"Our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system."

~Dorothy Day

Jul 31, 2010

Book of Note


I'm currently devouring George Pyle's fiery Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for the Independent Farm and Against Industrial Food. Devouring, not for the pun, but because I really am racing through the text at a speed usually reserved for the confrontation between Dumbledore's Army and Dolores Umbridge.

When I finish I'll post a proper review(ish), but I want to point out something that is truly mind-boggling that Pyle includes. Amartya Sen, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote that,

Starvation is the condition of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there not being enough food to eat.

This was at the beginning of his manuscript Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. What he showed, historico-economically, was that in the modern world people go hungry (as in those sad little African children) not because there isn't enough food in the world (or even their own country or region) but because those people lack cash. There's plenty of food--FAR more than enough. Yet people are still starving. For me, this changes everything.

In the meantime, think about this (from Monsanto's home page) in light of what Amartya Sen found:

The world's population is growing. To keep up with population growth, farmers will have to produce more food. America's farmers will meet this challenge.

Jul 5, 2010

Pasta

A few days ago my friend Mark and I made homemade pasta. We built a mountain of our dry ingredients (flour and salt), formed a well, and put in eggs and water. The goal is to slowly scrape the sides of the well (mixing the wet and dry ingredients), but structural unfitness led to catastrophe as a side of the well split open. Mark and I pretended to be mopping up the Gulf Coast (his counter). Except we were far more effective than BP.

The dough was really sticky (probably too much water), so we added extra flour. Then we had to wait for an hour. After that, the real pasta making began.

There are two stages of "processing." The first is to flatten the dough by rolling it multiple times through the pasta maker. The second stage is sending it through the pasta cutter. We had the option of angel hair or fettucine. We chose the latter because the stickiness of the dough; we would have messed up thousands of strands of angel hair. Below is basically what the pasta maker that we used looks like.


Then we boiled the pasta, added some red sauce, and threw in some meatballs (which didn't have a label but ended up being teriyaki pineapple...).

I took too many pictures and was punished by the camera mysteriously not saving any. I'd do it again, just not at 10 PM.