Wednesday, January 16, 2008

A good read

I'm reading a good book about food: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. It's very informative. I had a fairly good understanding of the vagaries of industrial cattle, pig, and chicken farming, which is why I try to buy local meat from the farmers' market, but I had no idea about industrial corn farming! Pollan basically calls us fritos on legs because of our large consumption of processed corn.

My other favorite food book is Salt: A History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. It might actually be the only book our dipwad head of state has read in eight years, but don't let that deter you.

5 comments:

skvidal said...

Pollan has a new book out titled: In Defense of Food. The subtitle on the front is:

"Eat food, not too much, mostly plants"

Tom Meltzer said...

Greetings from another Durham area food nut. After stumbling onto your blog and reading this post I felt compelled to share your enthusiasm for The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I too just finished reading. I blogged about it here, FYI.

Keep fighting the good fight, and bon appetit!

Cheers,
Tom M

K said...

Yes, I am looking forward to reading Pollan's new book. My biggest concern with the entire food system is that healthy, unprocessed, sustainable, local food is inaccessible to the urban poor because of price. I worry that eating mindfully is a bourgeois prerogative.

Anonymous said...

Michael Pollan - In Defense of Food (broadcast Friday, January 4th, 2008).... replay here http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200801043

M said...

Hi Kelly! Found your blog searching for info on Con-Fusion and your Durham list of local restaurants to try is awesome, I will definitely be checking out Federal. Anyway, I was browsing your archives and noticed you link to NY Times pages pretty often and they archive their stuff pretty quickly. However, you don't need to tell people to register on their site - they can use a great site called http://www.bugmenot.com to get a logon and password to use to login to the NYTimes and other reg-required sites, without giving up their email, etc! If your readers use Firefox, they can even download BugMeNot as an extension and right click in the field to auto-populate BugMeNot info! Thought you might not be aware :) Thanks again for your great blog (and links to other cool ones).