Long-form Food Writing: Journalism You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

Non-regional discussions Food in the news & other media
48

“… the threat to pollination and our food systems and the threat to the economic survival of the honey producers from honey fraud are intimately connected. In the United States, bees help produce 90 commercially-grown crops and push more than $24 billion into the United States economy, according to a White House press release from 2014. The honey producers in the United States are in “a state of crisis,” Roberts wrote in his white paper, “even while the popularity and demand for honey products soars.”

In 2008, the European Parliament recognized the symbiotic relationship between a beekeeper, their ability to make money from honey, and their ability to manage honey bees as pollinators. “The White House, the USDA, the EPA have all recognized the threat to pollination, yet they didn’t make the connection to the honey producer and the economic fraud,” Roberts said.

Instead, the USDA, under the Trump administration, said that it stopped collecting data for the Honey Bee Colonies survey for budgetary reasons, only a few weeks after scientists found that almost half of bee colonies were lost in the previous winter.

“Adulteration will cause American food production to falter,” Gawenis said."

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49

“Building on the pioneering model of Jonathan Gold” followed by a quote from Soleil Ho … ugh. If she walked the walk instead of just talking the talk she might have been an improvement over Bauer.

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50

What an interesting article. It has everything: ecology, economics, the majesty of the law, and much nefariousness. Very good read. :slight_smile:

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51

Two pieces from the Washington Post, both related to food service and wages.

First article, about a cook and gig work:
“Because diners are largely kept in the dark about the well-being of kitchen labor, at The Washington Post’s request Sheikh kept a diary of three weeks of life as a Pared worker. Since joining last May, he has worked more than 160 gigs at more than 70 restaurants, earning $18,845.10 over 1,156 hours as a prep cook, line cook, event cook and dishwasher. Pared is essentially his only job (in that time, he has worked only nine gigs with other apps), and he has been favorited in Pared by 14 venues. But the diary clarifies why Sheikh also has founded Restaurant After Hours, a mental health nonprofit group for kitchen workers. Pared and its digital ilk highlight the industry’s open secret that every dish is built around the same three ingredients: blood, sweat and tears.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/apps-have-turned-restaurant-work-into-a-gig-economy-hustle-heres-how-one-cook-chases-a-paycheck/2020/02/24/1f02ee5c-54a8-11ea-9e47-59804be1dcfb_story.html

Second piece, about a Waffle House server:
"She had been both employed and poor for her entire adulthood, but only in the past few months had she learned that officially made her a part of something: the low-wage workforce, the fastest growing segment of a splintering American economy that continues to expand at both extremes. There were a record 53 million low-wage workers last year, or about 44 percent of all active workers in the United States. More than half were women. Two-thirds were in their prime earning years. Forty percent were supporting children at home. They earned a median annual salary of $17,950.

Sara’s own version of those statistics meant awakening at 4:40 a.m. to catch the first city bus of the day because she didn’t have a car, and asking friends to share medications because she didn’t have health insurance, and working the past 11 years without taking a vacation because she couldn’t afford the time off. But what she resented most about being one of the working poor was the constant anxiety that came from having no margin for error. At every moment, the smallest problem threatened to upend the fragile balance of her life, and now on a day when she had $28.42 in savings and $2.09 in checking, she arrived home from the bus station to find a big problem waiting in an envelope on her porch."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/08/living-without-living-wage/?arc404=true

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52

Two pieces on foraging for wild foods:

https://www.southernfoodways.org/the-chanterelle-seeker/

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53

"Riyad looked around the room, gauging the mood. This restaurant was his life’s work. He’d learned to cook these meals in his grandmothers’ kitchens and in the “tribe houses” of his hometown in Raqqa, Syria. Now his grandmothers were dead, his native city destroyed by war. But his restaurant still stood, and with it a piece of his tribe’s culture, finding new life thousands of miles away in a Tennessee strip mall. But with the virus in the air, business was eroding. The restaurant was bringing in 23 percent of projected weekly revenue. “The ship was sinking slowly,” he would tell me later. “We were choking. Going underwater.”

That night, he looked around at his employees. They ranged in age from their early 20s to their 50s. A few were white, native Hendersonvillians. Others were immigrants from Jordan and Ecuador and Mexico and elsewhere. “This is my new tribe,” he likes to say about himself and his staff. Together, they’d built a restaurant consistently named the best in their mostly white and conservative suburban county. But now, he looked around the room and he saw that they were afraid. Of illness. Of unemployment. Of how the virus could destroy life in so many cruel and unpredictable ways."

(This is cross-posted here: Assorted Articles about Covid-19 and Food - #51 by ElsieDee)

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54

Three topically-related pieces on food textures from Bon Appetit.

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55

https://www.southernfoodways.org/your-fried-chicken-has-done-drag/

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56

There’s a rawness to this - how could there not be - that’s difficult to read, but also some real assessment of what was and what might be.

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57

I read this earlier today. wow…incredible on so many levels.

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58

“For some reason, I can’t see wanting deuces anymore: No more two-tops? What will happen come Valentine’s Day?” :laughing:

Gabrielle Hamilton seems no bullshit to begin with. Glad she was honest.

“The conversation about how restaurants will continue to operate, given the rising costs of running them has been ramping up for years now; the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time. The past five or six years have been alarming.”

The restaurant bubble is like the dot com bubble of the 90s and housing bubble of the 00s. Probably better for it to burst this way, with Coronavirus to blame, than to actually acknowledge that having so many restaurants was unsupportable.

“If Covid-19 is the death of restaurants in New York, will we be able to tell which restaurants went belly up because of the virus? Or will they be the same ones that would have failed within 16 months of opening anyway, from lack of wherewithal or experience? When we are sorting through the restaurant obituaries, will we know for sure that it was not because the weary veteran chef decided, as I have often been tempted myself in these weeks, to quietly walk out the open back door of a building that has been burning for a long time?”

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59

https://www.southernfoodways.org/how-to-make-tamales-in-prison/

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60

https://www.southernfoodways.org/highway-220-daddy-lessons/

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61

amazing! Sad, yet genius - those tamales

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62

What a great read, thank you! I was actually thinking of turning leftover corn tortillas into tamales after grinding it into a kind of flour.

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Matzo balls worked pretty well.

Instead of patting myself on the back like I was a genius I should’ve been hitting up prisoners for advice!

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63

Inspirational read, thanks!!

We just happen to have a Costco Frito Lays assortment box. If we stay locked in, may just have try and wing this.

Maybe wash down with some Pruno. :wink:

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64

"Last year, my mother’s health took a severe downturn. I visited her once a week in the hospital, bringing her a flat of sushi. My food was the only food she enjoyed and I fed it to her by hand in a vain attempt to keep her here, though she was steadily losing weight. I thought about my grandmother who fed her to keep her here too.

I had not made the sushi for my mother—it was from Japantown in San Francisco—though I was taught how to make sushi like it. I knew that the carrots were sautéed with soy sauce and dashi. The spinach was steamed, the water squeezed out, and the leaves placed into strips. The egg was whisked and then poured onto a special square pan at a high heat to make a thin and flat omelette. There was the whole matter of seasoning the rice to be neither too sweet nor salty, and of spreading it just-so on a sheet of seaweed without tearing the tissue. Making sushi like this takes hours of assembly—hours which I did and do not have.

“The sishi here is so tiny. You know? Like at Whole Foods?” the nurse said.

“Sushi,” my mother growled.

“Sishi,” the nurse repeated.

“SOO-shee.” My mother took a bite of her food and avoided further eye contact.

In the hospital, I told my mother that it was not necessary to correct the nurse’s pronunciation. She was, I insisted, doing her best.

“I want to go home,” my mother said, referring to the house she has lived in since she moved to America to marry my father, and where he passed away a decade ago. More specifically, she wanted to be surrounded by nature—her rose bed, orchard, and vegetable garden. It was from nature that she learned to forage for wild shoots, insects, and nuts to feed her family in the years after the war, when so many Japanese starved to death. “You give just a little bit to a garden,” she always said, “and it will give back.”

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65

In sharp contrast to Ms. Mockett’s piece, here’s an edgy one, on slut shaming and bread.

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66

Hi @ElsieDee!

This is a way late response to the article you posted on Lillian Harris aka Pig Feet Mary! I started reading it then got busy with work and life so set it down. When I went back it was behind a paywall. I should probably get a NYT online subscription. Anyway! I looked her up. Her life story is such a classic American story of migration, hard work, ingenuity and success - coming from the south with $5 and retiring a multi-millionaire. As I’ve mentioned I have older family members who lived and found success during the Harlem Renaissance. Lennox Ave was always talked about as the hub of everything going on in Harlem. I so wish they were still here and I could ask them about these pioneers. Her story made me proud and hungry! :hearts:

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67

Just a gentle reminder (to anyone reading) that you can access the NY Times with an LA Public Library account here:

I somehow overlooked that article when @ElsieDee posted, reading it now!

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