Working with fresh vegetables from the garden helps me put general foodie preoccupations in perspective. This New York Times piece on expensive boutique ice cream raises the question of when it makes sense to prefer local or high-end foods and when it doesn’t. I like locavores and slow-food advocates because the consequences of their advocacy is often very good food. But the more religious versions of both turn me off. I don’t think it’s at all clear that eating local is always a net plus in environmental terms, for example. I know it’s not always a net plus in terms of taste or quality. There’s nothing better than heirloom tomatoes from your own garden, but plenty of things that I have grown over the last decade aren’t measurably better-tasting for having come from my own yard. When I find that’s the case, I stop growing them. (I also stop growing them when it turns out that the local varmints can’t keep their paws and beaks off of them.) The mainstays are tomatoes, beans and greens, all of which seem better to me grown right here.

In terms of local foods, cheese and dairy can often be superior, but that’s often because of the way the dairy is run or the skill with which the cheese is made, not because it’s local. Local meats can be better, but that’s generally the case only if there’s something different about the conditions under which it is kept or the breed quality (especially with heirloom breeds). Eggs are different: a freshly-laid egg is a thing of wonder. Local produce is better if it’s something where spoilage is a factor over longer distances or if it’s a fruit or vegetable where mass production has totally destroyed flavor in favor of standardization and shippability (tomatoes or apples). And all of this applies if you’ve got the money to pay for distinctiveness: none of these locavore preferences scales at all well to mass production. I was down at the Italian Market in Philadelphia earlier this week, and honestly, in some cases, I don’t see that the produce or meat there outdoes a good-quality supermarket, except that you can get more cuts and things like tripe from the butchers there.

All of this goes double or triple for prepared or manufactured foodstuffs. There are mainstream brands that I think are superior to up-market organics, and in some cases better than what you might make yourself. I can make corn tortillas from scratch and then cut them up and fry them, but honestly, there are a number of brands of tortilla chips that would outdo anything I can do at a cheaper price, without the labor. Good food is good food: it can come from a factory or from the little old lady next door, from a big farm or from a garden.

I used to subscribe to Gourmet some years ago. I stopped reading it because at some point, I just didn’t enjoy a monthly reminder of travel I’d never be able to afford, dining I was unlikely to indulge in very often, and recipes that mostly didn’t excite me. When Gourmet made the news this past week due to its cancellation, it turned out that I wasn’t the only person who had felt the same way.

I didn’t stop being a foodie when I stopped reading it. I didn’t stop reading it because the Internet came into being and replaced old-media. Something did change in my media and consumer habits, though, and maybe the Internet has had something to do with this change (whether cause or effect, I’m not sure). I stopped thinking of some of my media and leisure consumption as habitual, or as a kind of personal tradition. And I started having a much more pronounced hair trigger when it came to changing that consumption. Gourmet or anything like it stopped being habitus, a thing that defined an aspirational life or state of mind. I started reading Cook’s instead because it seemed practical and useful. But I’m just as much on a hair trigger with that as I am with anything these day. Christopher Kimball’s completely inane frontspiece to every single issue is enough alone to make me pull that trigger, but in the latest issue, they’ve started sequestering some of the content in the print magazine behind a paywall on the website. That’s pretty much the end for me.

This is the real issue for a lot of old media. They used to be a habit, a tradition, a part of life. As such, you ignored what you didn’t use or like the same way you ignore a tear or a stain in a piece of furniture that you otherwise find comfortable and can’t afford to replace anyway. But now I think a lot of audiences have a much more active imaginative engagement with what they read, and much less patience for a publication that isn’t nimble in its response to the needs and desires of its readership. You go to old media for a kind of quality you can’t get in new media, but now we expect much more for our (relatively small) payment.

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On the other side of the fence, though, it’s curious to see how much an old rhetoric about an expectation of quality still informs the way that some readers interact with new media. I was struck a bit by this right here at Swarthmore recently. In recent years, there’s been an online campus newsletter, the Daily Gazette, in addition to the regular campus newspaper, the Phoenix, both published and written by students.

Both publications have editorial staffs and operate under an old-media umbrella in the sense that they’re composed of articles that the editorial staff has commissioned or reviewed and decided to publish, rather than being new-media platforms that are open to any content. In practice, though, it seems to me that any student who really wanted to write something could publish it in either, particularly in the Daily Gazette, which is purely digital and isn’t affected by an economy of limited space.

Recently, one student published a satire aimed at the activists behind the Kick Coke campaign here. Several students wrote a column in reply complaining about low standards in student journalism and calling upon editors and reporters to publish better, more meaningfully investigative work.

The divide between old media environments and new media ones isn’t about print and digital. Mostly, old media is now clearly a packaged product. I buy it, I consume it. If I’m sufficiently unhappy with it, I stop consuming it. Print journalists lately have been proclaiming themselves instead to be public servants, to be an organ of civil society, and made it out that the consumption of print journalism is a form of republican virtue. This may have been true at some point in the past, but if that’s the social contract between readers and reporters, the reporters broke the contract unilaterally some time ago.

If I’m unhappy with the content of new media, well, first off, change the channel. There’s a lot out there. If I don’t find the blogs I like, switch to Twitter feeds or asynchronous bulletin boards or what have you. More importantly, roll my own, if I can.

Sure, I couldn’t do a blog reporting on current conditions in Guinea because I’m not there at the moment. But somebody can. But I could and do blog about issues in higher education, scholarly writing, U.S. politics and popular culture. Making your own media tends to connect you to others who are making media that provides some of what you can’t provide for yourself.

In a new media environment, complaining that someone should not publish work that you find to be of low quality is mismatched rhetoric ported over from old media consumption. You can certainly criticize such work, though often I think it’s best to just ignore what you really disdain. If it’s not what you think should be said, though, it’s up to you to say it. So in the case of the Swarthmore debate, for example, it feels oddly antiquated to me to see students (especially students with activist aspirations) arguing that it is the responsibility of student editors to provide the readership with a different kind of content while suppressing other kinds of content. A digital publication can shrink or grow dynamically in response to the amount of material provisioned to it by authors and creators. It doesn’t have a resource or price limitation that forces an editor to choose to publish a satire or an investigation, a light piece on fashion or a serious treatment of a public issue.

For a student at a college like this one, there’s nothing easier than writing what you’d like to write about the life and culture of the institution. There’s a lot of information lying around waiting to be used. The best complaint is not a demand that others write and publish differently. It’s rolling your own, saying what you think ought to be said, putting your own name and reputation on the line.

I’m completely happy to relate to some media and forms of information passively, to buy it and stop buying it as a product depending on my satisfaction with its quality. I might even warn a producer that they need to change the product to keep me pleased. But if it’s the kind of media where barriers to an active, participatory role are low, that’s not the right kind of response. Then my job is to make what I want rather than demand that it be made.

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Addition: It turns out Christopher Kimball knows that people hate his stupid frontspiece and doesn’t care. Bang! Goes my hairtrigger.

My seeding was totally random, e.g., as I thought of easy-to-make lunches, most of them using Trader Joe’s precooked or precut foods, I put them into brackets, though I did try to avoid doubling-up things that were too similar.

Unfortunately my daughter is already gaming things, not so much to favor things she really likes (which is the point of the whole exercise) but because she’s too tender-hearted to see something lose and because she wants to show her loyalty to what she’s learned about healthy eating when The Man aka Dad appears to be recording her preferences. I just barely bought that lentil salad defeated a salami-and-cheese medley in the first match-up yesterday, because the lentil salad was pretty good. But today rice salad tied with a pepperoni-and-cheese medley and the rice salad was decent but not really a kid’s thing. (Trader Joe’s precooked brown rice + a bit of sausage and chicken + roasted red bell pepper + fresh green beans from garden + lime vinagrette.) Unfortunately I hadn’t figured on a tie. I’m thinking a secret judge’s ranking that’s based on “how much of each lunch was actually eaten”, in which case today’s pepperoni medley won pretty handily.

I totally agree. One of the best things my mom ever did to for me was to insist I take a typing class during the summer during high school. I hated it at the time but the value it returned goes well beyond almost any other course I’ve ever taken. I wish now that some of the other applied or practical courses I had to take hadn’t been so badly taught. I had metal shop when I was in 7th grade, but the teacher was a jerk: the class really should have been called “Asshole Masculinity for Guys The Teacher Thinks Have No Other Prospects In Life”. Same for the course I had to take in 9th grade on mechanical drawing: the teacher made no attempt to teach it for anyone who wasn’t going to be using the skill in an immediate vocational sense.

I’d even love to see a life-skills course at the college level in a liberal-arts environment. Why not? We have a swim test here, rather infamously. Here’s what would make my list of concrete skills that men and women will find useful to know as adults, some of which I’m still awkwardly trying to pick up now in mid-life, a few of which I’ve never picked up. The key thing here is to insist that both genders have to be exposed to all of this stuff, that nobody gets to opt out on the argument that it’s not manly or feminine. It’s ok if later on people divide these chores according to facility or preference.

I’m leaving aside intellectual skills that are more commonly taught, such as writing or numeracy. Also leaving aside child care, as that is more relevant if and when you have kids or have to take care of someone else’s kids.

Maybe this list is a bit biased towards suburban and rural life. Anybody think of important urban skillsets that are missing from this?

I mostly think that the way that social, emotional and psychological skills are taught in K-12 schools don’t belong on this list, partly because I’m skeptical that they are well-addressed by conventional pedagogy, which easily degrades into well-meaning jargon that has little to do with real-life. Most of the things on this list are concrete, though I think if they’re taught dully (see again my 7th grade metal shop), it’s hard to retain them.

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The insides and workings of a computer, and how to replace and add components to one.
How an operating system works. How to customize an operating system. File systems.
How Internet works. How to set up a router. Internet safety and virus protection. Online commerce.
How to operate important software applications: word processor, spreadsheet, image management, presentation software.
Best practices for searching for information online.
The basics of investment and personal finance.
How to file tax returns. How to read a paycheck.
Basics of how to start and manage a small business.
Price comparisons and management of monthly budgets.
Cover letters and resumes.
Basic first aid. Proper use of medicine. Common illnesses. When to call for expert medical assistance.
Basic cooking.
Basic evaluation of food quality in markets. Food safety, especially cross-contamination.
How to drive, including stick-shift. Basic auto maintenance.
How to read a map. Knowledge of mass transit systems.
Basic power and non-power tool operation. Safety training in tool use.
Care of plants. How to plant, including use of shovel and other garden implements.
How to paint interiors.
Basics of home mechanical and electric systems.
Basics of carpentry.
Basic self-defense, including watching for trouble signs from other people.
How to swim.
How to ride a bicycle.
Dealing with poisons, hazardous chemicals, insect bites, common irritants.
Sewing and clothing repair.
Legal rights, small claims courts, basic familiarity with civil and criminal provisions.
Condom use, safe sex, reproductive health.
Simple diagnostics and repair of appliances.
Cleaning of home environments, clothing.
Reuse and repurposing of household items.

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What would you add? Take away?

If you want a look at what blogs are really for, there’s a fantastically engaging dispute unfolding over a clash between a customer and a barista at a Washington DC coffee shop. The basic issue: the customer ordered espresso over ice. The barista said that espresso over ice was against store policy. The customer, irritated, ordered espresso and some ice. This was reluctantly given to him. When he prepared to pour his espresso over the ice, the barista said that what he was about to do was “Not Okay”. Customer is angry. Customer returns later and orders an iced Americano, which is ok by store policy. (Really not much different than an iced espresso, in my humble opinion.) Customer pays with a dollar bill upon which he has written a message for the store.

Here’s the original post from the aggrieved customer.

It turns out someone else witnessed the exchange.

The store owner replies (and then doesn’t allow comments, unlike the other two posts).

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The comments, though, are the real payoff of the whole exchange. You get the inevitable smattering of metacomments from people who think the debate itself is irrelevant, sure. (I find this kind of comment incredibly annoying, by the way: the person who shows up to say, ‘How silly that you all have the energy to post about such things, or beat dead horses, etcetera.’ How silly does that make the metacommenter, then? He’s got the energy to post about people posting.) But mostly what you get are people making strong statements about the following subjects:

1. How espresso should be consumed.
2. How coffee in general should be consumed.
3. Whether businesses should have policies that dictate how customers consume what they buy.
4. How a service employee should behave.
5. How a customer should behave.
6. What the “real” motivation for the policy might be (to prevent something called a ‘ghetto latte’, where a customer orders espresso over ice and then adds 6 ounces of half-and-half himself for free)
7. The particular history of this particular business, including their problems with DC taxes.
8. Witnesses offering their reading of the way the two individuals in conflict actually acted (I think we’re up to three self-proclaimed witnesses, though the barista himself hasn’t said anything yet, I think.)
9. Whether it’s ever worth getting pissed off enough to write confrontationally on a dollar bill.
10. Whether the owner of a store should reply to a clearly non-serious threat of arson with a slightly less non-serious threat to punch a former customer in the dick.

Once you get into the thread, I think you’re going to end up with an opinion yourself. (For the record: I think it’s right that it’s not the best way to drink espresso though I don’t like iced coffee of any kind; it’s none of the barista or store’s business what someone does once they’ve ordered something and it’s stupid to have a prescriptive policy of the kind that the store has in the first place; the barista himself handled the situation badly; it was over the top to go back and hand in the defaced dollar: that’s what blogs are for.)

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This is how culture gets made, transformed, and is made meaningful. An incident or moment breaks into the assumptions, ideas and orientations that govern everyday life and reveals that there are wide disparities between different people about shared experiences. The accidental character of the particular incident shapes the debate that follows. If Jeff Simmermon hadn’t reacted visibly to the barista at the store or had passively accepted the store policy while quietly fuming about it, the blog entry wouldn’t have drawn attention from BoingBoing. If the barista had initially suggested an iced Americano or shown good humor about the store’s policies, Simmermon probably wouldn’t have been irritated. Simmermon’s quotation of “Five Easy Pieces” gives readers a cultural anchor, and gives further nuance to the different reactions coming from readers.

Sometimes social scientists or humanists argue that stories and incidents serve as mirrors or as synecdoches, that they are a smaller, more concentrated way to view the whole of society. I think this story shows the problem with that perspective. Stories like the “Iced Espresso Incident” don’t reflect underlying social reality: they make it. People discover their own assumptions when reading about such an incident, discover that other people may have very different assumptions, and then modify, rethink, or strengthen the mental software that guides them through everyday life. The particular contours of the story that pulled back the casing of everyday life to reveal the wiring and infrastructure underneath lends unpredictable shape to those reactions. Change the particulars of the story, and you change the way that culture transforms in its wake.

Ratatouille, on the other hand, is fantastic. Whatever Brad Bird wants to make next, I’ll be first in line to see it: I love all three of his films, but Ratatouille the most of all. I’m sure it’s partly because I’m a foodie, but there’s a lot more to the film. A lot of critics have picked up on the anomaly of a mainstream movie at least partially aimed at children that is praising good taste and a life devoted to aesthetic pleasure. What I think is almost more startling is that it is a film whose most emotionally moving scene centers on the importance and usefulness of cultural criticism when it is done honestly, on the importance of discerning judgements about taste and beauty. It might be the first time I’ve ever found myself tearing up while listening to a critic read a theoretical statement about his craft.

What I like is also that Bird isn’t an axe-grinding crank about his messages: they’re gentle but heartfelt, open to contradiction and nested in character and circumstance rather than written on neon floating above the story.

This is the first time as a family that we’ve rented a house for a long-term vacation. We’ve been thinking about trying to find a place to go in the summers for three weeks or a month, and northern New England has been high on our list of preferences. I don’t really like Mid-Atlantic beaches in part because of the hassle involved (traffic to and back plus crowds when you get there). I’d love to spend three or four weeks every summer in the high mountains of the American West but I don’t want to get on a plane more often than I have to at this point in my life.

So we thought we’d try the northeastern part of Vermont for our first go, and we picked a farmhouse along a quiet gravel road near to the town of Craftsbury. The house was great, the result of about 15 years of steady work by the owner. He has a small herd of beef cattle in the 35 acres around the house, and while we were there he added two young goats, which my delighted daughter was happy to goatherd around. (Also some geese who took a few days to settle in and find the pond in the pasture.) Fantastic southern exposure and view all the way down to Mount Mansfield, about 50 miles south. There was also a great barn that was set up as a workshop. (The house is for sale: if I had the money, I’d seriously consider it.)

At night, you couldn’t see any lights at all. If we turned off all the lights in the house, it was completely dark everywhere, in all directions. No planes overhead. During the day, there might be one car on the road outside about every 90 minutes or so. At dusk, we heard screech owls calling bloodcurdingly to each other at the tree line. Lots of local lakes with good swimming, and supposedly good fishing in the area, though my own experience with several highly recommended rivers was pretty disappointing.

There isn’t as much of an artisanal food scene in this part of Vermont as there is in southern Vermont and western Massachusetts. This is not to say that people aren’t producing great produce, meat and such for regional consumption, but it’s mostly flowing south and eastward of the area itself. (Reminded me a bit of how you couldn’t get really good coffee in some coffee-producing parts of Africa I’ve been in: it’s all packaged for export, because there’s hardly anyone nearby who will pay a comparable price for it.) The owner of our house was a really interesting, smart guy and we talked quite a bit about the local economics of farming. Upshot: not much, if any, profit in it unless you’re doing it at a large scale. (Though the profit on grass-fed organic cattle seemed a bit better.) If you’re not working for the government or for one of the few local businesses, you basically have to have a bunch of different small entrepreneurial ventures going at once.

It was also fun to take the dog along on the trip, another first for me. He particularly liked Stephen Huneck’s Dog Chapel. After reading the numerous moving eulogies of beloved dogs (and a few cats) put up on the wall by visitors, I thought of Chris Clarke for some reason–his dog Zeke belongs up on that wall, I think.

Our dog’s a little less happy now as he got a bad wound on his eyeball from a cat when we stopped overnight in Western Massachusetts on the way back. (He was just trying to have a friendly sniff of the cat, but the cat didn’t see it that way.) So he has to wear a cone around his head for a while. I’m cautiously optimistic but he may end up losing the eye.

1) Braised lamb, roasted lemon
2) Arugula, garlic, cheese and fried egg.

I decided to try making the latter last night, using gruyere and goat cheese. (Gruyere for base, then arugula and finely chopped garlic, then four fried eggs over easy with yolks as liquid as I could get them, goat cheese on top.)

Insanely good, even without a wood-fired oven.

Just curious about the best unusual pizza topping various people have encountered.

I am struck though at the dichotomy of how the two major political cultures in America consume or envision the world. Liberal, affluent, multiculti enthusiastically listen to music from around the globe, eat the cuisines of a hundred societies, read translated novels, watch the local national cinema from around the planet. At least some of this activity is surrounded by tropes and slogans that celebrate it as building a peaceful, enlightened world, though in my experience most of the real-life multiculti simply go about listening, eating, consuming in a global frame without rehearsing the more vapid self-congratulatory formulae that pop up in marketing or p.r. of various kinds. We sample the world with simpler ideas of pleasure and curiosity in mind.

That’s not confined to political liberals, of course: this is the dominant cultural modality for many middle to upper-middle class Americans. Cosmopolitanism isn’t as politically narrow as some might claim. But there is a conservative view of the world as threat, the world as a place which departs or deviates from American values or commitments, the world as a dark and dangerous backdrop to the American dream. It’s customary to mock that vision and see it as the causal force behind our current disastrous foreign policy, which to a significant extent it is.

But I do think it’s a bit odd that we can sup on pleasingly exotic spices and unfamiliar cuisines, on novel musical forms, on the cultural and human heritage of a hundred localities, and not “consume” at the same time a sense of the life of the world as it unfolds in all those places too. I suppose some multiculti do that when they buy photos of well-staged and colorful ethnics, or campaign for fair trade coffee. I don’t mean to mock either thing: fair trade coffee is a meaningful change to a production regime that we are intimately involved in through our consumption of coffee, and beauty is beauty whatever its form or focus. But for example, if someone wanted to buy Zimbabwean coffee or read Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions or listen to mbira music, I’d want them also to think not just about the question of US policy towards Zimbabwe but also about the ferocity of the struggle within Zimbabwe for liberty and justice–and the very real way in which the Mugabe government is a kind of threat to the values we hold dear. Not because they threaten us within our world, but because they mock and degrade the things that matter most, and that not all of that derives purely from the top, but also from some of the deep structures of Zimbabwean society and its political culture.

So I don’t quite want to run down that sense that the world is also threat, that sampling the world is about more than its pleasures. And not only the usual self-flagellating understanding of ourselves as guilty violators of the world, but the possibility that the richness of global culture contains also its darkness, that folkways that produce spices and music and fabrics and philosophies produce locally painful ideas and repressive practices. That if you sample the good things you should not look away from the bad ones.