Locavores | Gherkins & Tomatoes

Worshipping Different Gods … The French (Food) Reformation

November 2, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

People throughout history reveal their preoccupations through their architecture, artifacts, and the written word. These aspects reflect what matters to societies at various times. It comes down, in a way, to questions of taste, not just alimentary, but cultural and moral. The fashions, the trends, the modes of the day pass and morph into others as the years go by. Like all ideas, current preoccupations – with simple, natural, sustainable, green – mirror the concerns of a certain segment of […]

Categories: Art, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores, Photography • Tags: Aix-en-Provence, Cafés, Choir stalls, France, French Cooking, Paris

The Man Who …

August 29, 2011 by Cynthia Bertelsen

… in a way … holds the future of French cuisine in the palm of his hand, French Agricultural Secretary Bruno Le Maire: Given this short biography, it’s not clear where farming enters into his background: Bruno Le Maire became Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries in June 2009. Prior to this appointment he was the Secretary of State in charge of European Affairs. Mr Le Maire studied at the École Normale Supérieure and at Sciences Po, France’s academic institution […]

Categories: Agriculture, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores • Tags: Agriculture, Bruno Le Maire, France

Is Cooking Necessary?*

October 4, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

No, it’s not. That’s your immediate answer, isn’t it? After all, you’ve got more important things to do, don’t you? Or do you? You can live your life without cooking. You can go to your nearest grocery store and bypass all the technology and knowledge that took your ancestors centuries to refine. You can buy all the ready-made food you could ever eat. You can eat plastic food. And you’d survive, too. But, in spite of all that, well, and […]

Categories: American Cooking, Cooking, Local foods, Locavores, Recipes, Science of cooking • Tags: Community, Cooking, Empowerment, Fast Food, Local foods, Locavores

Elizabeth David Frenc Country Cooking cover

Ladies of the Pen and the Cookpot: Elizabeth David

September 20, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Foxed, spotted, acid-rich, the paper crackles under the slightest touch of my hands. The book’s an old Penguin paperback, worth only 74 cents on Amazon.com. As I turn the pages of French Country Cooking (1951), I vaguely recall a comment I once read, written by food activist and restaurateur Alice Waters in her book, The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook (p. x), where she talked about how she got started in the whole business of food and cooking: I bought Elizabeth […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Cookbooks, English Cooking, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores • Tags: Alice Waters, Cookbooks, Cooks, Elizabeth David, France, French Cooking, Local foods, Locavores

John Evelyn: Cook, Or, the 17th C. Man Who Would Be a Locavore

February 1, 2010 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Omnia explorate; meliora retinete (Explore everything; keep the best.) ~~ Evelyn family motto Somehow, and how I wish it were so, it would be nice to time-travel, to sit at table with the people I’m meeting through their words, written by long-dead hands with quill pens and India ink. One of my new “acquaintances,” if such a word be the correct way of putting things, went (goes?) by the name of John Evelyn. Seventeenth-century English author John Evelyn chronicled upper-class […]

Categories: Agriculture, Books, Cookbooks, Cooking, Desserts, Eggs, England, English Cooking, Gardens, Herbs, Local foods, Locavores, Milk, Pies--Sweet • Tags: Cheesecake, Chess Pie, Cooking, Cooks, Eggs, Eliza Smith, England, John Evelyn, John Nott, Rennet, Robert May

Dig for Victory! Locavorism in Eons Past

December 31, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Looking at the past almost always calls up that old adage: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”* Take locavorism’s wartime antecedents … As these WWII posters from England’s “Dig for Victory!” campaign prove, the idea of local foods is not one whose time has come, but whose time has come again. Aimed at encouraging the civilian population to grow their own gardens, “Dig for Victory” freed up commercially grown food for the troops. The “Dig for Victory” program began in […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Art, Cooking, England, English Cooking, Europe, Gardens, Hunger, Local foods, Locavores, Posters, United States • Tags: Art, Cooking, England, Food, Posters, Propaganda, United States, Victory Gardens, Wartime, World War II

The Feat of Feasting

November 16, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

One cannot both feast and become rich. Ashanti Proverb “Feasting,” for all practical purposes, appears to be the antonym of “hunger.” And yet, feasting is rife (ripe?) with teeming contradictions and ritualistic conventions. For some, feasting implies hunger. Ambrose Bierce defined feasting in a rather limiting manner in his irreverent Devil’s Dictionary: FEAST, n. A festival. A religious celebration usually signalized by gluttony and drunkenness, frequently in honor of some holy person distinguished for abstemiousness. In the Roman Catholic Church […]

Categories: American Cooking, Italian Cooking, Local foods, Locavores, Menus, Thanksgiving • Tags: Feasting, Feasts, Local foods, Locavores, Medicis, Menus, Thanksgiving, Weddings

Fresh: A Look at the Meaning of Freshness and the Refrigeration Revolution

June 15, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

A review of Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009) The debate continues on the local foods argument … To listen to many food activists talk these days, one would think that for dinner — up until now — most people just simply stepped outside their doors and plucked fresh leaves and herbs and slaughtered one of the many chickens clucking around in the dirt. Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History (Belknap Press of Harvard […]

Categories: American Cooking, Book Reviews, Locavores • Tags: Book Reviews, Eat Local, Fresh: A Perishable History, Locavores, Susanne freidberg

Reveling in Books: DIY (Old) Food, Knowledge Lost and Now Found

June 11, 2009 by Cynthia Bertelsen

Want to make your own cheese? How about pickles or chow-chow? Sausage and headcheese? Raise a couple of cows or keep a flock of geese? At a time when people want, no, need, to know the how-tos of old foodways, it seems that there’s a book for making just about everything. Fortunately, because this knowledge is dying out along with the older generation, many of whom had hands-on ties to pre-World-War-II American agriculture one way or another. If they themselves […]

Categories: Agriculture, American Cooking, Bibliographies, Book Reviews, Cookbooks, French Cooking, Locavores • Tags: Agriculture, American Food, Barnyard in Your Backyard, Bibliographies, Canning, Charcuterie, Cheesemaking, Culinary History, Food Preservation, Foodways, Foxfire Books, Locavores, Meat-Smoking, Root Cellaring, Wood-fired ovens

Gherkins & Tomatoes

Meditations and Photographs about Food, Cooking, and Life

Category Archives: Locavores