Slow Food Nation will take place Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. Here's a another chance to answer the question of whether sustainable, localized, in-season eating is a luxury, available only to the froo-frooiest among us. It's interesting. The slow food movement in Europe, despite being seen as a high-brow food dilettantism and a shallow cultural choice, is still quite popular. But it's been slow to take root in the U.S., even though it has the awesomest of snail logos.

How do we get over that hurdle stateside? It seems like it might require those of us who believe in slow food principles to articulate some clearer thinking about the politics of said food: who deserves to eat what, when, why, and how. Seems to me one answer is to infiltrate American culture through school cafeterias -- brainwash 'em when they're young and can't put up a fight!

Food is becoming increasingly important to me as I try to be more mindful about planet Earth and my place on it. I was intrigued by Ezra Klein's pointer to a grilled bread salad from Marc Bittman because it seemed like I could get all of the ingredients besides olive oil at our farmer's market up at Grand Army Plaza. I struck out with one thing -- lemons, which give the dish a nice citrusy kick. (Perhaps a bit too much of a kick. If you try out the recipe, I might recommend cutting the lemon juice by about a quarter.) Lemon trees just don't grown in Brooklyn, it seems, nor its environs. I was, though, able to pick up some organic ones at the local natural food store, and with the leftover juice I made what I have to say was a tremendously delicious simple-syrup lemonade.

I'm a big eater, and a bread salad alone seemed like it might be a bit insubstantial, so I made up a batch of my mozzarella to kick in some milk proteins. Nice pairing, I think. Jane's studying for her upcoming bar exam, but she carved out a little time to have this meal out on our stoop. She said it made her belly happy, and fueled her up for the tough task ahead.

My first cheddar came of age tonight and so we opened it up for a taste. It was good enough to eat, but I think if we're being honest with one another I have to admit that I've left myself some room for improvement. The taste was decent -- just a nice, mild cheddar. The mouth feel, however, wasn't quite right. I don't know how to describe it other than to say that it was kinda chalky. Though I haven't had one in ages, something tells me that I might be close to what it would be like to eat a cheese-flavored Necco wafer.

I suspect that I may have erred by overheating the curds. (That's not altogether surprising. We joke that you know I'm cooking when you hear the smoke detector beeping.) I'm going to do some poking around the Internet's many cheesemaking sites for tips and give it another go soon.

Over on the Center for American Progress's Science Progress, I have a new story up on the mismatch between the U.S. food safety system that grew out of the response to The Jungle's gruesome depiction of Chicago's meatpacking plants ("...the meat would be moldy and white, stinking and full of maggots.") more than a century ago and the globalized way we eat today, where a fast-food hamburger can contain the beef from a hundred cows and ingredients from around the world. As things stand today, more than a dozen inside-the-Beltway agencies, offices, and bodies with widely different ideas about food safety have jurisdiction over the American food supply.

In the article, titled "Our Fractured Food Safety System," I cover a proposal now pending in Congress to unify food oversight under the roof of a single public health agency, which is the way the EU is trending. I hope you might have a look at the piece. I guess if you have a weak stomach, you might want to wait until after your next meal.

Reading the World Bank's new report on the tremendous increase in food prices we're seeing across the globe, it starts to look like if there were a recipe for driving food prices sky high, we're following it like a scrupulous cook. The WB attributes the fact that, say, the cost of ton of exported Thai rice has risen from $365 in January to $560 last month, to three main factors, each of which we seem to be pursuing with aggression: a dependence on biofuels; high energy costs, and a weak U.S. dollar.

So, in case we needed some reminders of why pandering on ethanol instead of creating sustainable energy policies, entering into unnecessary foreign wars, and destabilizing the global economy with dumb, dumb investments are all bad ideas, there's the fact that folks from Sri Lanka to Burkina Faso to Costa Rica are finding it tough to get enough good food to eat.

Of course, when food prices rise to unsustainable levels, the problem isn't just about food alone: the increase in wheat prices in Yemen, says the WB, is threatening to roll back all the gains in poverty reduction made there since 1998.

Vanity Fair has a multi-thousand word exposé on Monsanto that is a reminder of just how capital-C crazy our food chain is in this country. The article, by the famed investigative duo Donald Barlett and James Steele, goes deep into Monsanto's m.o. This is a company that surveils farmers going in and out of seed stores. It pursues its many patents with a vigor that Microsoft would find unsettling. And we've centralized nearly every step of our very food system -- from seed engineering to food production -- into the hands of companies like this.

Monsanto is sorta like Google of the food world, without the "don't be evil" ethos or the transparency that comes from being an online company. Of course, Google just handles our searches and online advertising and calenders and mapping and... But Monsanto is shaping the very food we eat and the morsels we put in the hungry maws of our kiddies. While it's CNN.com banner news when someone complains that Google Street View has an image peeking into their living room, biotech companies like Monsanto and Dow Agro file patents on seventeen different varieties of corn and thirteen different soybean strains and we don't bat an eye.

It's great to see a major piece in a popular general-interest magazine like Vanity Fair for that reason. I've started to think that one way of thinking about our food system in the U.S. as "black box food," meaning that we don't know what goes into it and don't really understand what comes out of it. Great to see a little light shined into that box.

So I really decided to ratchet up my dork factor to record levels today by taking on cheese making as a new hobby. (A farmhouse cheddar, to start.) It turns out that cheese making isn't as difficult as I had thought it would be, as long as you start with high-quality milk and stay pretty true to the directions. Of course, I haven't been able to actually taste my final product yet, as my tiny wheel needs to age for at least a month first, so who knows how successful I was. But at every step of the way what I was doing roughly matched what I saw happening in the one million YouTube videos I watched on cheese making, so I can't imagine I was too far off.

A few pictures, starting with the adorable glass-bottled milk that I picked up at our local farmers market. Cheese making requires milk that hasn't been ultra-pasteurized, which many store-bought milks are these days. And I had been hoping to avoid the vitamin D added to a lot of them. (Has to do with the somewhat-less-than-vegetarian sources of the additive.) But I picked up these beauties for a few bucks each. The milk inside is what's called creamline, meaning that you have to shake before drinking to mix the cream back in:

I was surprised to find that cheddar's made by heating the milk in a water bath; you never involve a stove in the process at all. Here's a shot I took while patiently waiting for the thermometer to hit 90 degrees:

The curding stage, produced by the interaction of the mesophilic starter, heat, and rennet. It really put a huge smile on my face to produce these beauties. Up to that point, I had kinda been thinking, "yeah, this milk is gonna suddenly up and congeal because of 'science' -- suuure...":

The curds, broken up and salted. I snuck a taste. They were pretty good, actually -- like tiny milk clouds:

From there I packed it into a mold, and that's resting under 20 pounds of pressure as I type. A day or so of pressing is followed by four days of air drying, and then I get to wax it. Then it gets stored away for as little as a month and for as long I can possibly stand it. It gets better with age, of course, but I suspect that every day over thirty that I wait is going to feel like torture. I do love me some cheese.

AlterNet has a story up today that I wrote about Order 81, which is the directive issued by Paul Bremer back in 2004 establishing the legal framework for the respect of patented genetically-modified seeds in Iraq. I'm all into patents, and am newly obsessed with the future of food, so had been intrigued by Order 81 for a while now. But alas, there hasn't been too much to learn about it; the great Molly Ivins called it "one of the 10 biggest stories ignored or under-covered by mainstream media."

Then I started hearing about how Indian farmers were killing themselves by the thousands, when I started digging into it, it turned out that they were responding to same sort of Monsanto-driven, genetically-modified agricultural system that Bremer had introduced to Iraq. GM seeds promise great rewards, but when crops fail and harvests are smaller than promised, farmers find themselves in far deeper debt than they would have been had they stuck with traditional farming.

So that's the story I wrote, making the connection between the patented seeds we introduced to Iraq and how a similar scheme in India is driving farmers there to death. Again, it's up now and I'm hoping that you'll read it and keep the conversation going by offering your thoughts in the comments. And if your so inclined, go ahead and give it a Digg. (I swear, I didn't put it there nor do I know who did.)

As for the image above -- I'm calling it a "story card." It was a design exercise for myself but also a protest against the fact that so much of what we on the political left do is visually boring or just plain ugly. But I tend to think in pictures, even though I prefer to express what I'm thinking by writing it down. Consider it a challenge to better designers than me to come up with better ways of showing to go along with all our telling.

"Someone will probably have my head for saying this," said Gary Ibsen, an organic tomato farmer in central California. "But to my mind, what the Jersey tomato has going for it is the legend, and the loyalty, and the rest of it is just the pronounced flavor of any tomato that’s picked ripe and not shipped around the continent."

The Nationals and the D.C. Sports & Entertainment Commission wanted a ballpark that was aesthetically "of the city." So for the sides facing the Capitol, the designers chose buff-colored stone typical of Washington's monumental architecture.

...

The site's design includes circles (the shape of the stadium) and triangles (the footprint of the Nationals' adjacent admin building) to echo the D.C. street grid created in 1791 by planner Pierre L'Enfant. The good food of Ben's Chili Bowl will also be served on site.

...

The cherry trees, a special request by Nationals owner Mark Lerner, are a Washington icon. They'll bloom in early spring, just when baseball season gets under way.

Many districts have a dual system like the one at Balboa: one line, in the cafeteria, for government-subsidized meals (also available to students who pay) and another line for mostly snacks and fast-food for students with cash, in another room, down the hall and around the corner. Most of the separation came into being in response to a federal requirement that food of minimal nutritional value not be sold in the same place as subsidized meals -- which have to meet certain nutritional standards.

The table of contents of the new book Twinkie Deconstructed is based on the 37 different ingredients that make up the snack cake (grilled or ungrilled):

Chapter 1 -- Polysorbate 60
Chapter 2 -- Wheat Flour
Chapter 3 -- Bleach
Chapter 4 -- Enrichment Blend: Ferrous Sulfate and B Vitamins–Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Folic Acid
Chapter 5 -- Sugar
Chapter 6 -- Corn Sweeteners
Chapter 7 -- Corn Syrup, Dextrose, Glucose, and High Fructose Corn Syrup
Chapter 8 -- Corn Thickeners: Cornstarch, Modified Cornstarch, Corn Dextrins, Corn Flour
Chapter 9 -- Water
Chapter 10 -- Soy: Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening, Soy Lecithin, and Soy Protein Isolate
Chapter 11 -- Eggs
Chapter 12 -- Cellulose Gum
Chapter 13 -- Whey
Chapter 14 -- Leavenings
Chapter 15 -- Baking Soda
Chapter 16 -- Phosphates (Sodium acid pyrophosphate and monocalcium phosphate)
Chapter 17 -- Salt
Chapter 18 -- Mono and Diglycerides
Chapter 19 -- Polysorbate 60
Chapter 20 -- Natural and Artificial Flavors
Chapter 21 -- Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate
Chapter 22 -- Sodium and Calcium Caseinate
Chapter 23 -- Calcium Sulfate
Chapter 24 -- Sorbic Acid
Chapter 25 -- Color (FD & C Yellow 5, Red 40)

Author Steve Ettlinger will be at The Tank in New York City tonight at 6pm to discuss his book. And as if that's not enough to get you there, there will also be a tasting of local/organic/sustainable/vegan Twinkie alternatives. (Photo thx: crazywanda)

After testing and discarding single-lobster "condos" and other potentially more humane treatments, Whole Foods has decided to temporarily stop selling live lobsters. Dead ones, however, will still be available.