A cornucopia of food writing

From UTNE on-line, this list of recent articles about food. Not recipes. These articles explore the issues all of us have been thinking about or working on in recent years.

A Feast of Reading About Food

8/6/2010 3:21:53 PM

 by Julie Hanus

In our September-October issue, we rounded up some of the most forward-thinking articles about food that the alternative press has to offer…

We led off with an excerpt of Michael Pollan’s “Food Fight,” from the New York Review of Books, and followed up with Rachel Laudan’s “In Praise of Fast Food,” from The Gastronomica Reader. We heard from Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton (“The Rich Get Richer, the Poor Go Hungry,” from A Nation of Farmers) and Nicole Miller and Michael Penn (“Waste Not, Want Not,” from Grow). And we wrapped up the section with Heather Rogers’ “The First Family’s Fallow Gardens,” a muckraking essay from our 2010 Utne Independent Press Award winner The American Prospect.

But if one thing is true about the alternative press, it is that its bounty knows no end: There is more, so much more thinking about food than we could fit in our print edition. So here you go. Read until you’re stuffed; debate until you’re sated. More than ever, the future of food is in our hands.

 — The Columbia Journalism Review’s Brent Cunningham interviews Grist’s Tom Philpott on why class needs to be part of the food debate.

 — Read about a pair of activists (profiled in Permaculture Activist) working to reintroduce staple crops to regional farming—and why their work is at the heart of food security.

  — We spotted ecologist and author Sandra Steingraber’s “Organic Manifesto” reprinted in a recent issue of In Good Tilth.

  — Head over to Enviroblog to read about kids’ food even a fly won’t touch, and if you are sufficiently grossed out, peruse our Cafeteria Chronicles, a series of blog posts about revolutionary school lunch reformers and childhood nutrition.

 —  Want to grow food in the city? Terrain has a great piece about urban farms vs. urban zoning. And in our July-August issue, we excerpted a dispatch from Next American City about Cleveland’s progressively zoned urban garden overlay.

  — One family’s experiment: crap food vs. sustainable food. (We spotted it in the Sacramento News & Review).

  — What do you think: Should organic cattle finish on grain? The Cornucopia Institute has a few thoughts on the matter…

  — Read our report on a piece from Spacing about a truly organic community transformation, spurred by front-yard gardens. Ready to go whole hog? Watch Chow’s documentary short about Novella Carpenter and her urban livestock.

 —  At his blog Wild Green, Utne Reader senior editor Keith Goetzman talks about composting in the city—the good and the rotten. Plus, check out this dispatch from Governing about fighting food deserts—with groceries at the library.

  — EcoSalon takes a firsthand look at the underground food craze.

Image by *clarity*, licensed under Creative Commons.

 Final note from Ellen:

If this doesn’t feed your food writing hunger, search our website for David Sommerstein’s recent broadcast and blog pieces on food and agriculture in the region. Also, if there’s a favorite or provocative article or book on food and agriculture you’ve read recently, share the title with us below.

Tags: agriculture, food, UTNE