Thursday, February 08, 2007

Ethicurean: Chew the Right Thing

New favorite blog, which documents the growing enlightenment of foodies toward food consciousness.

Inspired by Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Bonnie Azab Powell rounded up some friends also interested in thinking about food, and created a collaborative blog on sustainable, local, organic, and/or ethical food choices.

I like the multiple perspectives from different foodsheds (Berkeley, Austin, Seattle, plus reports from readers) on restaurants, farmer's markets, and farmers. I also like the recipes and the essays grappling with how to make meals more local, or more in line with sustainable agriculture.

But what I really like is the News roundup: several times a week the team posts links to headlines in the media about our food supply chain. You'd think that might be hard to sustain. But these folks comb the news for health stories (trans-fat; E. Coli outbreaks), trade policy (Genetically modified crops, the impact of NAFTA on corn, Japanese bans on American beef), consumer issues (package labelling), agriculture (the Farm bill, the citrus freeze), and intersection of all these issues with big business, Wal Mart, Archer Daniels Midland, and global warming... why some weeks there's more food news than foodie essays.

And on top of that, their tag line cracks me up.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks Tim - appreciate the kind words, especially about the news Digest, which sometimes feels like cooking an 18-course dinner in two hours, with recipes from 10 countries. As the Digest's scope grows and grows, it does eat into the time left for the foodie essays, but there are plenty of people around doing those. Maybe some day we'll have time to do both with abandon, instead of fitting them into the corners around those pesky jobs that pay the bills.

P.S. What's wrong with getting all your news from Comedy Central?