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HEY HEY HEY! First things first….get over to Missy’s blog and vote for your favorite salsa recipe in her contest!! I’m #8, in case you have trouble choosing a winner from all the yummy choices! 🙂

One more fair this morning and with a lucky traffic day, I was home around 3:30!! I am EXCITED!  I love being on the road and travelling to new places, but I get so homesick…I wish I could take Matt and Santana along with me whenever I travel! That would be the best!

Green Foodie Arguments

Here is a link to an interesting post that is probably of interest to some of the other foodie bloggers out there.  Anyone into the organic, slow food movement should be familiar with Alice Waters and her restaurant in Berkeley, CA, Chez Panisse. When the roommate and I went to California on a grad school visit/research trip the summer before our senior year, and we made it a point to have lunch at Chez Panisse (dinner was WAY out of our price range). Super delicious and fun to be eating at Alice Waters’ place.  I met her and listened to her speak at The Bale Boone Symposium put on by The Gaines Center at the University of Kentucky in 2005 (I think?).  It was really amazing and wonderful for me at a time when I was still sort of defining who I was as a cook. 

The Jezebel post by Sadie, points to a recent backlash against Waters and her push for organics.  One of the most vociferous, unsurprisingly, is Anthony Bourdain (who I have a bit of a crush on, fyi).  Sadie quotes Bourdain:

Alice Waters annoys the living s%#* out of me. We’re all in the middle of a recession, like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There’s something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I’m not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I’m a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits.

First of all, he loves to talk about the Khmer Rouge…I have zero statistics or citations to back this up, but I have heard that name come out of his mouth so many times that when I read about Khmer Rouge (even unrelated to Bourdain at all), I hear it in his voice and I picture him ranting. This kind of random association is wonderful…maybe I should choose something to be obscurely connected to.  Whenever you think of Mussolini, you will think of me! Maybe not…

Second, I love Alice Waters, but I have no problem with Bourdain’s ranting…he often goes off on a lot of topics that I don’t agree with, but that is basically his job.  He’s a complainer and a grumper and I think this is why I love him oh so much.  He openly hates on cultures, women, men, children, other chefs, things I would normally be very against  ranting about…but from him, it’s pretty enjoyable.  So I am not bothered by him particularly saying this.  And I don’t think his overall culinary stance eschews the organic, local side of things.  In the essay “The Evildoers,” Bourdain says that you should “try to eat food that comes from somewhere, from somebody,” and I think this applies not only to his signature “Chef’s Tour” mantra of eating the cultural food of wherever you are, but also to the roots of where you get your food…if your veggies, your meat, your dairy comes from somewhere, someone in particular, you are more likely to connect to it and more likely to appreciate and understand its importance.

About the post itself, I have to agree with Sadie…Waters can handle the criticism as someone behind the Green movement and any kind of revolutionary progress needs to be questioned and pulled in different directions as it develops.  Yes, we’re in an economic crisis and a lot of people are having trouble affording the bare basics for their families.  Yes, the cost of organics is often high and going fully green is not necessarily feasible for every family out there.  But I know an increasing amount of people who are not typical of the “elitist” perception that has been tied to organics, especially as I’ve discovered more and more food bloggers who are in super green mode in so many ways.  And I think if more and more people fit local, sustainable, green, organic ways into their lives on a daily basis, at a level that fits their lifestyle and economic means, then it pushes for more and more change towards the positive. 

While the individual families have to make these changes on the small scale, on the larger, more vocal scale, revolutionaries like Waters and critics like Bourdain are necessary to keep pushing ideas forward and honing and refining the ideas that have made it to the mainstream mindset. 

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Ok, that was more rambling than I predicted, but I thought some of the bloggers out there would find this discussion interesting! What are your thoughts on Alice Waters? Anthony Bourdain? Feel free to despise either one, despite my love of them! 🙂

Contest news:

Don’t forget to enter Dori’s Doormat Giveaway, and she has a second one this week for an Always Infinity Gift Pack!

Missy is also having a giveaway for the Always gift bag!

Jackson’s World is not only featuring an adorable pup, but is also having a Spring has Sprung Giveaway! Bring on the spring!

Lucky Taste Buds has a Big S Farms Salsa giveaway! Yum yum yum for Salsa!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Blog Fun, Contests, Fun, interwebs, Life, Matthew, Politics??, reading, Work, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.