Tackling Obesity through Food Relationships

Published by Thursday, April 10, 2014 Permalink 0

Jonell Galloway, Writer, Editor and Translator

Swiss Food

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Jonell Galloway

I was recently interviewed for a Swiss Info documentary called “Finding the Right Food Formula.” In the context of recent childhood obesity figures in Switzerland, Veronica De Vore is exploring the Swiss relationship to food and how that might have changed, how it might be related to the rise in childhood obesity.

Click here to listen to the show. I cooked a Kentucky Fried Chicken feast for Veronica, while discussing the more serious matter of relationships to food in the context of my work in mindful eating. (The article also includes an abridged recipe for my grandmothers’ traditional Kentucky Fried Chicken.)

Continue Reading…

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

Music as Food: Homage to Alice Herz-Sommer

Published by Thursday, March 6, 2014 Permalink 0

Music as Food: Homage to Alice Herz-SommerJonell Galloway, The Rambling Epicure

by Jonell Galloway

Alice Herz-Sommer died on Sunday, March 2, 2014, at her home in London, at the age of 110. She was the oldest known survivor of the Holocaust.

Mrs. Herz-Sommer was a concert pianist in her native Czechoslovakia before the war, and said that it was Frédéric Chopin who had “fed” both her and her audiences in over a hundred concerts she gave in her two years in the ghetto-concentration camp in Theresienstadt. She spent most of her time perfecting Chopin’s Études, a set of 27 solo pieces known for their technical innovation and sheer mechanical difficulty. Chopin became her food; it nourished her soul.

 Images from the book The Garden of Eden in Hell. Photograph: Droemer (C)

Images from the book The Garden of Eden in Hell. Photograph: Droemer (C)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Theresienstadt, her son would often ask her, “Mother, why don’t we have anything to eat?” She believed human beings don’t need food when they have something spiritual. “The concerts, the music was our food.” But wasn’t it painful to not have food? “No, I was always laughing,” although she slept on a stone slab floor with no covers and no pillow.

If she could play the piano, she was happy. She was glad to be alive with her son; her concerts ensured that she and her son would survive. Her secret to happiness was to be thankful, thankful for everything. Thankful for seeing the sun, for seeing a smile, for a nice word from someone. Everything we experience is a gift; we have to be thankful for it all, was her philosophy.

Alice Herz-Sommer with her son

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She learned Bach by heart. When she got cancer at 83, her doctor told her that knowing Bach by heart was more healing than all the pills she could take.

Sometimes she was thankful to have been at Terezin. “We all learn from mistakes.” Bad has to exist, she said with a smile, always a smile. I lived my life backwards, looking back at all the beautiful and wonderful things I have had.

 

And she learned from the bad, saying hatred eats the soul of the hater. Reminiscent of the Dalai Lama, she said complaining is a waste of time. “I know about the bad, but I only look at the good things.” Everything you receive is a present and arises out of how you look at the world.

Wealth is of the spirit, she told The Guardian.

She never hated, not even the Nazis, saying that we all do wrong sometimes: forgiveness of the ultimate sort.

Alice Herz-Sommer. Sheet Music Background

 

 

 

 

 

 

Until virtually the end of her life, she practiced for three hours every day, and it is what helped her survive the death of her son Raphael in 2001.

Music was the food of her soul, and her music fed the souls of so many. It kept them living when they had no food to eat. Her music continues to resonate, as does her example as a human being. She continues to nourish us, even though only in spirit.

Why don’t we have anything to eat, Mommy? Not to worry, we have music. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, “if music be the food of life, play on.”

 

Sources: A Few Precious Moments with Alice Herz-Sommer,Alice Herz-Sommer, 1903–2014: remembered by Ed Vulliamy, Alice Herz-Sommer, Who Found Peace in Chopin Amid Holocaust, Dies at 110, Oldest-Known Holocaust Survivor Dies; Pianist Was 110, Alice Herz-Sommer: Practice the Chopin Études, they will save you

 

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

Saffron Culture: A Pictorial Cycle on Santorini, Part II

Published by Thursday, January 23, 2014 Permalink 1

Saffron Culture: A Pictorial Cycle on Santorini, Part II

Mistress of the Animals – Did She Make Powerful Medicine with Saffron?

by Elatia Harris

Mistress of the Animals from Xeste 3 on Thera

Mistress of the Animals from Xeste 3 on Thera.

Part Two in a series of articles on aspects of saffron. Photos of wall paintings from the excavated areas of Thera (also called Santorini), are taken from a magnificent site that has expired off the Internet, www.therafoundation.org. Other photos credited where possible. Part One examines the origins of saffron culture in Western Asia, with an overview of the saffron-dominated fresco cycle on Santorini, dating to the 17th century B.C.E. The present article looks at saffron in cultic rituals.

Mistress of the Animals

It is hard not to look at the goddess on the saffron cushion. Though her state of preservation is less than optimal, she is the focal point of the cycle.  In 1996, the archaeologist Paul Rehak undertook a gendered reading of the Xeste 3 fresco cycle – one that pointed up many subtleties in both the organization of society on Thera and the medicinal use of saffron, by and for women. In his monograph, “Myth, Medicine and Matriarchy: Reconstructing a Female Homosocial Environment in the Thera Frescoes,” he raises as well the issue whether the Xeste 3 frescoes were painted by women, for women – a possibility worth considering.

Necklaces with a duck and a dragonfly motif hang in an arc from the throat of the main image. Her blue and white costume is richly embroidered with a saffron crocus motif, the easily recognizable silhouette of the wild-growing C. cartwrightianus that is everywhere represented in Xeste 3 – clinging to rocks, garlanding its gatherers, piled into baskets, and patterning the creamy white field on which all the images are painted.

To us, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the goddess is not her regalia, but her expression.

akrotiri1

Drawing from Nanno Marinatos -- Wall of Xeste 3, with Mistress of the Animals

Drawing from Nanno Marinatos — Wall of Xeste 3, with Mistress of the Animals.

Head turned in profile, her eye is starry with interest, her lips parted as if in speech with the blue monkey to her right offering a handful of saffron. A gryphon flanks her left, present only in paw and wing. She may command girls to gather saffron and bring her tribute, but her companions are animals, on the same platform as herself. We do not know her name on Thera, but she is known to us anyhow. This is the Mistress of the Animals — potnia theron — one of the oldest goddesses of ancient times. And this is not her first or last iteration. As we enter historical times, she often takes the form of Aphrodite.

minetelbeidagoddess

 

Elatia Harris is a writer and consulting editor in Cambridge, Mass. She is most often at work on books and articles about food, wine and travel. Contact her at elatiaharrisATgmailDOTcom or via text at 617-599-7159.

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

The 7 Lives of Bread

Published by Wednesday, September 4, 2013 Permalink 0


The 7 Lives of Bread

by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac

Translated from the French and adapted by Jonell Galloway. Cliquez ici pour la version française.

If you ask an artisan bread baker who is passionate about his work from where he derived his passion, he or she will almost invariably reply, with no hesitation, that it arose out of the “mystery of the fermentation.” Did you know that bread is the result of an alcoholic fermentation, and the baker therefore actually manufactures alcohol? Now how does that come about, you might ask?* (If you’re interested, read the very technical footnote below.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not really surprising that a bread baker shares the wine maker’s penchant for the processes of “alteration,” “deterioration,” and “transformation,” which make them both somewhat sorcerers, metaphorically speaking. While a baker talks about bread fermentation, the wine maker continually refers to “maceration,” and the cheese maker to “maturation.” But whether it consists of alcoholic or lactic fermentation, we are still talking about transubstantiation, a sort of “sacrament,” which creates an aura without parallel around these “artists”. They are aware of this, and they know it is at the very heart of their art. Bread baker, cheese maker, wine maker: they all fight the same battle, that of transformation of food, of true metamorphosis.

When does dough become bread?

At the same time, at what point in this long sequence of processes does the product we actually consume merit the name “bread”? This is not an easy question.

In most of our minds, bread is a loaf or a baguette; it is ciabatta in Italy and pumpernickel in Germany. In Iran, they call it sangak, in Denmark, rugbrød, in Jamaica, bammy, eaten straight out of the oven.

Can we call the fat roll of dough after kneading and shaping or left to rise “bread”? Is the dough left to ferment in the dough trough not already bread?

The large sacks of flour that the miller delivers every morning, are they not, in some ways, already bread? Is a grain that we mill, or even a seed that we plant, not bread? Is leftover bread, bread we let dry, whether on purpose or not, and that we use to make croutons for a thick winter’s soup that we lap up like a Jacques Brel song, not also bread?

This 7 Lives of Bread column will explore every facet of bread, walking you through all the phases of transformation, from seed and grain to the end product you savor.

The 7 Lives of Bread will trace the life of a loaf of bread, from its “birth” to its “death”. Bread is therefore:

  1. The grain prepared for milling.
  2. The flour that results from milling.
  3. The dough that seals the coming together of flour and water, a meeting that starts the fermentation process.
  4. The dough roll that is detached from this initial bulk of dough, and then starts down its own individual path.
  5. The dough roll when it is baked in the oven.
  6. The bread we choose at the bread bakery, or the bread we make ourselves.
  7. Stale bread, that can be baked again (the term “biscuit” means literally, in French, “cooked twice”, in the spirit of Melba toast) so as to conserve it for future use.

The latter is typically the bread of sailors and nomads. The Greeks – great seafarers — are given credit for having invented the double cooking process.

The 7 paths: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread

In the 7 Lives of Bread, we will explore all seven paths of these seven “lives”. If fermentation is at the very heart of bread baking, it can also be considered that all steps – from the cultivation of wheat and milling to the actual bread making itself – are active participants in the transformation process.

This concept is aptly put in Genesis 3:19: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou [art], and unto dust shalt thou return.

Bread is therefore to be taken in like mother’s milk, earned with the sweat of our brows. Symbolically, it is interesting to attempt to understand why bread has a price, the price of transformation or of conversion: the bread changes to the same degree as the man or woman who makes it.

If we look at it in this light, for ten thousand years now, it is as much bread that has shaped humankind as it is the hands of women and men who have shaped bread. The realization of this reciprocal shaping and, through it, conversion is the starting point of this column.

*The chains of starch (complex carbohydrates, which along with gluten constitute the essence of the endosperm or starchy kernel and quantitatively speaking, the essence of the wheat grain), under the action of enzymes or amylases, are broken down into simple glucose (C6 H12 O6), which is, in turn, converted by yeast or enzymes into either carbon dioxide (2CO2) and ethanol or ethyl alcohol (2C2 H5 OH) and energy.
 
Jean-Philippe de Tonnac is editor of the Dictionnaire Universel du Pain or Universal Dictionary of Bread, published in French by Éditions Laffont on October 16, 2010.
Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

A cozinha como metáfora:o ato culinário e seus horizontes

Published by Monday, August 26, 2013 Permalink 0


Exif_JPEG_422

A COZINHA COMO METÁFORA: O ATO CULINÁRIO E SEUS HORIZONTES

by Betina Mariante Cardoso

English translation coming soon

Minha cozinha

Sou eu, Betina, na minha cozinha de hoje!

E por falar em subjetividade, a partir da minha escrita sobre a obra de M.F.K. Fisher, “The Gastronomical Me”…Você já pensou na cozinha como   metáfora? Pois a reflexão de hoje  é sobre o ato culinário e  seus horizontes,  sua subjetividade… Deste  universo, nasceu minha  escrita  de cozinha, em começo de 2012,   pelo meu desejo de compartilhar  as epopeias criativas de forno-e-  fogão. Não apenas as receitas,  mas toda a riqueza que a  culinária pode produzir em  nosso mundo interno, do  autoconhecimento à percepção  de aptidões, anseios,  sensibilidade e tantas outras  riquezas. Assim, surgiram meu blog Serendipity in Cucina, em  março, e meu livro, nove meses  depois. No  entanto, esta história tem início  há trinta anos atrás, lá na minha infância.

Explico.

Para mim, a cozinha sempre foi um território mágico, um espaço de descobertas, de experiências, de sabores, de liberdade. Quando éramos crianças, meu irmão e eu fazíamos o ‘bolo inventado’, onde tudo era possível na elaboração da massa do bolo, estimulados e supervisionados pela mãe. Aprendíamos a sentir o efeito dos ingredientes na textura da preparação, a conhecer os aromas e cores que cada etapa assumia, a viver nossa criatividade de modo lúdico, livre e, sem dúvida, cauteloso nas tarefas que só os adultos poderiam executar. Espiávamos o bolo crescendo no forno, sentíamos o cheiro inundando a cozinha, e entendíamos que o resultado era produto de nossas ideias, possibilitado pela expertise da mãe. Preparar receitas, conhecer elementos e reações químicas aplicados, vivenciar a diversão ímpar de mexer a massa e de vê-la crescer no forno, tudo isso era viver a culinária como objeto de nossa primeira autoria. E, além de tudo, saboreávamos o bolo no lanche da tarde!

Com sete ou oito anos, disse para a Vó Léia que desejava fazer um bolo de Natal, de maçã com castanha-do-pará, recheado e coberto com doce de leite e castanhas raladas. Nem imagino de onde tirei esta ideia, e nem mesmo porque escolhi esses ingredientes. Cozinheira de mão cheia, ela me deu um dos maiores presentes que eu poderia ganhar naquele Natal: a confiança na minha ideia e os ensinamentos práticos de como realizá-la – explicou-me tudo, tim-tim por tim-tim, deixando que eu mesma fizesse cada passo, exceto quando a atividade envolvesse cortar alimentos ou mexer no forno. Ali, pude descobrir que poderia inventar uma receita, mas isso envolvia uma nova etapa: descobrir que as medidas devem ser seguidas à risca, que há uma metodologia para o desenvolvimento da criação, que certos cuidados são essenciais, e tantas outras coisas que sei hoje sobre as receitas culinárias. Inventar ganhava um método.

Entretanto, o mais importante que aquela ocasião me proporcionou foi saber que eu poderia, a partir de um desejo, elaborar sua realização através de passos definidos, prestando atenção em cada detalhe de cada etapa. Então, a autora daquela torta seria eu mesma, da teoria à prática,  com supervisão cuidadosa dos adultos. Claro que minha compreensão, na época, estava muito longe desta complexidade toda, mas me lembro de ter sentido alegria, muita alegria, e um orgulho por ter criado a receita. Era como o prazer de abrir um presente de Natal. Aquela experiência ficou profundamente marcada em mim, assim como a prática do bolo inventado. Criatividade e método eram atributos que começavam a me despertar encanto. Repeti o ‘como-se-faz’ da torta de maçã com castanha-do-pará nos outros Natais, seguindo os registros da primeira experiência. Com isto, verifiquei que o método, seguido à risca e com atenção aos passos do processo, resultava muito semelhante entre uma e outra vez. Acredito mesmo que tenha nascido ali meu prazer em inventar receitas e repeti-las.

Exif_JPEG_422

A lasanha feita por minha mãe, desde nossa infância…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seguiu-se então o aprendizado  de preparar receitas já  conhecidas,  como a da Nega  Maluca, sempre sob supervisão.  E, como toda a  família    era  adepta da prática culinária, as  oportunidades de  observação e  de    treinamento eram  múltiplas, e o encanto era  crescente. Via minha mãe    fazendo  a lasanha anotada em  seu caderno  de receitas – feito à  mão  por  uma tia –, camada por  camada da  lasanha, tudo passo a  passo. E fui    gostando cada vez  mais de ler  cadernos de  receita:  dos ingredientes ao  modo de  fazer, da leitura das   receitas  escritas à mão ao exercício mágico do preparo dos quitutes.  Além disso, via o entusiasmo coletivo da mesa da cozinha nas vésperas  de festas, principalmente nos Natais, em que a mãe, as avós e as tias picavam oleaginosas, preparavam sabores e compartilhavam a alegria festiva de produzir os cardápios de nossa história. Aquelas reuniões de cozinha pareciam ser a coisa mais divertida do mundo, um lugar em que se reuniam o prazer e a prática de todas as gerações, em uma vivência contagiante. Ajudando nos preparativos, observando a força de cada uma das criações próprias da mãe, da Vó Léia, da Vó Alda – cuja ambrosia ensolarava qualquer mesa de doces – e das minhas tias, descobri que cada uma tinha suas especialidades, suas preferências por esta ou aquela receita e a habilidade fervorosa na execução das gostosuras.

Continue Reading…

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

Mindful Eating from a Buddhist Point of View

Published by Sunday, August 25, 2013 Permalink 0


The Rambling Epicure, Editor, Jonell Galloway, food writer.Mindful Eating from a Buddhist Point of View

by Jonell Galloway

I’ve been talking a lot about Mindful Eating lately. It’s a term that came to me out of the blue, and only weeks later did I realize that I picked up the word “mindful” in my many years of studying Buddhism and Hinduism. I studied these for so long that the vocabulary has become somewhat incorporated into my way of expressing myself and my subconscious. I am mindful; I live mindfully.

As a result, before publishing my own Mindful Eating Manifesto – a practical approach to my favorite subject of food – I only thought it fair to publish the somewhat more philosophical article by Buddhist thinker and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh.

Traditional Buddhist and Hindu teachings urge us to be mindful about every act, at every moment, every day of our lives. The word “mindful” is not a trademark. It is a way of being. Mindfulness gives meaning to every action, and creates a sharper awareness and a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of all living things.

What does mindfulness have to do with the way I eat?

This may not seem to have anything to do with how you eat, but indeed it does. It’s the current food trend in the developed world, and I feel confident that it will spread at a rapid pace. Eating is not just about filling your belly.

Continue Reading…

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

Wendell Berry Food and Farming Quotes

Published by Sunday, August 4, 2013 Permalink 0

Wendell Berry Food and Farming Quotes

“I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade.” (What Are People For?)

“Eating is an agricultural act.” (What Are People for Essays By Wendell Berry)

The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.

Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” “A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us… What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce.

But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer’s anxiety that he is missing out on what is “in.” In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.” (pg. 85, “Think Little“) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

Bem no sul deste País
Eduardo Amorim / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. (pg. 88, “Think Little”) (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

“…the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

“The Satisfactions of the Mad Farmer…the quiet in the woods of a summer morning, the voice of a pewee passing through it like a tight silver wire; …” (The Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1957-1982)

“If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth’s ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man’s only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place – a much humbler place than we have been taught to think – in the order of creation. (pg.89, “Think Little”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

“He imagines a necessary joy in things that must fly to eat.”

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. (pg. 27, “A Native Hill”)” (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

Never miss a post
Name:

Your email address:*

Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

About Jonell Galloway

Jonell Galloway grew up on Wendell Berry and food straight from a backyard Kentucky garden. She is a freelance writer. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and La Varenne cooking schools in Paris and the Académie du Vin, worked for the GaultMillau restaurant guide and CityGuides in France and Paris and for Gannett Company in the U.S., and collaborated on Le tour du monde en 80 pains / Around the World with 80 Breads with Jean-Philippe de Tonnac in France; André Raboud, Sculptures 2002-2009 in Switzerland; Ma Cuisine Méditerranéenne with Christophe Certain in France, At the Table: Food and Family around the World with Ken Albala, and a biography of French chef Pierre Gagnaire. She ran a cooking school in France, and owned a farm-to-table restaurant, The Three Sisters’ Café, with her two sisters in the U.S. She organizes the Taste Unlocked bespoke food and wine tasting awareness workshops with James Flewellen, is an active member of Slow Food, and runs the food writing website The Rambling Epicure. Her work has been published in numerous international publications and she has been interviewed on international public radio in France, Switzerland, and the U.S. She has just signed on at In Search of Taste, a British print publication, and is now working on a book, What to Eat in Venice

 

  • Wendell Berry: No technological fix to climate change
  • Wendell Berry – The Real Work
  • A Poem For Sunday
  • A Poem For Saturday
  • Composer of Wendell Berry songs is interviewed
Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

Food Quote: Nelson Mandela on Food

Published by Wednesday, June 12, 2013 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

Nelson Mandela on Food

I was not born with a hunger to be free. I was born free. Free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother’s hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies [corn] under the stars … It was only when I learnt that my boyhood freedom was an illusion … that I began to hunger for it.–Nelson Mandela

Photo courtesy of The Guardian

has provided “the backdrop and occasionally the primary cause for momentous personal and political events in the life of Nelson Mandela.” In his autobiography, he took an innovative approach to history and showed that a great man’s life can be measured out in mouthfuls, both bitter and sweet. With this title, the reader can cook and taste Nelson Mandela’s journey from the corn grinding stone of his boyhood through wedding cakes and curries to prison hunger strikes, presidential banquets and ultimately into a dotage marked by the sweetest of just desserts. Tales told in sandwiches, sugar and samoosas speak eloquently of intellectual awakenings, emotional longings and always the struggle for racial equality. He was always motivated by hunger, either longing for food he couldn’t have, or depriving himself of food in the name of freedom.

“Only the truly food obsessed would read such a statement and consider the stomach from whence it came, but I did and the result is a gastro-political biography entitled Hunger for Freedom, the story of food in the life of Nelson Mandela,” he told Ana Trapedo of The Guardian.

When in prison, he wrote to former wife Winnie: “How I long for amasi (traditional South African fermented milk), thick and sour! You know darling there is one respect in which I dwarf all my contemporaries or at least about which I can confidently claim to be second to none – healthy appetite,” he told Trapedo.

 

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

Daily Food Quote: Mahatma Gandhi on Hunger and Eating

Published by Friday, May 24, 2013 Permalink 0

Daily Food Quote: Mahatma Gandhi on Hunger and Eating

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.–Mahatma Gandhi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, more commonly known as “Mahatma Gandhi,” was born on October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, India. He studied law and became a defender of Indian rights both in India and South Africa, where he lived and worked for some 20 years. His method of opposing British rule and treatment was through mass non-violent civil disobedience, which has made him a model for peaceful revolution around the world.

Gandhi believed in living a simple life. He wove and made his own clothes, was a vegetarian and used traditional Indian fasts both for self-purification and protests against British discriminatory legislation against Indians. His philosophy of life and political “action” remain a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world.

 

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

New on The Rambling Epicure: List Your Real Food or Photo Blog

Published by Friday, April 26, 2013 Permalink 0

by Jonell Galloway

We’ve just created a widget in the right-hand sidebar that allows all real food sites, blogs and readers to enter their URL on our list of visitors, whether it be a recipe, photo, news, farming, or other real-food related site. All you need to do is enter your RSS feed URL. Sign up soon so we can form a community of like-minded people!

From artsy

Photo courtesy of Ilian

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to philosophical and literary

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture (Photo credit: elycefeliz)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Continue Reading…

Never miss a post
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please enter all required fields
Correct invalid entries

UA-21892701-1