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Annas Blog

"My favorite political action these days is working to ban advertising junk food to kids." –Marion Nestle

BLOG REPORT

The Right to Food Means Freedom from Dogma

The mother-daughter-duo, Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, make the connection between food, environmental crisis, and social injustice in many of their books and have also published recipe books. Their website (http://www.smallplanet.org) and Anna’s accompanying blog (http://grubbook.blogspot.com/) incorporate food in the form of ‘food activism.’ It's a great resource blog. The Lappe's are successfully broadening people's ideas of what food and eating entail; and I find that the social and political aspects of how they approach this (along side of producing and eating my own food) are part of being a 'gastronome.'

Two of the initiatives supported by the blog are:

MILK-N-HONEY a multimedia play about the politics and pleasures of eating, starring Dumpster divers, food chemists, the color yellow, farm workers, a very Happy Burger, a very unhappy cow, Doritos, the flavor of light, and corn (of course). After each performance, the theater becomes an After Show Café, with free cupcakes and fair-trade certified coffee from the Lower Eastside Girls Club, where you can engage with the actors, and special guests for conversation.

http://www.greengourmet.org/

Iowa City Fieldtrip

Speaking with the marketing director, I got the sense of the passion and conviction of the people behind the scenes of this operation; they seem to be very interested in the integrity of their products and business. I was inspired to see a business which was being run with concern for the constituents which make up the organizations (ie. the farmers and consumers). However, it was very clear that this was an industrial set-up with an organic angle and fascination with artisan.

Seeing the inner workings of the dairy industry, the machines and processes used has given me a much more concrete understanding of what my food goes through. It's one thing to know that eggs are packaged in a dark warehouse and quite another to know what that warehouse looks and smells like. I think they are taking a giant step in the right direction and I wish them a lot of success, but I'm still going to Radiance Dairy ;)

I've shopped at New Pioneer since my mom discovered Iowa City shortly after we moved to Fairfield in the 90s. It's always been my impression that it has had a committment to good, clean, and fair food, I simply didn't have the words to describe it. Hearing Teresa's story about the founding of the co-op and how it treats its employees as well as her conviction and passion for what she was talking about, confirmed my observation that the co-op is a great outlet for outspoken people committed to health and seeking to support a business that's doing good stuff even if they as a consumer must purchase Swiss Valley milk.

I love old people. It was inspiring to see the owners doing what they love and are passionate about and enjoying a comfortable life. They commented on their concern for the declining taste and available variety of the apples available to the general public and I particularly liked the stories they told about the nurseries false labeling, it it was a clear example of what can happen when the only stake you have in something is monetary gain.

I'm impressed with the amount of "activism" with which Kurt Freise is involved with as well as the working relationship between husband, wife, and 'hired' help. It's difficult to really know what the dynamics of a business are without direct experience, but they all appeared to be excited about the direction in which the business is progressing. To a certain extent their vegetarian dishes are like home-cooking, but its presentation combined with the mission of the restaurant and the ambience creates a ver satisfying experience for the diner.

It was desperately cold and therefore hard to pay attention to the owner, but never the less I was interested in the reasons he was stating that wine producers plant the vines particular distances apart (productivity, companion planting, harvesting ease) and the differences between corking options.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Dear Martha Stewart Living,

Thank you for publishing projects and articles which focus on beautiful and productive activities.

Staying Warm,

BOOK REPORT

“Long Ago in France” by M.F.K Fisher

Long Ago in France by M.F.K. Fisher

We smelled Dijon mustard, especially at one of the most impor. tant corners of the rue de la Liberte, where Grey-Poupon flaunted little pots of it. And I remember that long after I was there, my nephew Sean and his wife Anne and their two little boys were in France one year, and I had told Sean about the Grey-Poupon shop ... a kind of showplace, with beautiful old faience jars in the win¬dows and then copies of them that one could buy for mustard pots. The two boys were fascinated, because they said the floor opened, and their clerk simply disappeared down into the basement right in the middle of the store. Of course, I was not surprised, but the boys were, and they waited, and finally the little man popped up again with a small moutardier. I broke the bottom of it about three years ago, but I used it until then for mustard, and I still have its top, I believe, and the little wooden spoon with the blue ball on the end of it. It was darling, and they brought it clear from Dijon to me. I liked that We smelled Dijon cassis in the autumn, and stained our mouths with its metallic purple. But all year and everywhere we smelled the Dijon gingerbread, that pain d'epice which came perhaps from Asia with a tired Crusader. Its flat strange odor, honey, cow dung, clove, something un-nameable but unmistakable, blew over all the town. Into the theater sometimes would swim a little cloud of it, or quickly through a cafe gray with smoke. In churches it went for one triumphant minute far above the incenses. At art school, where tiny Ovide Yencesse tried to convince the hungriest students that medal-making was a great career, and fed them secretly whether they agreed or not, altar smoke crept through from the cathedral on one side, and from the other the smell ofp^tn d'epice baking in a little factory. It was a smell as thick as a flannel curtain. lied We knew most of the shops, and although I can't remember eat¬ing much gingerbread when we first went there, later when younger sister Norah lived nearby, I bought it often. It was called

LONG AGO IN FRANCE Dave de sante, and it was the plainest and the most delicious, and the cheapest cut. It was made in huge loaves about six feet square, six inches thick, and it was sold in square blocks of about a kilo each, or a half-kilo maybe, and wrapped up in paper marked Mulot et Petit [ean or any of the other good gingerbread places. The smells were heavenly. Mulot et Petit Jean was the biggest and oldest supplier of gin¬gerbread, and its main store always looked something like a phar¬macy. The women who worked there all looked the same, with tight high-breasted bodies and handsome hands and feet, and they went lightly over the tiled floors, behind the high polished counters piled with pretty boxes and the towering cash desk with a little carved fence around its top. They were deft and remote, and yet protective. Now and then for Christmas or birthdays, I sent loaves of the plain kind of gingerbread and boxes of the sticky kind to America, and they advised against shipping a round cake covered with candied cherries, and advised for a smaller square one stuffed with apricot jam, and I smiled at them without their knowing why, nor caring. The Grey-Poupon shop was on the corner of one of the streets that led off the rue de la Liberte down to the place Bossuet, where Mulot et Petit Jean was, and across from it was a wonderful store where workmen got their clothes. Al bought a suit there, I remem¬ber. It was a navy blue corduroy, a thick-waled corduroy. One time there was a masked students' ball given by the Mayor in the Ducal Palace, and we both bought harlequin costumes alike there. I skinned my hair back, and was perhaps a little masculine. Al was rather effeminate, I think. Anyway, we both wore makeup, and he, to me, was obviously a man and I was obviously a girl, and it was fun. The shop also had smocks for various kinds of working people uhey all had their own smocks, navy blue, or dark gray), and there ere lots of butchers' aprons. Every kind of workman had his own ^ality and cut and color of suit. I still have a smock that I bought P^. It is gray and ugly, but I still have it hanging in my closet. I laven't worn it for years, but I keep it, for some reason. It would be nice thing for a sculptor or cabinet worker . . . something to wipe gluey old hands on.

58

M.F.K. FISHER There were people who belted out street songs in 1929-1930 There were usually two people: One would be a wounded veteran from the war—World War I, which was still very keen in their minds, of course—and then there would be a woman. The man would sit on a little stool usually, and the woman would go around and collect pennies and sell sheet music now and then. They would sing a song, and sometimes they'd sing two or three, but they would sell the sheet music to people for a penny. I always stopped and lis¬tened, but it seems odd that I don't remember ever paying for and getting a piece of sheet music. The Ducal Palace was at the far end of the rue de la Liberte fac¬ing the place d'Armes, and it was a series of majestic buildings, which housed the mayor's offices as well as the museums. In its courtyard was the Ducal Kitchen, which was nothing but a great chimney rising from a space which formed the oven itself. There were several other things in the courtyard, including the brooding statue of Claus Sluter, the first great sculptor of Burgundy, who did the Puits de Moi'se, which is outside the town. The great tower of Phillipe Le Bon was toward the back of the high buildings and rose high above even the churches. The rue de la Liberte sepa¬rated the Ducal Palace from the place d'Armes, which was its natu¬ral parade ground and always seemed the center of town. Down the rue de la Liberte from the Ducal Palace, there was the Opera House, the place de 1'Opera, and the small Cafe de 1'Opera. There was also a famous printshop, where they printed James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and other writers forbidden in Amer¬ica and England. There were strange typos in them, because all the proofreaders were, of course, Frenchmen speaking English. They fi¬nally did print Al's thesis and later Larry Powell's, because printing theses was their livelihood. Then there was the grain market, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays there would be lots of pigeons walking around, picking up seeds that the merchants had dropped from their pockets. Behind the Ducal Palace ran the oldest marketing street it town. It was very narrow and crowded and dirty, and it was the most picturesque part of town, with gabled buildings showing the famous tiled roofs of Burgundy. . . green and yellow and black and red. And 60

LONG AGO IN FRANCE there was the beautiful small place Francois Rude and finally the place where people gathered to see the famous gargoyles and the great clock Jacquemart with its mechanized figures on the facade of the eglise Notre-Dame. The other half of the ancient city was where the place d'Armes spread out in front of the Ducal Palace. Out from the half-circle of the place ran a dozen small streets which led into the older quarter of the city, part commercial and part beautiful town houses, which seemed to end for us anyway on the corner of the Chabot-Charny and the rue du Petit-Potet. The buildings on the place d'Armes were all two-stories tall and fairly uniform, and they included several small cafes and tea shops and two restaurants, the Pres aux Clercs and Racouchot's Three Pheasants. On the corner of one of the streets that went down from the place was Venot's, the main bookstore of the town. It was the only one known to me then, and it supplied all the university books. Monsieur Venot was a town character and was supposed to be the stingiest and most disagreeable man in Dijon, if not in the whole of France. But I did not know this, and I assumed that it was all right to treat him as if he were a polite and even generous person. I never bought much from him but textbooks, because I had no extra money, but I often spent hours in his cluttered big shop, looking at books and asking him things, and sniffing the fine papers there, and even sitting copying things from books he would suggest I use at his worktable, with his compliments and his ink and often his paper. In other words, he was polite and generous to me, and I liked him. When I told that to Georges and Henriette Connes, many years after I had stopped being a student, and after old Monsieur Venot had died and left a lot of money to a host of people nobody ever knew he would spit upon, they laughed with a tolerant if amused as-°nishment; and of course I too know that by now I am much shyer than I was then, or perhaps only less ignorant, and that I would not ream of accepting so blandly an old miser's generosity and wisdom. In Monsieur Venot's shop I learned to like French books better than any others. They bent to the hand and had to be cut, page by pagg. I liked that. 61