Reading for 9th week Tuesday

As promised, here are links to the reading due Tuesday. It's all from the New York Times, much of it from Sam Sifton, the Times' chief restaurant critic. I think you'll have a good time with it.

United Tastes comes to the Midwest
Mark Bittman v. McDonald's Oatmeal
Sam Sifton reviews Ai Fiori
Sifton reviews Bar Basque
Hey Mr. Critic
Another Hey Mr. Critic
Sifton does Brooklyn
Sifton says Jamaican is the thing
Sifton blogs about the John Dory Oyster Bar
Sifton on how to eat for a living and stay healthy doing it
Sifton's My Life in Food
Round One Q&A
Round Two
Round Three
Round Four
and just for fun, To Catch a Critic

A little food love

Here's a beautiful post today from one of my favorite food blogs.

Enjoy, and happy Valentine's day!

Bittman takes on the government, big business and OPRAH, oh my!

Mark Bittman wrote a powerful critique for the New York Times that speaks to just about everything we've been talking about lately. Check it out.

What do you think of his acronyms and do you think he goes far enough? Or is it his job? Something we've discussed is how do we fix it? What can we do? What if we all just do what we can? Bittman doesn't have to please, or even address, the lobbyists and the corn growers. He speaks to New York Times readers, which is no small group. If he can convince even a fraction of the people reading this piece to ERF, then he's done a lot.

Here's where you can find his blog post about the resources he used to back up his claims, fyi.

Essay Workshop lineup

For workshop number two, we're reversing the order. That means if you were workshopped Tuesday last time, you'll be workshopped Thursday this time (and vice versa).

That means if you're Jake, Alaina, Julia, Max, Gabriella, Emily or Stephanie, your piece is due Sunday at 5 p.m.

If you're Nora, Hannah, Elaine, Jaime, Kelsey, Katie or Alexis, your piece is due Tuesday at 5 p.m.

Let me know if you have questions!

Essay/Advocacy Journalism prompts

Here's the assignment due next week according to your syllabus:

Cook your idea of a perfect meal for others and write about the entire experience.

If you're comfortable working with that, go for it. For those of you who like a little more prompting, here are some considerations:

Use The Omnivore's Dilemma as a jumping off point. Create a list of rules to follow like Pollan does on page 392. Set out to follow them, and allow your discrepancies to provide tension in the narrative.

Another great technique to borrow from Pollan is to write about your expectations and assumptions before the meal and as the experience of hunting, gathering, preparing, feeding and eating unfold, address how your expectations and assumptions are either met or not. This, too, provides tension in the narrative.

Allow yourself to be as transparent and conversational as possible.

Think about the religiosity or other moral implications of your meal. Consider the meal as grace, as Pollan does on page 407.

"Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place," Pollan writes on page 408. Make your meal as much about getting to know a place as possible.

Attempt to create "a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it" (409). Write about your successes and failures in all their glory.


Hopefully that gets you going. I can't wait to read about your experiences!

They want to scan our faces to make us eat more Kraft!

I heard about this when I tuned into The Splendid Table for a minute this afternoon. It struck me on a new level how our capitalist system supports corporations in their quest to sell us more processed food.

How do you feel about a Kraft kiosk that scans your face to determine who you are and how they'll best get you to buy more of their products? Are you interested in this kind of "meal planning solution"? Don't you wonder how many fresh ingredients they'll try to get onto your shopping list? It's a very different way of getting to know the customer than the farmer's market model in which your grower knows you by name and what you tend to buy because you actually have conversations with a human being with dirt under her fingernails.

Bittman, Waters, Sifton and the F.D.A.

Here are the links I referenced in class today, as promised:

Mark Bittman in Bon Appetit

Alice Waters' The Edible Schoolyard

Sam Sifton's take on The Fat Radish

The new food guidelines

F.D.A. says no to new obesity drug

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think in the comments!