Tag Archives: Michael Pollan
Top food stories from Berkeley in 2011
As the year draws to a close, it’s time to look back to see what food stories created a buzz around town and on Berkeleyside in 2011.
Granted, there’s an arbitrary nature to such end-of-year lists. But it’s an opportunity to take stock of the city’s culinary culture.
For the purposes of this post we’ve focused on food news stories, which doesn’t take into account the dozens of interviews with foragers, farmers, artisans, advocates, chefs, cooking teachers, preservers, pasta makers, cheese purveyors, pop-up restaurateurs, and farmers’ market vendors we’ve published during 2011.
This year also saw controversial coverage of corner stores, reporting on detractors of school food, an insider’s take on speed dating with a veg-friendly focus, and a widely criticized first-person piece on disappointing camp chow.
Readers may differ on what food stories caught their attention. Feel free to add your own highlights (or low points) in the comments section.
In alphabetical order: … Continue reading »
Baker’s dozen: To Berkeley from a brick oven in Marin
As commutes go, Eduardo Morell knows he’s onto a good thing. The south-west Berkeley dweller spends 35 minutes behind the wheel before he reaches the bucolic setting that is home to the Headlands Center for the Arts near Sausalito, in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. He’s greeted by fresh air, windswept hills, blue (or fog-filled) skies, the sound and smell of the ocean, and the seasons on display.
It is, without doubt, a special spot. That Morell gets to call it his workplace only makes it more magical.
The baker behind Morell’s Bread spends two 14- to 16-hour days at this artists’ enclave in a collection of former army barracks in the Marin Headlands, where he bakes naturally leavened bread in a wood-burning brick oven designed by master-builder Alan Scott. His loaves are served up to the artists-in-residence and sold at the Thursday and Saturday farmers’ markets in Berkeley. … Continue reading »
Michael Pollan: New food rules, but no need to be neurotic
Sometimes a spoonful of sugar does, indeed, make the medicine go down. Though you won’t find that catchphrase in the just-released hardcover edition of Food Rules, Michael Pollan‘s best-selling little eater’s manual.
Food Rules does sport the whimsical and witty illustrations of well-known artist Maira Kalman, however. And the new book also boasts 19 new rules — many gleaned from eaters around the country that Pollan wished he had thought of and included the first time around.
Take two is again full of commonsense kitchen wisdom such as If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry; and When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.
The takeaway message: food need not be complicated, and the act of eating is as much about pleasure and communion as it is about nutrition and health. In other words: lighten up a little and enjoy your dinner. … Continue reading »
Food Day: Growing a movement around what we eat
Can Food Day, which is on October 24th, do for the growing food movement what Earth Day did for the nascent environmental movement back in 1970?
The organizers, the Center for Science in the Public Interest in D.C., certainly hope so. A national, grassroots campaign, Food Day is designed to celebrate what we eat while drawing our attention to the need to overhaul this country’s food system from farm to fork. In this way it is similar to Earth Day which sparked widespread interest in the fragile nature of our planet.
Events planned for Monday, including in Berkeley and around the Bay Area, will highlight the good, bad, and ugly of the way we consume food in this country.
Simply put, how we grow, transport, process, market, and eat is not sustainable for the environment or our health, said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of CSPI and the creator of Food Day in a recent piece for The Atlantic. Dietary diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks are rising at alarming rates. Industrially raised meat sucks up energy, pollutes the land and water, and is cruel to beast and worker alike.
Even in places like Berkeley where local, seasonal, organic, sustainable, and fresh food is available in abundance, too many people lack access to good grub and/or go hungry or malnourished. … Continue reading »
The frenzy around Chez Panisse’s 40th anniversary
The next few days in Berkeley will be all about Alice. You know, Alice Waters. Forty years ago, on August 28, 1971, she opened Chez Panisse in a small shingled building on Shattuck Avenue. The inaugural dinner consisted of pate en croute, duck with olives, salad, and almond torte. The dinner was a few hours late, cobbled together by a number of well-meaning but amateur chefs, but it was good. And fresh. And it started a transformation in California cuisine … Continue reading »
Nikki Henderson: On the frontlines of edible education
People seem to have an insatiable appetite for food matters right now. Case in point: the public tickets for Edible Education 101 at UC Berkeley were snapped up in 12 minutes on Monday, according to a tweet from Alice Waters, who played a key role in bringing the curriculum to the university.
The 13-week course, co-taught by J-school professor and The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan and Nikki Henderson, the executive director of People’s Grocery, … Continue reading »
Tickets expected to go fast for Michael Pollan’s food class
When word leaked out in the spring that Michael Pollan would be co-teaching a class on the rise and future of the food movement, students at UC Berkeley rushed to sign up. The 10-week, two-unit course was filled minutes after it was listed online.
Now, the general community has a chance to participate in this gold rush.
UC will be releasing tickets for Edible Education 101 on a first-come, first-serve basis on August 15. There will be about 282 tickets available for each class and people will be able to sign up for just one lecture or all of them, said Carolyn Federman, director of development for the Edible Schoolyard, which is co-sponsoring and paying for the course. The tickets will be free and will be sold through Ticketweb, she said.
Pollan is co-teaching Edible Education 101 with Nikki Henderson, the executive director of People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in Oakland. While Pollan and Henderson are the co-teachers, much of the class will center around lectures given by luminaries in the food movement. Confirmed speakers include Carlo Petrini, Peter Sellars, Marion Nestle, Frances Moore Lappé, Raj Patel, Ann Cooper, Eric Schlosser, and Alice Waters. … Continue reading »
Chez Panisse chef to open artisan butcher shop
Chez Panisse chef Aaron Rocchino and his wife Monica are bringing artisan meat to the heart of the Gourmet Ghetto with the opening this summer of The Local Butcher Shop on Cedar Street in the old Red Hanger Kleaners space.
“We think there’s a void in the market for restaurant-quality, sustainable meat for home customers,” said Monica Rocchino, who is setting up the new retail operation with her husband.
“It’s an idea whose time has come. I’m looking forward to having this shop in the neighborhood,” said Michael Pollan, who lives in north Berkeley and has done much to champion the consumption of responsibly sourced meat.
The butcher shop will feature whole animals sourced directly from farms, none of which are further than 150 miles from Berkeley. The emphasis will be on grass-fed, sustainably raised meat, and the butchering and cutting will be to order. … Continue reading »
Author Raj Patel’s food revolution: From chips to salad
Raj Patel is a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an honorary research fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First, in Oakland.
Such affiliations allow the academic activist to hang out with his brethren in both camps. At the same time it affords the Oxford, Cornell, and London School … Continue reading »
Chez Panisse to throw a birthday party for 5,000
Chez Panisse will be 40 years old this summer, and there are certain to be all sorts of food-related events to celebrate the anniversary. For example, there are whispers that Michael Pollan will be giving a series of lectures on food that is open to both students and the public.
Leah Garchik, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, reported today that the Chez Panisse sent out a holidayContinue reading »
Doctor’s orders: Eat your greens says Preston Maring
Here’s a notion that hardly seems radical: longtime Berkeley resident Dr. Preston Maring thinks physicians should prescribe healthy eating along with dispensing drugs to their patients.
Maring, Associate Physician-in-Chief at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland, believes doctors should also walk the walk about the preventive health benefits of sound nutrition.
He’s so committed to the good food cause he’s willing to show other medical professionals how to mince garlic and whip up vinaigrette from scratch for … Continue reading »
Can’t we just have dinner without all the analysis?
One of the undoubted pleasures of living in the Bay Area is being able to enjoy the fruits of its pioneering food movement — whether it’s savoring the freshest, sweetest organically grown peach or dining at restaurants where sustainability and relationships with producers are taken seriously.
But there’s also a risk that such enthusiasm can turn into evangelism — that we can veer into being a little worthier than thou. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker summed it … Continue reading »
Berkeley Bites: Alice Waters
Do Berkeleyside readers even need an introduction to the mother of the American fresh, local, sustainable, organic food movement?
Alice Waters is a living legend. For four decades, the California cuisine innovator, Chez Panisse chef, Edible Schoolyard founder, school food reformer, and Slow Food advocate, has influenced how people in this country buy, cook, eat, talk, and think about food.
As with any icon, Waters has her fans and foes. Some see her as … Continue reading »
