Why Are Twinkies Cheaper than Carrots?

In prior posts I've criticized farm subsidies from the US government. Here is a video that puts it in clear and simple terms:

A Delicious Musical About Pac-Man

If you remember the early 1980's, you know that Pac-Man was a major video game craze. (Statistically, Ms. Pac-Man may have been an even bigger craze if my memory of video game history is correct.)

In the interest of promoting art and nostalgia, and possibly to familiarize you with some culinary terminology, I now present the Pac-Man Musical:

Fifty Best "Mom Food Bloggers" of 2010

They've been known for their food for many generations.
I'm talking about Moms.

Add some technology to the mix and you have Food Blogs by Moms.
Babble.com recently picked the 50 best food blogs by moms.

Many, but not all of these blogs are about kid-oriented food. But whether you're a mom or not, the 50 Best Mom Food Bloggers is worth checking out!

More Food Blogs, Please!

I take pride on food-related posts. Specifically, I've shared links to some good all-food format blogs. I connected you to the London Times' 50 Best Food Blogs in May of 2009 and Serious Eats, another award-winning food blog about a year after that. I figure that you're ready to hear of another food blog now.

Emily, the mother of 3-year-old Ella, committed herself to presenting healthy foods to her daughter "in a way that interests her." Emily's blog, Bentobloggy, displays her success. If you're looking for delicious, nutritous foods (especially for kids), and cute garnishes, you probably won't do much better than Bentobloggy.



Here's what I mean by succes:

If you can get your three-year-old to eat ethnic food, you're doing pretty well. Bonus points for using chopsticks!



By the way, I looked up Bento in the dictionary. It is short for Obento, a Japanese meal that is packed in a partitioned, lacquered box.




And here's a spread-sheet of possible school lunches for your child/children.

Serious Eats: An Award-Winning Food Blog

The winner of the 2010 James Beard award for Food Blogs is:

Serious Eats

Serious eats claims to be more than just a blog - the material on Serious Eats generates so much discussion that the claim to be an online "community" appears to be warranted.

As you might expect, Serious Eats is a good place to go for recipes, information about food ingredients (e.g. "How to break down a pig") and multi-media how-to's on food-related topics. Although I was not particularly impressed with their photography, the blog has a "photograzing" tab which supplies loads of links to delicious and colorful photos posted on other sites.








If you want to get creative with pizza, be sure to check out their "Slice" tab!

More New Books: Ethnic Food

We have more new books for Culinary Arts students - or anybody who is looking for some recipes, looking to improve their kitchen skills, or just looking for some pictures of food to salivate over (don't drool into our new books!). All these books are kept at the Fond du Lac campus library.

Taiwanese food is a balance of flavors say Jade and Muriel Chen, proprietors of a restaurant and authors of
Blue-Eye Dragon: Taiwanese Cooking.


Call number: TX 724.5 .A1 .C54 2008



There's a lot of good food on the multi-cultural island of Singapore. Now we have a book that brings you their beloved local classics as well as less common, but equally delightful, dishes. Singapore Cooking: Fabulous Recipes from Asia's Food Capital by Terry Tan and Christopher Tan boasts well-written and easy-to-follow recipes.

Call number TX 724.5 .S55 T36 2009



One of a small handful of restaurants to get the highest rating from AAA and Mobil, the Kai Restaurant on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona is redefining Native American cuisine. Two of Kai's top chefs put their recipes into The New Native American Cuisine by Marian Betancourt.

Call number: E 98 .F7 B54 2009



Make It Moroccan: Modern Cuisine from the Place Where the Sun Sets is one of those food books from which you can learn a lot about a country. The author, Hassan M'Souli has owned and operated three restaurants specializing in Moroccan cuisine.

Call number: TX 725 .M8 M759 2008

Online Documentary: The Future of Food

Deborah Koons, the widow of the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, wrote and produced a poignant film about food that is available on snagfilms.com. With interviews footage and other relevant documentation from various experts and sources, The Future of Food makes it clear that big, influential chemical corporations like Monsanto (especially Monsanto), are pulling strings to control farmers and even pulling strings to control the government.


What is the future of food?
Of course we don't really know for sure and the film doesn't make any specific predictions. Nevertheless, one thing is clear, you and I, as citizens and as consumers, will have a say in what comes next. In the last fifteen to twenty years Americans' spending on organic food has increased at a remarkable rate. Many of us are willing to pay a little extra for the safety and quality of "real food." Many more of us also enjoy raising our own food. The future of food is up to us.

Watch The Future of Food on Snagfilms now.

Will Allen, Founder of Growing Power, Wins the MacArthur Fellowship

Like you, I normally don't pay much attention to who wins the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as "the genius award." But in 2008 the $500,000 award went to a Wisconsin resident who is part of the solution to the inherent problems of our commercial food production and food distribution systems.

Will Allen is the founder and CEO of Growing Power, an organization that produces lots of food year-round on two acres in Milwaukee. Since supermarkets are reluctant to build in our inner-cities, inner city residents are often forced to subside on the highly processed foods they can get at corner stores.

So Growing Power is doing a great service to inner city residents by making good food available to them.

But I think that those of us who don't live in inner cities would be making a huge mistake to assume that the Growing Power model is not relevant to our own needs. As you may remember, the price of food has gone up over the last few years. It is no coincidence that it went up at the same time that the price of oil skyrocketed.

As you may have already seen in King Corn, or read in books like The Party's Over, or articles like "Eating Fossil Fuels", commercial food production in our country is largely dependent upon fossil fuels. Oil and natural gas are the main ingredients in the fertilizers and herbicides that the system is based on. Even the seeds are produced by chemical companies like Monsanto. And did you know that the agricultural system as I have just described it is literally ruining the soil of our great land? The American food production system is unsustainable.

On the other hand, Will Allen and his people at Growing Power work with nature. They grow fish in tanks and the water is cleaned with aquatic plants. Worms consume the garden waste and make it into compost. The greenhouses and hoophouses have multiple levels so that growing space is maximized.

We have more than enough land to start our own community gardens at Moraine Park Technical College. Let's be ahead of the curve and become leaders in sustainability!


Watch a two-minute-plus video of Will Allen based on an interview he did for the MacArthur Foundation after winning their award.




Read Street Farmer, an article about Will Allen that appeared in the New York Times Magazine.






Visit the Growing Power website.

King Corn: A Documentary About America's Most-Subsidized Crop

King Corn is marketed as entertainment. I'm sure it will hold your attention, but it didn't make me laugh. Instead, I think many people can expect to feel outraged while watching this documentary.

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis (pictured) are just trying to learn how to grow an acre of corn in Iowa. Along the way they also visit a variety of experts on food and agribusiness. If they are outraged themselves, Cheney and Ellis themselves never let on. Instead, they behave like good apprentice farmers, or student-journalists, depending on the situation.

But it is hard for me to imagine that our two heroes didn't come away from their experiment shaking their heads at the absurdity of modern American agribusiness and hoping that things will soon change. Let me tell you what I'm talking about:

1. All of the Iowa farmers seemed to agree that they're only able to make a living growing corn because it is heavily subsidized by the federal government.

2. The government, however, is not subsidizing the delicious, healthy sweet corn that you might grow in your backyard, instead they're growing varieties of corn that cannot be consumed until they are thoroughly processed.

3. The pesticides used by today's corn farmers will kill every possible plant, even every possible type of corn - except the one that particular pesticide was made to be used on. (Could that possibly be good for the land?)

Okay, so I'm outraged, or at least sad, how about you?

New Books on Addiction, Food, and the Environment

A History of Food, by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. The New York Times raved that this new and expanded version is "indispensible, and endlessly fascinating." The topic is the social history of food. Beautifully illustrated.



Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, by Lester R. Brown. Brown is an "eco-economist." In fact, he's probably the world's most preeminent eco-economist, studying the results of civilization's effect on the environment. The bottom line according to Brown: The business-as-usual path we've been on (Plan A) with regards to the environment is leading us to economic decline and collapse. Brown's Plan B 3.0 will put things on the right track.

Addiction: A Disorder of Choice, by Gene M. Heyman. In this book, Heyman argues that the conventional wisdom about addiction - that it is a disease, a compulsion beyond conscious control - is wrong. Based on extensive research Heyman makes a powerful case that addiction is voluntary. People (some more than others) have a deep-seated tendency to consume too much of whatever we like the best. That reality has relevance beyond drugs and alcohol in our society today.

The 50 Best Food Blogs

If you've got a few minutes to check out some links, you're in for a real treat - for your eyes at least, but hopefully it will also prompt you to treat your mouth and stomach too. The online side of The Times, a London-based newspaper, picked the world's 50 best food blogs earlier this year.


I'll name just a few of their top 50 here and borrow some of their descriptions and samples of the great photos:

David Lebovitz: Living the Sweet Life in Paris: The traffic on this blog - up to 25,000 visitors a day - speaks for itself.

Matt Bites: He isn't a professional chef, he's a professional photographer - and photos are often one of the key ingredients of a good blog.

Serious Eats: The focus of this blog is on American foods. Included are restaurant and gadget reviews, food videos, and recipes.

Orangette: This was The Times' first choice, it was praised so highly that I must quote Times Online's Lynne Robinson, "The ultimate food lovers' blog. The seductive powers of food writing are not to be underestimated - Molly Wizenberg’s words even helped to find her a husband. I cooked for almost 12 hours straight after discovering this blog - recipes range from the simple to the delectable."

Rambling Spoon:

Canelle et Vanille:

Artisan Sweets: Features recipes and video demonstrations for the sweet-toothed reader.

Catering to the Earth

Much of the food you see on the grocery store shelves has been handled by vast armies of processers, packagers, and other people who cart waste away. The whole show appears so well-choreographed that it seems like it could go on forever...but it can't. When we speak of "sustainable" foods, we mean foods that are grown in a way that maintains the earth's ability to keep on growing, rather than farming like there's no tomorrow. This is a whole new way of looking at food, with the earth as a character instead of just a backdrop. This is Catering to the Earth.

Find out more about Catering to the Earth at the New American Dream's Food Website.

New Books

"A thorough and often shocking discussion...[the authors] drive home their crucial theme: What's best for our bodies is best for our communities and for the earth itself." -Booklist

The National Bestseller Hope's Edge, is the sequal to the three-million-copy bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet. Hope's Edge is about the impact of what everyobdy eats. Each chapter ends with a recipe and the Wisconsin is the setting of chapter ten.


*some were purchased to replace battered old copies, others are "new" in the strict sense of the word.

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
by William Shirer.
Wikipatterns: A Practical Guide to Improving Productivity and Collaboration in Your Organization by Stewart Mader.
We're Born to Learn: Using the Brain's Natural Learning Process to Create Today's Curriculum by Rita Smilkstein.
AutoCad 2008 for Dummies by David Byrnes.

Principles of Economics, 9th Edition by Karl Case, Ray Fair, and Sharon Oster.

Essentials of Economics by R. Glenn Hubbard and Anthony P. O'Brien.

Essential Foundations of Econimics, 4th Edition by Robin Bade and Michael Parkin