Toledo Northwestern Ohio Food Bank to host drive-thru food distribution events - Toledo Blade |
- Toledo Northwestern Ohio Food Bank to host drive-thru food distribution events - Toledo Blade
- Our 2020 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide - Civil Eats
- Food insecurity on the rise as COVID-19 cases surge and economy sputters - The Denver Post
- Boston.com readers have a runaway favorite for favorite food chain - Boston.com
- AU, Bama students use rivalry to fight food insecurity - Opelika Auburn News
Toledo Northwestern Ohio Food Bank to host drive-thru food distribution events - Toledo Blade Posted: 30 Nov 2020 02:07 PM PST |
Our 2020 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide - Civil Eats Posted: 30 Nov 2020 01:02 AM PST In an unprecedented year, we found solace and inspiration in some wonderful food and farming books, and once again, we're excited to share some of our favorites. Here are 28 books designed to broaden your knowledge base, introduce you to powerful new voices, and deepen your understanding of food and agriculture in this challenging but pivotal moment. Books We ReadHow to Eat: All Your Food and Diet Questions Answered – Christina Cooke Diners, Dudes, and Diets: How Gender and Power Collide in Food Media and Culture The bulk of the 21st Century has seen food media and marketing under the thrall of "the dude." Look no further than the rise of Guy Fieri, who brought dudely defiance to the world of cooking, or the launch of products like the Bake It Like A Man cookbook and Coke Zero, which sought to give men cover while indulging in previously feminized foods and pastimes. Sociologist Emily J. Contois explores how cultural forces have reinforced the food gender binary over the last 20 years, and how economic forces have driven food corporations to make absurdly gendered products like Powerful Yogurt, which has a container designed to resemble molded six-pack abs. As a survey of a generation worth of food marketing and messaging, the book offers a useful overview of how corporations package food, identity, and gender norms for consumption. Perhaps even more valuable, and hopeful, is the closing section, "Dude, What Happened?" which explores how the election of Donald Trump, the #MeToo movement, and the pandemic have caused many of the companies with the most egregiously gendered approaches to food to seek more neutral, inclusive territory.– Matthew Wheeland Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food, and a Green New Deal – Cinnamon Janzer Bite Back: People Taking On Corporate Food and Winning Bite Back is a book for the present moment. Many of the issues that the authors set out to illuminate for their readers—particularly workers' rights and the poverty–hunger connection—have been thrust to center stage as the pandemic upended our regularly scheduled programming. The structure of the book also calls to mind the many ways that mutual aid and people power have been on display throughout 2020. Each chapter consists of a "Call to Action" that lays out the landscape of a topic, followed by a "Collective Response" that explains how people are organizing to respond, resist, and redirect toward the greater good. Every topic covered by the book's contributors—corporate control of the global seed supply, pesticides, fast food, and food sovereignty, to name a few—will be familiar to many Civil Eats readers. But by highlighting the ways that individuals and organizations are uniting to create positive change, Bite Back offers empowering and inspiring examples of collective action that take the reader deeper. Welcome to the Agrihood: Housing, Shopping, and Gardening for a Farm-to-Table Lifestyle – Bridget Shirvell How to Be A Conscious Eater: Making Food Choices That Are Good for You, Others, and the Planet – Lynne Curry The Growing Season: How I Built a New Life–and Saved an American Farm – Bridget Shirvell Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice – Lisa Held The Future-Proof Farm: Changing Mindsets in a Changing World – Jake Price Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet – Lela Nargi All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis – Naomi Starkman An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables – Lynne Curry Uncertain Harvest: The Future of Food on a Warming Planet – Cinnamon Janzer Notes from a Young Black Chef When Kwame Onwuachi was six, he stayed for dinner at his best friend Patrick Gallagher's house, where he was served an overcooked London Broil. "What's wrong with this?" he asked Mrs. Gallagher, not realizing the etiquette involved in eating as a guest. "It doesn't taste like anything!" This anecdote offers an early hint of Onwuachi's future as a chef who would go on to win the James Beard Award for his Afrocentric fare at D.C.'s Kith/Kin. Written with Joshua David Stein, Notes from the Young Black Chef offers a deep dive into the life of a man raised on Creole cuisine and African stews with no reference point for a bland top round. After growing up in a housing project in the Bronx, attending and getting expelled from college, and falling into drug addiction, it's clear that cooking was a form of salvation for Onwuachi. One morning, he woke up craving home-cooked food, so he prepared the chicken curry his mom taught him to make when he was a boy. Cooking, he said, "reminded me of real love, not the chemical highs of Ecstasy." The book details Onwuachi's path through culinary school and onto globally renowned restaurants including Per Se and Eleven Madison Park. Throughout, he is brutally honest about his life and his experiences with racism in high-end restaurant kitchens. And his mother emerges as a steady force of tough love. She taught him his trade, and she also taught him a lesson he seems to have taken to heart: "No one deserves anything. You get what you work for." Onwuachi's engrossing memoir, which also includes recipes for some of his favorite dishes, shows just how hard he has worked to get to where he is today. Food Freedom Community – Jake Price The Reindeer Chronicles: and Other Inspiring Stories of Working with Nature to Health the Earth – Gosia Wozniacka Food system reformers often passionately embrace one solution and then defend it at all costs. In A Small Farm Future, social scientist and farmer Chris Smaje takes a refreshingly different approach, presenting a vision for a radically reimagined holistic system based on small-scale, localized production, while carefully considering his own arguments along the way. Smaje describes a more agrarian existence as a fundamentally practical and urgent answer to 10 systemic crises facing humanity—including those regarding climate change, health, and nutrition. He explains the history and logic of capital and analyzes the claim that agricultural systems should mimic nature. Like well-tended soil, the book's argument is rich and complex, and Smaje doesn't allow himself to accept easy answers about what is best or possible when it comes to reimagining farming, and, consequently, modern society. In the end, "it's surely unlikely that the governments of the world will collectively engineer a wrenching change of course to the capitalist juggernaut and nurture a distributed economy of rural horticulture," he writes, but it is likely the book will encourage readers to think deeply about what kind of change of course is possible, and maybe even necessary. – Lisa Held Living Lively: 80 Plant-Based Recipes to Activate Your Power and Feed Your Potential – Christina Cooke In Search of the Wild Tofurky: How a Business Misfit Pioneered Plant-based Foods Before They Were Cool – Hannah Wallace Hungry: Avocado Toast, Instagram Influences, and Our Search for Connection and Meaning – Lynne Curry Grocery Activism: The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota – Lela Nargi Our 2020 Book CoverageHealthy at Last: A Plant-Based Approach to Preventing and Reversing Diabetes and Other Chronic IllnessesBy Eric Adams In his new book, the Brooklyn Borough president chronicles his journey from a diabetes diagnosis to restored health, and maps a path for communities of color to healthy eating, even in food swamps. – Nadra Nittle Let's Ask Marion: What You Need to Know about the Politics of Food, Nutrition and Health Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It By Marie Mutsuki Mockett The author traveled with a team of wheat harvesters from Texas to the Dakotas, catching a rare glimpse of modern farm life and gaining valuable insight into the urban-rural divide. – Twilight Greenaway Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate By Jane Kleeb In her new book, the chair of the Democratic party in Nebraska, says unlikely alliances are the way forward for environmental protection, small family farmers, and immigrant communities. – Twilight Greenaway |
Food insecurity on the rise as COVID-19 cases surge and economy sputters - The Denver Post Posted: 30 Nov 2020 05:00 AM PST The number of people being served by food banks and food pantries in Colorado swelled as the COVID-19 pandemic spiked heading into the holiday season. Food bank and pantry operators who serve people in need — those who are battling "food insecurity" — were forced to make adjustments to their operational models when COVID-19 struck in March. Their supply chains were interrupted as restaurants shut down; food banks and pantries traditionally receive donations from restaurants, a way to minimize waste. At the same time, grocery store shelves were emptied by consumers preparing for stay-at-home orders, another ding to the supply chain. The start of the pandemic also thinned out the volunteer ranks, especially among COVID-19 vulnerable seniors, as many complied with stay at home orders. Those initial pandemic-created issues, for the most part, have been solved as food supply donations got back on track and new, younger volunteers stepped up. Now, the surging number of people depending on food banks and pantries continues to swell, brought on by ongoing COVID-19 related job losses and layoffs. "Most of the pantries are reporting numbers are up anywhere from 200(%) to 300% from what they've experienced in the past" prior to COVID-19, said Jane Barnes, executive director of Benefits In Action, a partner of Lakewood's Coalition to End Hunger. Nationally, in 2018, an estimated 1 in 9 Americans were described as being food insecure, equaling more than 37 million people, including more than 11 million children, according to Hunger and Health, Feeding America. Those numbers have gone up during the pandemic. "Food insecurity refers to a lack of available financial resources for food at the household level," the HHFA says on its website. New unemployment filings have increased in Colorado and across the country, fueled by the coronavirus-spurred recession. Use of food pantries is on the rise, nationally and locally, as a great many jobless people prepare for the upcoming holiday season. "This is something being seen statewide," said Ellie Agar, director of communications with Hunger Free Colorado. "It has changed the way food pantries have to operate." Gone are the days of brick-and-mortar pantries, where clients would choose items from shelves and refrigerators. Now, food pantries and food banks distribute through mobile, drive-thru models with food in pre-packed boxes being packed into vehicles or delivered to homes. "Every organization is trying to figure out how they can best serve those in need while adhering to current COVID recommendations," Agar said. Since COVID-19 emerged, the Food Bank of the Rockies has been distributing more than 2 million pounds of food weekly across Colorado and Wyoming. More than 30% of the people now served report that they had never been assisted before. FBR's monthly food distribution volume is up, averaging about 59% more this year, compared to last year, said Erin Pulling, president and CEO of the organization. One month the increase was as high as 80%. As demand has gone up, so to has costs for the Food Bank of the Rockies, Pulling said. "We are spending about $1 million more per month." "Our concern is that food insecurity is going to rebound more slowly than our economy and that we may see increased food insecurity for up to two years," Pulling said. "We are here for the long haul, we are committed to doing everything it takes." Donations have increased this year, including a recent donation of free, and much needed, warehouse space for seven months, she said. The volunteer drain first experienced in the pandemic has been corrected as younger people, typically less vulnerable to COVID, have stepped up in great numbers. "We depend on the generosity of the community," Pulling said. "Volunteers and donors." |
Boston.com readers have a runaway favorite for favorite food chain - Boston.com Posted: 30 Nov 2020 09:18 AM PST Our very unusual Thanksgiving of 2020 is behind us, the leftovers have been demolished, and you know what that means: Time for takeout, or, if you're the daring sort, some socially distanced indoor dining. And we know where you want to go. You'll recall that an ersatz "Favorite Food Chain" map chose Boston Market as the Bay State's go-to chain eatery, resulting in much consternation among the locals on Twitter. It prompted us to ask Boston.com readers what their actual favorite chain was, and the results were clear. First we should mention that while it may not be as ubiquitous as it once was, Boston Market's results were actually not too shabby: About 5% of the almost 300 responses gave the thumbs up to the Market as their favorite chain, more than such stalwarts as Papa Gino's (4%), Panera Bread (4%), or Five Guys Burgers and Fries (3%). Advertisement
But the top destination for hungry locals, dominating 23% of the votes, was an old standby: New England's own Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, headquartered in Woburn. The quintessential "something for everybody" family eatery, it's also known for letting kids eat free the day after a Sox win (not really much of a consideration for this year, unfortunately). Second place, with 12%, was that other local favorite, Dunkin' ("Donuts," we hardly knew ye) — this despite its lack of what most people would call an actual meal, with apologies to the various combinations of bacon, eggs, and cheese on their ever-expanding menu. Other top finishers included Chick-fil-A, whose politics apparently didn't turn off 7% of our reader respondents; Chipotle, which got 6%; and a pair of locally based eateries: Legal Sea Foods, with 6%; and Bertucci's with 5%. Take a look at all the chains that got at least three votes in our poll in the chart below: Other quick takeaways: Wendy's is twice as popular as either McDonald's or Burger King (somewhere, Dave is smiling); at least three readers are saddened to see the ever-dwindling supply of Friendly's locations; and four others took the time to answer our food chain poll by telling us they don't eat at food chains. ("I'd rather starve than eat at a chain," said Lori from Billerica, dramatically.) Here's what some Boston.com readers had to say about why they love their favorite chains:Advertisement
"Boston Market: Great takeout meals for a good price. Good juicy chicken and sides … terrific cornbread." "110 Grill: They provide an extensive gluten free option menu. The Chorizo Tater Tots are the best!" — Rebecca, Boston Ninety-Nine: "Consistency no matter what location I visit in Mass. or N.H., in both service and local beer selection or menu quality and variety." — Bob, Stoughton "B.Good: Really good burgers and fries." — Alex, Westwood "Bertucci's: I still have plenty of nostalgia for the place from growing up in the Mass. suburbs. And yeah, the bread rolls are unbeatable." — Greg, Somerville "Burger King: Impossible Whoppers!" — D, Jamaica Plain "Chick-fil-A: Tasty food, unbeatable, cheerful, professional, efficient service (have you seen their drive through at peak hours — a master class in logistics right there!), good prices, and good working conditions. Hands down winner!" — Kay T, Woburn "Chipotle: I see the food right in front of me, I like to tailor order my food, and I like Mexican food." "Dunkin': DUNKS IS LIFE KID!" — T. Dubbah, Boston "Friendly's: You know going to dinner that dessert is on the menu. Sad they are disappearing!" — Tina, Boston by way of East Longmeadow "Kelly's Roast Beef: Get a large roast beef sandwich with sauce, and you'll know why." "Legal Sea Foods: The food quality is up there with a lot of the top fine dining restaurants. They have also diversified their newer-ish locations like Legal C Bar (Legacy Place), Legal Oysteria (Charlestown), Legal on the Mystic (Somerville), and Legal Harborside (Seaport) so each location has its own identity and vibe. You can go there for a family meal, just take the wife for date night, or get drinks and apps with buddies and watch a game. Not something you can say about a lot of chain restaurants: great food and diversity. (I like Berkowitz's ads too.)" — Chris, Westwood Advertisement
"Mary Lou's: The. Pink. Cup." Get Boston.com's browser alerts:Enable breaking news notifications straight to your internet browser. Turn on notificationsGreat, you're signed up! |
AU, Bama students use rivalry to fight food insecurity - Opelika Auburn News Posted: 30 Nov 2020 01:00 PM PST The rivalry between Auburn University and the University of Alabama extends far beyond the two fan bases. And, for the past 26 years, that competitive spirit has benefited Alabama's food insecure daily. In 1994, Craig Young, a former director of the West Alabama Food Bank, decided the friendly competition between the Auburn Tigers and the Crimson Tide could be put to good use. So, he formed the food drive completion between the two universities to help alleviate hunger in the state of Alabama and promote food insecurity awareness. Earlier this month, The University of Alabama's Beat Auburn Beat Hunger collected 291,047 pounds of food over Auburn University's Beat Bama Food Drive's 259,160 pounds of food for a total of over 500,000 pounds of food raised to benefit Alabamians. "I am so grateful for the effort put in by all the members to support such an amazing cause," Peyton Hill, vice president of operations and sponsorship for Beat Bama Food Drive, said. "Food insecurity is something that hits home with a lot of students on Auburn's campus; an estimated 1 in 4 Auburn students are food insecure." This is the fourth year the University of Alabama student-led organization has won the friendly competition. The rise in demand for food is a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic, as many citizens find themselves needing the food bank's services for the first time. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, 18% of Lee County residents faced food insecurity. Since the pandemic, that number has risen to 27% of residents, according to the Alabama Food Bank Association. Alabama has the second highest food hardship rate in the nation, according to the Food Research and Action Center. That accounts for 25.2% of the population. "We knew that this year's Beat Bama Food Drive was more important than ever," said Johnson, vice president of community for Beat Bama Food Drive. "I am so thankful for our community partners and the Auburn Family for rallying behind our cause and helping us raise 259,160 pounds of food. I know the immense difference it will make in the lives of food insecure individuals in East Alabama." The annual food drive runs from Oct.1 to Nov. 19 ahead of the Iron Bowl. This year's total of 259,160 pounds of food collected by Beat Bama Food Drive marks the second highest total for the program's history. Donations are divided into two categories: financial and food. Those in Auburn who seek to donate financially can do so through the East Alabama Food Banks' website Johnson says over 8,000 pounds of food was collected from various Auburn community neighborhoods alone. Financial contributions allowed the Beat Bama Food Drive to buy more products to donate to their agencies. Individuals dropped off food donations at one of the various orange, white and blue food barrels spotted at participating businesses around town. Supporters ranged from local grocery stores such as Kroger, 300 N. Dean Rd., Auburn, to Praise 88.7 WELL FM, 2101 Executive Park Dr., Ste, 103, Opelika. For more information, visit the Food Bank of East Alabama's website at www.foodbankofeastalabama.com. Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. |
You are subscribed to email updates from "food" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. |
Email delivery powered by Google |
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States |
from What to Cook https://ift.tt/36obxmc