A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Food

  • Looking beyond the labels

    James McWilliams, author of the forthcoming Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, looks at the lives of free-range pigs. While emphasizing that they’re far better off than their factory-farmed counterparts, McWilliams finds some serious ethical problems with the practice. McWilliams’ conclusion is a measured one: As responsible Read more

  • The resurrection of Eastern Market

    My wife and I live about a block and a half from Eastern Market, but the fire that gutted the building happended just before we moved here, about two years ago. Since then, the butchers, fish-monger, etc. have been housed in a makeshift building across the street, while the weekend produce vendors set their stalls Read more

  • “Critical Animal” on Pollan

    A couple of posts providing some interesting criticisms of Michael Pollan’s views on meat eating, here and here. Pollan’s obviously doing more than nearly anyone to draw attention to the problems with our system of food production, including factory farming. And yet, he seems to have a soft spot for silly atavistic arguments against vegetarianism. Read more

  • VB6 (DTW)

    Lately I’ve been trying–with some success–to follow Mark Bittman‘s “vegan before six” (or vegan before dinner) regimen, with one qualification: only during the week. On the weekends I like to leave open the possibility of eggs for breakfast or a grilled cheese sandwich with fresh tomatoes from the farmers’ market for lunch, or what have Read more

  • What Big Food has to worry about

    Not a leftie, organic-arugala loving Obama administration, writes Tom Laskawy at Slate, but the constraints imposed by Mother Nature herself: The one threat that Big Food hasn’t proven itself very adept at handling, however, is the multiheaded hydra of climate change, drought, and the shrinking supplies of various natural resources. The industry is not ignoring Read more

  • The coming anti-meat tipping point

    This article suggests that we’ll be forced–by resource and environmental constraints, among other things–to give up eating meat, except perhaps the very rich, and that this will lead to a rapid moral revolution in our treatment of animals. It’s an interesting argument and pretty much the reverse of how we usually imagine these things go: Read more

  • Tofu-licious!

    We made this Mark Bittman recipe for Mexican Chocolate Tofu Pudding tonight and it was really good. I was surprised how creamy it was. We added a bit of cayenne pepper for some kick. Read more

  • Eating with civility

    I imagine this will be of interest to some readers: “Civil Eats,” a site dedicated to “critical thought about sustainable agriculture and food systems as part of building economically and socially just communities.” This post, by Paul Shapiro on big ag’s counterattack against animal welfare measures is worth checking out. Read more

  • “it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist”

    Via John Schwenkler, Rod Dreher interviews James McWilliams, who Dreher calls a “contrarian agrarian.” He is a fierce critic of our system of industrial agriculture, but he also slaughters some sacred cows (pardon the expression) of the organic food and locavore movements. He has some kind words for GMOs and particularly questions the sustainability of Read more

  • Beyond “organic”

    Mark Bittman makes a couple of good points here: food labeled “organic” is not necessarily true to the spirit of organic food (i.e., is sustainable, treats animals and the land well, etc.); and you don’t necessarily have to buy “organic” food to eat better. An easier place to start is simply with eating real food Read more