"new york times magazine" news and stories

This Sunday's New York Times magazine is entirely dedicated to food. Here's the rundown:

Michael Pollan tells the next president what he needs to do to change America's relationship with food and food sources.

A new kosher movement seeks to bring social justice and sustainability to the slaughterhouse.

Will tipping in America ever go out of fashion? It already has at one San Francisco restaurant.

Is Vietnamese catfish a real thing?

Eat at Shopsin's, where the food is seasoned with expletive-laden tirades and a dash of verbal abuse.

A wanna-be sustainable gardener learns about Mother Nature's wrath the hard way.

A slideshow of young leaders of the new food movement.

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"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

Those are the words that Michael Pollan uses to open his piece, Unhappy Meals, from yesterday's New York Times magazine. The short statement is the very simplest way to condense the way that we are supposed to eat to ensure our continuing good health and reduce our risk for various health problems that are associated with food intake. After all, it seems like it seems like just about everything you put into your mouth can do something bad to your body, these days.

But this basic advice is deceptively simple. It is not always easy to find "real food" and it is hard to motivate yourself to keep away from favorites (meat, cheese, chocolate) for long periods of time. This is the issue that Pollan tries to tackle in his the 12-page long (online page length) article, where he looks at how, why and why eating became so complicated and if it is still possible to eat both nutritiously and well.

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For those of us who follow the food blogosphere, Julie Powell is a familiar name. Her recently published book, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, is based on her own food blogging chronicles. She's in the Times' Magazine this week, writing about how her meals are changed now that she lives alone in a studio on the Upper East Side. Gone are dinners of pork chops in cream sauce, potatoes, meat. In their place, she makes simple things like a garlic soup with a poached egg, which she eats night after night, alone, until the large pot she made runs out.

Sounds a lot like my weeknight dinners.  

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Though it may seem as though the food processing industry is constantly trying to improve on nature, twisting it into new and more appealing forms, sometimes it turns out that they are not trying to improve on it as much as they are trying to help it compete with the ever growing range of packaged products. With consumers asking for more natural and more organic products, it would seem that they would turn back to old standbys, like nature's single-serving snack: the apple. The problem with the apple is that it is not as easy to eat as a bag of chips, there's a low "munchability" factor that would drive you to reach for more. Today's consumers are used to having a product go straight from the package to their mouth, without having to pick it apart - or bite off pieces a bit at a time. Packaging Nature's finest into a convenient, ready to eat form takes more work that you would think, despite the fact that apples come off the tree ready to eat. The New York Times Magazine did a great job chronicling the fascinating development of the prepackaged, non-browning apple slice. No longer will modern snackers have to contend with slicing, disposing of cores or trying to avoid the previously inevitable browning of their flesh because almost every store now carries the fruits, perfectly preserved and ready to finally be eaten.

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When Rachael Ray and Martha Stewart and Emeril are turning the glass inward, cooking up comfort foods like meatloaf and mac-and-cheese and Americanizing European classics by making them bigger, saltier and less dependent on exotic ingredients, the husband-wife team of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid are going the other direction. They seek to be "engaged" rather than to be comforted by their food choices. Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Amanda Hesser seems to ask, which movement reflects that of America at large?

Be engaged, she seems to whisper hopefully in response, although none of the evidence points there.

The cookbooks of Alford and Duguid, which explore Southeast Asian cuisines and flatbreads and things of this nature, sound amazing (even if I've never picked up a copy). Hesser points to the 80s and 90s infatuation with the authentic cookery of Diana Kennedy and Paula Wolfert, and heralds Alford and Duguid as the prophets of a renewed interest in real world cuisine. While I can't promise I'll go out and buy pomegranate molasses, you've sold me, Amanda: I'll at least try one of their cookbooks (how about  Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, their "meditation on Southeast Asia").