Roald Dahl and Philosophy: A Little Nonsense Now and Then. The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Janisse Ray. The Drunken Botanist | Amy Stewart. The Drunken Botanist Reviews "Cocktails become one with nature in this upcoming release from Amy Stewart. Expect flora- and fauna-rich formulas, botanical brews, and growing tips. " “Gardeners, nature lovers and mixologists will find themselves reaching frequently for this volume . . . A rich compendium of botanical lore for cocktail lovers.” "Ms. "A curiously boozy book . . . "Stewart writes in an engaging, conversational tone that will attract even the casual reader. "Fascinating, well researched and instructive — with appealing recipes too.
" "Jaunty yet meticulously-researched...This personable volume offers history, anecdotes, advice and cocktail recipes, all revolving around plants used either to make booze or to flavor your favorite tipple. " "Many boozy books have been published over the years, spilling over with fun facts about absinthe, grog and bathtub gin. "For a more spirited take on plants, try Amy Stewart's The Drunken Botanist.
"Amy Stewart is a national treasure. Second Nature. In Defense of Food. Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it? Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food.
In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. Articles. The Intelligent Plant The New Yorker, December 23, 2013 In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. “The Secret Life of Plants,” by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, presented a beguiling mashup of legitimate plant science, quack experiments, and mystical nature worship that captured the public imagination at a time when New Age thinking was seeping into the mainstream.
My Tragic Encounter With James Taylor’s Pig The New York Times Magazine, September 12, 2013 The summer of 1971 was drawing to a close, and I had a large and growing problem: Kosher, my pet pig. Some of My Best Friends Are Germs The New York Times Magazine, May 15, 2013 Vote for the Dinner Party The New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2012 Michael Pollan Answers Readers’ Questions These questions for Mr. More » In Conversation: Michael Pollan and Adam Platt. Photo: Christopher Anderson Since publishing The Omnivore’s Dilemma in 2006, Michael Pollan has become an ethical-eating guru, pointing the way toward conscientious consumption for a generation devoted more and more to the cult of food.
A few weeks ahead of a new book, Cooked, he talks to Adam Platt about his love for TV dinners, the magic of homemade kimchee, and the lining-up-for-hours locavore madness of today’s restaurant culture. Were you always a food geek? Often I would have toaster waffles for breakfast growing up. Or Pop-Tarts. I’m sure they’re around. Stouffer’s was my first experience with fried chicken, which is a sad thing to say. I also had an aunt who lived up the street, two doors away, who was a really good cook but was afflicted with a family who didn’t like to eat. The dreaded word foodie had not yet been invented. Gardening? Did you ever dream that you’d find yourself as a sort of high priest of food? I’m not a scientist. What’s that story? What kind of leeway?
Power Steer. Garden City, Kan., missed out on the suburban building boom of the postwar years. What it got instead were sprawling subdivisions of cattle. These feedlots -- the nation's first -- began rising on the high plains of western Kansas in the 50's, and by now developments catering to cows are far more common here than developments catering to people. You'll be speeding down one of Finney County's ramrod roads when the empty, dun-colored prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see -- which in Kansas is really far.
I say ''suddenly,'' but in fact a swiftly intensifying odor (an aroma whose Proustian echoes are more bus-station-men's-room than cow-in-the-country) heralds the approach of a feedlot for more than a mile. Then it's upon you: Poky Feeders, population 37,000. Eating meat, something I have always enjoyed doing, has become problematic in recent years. So this is the biography of my cow. The Burden of the Gospels. Wendell Berry is the author of more than 40 books of fiction, poetry and essays. This essay is excerpted from the The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays, by Wendell Berry, to be published in November by Shoemaker & Hoard. © Wendell Berry, 2005. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers (an Avalon Publishing Group imprint).
This article appeared in The Christian Century, September 20, 2005, pp.22-27. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscriptions information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. Anybody half awake these days will be aware that there are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels, and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith. Having been invited to speak to a convocation of Christian seminarians, I at first felt that I should say nothing until I confessed that I do not have any such confidence. "Don’t resist evil.