Edible North Carolina: a journey across a state of flavor by Marcie Cohen Ferris, ed.
Edible North Carolina is a collection of essays all about food in North Carolina. From how restaurants adapted to survive the COVID shut downs to histories of local, family farms and everything in between is covered in this book. Each essay was followed by a recipe that was mentioned or pertained to that story. While I liked most of the essays and I love that Vivian Howard wrote the foreword, the Introduction was SO long and detailed that it should have either been fleshed out into it's own book or greatly edited/shortened for this type of book. I also wish that the essays had been organized by region, the order and topics just felt very random. I was also disappointed that there were very few essays about the Charlotte/Piedmont region of the state. It's obvious there is a HUGE local food movement in Asheville and Raleigh/Durham, but nothing much about Charlotte which is surprising because I think Charlotte is the biggest city in the state and we have tons of small, local, family farms in the Charlotte area. Overall, I did like it, but I think it could have been organized/edited better to create a more cohesive book.
Eating to Extinction: the world's rarest foods and why we need to save them by Dan Saladino
This is a really unique book that explores the importance of food diversity through foods that almost went extinct, but have been brought back from the brink by committed farmers and communities. The book is divided into 10 sections for types of food like vegetables, meat, cheese, etc. and each section explores a few specific types of food that were once commonplace in a specific area, but are now on the verge of being wiped out. Many of the food explored thrived in a specific environment and were crucial foods for that local/indigenous community, but as globalization and homogenization of food continues local foods are often lost to industrial, cheap food. Dan Saladino does a great job of really exploring this issue and highlighting what will be lost if these foods go extinct.
Joel Salatin, my favorite lunatic farmer, often says you never see monoculture in nature. Nature is diverse and when we try to force our monoculture will on nature it's a lose/lose for everyone. Thankfully Saladino found lots of people around the world who are working hard to keep their local food traditions not only alive, but to encourage these traditions to continue in the future.
Some quotes I liked:
"Of the 6,000 plant species humans have eaten over time, the world now mostly eats just nine, of which just three - rice, wheat and maize - provide 50 per cent of all calories. Add potato, barley, palm oil, soy and sugar (beet and cane) and you have 75 per cent of all the calories that fuel our species...Seen in the context of 2 million years of human evolution, these dietary shifts taking place at a global level, all pointing towards uniformity, are unprecedented. This is happening as we're just beginning to understand the importance of diversity to our own health. The richer our gut microbiomes (the trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes we all host) the better for us. And the more diverse our diets, the richer our gut microbiomes become." (p. 8)
"In the 1830s, the United States government saw it as a public duty to distribute diverse seeds 'of the choicest varieties' for free through the US Postal Service to farmers and homesteaders. In the space of two decades, the Federal government posted over a million seed packets to American farmers from a selection of 497 varieties of lettuce, 341 varieties of squash, 288 varieties of beets and 408 varieties of tomato. By the end of the twentieth century, only a tenth of that diversity had survived." (p. 106) [And now instead of handing out seeds the US government gives huge subsidies to industrial monoculture "farming."]
"'Outsiders criticise us for killing whales and wild birds, and they laugh at us for eating what they describe as rotten sheep,' [Gunnar] Nattestad said at the end of the meal. 'But I believe we are the ones who know the truth of what it means to kill an animal and eat its meat....the whales are free until the point of death, and our sheep are allowed to grow old. In your world, animals are trapped inside buildings and hidden away from view. Why is our meat any crueller than the slaughter of millions of animals inside industrial abattoirs no one ever gets to see?'" (p. 153)
"The idea was explored in the 1980s, using a line of birds which were born blind due to a genetic mutation. Like the ones in the Brazilian story, the chickens displayed no signs of feather-pecking or acts of cannibalism. 'They did not appear to have any other obvious welfare problems, and they were more productive,' said a review of the experiment years later, adding that scientists involved 'were of the opinion that blind hens could play a role in the future...This seemed, so to speak, to be a win-win situation: Farmers would make more money and hens would live better lives.' Bigger, faster and, for our benefit, even blind? Among animal ethicists, this is called the 'Blind Hens' Challenge.'" (p. 162) [WTF - this is like the more recent article about giving cows VR goggles so they can't see how terrible their CAFO living conditions are.]
"Yet science has taught us that microbes can also be dangerous, that some bacteria can kill. In the twentieth century, the view of microbes being deadly organisms took precedence. As a result, we waged a war on them, and cleansed and sterilised our homes and our food without discretion - all in the name of safety. Only recently have we learned that, from a health point of view, we have lost something in this process." (p. 264)
"There is an old Palestinian saying that Sansour shared with me before we said goodbye. 'He who does not eat from his own adze [a farming tool] cannot think with his own mind.' This is why a watermelon, a grain of wheat or a tiny sesame seed is such a powerful thing. Each one can be a taste of freedom." (p. 357)
I'll Be There (But I'll Be Wearing Sweatpants) by Amy Weatherly and Jess Johnston
When I first picked up this book and realized the authors were Christian I was glad, but also slightly worried - PLEASE don't let this be another version of Find Your People by Jennie Allen (also with a yellow cover and in my opinion awful). But, it's not. Amy Weatherly and Jess Johnston are obviously Christians, but they are not beating you over the head with it. And they actually have some good tips throughout the book. I liked that they alternated writing chapters and were real with the struggles that come with friendship as adults. They did give some solid, do-able tips (even for introverts) and covered some thorny issues like when a friendship ends or dealing with disagreements/arguments/fights, etc. I liked the book overall and felt like the tone was one of friends chatting. The main thing I didn't like was that they both seem to be part of the "messy mom" trend where you kind of brag about how messy and crazy your life is. I'm sure that's the truth, but that's not my life so I can't relate to that. One of my biggest issues in friendship is that I'm childfree and also a Christian, so in Church circles I've often felt like a circus freak. Many of their examples involved bonding with other mothers who had children close in age to theirs which is all great but not something I can personally relate to or do to find friends. Overall, I did like the book and felt like it did have some decent tips. And while the authors are clearly Christians I think anyone could get something out of this book because that's not the main focus.
Halfway Home: race, punishment, and the afterlife of mass incarceration by Reuben Jonathan Miller
Reuben Miller was a former chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now is a professor of sociology. He has spent a decade studying mass incarceration and the after effects. He says that life after incarceration is it's own kind of prison - lists of very specific rules, hoop after hoop to jump through, and the demoralizing realization that the odds are very much stacked against you. But Miller has a personal connection to the prison system - both of his brothers and his father all spent time in prison. At times his grandmother, who was raising him and his two brothers, had to choose between watching one of her grandchildren go to jail or a group home or be evicted from her apartment for housing a criminal. Miller grew up poor and black and has seen countless friends and family members go to prison. While he managed to "make it" to the middle class this issue is still very personal to him and continues to affect him and his family personally.
Miller does a great job of exploring this issue from both a sociological standpoint (which is his primary work) and his personal experiences. It really gives a much better view of this overall issue and how it's such a vicious cycle that includes poverty in childhood, unresolved and generational trauma, drug use, lack of good jobs and housing, to all the limitations put on convicted criminals once they are out of prison. It's a sad book, but the overall tone wasn't depressing. The tone was more like the tired sigh from someone who's exhausted, but has no choice but to keep going. Definitely a very needed book about a very hard issue.
Some quotes I liked:
"The plea deal is a perverse kind of a confession. It is an abdication of the inquisitorial process. Fact-finding is unnecessary. No deep truths are revealed in plea deals. They are negotiations between a prosecutor with the power of incarceration and death at his or her disposal, whether or not there is evidence, and a defendant who just wants to go home...The people who take these pleas are typically stuck in cells and live under the threat of long prison sentences. They've been separated from their families. They confess guilt to a judge and to their accusers in open court, giving up their right to a trial that they likely couldn't afford. They do this whether or not they believe that they are guilty because copping a plea is the fastest way to get home, but almost everyone I met who took a plea regretted it." (p. 37)
"In Detroit, in 2013 the average response time for a 911 call was fifty-eight minutes, and that was for 'high-priority calls' like robberies, sexual assault, or active shooters. And the homicide clearance rate in Chicago in 2017 was 17 percent. This meant that 83 percent of the city's murderers were never brought to 'justice.' Why would anyone call the police?" (p. 76)
"In that moment, I understood why Jimmy worked so hard to make sure that I was comfortable. He lived in an economy of favors. With so many rules to follow and so much risk involved - one mistake could cost him his freedom - he needed favors from people he barely knew to meet his basic needs. Life for Jimmy was so chaotic in part because he was so often rejected. He moved from one catastrophe to the next. There was no way for him to anticipate that he would need a ride from me, but he had to stay in my good graces just in case he needed me." (p. 123)
"We were both surprised to learn that half of everything he received [money sent to prisoner's accounts for them to buy clothes, food, etc. in prison] over fifty dollars in a thirty-day period would be applied to pay down his legal debt. He owed thousands of dollars. He was charged six hundred and fifty dollars for the privilege of being represented by the checked-out public defender he'd met just once, on the day of his hearing, and sixteen hundred and eleven dollars for 'court costs.' Judges, stenographers, bailiffs, and clerks had to be paid, I suppose. There was a four-hundred-dollar extradition fee and a sixty-eight-dollar fee for the 'state minimum costs' to record his felony conviction...Every month, I spend hundreds of dollars on e-mails, phone calls, trust-fund deposits, and food for my brother, more when he needed to make a special purchase, like shoes that didn't give him blisters, and more still on holidays and when I visited him, something he never asked me to do. He knew how busy I was, and he didn't want to impose. But this was my brother, and he was alone. I had to go and see him." (p. 134 & 136)
"Just about every woman I talked with had been sexually assaulted. An uncle. A boyfriend. A parent. A half sister's husband. One in six women nationally and a staggering 86 percent of all incarcerated women are survivors of sexual assault. Three-quarters of these women were abused at home, and over half were abused as children." (p. 148-49)
"The people the government has incarcerated, cut off from their family and friends, are twice as likely to die from any cause than anyone else in this country. They are three times as likely to die from heart disease and four times as likely to die from cancer. They are most likely to die within the first few years of their release...Studying the mortality of people released from prisons in New York State, the sociologist Evelyn Patterson found that for every year someone spends in prison, he loses two full years of life expectancy." (p. 196-97)
"Zo faced eviction. He had been to many different kinds of prisons - to juvie, to jail, to penitentiaries downstate - but he had never been homeless. Worse still, homelessness was a violation of parole." (p. 215)
