather and bad harvests. The general trend was actually one of simply heavily declining birthrates. Parents had fewer children as there would not be enough food to support them all otherwise, and most people died natural deaths, not from starvation. Impoverished populations who relied on food aid withered away, a painful consequence of the new order of things – but to this day, billions of lives have been saved compared to the alternative. Those populations generally did not disappear, but many of them were reduced to small numbers. By the time food trade was allowed again, every single country on the planet (and some countries had to merge or split in order to effectively manage their sustainable food systems) could feed its own population, many with the ability to set up reserves.
As for overconsumption, the principle of “cradle-to-cradle” economics became the law of the land. For all materials for which it was possible, recycling was mandatory. Energy had to become completely renewable for 80% of a nation’s energy consumption, and cities and towns were rearranged such that less energy and space was necessary to provide civilization with the goods and services it needed. Value creation became the rule-of-thumb, replacing growth creation. Old industries died and new ones were built up in their place. Families who could produce much of what they needed themselves were greatly rewarded with tax breaks.
The detractors at the time said that these plans amounted to a desire to return to Neolithic living. Having vacationed on the Moon more than once, I can readily say they overreacted. We are happy in our world of 2.5 billion people, clean and close-knit communities, pure air and water, and vast open spaces.
A sustainable way of life is not one in which we patch up our problems. We must solve the issues that cause our problems in the first place.
– Inspired by R. Black and Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael.
Many great works of science fiction present the world of the future as one in which the great cultures have blended together to create one global mono-culture. Harrison Ford ordering lunch in Chinese in a dystopian Los Angeles
ca. 2019 (
Blade Runner, 1982) or more recently the casually dropped slang words in the Chinese of Earth-That-Was (
Firefly) are just two more commonly known examples.
Life imitates art, and the effect that science fiction has had on the emergence of science fact is well documented (e.g. Star Trek heavily influenced the designers of the first cell phones). It follows then, that we can draw one conclusion from previous examples of future culture:
we will all speak Chinese.
But language is just one aspect of culture. There are arts, customs and values to consider along with perhaps the most exciting and unexplored: food!
What will the Chinese-Mexican-Indian-etc. take-out menu of the future look like?
Sesame Beef Burrito
Curry Frijoles Dumplings
Orange Chicken Shwarma
Italian Sausage Sushi
YUM!
And to drink… Coca Cola. Some things will never change.
Asian restaurants in the West generally try to put forth some effort into projecting an “Asian” image for patrons. This can range from simply having some nice naturalistic paintings titled in Chinese / Japanese / Korean characters or a smiling Buddha at the cash register covered in pennies and with a dull spot where everyone’s fingers rub its belly, to elaborate fountains full of koi and Japanese rock gardens.
Here is one concept for a particularly pleasing and aesthetically complete setting, which I call the Sushi Boat.
The Sushi Boat is a small, wooden floating platform rather than a transport boat with an engine. Its gunwales are carved with spare but gilt and well-defined katakana characters, describing the pleasure of dining on this boat and wishing its passengers a pleasant meal. Square in shape, the center of the boat is occupied by a master sushi chef who works guarded and enclosed by the serving bar which rises about a meter off the platform where there is room enough for four diners, one at each side of the bar. The chef’s station is sunk into the boat so that while he stands working, he is at eye level with the patrons who sit cross-legged or with their legs under them on comfortable pillows. The deck of the boat itself is made of soft bamboo matting and shoes are left on shore. All of the paneling on the inside and outside walls of the boat is a clean white. The only local source of light is from candles set inside small Japanese lantern-style fixtures on the sushi bar.
Remarkable as well is the setting of this boat. It is not some grimy tourist attraction anchored along with similar craft against a concrete seawall. Rather, it floats in a pristine and glassy-smooth lake fed by a mountain stream whose quiet flow provides aural ambiance. The lake itself, perhaps a square mile in surface area, is surrounded on all sides by jagged cliffs and mountains, low enough to be green save for a few snowy peaks visible beyond the immediate perimeter. The boat is accessed at its mooring, a small flat grassy beach where the vessel’s occupants leave their shoes and worldly cares. At sunset, the boat floats off to wander with the lazy ripples and occasional currents coaxed by the mountain winds, its small crew aboard to enjoy a fine sushi dinner and sake. As the chef heats up the sake and prepares the fresh rolls and nigiri, he chats with the diners. Sometimes there are only two who have boarded the boat for a romantic date, other times a group of three or four who have heard of the legend of the sushi boat and seek an incredible meal and experience. As they share tea and sake and anticipate the night’s offering of delicious fish and rice, the purple glow of the evening sky gives way to a starry black canopy that shines and sparkles brilliantly. Free of external light pollution save the low soft glow of the candles in their paper chambers, the astral dots can be appreciated as they deserve.
To dine on the sushi boat is to dine in nature’s heaven.
- Inspired by K. Greenawalt
