Food for thought

I recently finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver is well known for her award-winning novels (such as The Poisonwood Bible, Prodigal Summer, and Pigs in Heaven) and they are marvelous, though I appreciated this book even more. The narrative follows Kingsolver and her family (husband, Steven Hopp and daughters Camille and Lily) through a year of eating almost exclusively the food they grow themselves, or purchase from local farmers near their Virginia farm. In it, she says, "I understand that most U.S. citizens don't have room in their lives to grow food, or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question..."

She goes on to say, "I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration... Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.

"It's a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry... but a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life. I consider it the hoodwink of my generation."

Industrial food is a big part of our health problems. Because of the industrialization of our dinner, we are eating worse than ever before, in spite of the sheer abundance in the big box stores where we shop. So, Kingsolver writes with passion of the celebratory nature of good, wholesome, real food, cooked from scratch. As she pointed out in an interview I did with her for an upcoming article, "We have to eat. It is the one consumer choice we make three times a day, and there are so many different problems that have the same answer: we are worried about food contamination, with one scare after another making headlines, we are worried about our use of fossil fuels and climate change, we are worried about our vanishing farm cultures, and we are also worried about our health and the obesity crisis. All these problems are associated with eating processed foods, and all of these problems have one solution: get food from closer to home, and get back into cooking from scratch."

So, with this in mind, let me talk about cookbooks. I have dozens, but really there are just four cookbooks that I reach for with regularity. They cover the world of cooking and food choices (literally):

The Joy of Cooking, which I wrote about recently, is an absolute, must have cookbook. If you only own one cookbook, it is the one you should have!

Last night I made Potato Corn Chowder with some of our Yukon Gold potatoes (soup is a great use for the tiny potatoes I get from my garden). I used the recipe from Fresh Choices, an unusual cookbook in that it really drills down into information about the food choices we make, and how they affect our health. In nine chapters, it serves up great recipes plus a wealth of excellent facts, figures, and news on food (organic, local, grassfed, and beyond) and how our choices affect our health and the earth.

Colorado Cacheis another cookbook I reach for frequently. With over 400 pages, it always has a recipe that works for me. If you like Mexican food, there is a chapter dedicated to it, and the "potpourri" chapter covers things like homemade mustards, jellies and jams, and liquers and cocktails.

And for the last of my regular cookbooks: Author Sheila Lukins is an inveterate traveler who spent two years on a food journey around the world. Part travelogue, part cookbook, and rounded out with menu suggestions, her All Around The World Cookbook is the book to pickup when you feel like experimenting with different spices, or combinations of ingredients. For example, for chicken soup, Lukins gives a table that shows combinations of ingredients that make chicken soup what it is in 22 different countries, ranging from Argentina to Turkey.