Six on Food: For many Muslim grocery shoppers, a shifting definition of 'halal'; Colombian Hot Dog Gets Topped With Potato Ch
philip panaritis
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"Lawless writes that ten companies control nearly every large food and beverage brand in the world – Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Mars, Associated British Foods and Mondelez.
And still the food movement focus is the individual, not the corporation.
“When the food movement leader Michael Pollan says – eat food, not too much, mostly plants – his most famous catchphrase – he and others like him fail to acknowledge that doing so is an exercise in privilege and power in more ways than economic and access,” Lawless writes. “The vast majority of school age children do not eat healthy school lunches designed by Alice Waters, as kids do in Berkeley, California, where real food is the norm.” ..."In a nutshell, Lawless says – we can’t eat our way out of this.
“When food movement leaders say the solutions are to eat whole foods and buy organic, they leave out the crucial fact that we need to collectively reject the production of poor quality processed foods and stop the production of dangerous pesticides and other environmental chemicals that contaminate many foods,” she writes. “Critics do not often articulate this omission, but it is largely why the movement is perceived as elitist – and rightly so. If the food movement’s solutions are market-based and predicated on spending more for safer and healthier food, they ignore how impossible these solutions are for most Americans. In fact, this agenda serves the agendas of Big Food and Big Ag quite well.”
Kristin Lawless on the Corporate Takeover of the American Kitchen
The American kitchen. And how corporations have taken it over. That’s the story that Kristin Lawless tells in ...
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"ONE OF THE MOST UNASSUMING landmarks in New York’s Chinatown is a 23-year-old grocery shop with a bright green awning. Its frozen aisles are filled with chicken wings, pork belly, and spot prawns.
But these are no run-of-the-mill meats. In fact, they’re not meats at all—but rather mushrooms, soybeans, and cognac (a Japanese yam flower), all shaped and flavored to behave exactly like animal protein. In this world of Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat, plant-based meat may seem like a new phenomenon. But it’s actually a centuries-old tradition, popularized by Buddhism and Taoism, and this shop, May Wah Vegetarian Market, has long been a prime destination for those seeking impressively analogous meat substitutes.
Many Buddhists and Taoists believe in doing no harm to living things, and correspondingly follow a vegetarian diet. In several parts of East Asia, meat-based cuisines have long dominated. So, several centuries ago, many temple kitchens, whose cooks were skilled in pastries and noodles, started coming up with creative substitutions. They would mold soybeans into exact replicas of cooked duck breasts (complete with the scored skin), meld mushrooms into plump pieces of mutton, and sculpt cognac into a whole fish that flaked just like the real thing."
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