Keeping up with the news about the many aspects of food is a demanding job! I do two things that help somewhat. I have a Yahoo! home page that feeds me the New York Times food and dining stories. I also get an e-mail every Thursday from the Tribune newspapers that pulls together the best cooking and wine stories from the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.
Yesterday's NYTimes stories were an interesting bag. There was an article pondering problems at Whole Foods, getting too big, supporting industrial organic, not local producers - all of it didn't seem like news to me. But it was affirming to realize that I am not the only one who goes to Whole Foods only when I absolutely can't find something anywhere else.
A story on Paula Deen, on the occasion of the publication of her memoirs, was somewhat interesting. I have been wondering about the phenomenon on the food channel of increasingly having lowest common denominator home cooks in the ascendancy. I've never watched Paula Deen. I did watch Rachel Ray once. It seems like there are two extremes in television cooks - either so outlandish, out of season, out of my price range that it has to be pure entertainment, not any stimulus to actually get into the kitchen and do something. Oh for the days when Julia Child inspired my mother to try making coq au vin. Or it is so inane I fall asleep as I remember thinking a similar recipe was fun when I was ten and mixes and prefab food were a new thing. What about cooks who consider instant pudding mix or triscuits to be ingredients? Ugh!
I can't resist quoting Debbie Knox, a traditional cook from Greenville, South Carolina cited in the story. "She isn't a southern cook. She's a convenience cook. And deep-fried collard greens just seems like a publicity stunt to me."
The other story which interested me was one on what I think of as chemistry set cooking. Laura Shapiro - an author's whose chronicling of ordinary Americans' and particularly women's ways with food I recommend - wrote an article asking if there were differences between men and women based on their interest in kitchen chemistry. What she was talking about was the trend in the use of chemical enhancements - methyl cellulose and xanthan gum to name two - to create different textures in foods, like foams and gels. You know - the kind of thing Marcel was always doing on Top Chef. (Oh dear, now I've admitted that I DID watch some episodes of that show...) Female chefs, in Shapiro's estimation, are more interested in traditional processes for making real food, though she also opines that it was women, "home economists of the late 19th century" who started the trend toward being more scientific in the kitchen.
But has anybody asked about those chemicals? It occurs to me that they are the same in Paula Deen's pudding mix or Marcel's precious gels and foams. A kind of chemical lunatic fringe where poor folks' convenience cooking meets overpriced chef de cuisine pretension.
If all this makes you tired, and you'd like to help bring back real food, there is something else at the NY Times which I would recommend. Check out their videos for Mark Bittman, the Minimalist. Yesterday in a short clip he demonstrated how to make a loaf of whole wheat quick bread (and took on the "bread" of sunbeams and wonder in the process). Last week he showed how pudding from scratch was almost as quick as instant from a mix - AND you can pronounce the ingredients. He's got a basic recipe for home made vegetarian burgers, as well as lots of meat and fish, and the famous no knead bread recipe. More on that another day. The best thing about all this is that while you can't get old stories from the NYTimes without paying for them, you can get to the videos, [http://video.on.nytimes.com/ then enter the minimalist in the search box] and from there to the recipes that go with them. Go figure. Go cook!
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