"reading" news and stories

Prosciutto from Big Boy the pig. Photo: Rebecca Winters.

"What happened to the rats on your property?" someone asks urban farmer Novella Carpenter.

"I have a theory that my pigs ate the rats," Carpenter says. Realizing that her audience has been munching on slices of said pig's hindquarters, she laughed. "So enjoy some delicious prosciutto!"

Farmers are reputed to have a tough streak. They step over piles of excrement, battle gargantuan hogs and, of course, have to earn a living. Carpenter, author of "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer," seems no exception. She lives in the city, not the country, "so I can get Chinese food at 2 a.m."

The two 300-pound hogs she raised in what she calls the Oakland, Calif., "ghetto," also enjoyed Chinese takeout. She read about her adventures in urban farming on a Brooklyn, N.Y., rooftop adjacent to a 6,000-foot, 30-crop rooftop farm built by Goode Green and tended by farmers Annie Novak and Ben Flanner.

Dumpster diving, fish guts and the cost of rooftop farming, after the jump.

I was the kind of kid who was always reading at the dinner table, obliviously dipping the corner of my Judy Blume novel in the macaroni until my mother told me to "put the book away!" Eating and reading still go together for me - I eat alone in restaurants a lot while traveling for work, so I always carry a book to keep me company. This week I'm reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, which, at almost 1,000 pages, is a bit awkward to hold aloft above my plate.

So I really enjoyed reading a piece in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, in which Leanne Shapton asks various authors to name the book they most enjoy reading during solo dinners. The results are often unexpected. "Bright Lights, Big City" author Jay McInerney is the only writer to cite a food-related book - A.J. Liebling's gastronomic memoir "Between Meals." "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" author Junot Diaz chooses Michel Faber's "Under the Skin," though he says the aliens-eating-humans scenes will turn you into a vegetarian. Israeli writer Etgar Keret says reading Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" had him laughing and crying into his food at a Chinese restaurant.

Do you have a favorite book to take to restaurants for solo meals? What are you reading over the dinner table this week?

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It's no secret that I am obsessed with Jonathan Gold. "Who the heck is Jonathan Gold?" some of you may be asking.

Don't worry, I'm not offended that you may not know. If you don't live to eat in Los Angeles, or maybe even New York, then you might not know him. Jonathan Gold is the current restaurant critic for the LA Weekly, and I will most certainly have you all know that I had a cybercrush on him waaaaay before he was even in the running for a Pulitzer Prize, let alone named the winner! Yes, yes, y'all, Mr Jonathan Gold is a Pulitzer prize-winning writer.

Some of the obsession has to do with what he writes about -- though he has dined around New York, he started in LA and makes his dining home here now. He also tends to focus his dining experiences on places that don't get written up by every other person on the planet.

However, the real reason I gush like I do about Mr. JGold is not his subject matter. It's his writing.

A new poll reveals that 80% of Americans say that they read nutritional labels when they purchase food, but half of those people buy the food no matter what the label says. So, why do they bother reading a label when it's not going to influence their decision to purchase?  "I don't know, force of habit" was one woman's response.

This is surprising because, in the past, other studies have indicated that consumers change their buying habits when confronted with an unhealthy food label.

Of those who do check the labels, they look for things like calories and trans-fats, but not necessarily for overall nutrition. Other things that the survey found are the women are most likely to read a nutrition label, followed by men and then single men, and that women are more likely to place importance on what they read there.

It sounds as though people simply don't know what they're "supposed" to be reading, even though there is no right answer on the label. The information for all the food eaten during the day is what should be taken into account, not just for one product.

 

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