Sharon July 31st, 2009
Ok, I’ve already probably pimped this book so many times that y’all are bored, but it is a brilliant, important, and deeply under-rated book, and I don’t want anyone to miss it. Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen and Maria Mies have put together a truly necessary analysis of what is available to us, once we acknowledge that in their industrial forms, both capitalism and socialism have failed us.
That we believe that there’s no other choice but a few industrialized, huge scale economic options leads us to make terrible choices. With their emphasis on small scale and humane models, they argue that there are other choices, all emerging from cultures of subsistence.
The authors are feminists, and they take as given that subsistence models must include basic justice issues, and must stop erasing the contributions of women and the poor. But don’t let that turn you off – nor the fact that it is translated from the German. This book is worth your time and effort.
Sharon
Sharon July 30th, 2009
I have a peeve about non-vegetarian ethnic cookbooks published in America. Despite the fact that almost no culture on the planet eats as much meat as Americans, the format for ethnic cookbooks rarely varies, unless they are specifically vegetarian – the main course chapters procede through a largish collection of each kind of meat recipe, finally alighting on “vegetable and legume” dishes.
What’s wrong with this is that it gives you a deeply false perception of other people’s cuisines – Americans don’t necessarily know that the 11 recipes for beef are pretty much all the mainstream recipes for beef in the entire culture, say, because beef isn’t eaten that often, whereas the 11 recipes for vegetables and legumes barely touch the surface of the deep variety of vegetable and legume cooking. But because we “know” that Americans don’t eat nearly as many main course vegetable dishes, we know that we only can include one chapter on vegetables.
Which brings me to why I love Raghavan Iyer’s _660 Curries_ – yes, it has plenty of recipes for high value foods and meats, but in a book with close to a thousand actual recipes (there are breads, desserts and sauces added in), the bulk of the book is everyday food – vegetables and legumes, and a real variety, not just two ways to cook broccoli. Don’t get me wrong – I eat meat that is raised on my own farm, and I’m happy to have good Indian recipes to use with our meats. But what I really need are more recipes for simple foods out of my garden and pantry, and this is it. Morel Mushrooms (the one mushroom I forage regularly) with Green Peas are spectacular; Red Amaranth and Spinach with Coconut Chile Sauce will be a regular at our house and Red Lentils with caramelized onion sauce is a new obsession. The food is good and the perspective is useful. What’s not to love?
Sharon
Sharon July 29th, 2009
I’ve got a lot of books I’d love to review at length, but somehow there’s always something more urgent to do. So I’ve decided that I’m going to try and post regular (I doubt it will be every day…no, I’m sure it won’t be every day) short book reviews of a paragraph or so until I’ve done 365 of them. I know it’ll probably take me a lot longer than a year, but at least it is a way to get conversations going about my favorite books without having to take a month to write about them.
I’m not promising that every single one will be on a relevant topic to the main themes of this blog – in fact, again, I promise they won’t be. Everyone needs good escapist or imaginative literature sometimes, or simply to learn everything they can about something interesting, even if it has no direct application. Besides, it is very rare that I find I read something truly great and never use it again – it always shows up somewhere in my thinking.
Ok, the honor of being the very first book worth reading goes to Saul Alinsky’s superb book _Rules for Radicals_ – I picked it up at my school library when I was 14, and it was perhaps the first most important book I’ve ever read. I try and go back and look at it once a decade, at a minimum, and it keeps on being relevant. Alinsky gave us a model for how to do what needs doing long ago, when he wrote,
“The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals was written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”
What more urgently needed knowledge is there than that?
Sharon
