Fair Weather Vegan

20 Under 10

7x7 recently published an item called The 20 Best Dishes Under $10 in the Mission.  Too many of these dishes contain meat, although I suspose that's part of the selling point.  Meat at these prices really is a steal.  What is not a steal for people with actual budgetary constraints is one dish that approaches ten dollars, even if it is a sandwich from Pal's.  But 7x7 does do a good job selling many of the dishes as money-savers. 

To their credit, they include four vegan dishes: Idli vada sambar from Udupdi Palace (whose Peninsula location I wasn't thrilled with; I hear this one is better), cold sesame noodles from Mission Chinese Food (which seems expensive at $8 but the magazine assures us they are special and the ingredients are unique), Senroppen Salad at Cha-ya (if I had ten bucks for lunch I wouldn't spend it on radishes), and Gracias Madre's famous vegan pozole.  There are several other vegetarian and pescatrian options as well, none of which I have tried yet.  The one I'm intrigued by and wary of is the salmon Benedict at Valencia Pizza and Pasta, because who ever heard of a pizza place that serves brunch, let alone something that has hollandaise sauce, and it only costs $6.95.  I've had salmon Benedicts all over this fine city and the South Bay, and they're never less than ten bucks.  Lox is expensive.  Oh and 7 squared...cheese quesadillas?  Like ATM machine?  I know you want to tell us to get the vegetarian versions are the cheapest, but....

Every Coffee Shop In San Francisco c. 2009

Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City is an attempt to map San Francisco in terms that are not strictly geographical.  Just as Burrito Justice once pictures the city as a system of canals and islands, so this atlas is a book of articles and, most strikingly, maps that portray that city as various terrains, some real and some dreamscape, from the gangland to the phrenological.  One of the maps happens to be of San Francisco as home to a tribe of coffee shops, clustered in a heart from the Mission outward.  Of the score of java emporia, only Tartine seems to have been snotty enough to identify itself as coffee shop plus something else, although if you've tasted their baked goods can you blame them (it's also possible this feature was added by the cartographer).  The fact that this map may already be out of date, since Ritual has fired another salvo in the hipster wars by opening a branch half a block from Blue Bottle, is further testament to the place that coffee holds in our urban psyche. 

Garlic and Sapphires

I've been re-reading Ruth Reichl's tale of her years as the Times restaurant critic.  It primarily makes me wish I had more money, although she frames it as a tale of a former Berkeley hippie losing her soul around all those three-figure meals.  The politics of the book are among the best things about it: her famous two reviews of Le Cirque, one as an average person and one as someone in her powerful job; taking on the persona of a poorly-dressed, lonely woman she sees on the bus to attend other fancy spots and seeing how clothes and cache change the experience.  Reichl is also partly responsible for ethnic food being taken seriously as a subject of review.  I had forgotten that there is an entire chapter dedicated to touring Brooklyn with Ed Levine, herald of the current hole-in-the-wall craze.  There are also sensual descriptions of meals at many name restaurants you and I will probably never see the inside of (and there's a wonderful scene in which Reichl pays the bill of a couple at The Box Tree because they're having their One Special Meal and it's terrible).  The office politics of the Times are also fascinating, even if Reichl claims she did make some of the more unpleasant figures up, or at the very least create composites.  In a second reading, the lengthy bits about choosing wigs and getting into various personas can be tedious.  Some of the experiences she describes, like her her time at Windows on the World with the most obnoxious charity winner ever, are excruciating (also a feature of her first memoir about her bipolar mother).  Reichl is a bit of an over-writer in my opinion, and sometimes it all gets a little too precious.  Still, a look behind the scenes of a major paper's restaurant reviewing can only be a page-turner, even a second or third time around. 

Fat-Shaming Justification 101

Cartoonist Barry Deutsch provides the field guide to this fast-growing, popular prejudice.

 

Boy, These People Eat A Lot

As usual when I'm back in the bosom of my family, I re-read my old battered copies of the Little House books.  This year I'm really noticing again how much they're focused around food.  When I was a kid I had a Little House Cookbook (never made anything out of it but once, and that was quite a disaster), which included a fascinating little introductory essay on the place of food in the series.  The author intimated that they talked about food so much precisely because the family spent so much time hungry, and it was an object of longing.  Likewise, the almost ridiculous amount that Almanzo eats in Farmer Boy* is a way of presenting abundance as a kind of heaven which the Ingalls didn't experience.  This was one of my first introductions to a kind of Foucauldian reading of literature, the idea of discourse, and that books can talk about something and that doesn't mean it literally happened but is expressing some other kind of feeling. 

*Did you know that many readers of the series really dislike this book?  I always loved it as a kid, although I picked up that my parents strongly disapproved of the attitude toward corporal punishment.  The child me thought it was nice to get a break from all those girly things.  Also, I probably felt a little of how Laura must have, that it was nice to get a break from the tenuous, peripatetic existence her family was living. 

Get A Free Zagat 2012 Guide

If you head over to Zagat.com before March 27th and write them some reviews of San Francisco restaurants, they'll send you the 2012 guide (which might quote you, after all) for free.  The other options for prizes are a 90-day free subscription to the website or an entry into their $500 night on the town contest.  The only disappointment to me is that they list every branch of every chain in the Bay Area, which seems ridiculous already, but not K's Kitchen.  I appreciate my favorite restaurant being out of the way, but I'd also like it to stay in business. 

Coke, Pepsi Involve Themselves In Controversy

There's a surprise.  PepsiCo has bought blogging space for a few of its research and development scientists on the hugely popular ScienceBlogs site, a bastion for accessible writing by academic scientists, and several SciBloggers have already left in disgust. The decision to accept Pepsi's researchers as bloggers has brought the usual thoughtful debate on the site.  Here is Abel Pharmboy's negative take.  I lean toward Abel's perspective, although of course my problem with corporate presence on an academic site has to do with the corporate aspect, and not the identity of the company itself since I'm not in the business of judging foods on some kind of moral spectrum (factory farming etc is another matter).  It seems like the very definition of selling out to give an actual blog to corporate scientists, which will appear in SciBlogs' feed, and it may indeed affect the reputation of the site. 

As for Pepsi's rival, Coke was featured in a NY Times article about Honest Tea, in which it apparently has a 40% stake and which it may buy outright next year.  It may as well have been about Odwalla or Dagoba or any other corporate buyout of a small, ethical food company and the problems it brings as the company tries to maintain its own identity (indeed, the article highlights advice from several other types of company that have been acquired).  The situation also provides a conundrum for consumers, as they worry about giving more money to a conglomerate.  I love Honest Tea because it's a great product but also because I feel confident supporting them, and if they are purchased fully by Coke that may no longer be the case. On the other hand, according to the article Coke's stake has allowed Honest Tea, an ecologically-friendly product, to be sold in many more places, and that's a good thing.  Certainly a thorny issue. 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Did anyone get through this book?  For the first time, I have a keen understanding of how people who read Kingsolver's novels while disagreeing with her politics must feel.  'For the love of god, stop smarming, woman!'  The point at which she was waxing nostalgic about tobacco farmers in the middle of a book about how certain kinds of food and eating habits are morally bankrupt was a real highlight.  That's a defense of the worker and not the product, and she certainly attacks straight up the agribusiness responsibility chain at the right places for most of her points.  But we also can't solve our food problems if we don't correctly identify what they are, and I continue to think that the root is judgment about food and not necessarily food itself.  We are in the midst of an insanity that stems from calculating and feeling guilty about everything that goes into our bodies, and we if we don't deal with that before we alter our eating habits to include only local, organic foods, then the change is just a continuing symptom.  It's another way of being 'good' about something that is in reality morally neutral.  We need to eat, just like we need to breathe and sleep.  We need to eat a variety of foods.  Even if our food decisions are guided by certain principles, we also need to respect the fact that it is a basic function that needs to be fulfilled and is better fulfilled by being gentle with ourselves.  Although on some level she is just trying to prove it can be done on a yearly scale, Kingsolver's locavore obsession borders on eating disorder at some points.  It's better to eat out-of-season vegetables and fruits than get scurvy or be so bored with what you're eating that you're tempted to binge on 'disallowed' foods and start the guilt cycle all over again.  Although belonging to a CSA, growing your own produce, and eating organic are all positive for the planet and probably for your health (jury's still out on that in the long term), they need to be treated mindfully as part of a process, one which takes place in steps and which includes different kinds of mental health-nourishing practices including eating a damn ring-ding if that's what you want.  That makes it much easier to stick in general to your principles and keep the whole project afloat. 

I will probably have more to say, hopefully some of it more positive because I do plan to go back and try to finish the book while at the same time ignoring the parts that made me want to throw it across the room.  I'd be interested to hear what other readers think. 

If I Want A Shot, I'll Take A Drink

I don't like the taste of alcohol.  This is something that is true of most people when they are children, but they're assured that they will grow out of it when they reach adulthood (in the real world this means they're going to have to pretend to have done so by the first week of college at the very latest in order to keep up with their peers).  I'm sure this does happen, because most people seem to enjoy drinking, or at least the results.  I, on the other hand, retain the exact same reaction I did when I was a kid and I took a big swallow of the clear liquid from a glass on the table that I thought was water and turned out to be white wine...yech.  Actually, I had the same experience with Coke, which I was given with no warning as to what the experience was supposed to be like, and I have hated soft drinks ever since.  Perhaps my real problem was unexpected novelty.  Like many children, there was one stretch where I ate only one thing for lunch, ever.  

As a grownup who is overly fond of cream and sugar, I will tolerate one type of drink.  Every so often I will poor some Bailey's into a large glass of chocolate milk, and I will sip that for a bit, and then I will be done with alcohol for another three to six months.  This isn't exactly a pressing need.  We ran out of Bailey's over a year ago at my apartment and it has not ended up on my shopping list, in large part because you can buy a lot of chocolate with the money for a bottle of liquor.  Cognizant of my preferences, two Christmases ago my parents got me a container of Turin Bailey's Chocolates.  I snacked on a ton of them while I was home, but had forgotten their existence until I saw via Candyblog's Twitter feed that En Chocolat had reviewed them.  En Chocolat's writer is one who can find all sorts of ways to talk about the chocolate-tasting experience and that's something I often envy.  Cybele agreed that she, too, thought they needed more alcohol and less sugar.  I have to say that it never crossed my mind that I would want to eat a candy that had the "burn" of liquor.    I do find that feeling refreshing for about 2.4 seconds, but I like to eat chocolate for a significantly longer time than that.  For my part, I was a bit weirded out that they'd approximated the Irish cream flavoring so closely, didn't think the chocolate was any great shakes but didn't expect it to be, and appreciated the fact that I wasn't drinking so I didn't have to think about getting nauseated for once.  At the chocolate salon, the last thing I did was sip a shot of something called Vermeer, a chocolate liquor with an extremely high alcohol content for a sweet drink.  The chocolate is Dutch processed so it has very little content to get in the way of the alcohol, which burned a hole through two hours of solid snacking and also buzzed me immediately.  It was the right way to end the affair, but it wasn't something I would want to be doing in the same way I eat candy.  If I want a drink I"ll finally pay for that bottle of Bailey's.  If I want a dessert drenched in alcohol I'll order bread pudding.  To each her own. 

How Fair Is Fair Trade?

This fellow has some arguments about why it might not be the best system for small farmers.  I'm not in a position to evaluate his claims, but the post is definitely food for thought.