subscribe to this pageby Mark Winston Griffith
December 2003
One of the great, often unspoken, forms of oppression that low- and moderate-income communities suffer through is the lack of access to healthy food. When I moved back to Central Brooklyn in 1985, I was stuck by its barren nutritional landscape. It wasn’t just that options like fresh produce and organic foods were hard to come by. But the storefront food provision systems themselves - “bullet-proof” fast food joints, poorly stocked and over-crowded supermarkets, cruddy, stomach-curdling bodegas – seemed to represent a level of self-destruction and dietary corruption that went well beyond my inability to buy tofu on Nostrand Avenue. While most residents and activists look at conditions such as public safety, housing availability, public education, environmental concerns and economic opportunities when taking on community development issues, seldom do we consider one of the most basic elements – how an area feeds itself – as a sign of neighborhood well being.
Recently I stumbled upon a growing movement of activists who have coined a phrase - “food justice” - that I think places how and what a community eats squarely in the context of community building and social change. Up to now “food security” has been a more common term used to describe a similar, if not broader, area of social concern. While government bureaucrats and international non-governmental-organizations alike have been using food security to call attention to a whole host of agriculture- and hunger-related issues, activists have also used it to focus on creating community-based ways of producing food in an affordable, sustainable and environmentally-friendly manner. Along the way they have sought to create local jobs, promote good health and stress the importance of small, local farmers.
the origin of farmers markets in the US.
The idea that shook the world
Straight from farmer to customer, with no middleman? The very best fruits and vegetables in low-income neighborhoods? Twenty-seven years ago these were radical notions. My, how things have changed.
July 29, 2007
THE detail springs out at you from the laminated articles that practically sheath his pushcart on the corner of 45th Street and Avenue of the Americas: Mohammed Rahman, owner of Kwik Meal and maker of a widely touted lamb-and-rice platter, once worked as a sous-chef at the celebrated Russian Tea Room.
A native of Bangladesh whose pristine toque reaches nearly to the ceiling of his cramped stall, Mr. Rahman quit the restaurant business in 2000 after he noticed a pushcart near the World Trade Center selling platters of halal food. Intrigued, he ordered a container of chicken and rice. A few greasy bites later, he had concluded that he could elevate the plebeian dish to unprecedented heights of refinement.
“I’m a chef,” Mr. Rahman recalled thinking at the time. “I can serve better food for people from the office. The suit-and-tie people — they will come.”
Back then, the sight of a gourmet halal cart might have caused some passers-by to raise their eyebrows. But in recent years it has become increasingly common to see purveyors of $4.95 lamb-and-rice platters displaying glowing reviews and drawing huge crowds. It’s become increasingly common to see purveyors of $4.95 lamb-and-rice platters, period.
Although the city doesn’t collect statistics that distinguish between different types of street food, halal vendors generally agree that their ranks have swelled in the last five to eight years, prompting the obvious question: How did the halal platter become the city’s new hot dog?
Chef Sues Over Intellectual Property (the Menu)
By PETE WELLS
Sometimes, Rebecca Charles wishes she were a little less influential.
She was, she asserts, the first chef in New York who took lobster rolls, fried clams and other sturdy utility players of New England seafood cookery and lifted them to all-star status on her menu. Since opening Pearl Oyster Bar in the West Village 10 years ago, she has ruefully watched the arrival of a string of restaurants she considers "knockoffs" of her own.
Yesterday she filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan against the latest and, she said, the most brazen of her imitators: Ed McFarland, chef and co-owner of Ed’s Lobster Bar in SoHo and her sous-chef at Pearl for six years.
The suit, which seeks unspecified financial damages from Mr. McFarland and the restaurant itself, charges that Ed’s Lobster Bar copies “each and every element” of Pearl Oyster Bar, including the white marble bar, the gray paint on the wainscoting, the chairs and bar stools with their wheat-straw backs, the packets of oyster crackers placed at each table setting and the dressing on the Caesar salad.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A dabbawala (one who carries the box, see Etymology), sometimes spelled dabbawalla or dabbawallah, is a person in the Indian city of Mumbai whose job is to carry and deliver freshly made food from home in lunch boxes to office workers. Tiffin is an old-fashioned English word for a light lunch, and sometimes for the box it is carried in. Dabbawalas are sometimes called tiffin-wallas.
In India, Grandma Cooks, They Deliver
By SARITHA RAI
MUMBAI, India - Gaurav Bamania, a hedge fund analyst who works in one of the many downtown office towers that now dominate the skyline of India's financial capital, could easily eat lunch at one of the city's better restaurants. Instead, Mr. Bamania, 26, follows a practice dating back over a century to the early years of British rule: he has a hot meal, lovingly cooked at home by his grandmother, and delivered to his desk every workday.
In India, where many traditions are being rapidly overturned as a result of globalization, the practice of eating a home-cooked meal for lunch lives on.
To achieve that in this sprawling urban amalgamation of an estimated 25 million people, where long commutes by train and bus are routine, Mumbai residents rely on an intricately organized, labor-intensive operation that puts some automated high-tech systems to shame. It manages to deliver tens of thousands of meals to workplaces all over the city with near-clockwork precision.
At the heart of this unusual network is a chain of delivery men called dabbawallas.
good burrito article in wikipedia
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE
How I became a Tuscan butcher.
by BILL BUFORD
Issue of 2006-05-01