Time for an Update: Montana, Kentucky, New York & Beyond

It’s been a busy year for Betty Fussell. A brief re-cap:

* In April, Betty wrote about her first deer hunt for the Lives page of The New York Times Magazine. At age 82, in the foothills of the Swan Mountains in Montana, Betty shot, killed and ate the heart of a young doe. Titled “Earning Her Food: Granny Gets Her Gun and Goes Hunting for the First Time,” the piece drew both praise (“Go, Granny, go!”) and criticism (“Shame on you, Granny”) from Times readers.

* In the March issue of Saveur magazine, spotlighting food in L.A., Betty joined a notorious gang of four, including MFK Fisher, Marion Cunningham and Julia Child. The women were featured under the caption, “Home Grown in L.A: Los Angeles and the Surrounding Region Have Produced Some of Our Most Influential Cooks.” Born in Riverside, Betty is the youngest of these notables by five years.

* In the 10th anniversary issue of Gastronomica (Jan/Feb 2010), Betty was one of 10 distinguished food voices asked to “speak out about food culture today.” Noting the shift from real food to food porn, she writes, “We don’t watch sexy Rachael or Bobby on the boob tube because we’re hungry for food.”

Book readings, panels and lectures so far in 2010 have taken Betty from Boston to Kentucky:

* In Boston she helped Boston University celebrate the 20th anniversary of its Culinary Arts Program with a lecture on American beef. Betty was invited as part of BU’s “MLA in Gastronomy Lecture Series in Food Studies.”

* In Kentucky she was a featured speaker with Gary Nabhan at the annual conference of the American Grassfed Association, held at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. She also led a panel with Nabhan and John van Willingen that put “Meat on the Table: Past, Present and Local.”

* Back home in Manhattan, she joined Monica Bhide, Kathleen Flinn and Mimi Sheraton for a panel at the Roger Smith Food Writers’ Conference on food memoir, “Turning Your Life and Food into a Best Seller.”

* At the Astor Center in Manhattan, she joined Slow Food U’s panel on “Green Beef,” run by Michael Crupain of TheDairyShow.com. After previewing his show on the subject of grass-fed beef from pasture to plate (watch for it this summer), Michael led a lively discussion among audience and panel members: Dan Gibson, owner of Grazing Angus Acres, Jake Dickson of Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in the Chelsea Market and Josephine Proul, executive chef of Local 111 restaurant in Philmont, N.Y.

* Later this spring, Betty’s pursuit of food paths will take her on a culinary trip to Mexico City, Queretaro, Guanajuato and Morelia, led by the grande dame of Mexican cuisine, Patricia Quintana.

Check here for more appearances.

Review: A History of Beef, Times Two

by Betty Fussell

Just came upon a review from the Oct. 22, 2008 Time magazine, “A History of Beef, Times Two,” in which Gilbert Cruz compares Raising Steaks to Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, by Andrew Rimas & Evan D.G.Fraser (William Morrow).

I was pleased that the reviewer’s verdict was to “skim” Beef but “read” Raising Steaks. For read, I’d say, “Chew on it,” particularly since he praised both books for reminding us “that as tasty as burgers and steak may be, there’s a price to be paid — in oil, land and treasure.”

Our Lady of the Kitchen

by Betty Fussell

Everyone seemed to be riding the Julia wave as the media blitz for Julie & Julia swept the country this summer. I got a free ride because of my 1999 memoir, My Kitchen Wars (just out in a new paperback edition), which detailed what Julia meant to my generation of housewives in the 1960s. I was happy to be quoted, along with Nora Ephron, in the August issue of Vanity Fair by Laura Jacobs, who profiled Julia in “Our Lady of the Kitchen.”

Recalling Julia in the 60s, Nora Ephron told Jacobs, “It was an almost hilarious epidemic of cooking from that cookbook. … People would just pitch themselves into these things, and it was very much part of the fabric of all our lives in the early 60s.”

I’m cited as one of those “pitchers”: “We’d called Julia Child by her Christian name the moment Mastering the Art of French Cooking appeared in 1961, because she seemed to be talking directly to us. …. To cook French, eat French, drink French  was to become versant in the civilized tongues of Europe as opposed to America’s barbaric yawp.”

I got another happy freebie mention in a new novel that appeared in April, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s Admission, set in Princeton in the 1990s, three decades after Julia had taken over the lives of women like me. Korelitz’s heroine has read up on women who’d written back stories of the academic scene, and I was happy to be linked to such notables as Rebecca Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem) and Eileen Simpson (Poets in Their Youth).

But I was even happier to be linked to Julia, even though her revolutionary shakeup of American food was perhaps all too transient in Princeton.

Korelitz writes of her heroine: “The wonderful Princeton purveyors she had read about in Betty Fussell’s gastronomic memoir, My Kitchen Wars — like the butcher who gamely ground pork and veal for clever, frustrated housewives in thrall to Julia Child — seemed to have perished, and all good restaurants, if any had existed, had evidently fled along with them.” (p.83)

Julia was a blessed person and she continues to shed her generosity of heart and mind on all of us she left behind.

Tsunami Julia

by Betty Fussell

Hurricane Bill was nothing to Tsunami Julia. Julia washed over America this summer like a perfect media storm, the kind usually caused by a Sci-Fi Blockbuster. How soon will we have little action dolls in aprons and cleavers, or interactive TV games for kiddies played out with skillets and ice picks?

Actually, we already do and it’s called Iron Chef. But who could have predicted that real life Julia Child, that big-jawed giant of 6’2”, would morph into one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses and become an instant Hollywood star?

We all know the power of imagery but hold on — we’ve been warned by the late Michael Jackson that we ought to ask, What do we see when we look in the mirror? We also ought to ask, Who hung the mirror?

Julie & Julia set up a funhouse mirror. Now every little blogger in the country, who like real life Julie Powell (of the Julie/Julia Project) dreams by night of fame and fortune, will drown by day in oceans of butter while images of Meryl dance in her head. As she whips up one more Sabayon Mousseline and lets out her jeans, she’ll fantasize not just her big-screen career but her big-book career as a best-selling author.

The unlikely fact that Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking hit the #1 spot on The New York Times’ Bestseller List in August, after a delay of a mere 50 years, gives the fantasy some teeth.

So what’s wrong with this picture and why shouldn’t we cheer on a Julia resurgence? Because a nation deserves the fantasies it lives by, and ours have become as dangerous as Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. The bookend to the escapist fantasy of Julie & Julia is the documentary Food, Inc., which made a few ripples but not a tsunami.

How could it be otherwise? It’s not a fluffy romance about making it. It’s a monster movie about making everything Big. Who wants to see the ugliness of an industrial food chain that thrives by making people fat? Who wants to look at fat people at all? Or at billions of beheaded chickens or at characters named Diabetes and E.col. 0157? Puhleeze, give me James Bond 007.

A Stonyfields Farm truck delivering at WalMart / Food Inc.

For millions of people, the realities of the Recession are depressing enough without a bunch of talking heads undermining our faith in the American belief that cheap is good. In a culture queasy with fear, we don’t want to know where something as basic as food comes from. One of Food, Inc.’s stars, Michael Pollan, got famous by doing just that when his book In Defense of Food became a best seller last year. He made clear that what we’re eating everyday as food — fast, cheap, synthetic — is not real.

But to get really famous, Pollan would have to become a big-screen action hero played by Bruce Willis in rimless glasses. The message of today’s multiplex media is not information but escape. Neither the tsunami about Julia nor the little wave about industrial food is really about food. Both movies are about what we see in the mirror and what we want to see, and how we confuse those two images all the time.

Holding a mirror up to the nature of the American food scene is just too much for millions of us to stomach. We’d so much rather feed our hunger with images of Julia/Meryl’s joy. And while we’re watching, how about sharing that bag of Jumbo Popcorn — don’t hold the ersatz butter.

(cross-posted at Huffington Post)

“Raising Steaks” Finalist for IACP Award

In other book news, “Raising Steaks” is an International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook Award finalist in the category of literary food writing. The winners will be announced at the 2009 IACP International Conference in Denver on April 4.

Dear Reader Features “Raising Steaks”

This week only — Betty’s book “Raising Steaks” is featured at DearReader.com’s nonfiction book club, coordinated by Suzanne Beecher. Betty will answer readers’ questions and comments.

“Righteous Porkchop”: Good Food, Good Farming = Good Life

by Betty Fussell

It was pigs, of all things, that brought them together, the cowboy and the lady. Some romances are so unlikely they have to come true, and that’s what happened when cattle rancher and pork producer Bill Niman met the vegetarian environmentalist lawyer Nicolette Hahn.

They both cared about animal welfare, but came at it from different angles. Robert Kennedy Jr. had hired Hahn several years ago to head his “hog campaign” to help remedy the abuses of factory pig farms. Niman had already made his brand of pork products synonymous with raising pigs humanely.

They had a common concern and a common enemy. And what could be more natural, organic and sustainable than a wedding at the ranch Niman built himself in Bolinas California, near Bodega Bay?

On the ranch today they raise goats as well as cows and sheep and share a love of animals in the field if not on the plate. While Niman told his story in “The Niman Ranch Cookbook” a couple of years ago, Hahn has now told hers in Righteous Porkchop, published this week.

The subtitle, “Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms,” speaks for all of us who have waged war against the industrialization of livestock and who believe in the integration of good food with good farming to produce a good life.

Earlier, I endorsed the book this way: “To tell her story, Nicolette Hahn-Niman has created a unique genre — half romance, half expose, narrated through her personal experience of the horrors of factory farms,  mitigated by the human face of farmers and ranchers she’s met in her travels across the land. With a lawyer’s mind she dissects the extremes of industrial farming, with a woman’s heart she learns to mitigate her own extremes to create greener pastures for the animals, her husband and herself on the ranch she loves.”

Marion Nestle, who also blurbed Niman’s book (as well as my own), wrote last week on her blog that Righteous Porkchop is “a thoughtful and affecting memoir of her version of the events–her background as an activist lawyer, her romance with Bill, and their work together.”

Go read more on the history of Niman Ranch at the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Story of the Cow

A recent article in Slate looks at three books about beef, including Raising Steaks (though it is incorrectly referred to as “American Steak” in the first reference). Sara Dickerman writes:

Betty Fussell’s American Steak takes a picaresque approach to the American beef industry, examining through character sketches the story of American beef both light (how to cook carne asada) and dark (what happens inside a beef processing facility). In Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World, Andrew Rimas and Evan DJ Fraser take a longer-term look at bovines—examining the history of cattle, their co-evolution with humans, and their deep significance in mythology and culture. And in the academic collection Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, edited by historian Paula Young Lee, several scholars examine the modern invention of the slaughterhouse as a dark countermelody to the history of urbanism.