Cook the Vote!

At my recent soup meet at the Hull House it was open mic day. The soup was a spicy miso vegetable soup and the topic was Art and Food. Several people went up to show slides of sketches, read food prose, and talk about projects. I even got up there to tell people about community dining and the Cook the Vote campaign, stage fright and all.

I was beside myself to be in a room where everybody was on the same page. Food is so important and it inspires all of us in different ways. An artist from Switzerland showed us some slides of her work. She sneaks into restaurant kitchens and much like a courtroom artist captures dramatic faces in a courtroom, she sketches chefs, cooks, and dishwashers in the heat of the kitchen. She captured the speed of the Breakfast Chef of the Four Seasons in Chicago by drawing 4 torsos extending out of 2 legs, much like Neo dodging a bullet in the Matrix.

Robin Hewlett talked about one of her projects, One Mile Meal. Robin and her group choose a host venue in a city like Chicago, Pittsburgh, or D.C. They draw a 1 mile circle on the map surrounding the venue and bike around foraging for food. Then they sit down for a feast using what they found. And no, there is no dumpster diving involved. In Chicago they found wild greens and a fisherman in Washington Park, and rounded out their grocery list with items from neighborhood gardens. In Pittsburgh, they made pancakes out of acorns and washed them down with pine needle tea.

John McCain, in efforts to boost popularity for his party, has slowly been distancing himself from the lame duck president still calling the shots. He’s been busy campaigning and perhaps getting an extra energy boost from his wife Cindy’s homemade Oatmeal-Butterscotch Cookies.

Didn’t I see that recipe on my bag of Hershey’s chips?

We all borrow recipes from time to time. Didn’t Milton Hershey get that recipe from his grandmother?

To get all the cookie details and find out what John McCain has been up to check out the Analysis on First Read.

Americans are still safe, but in Japan, overweight men and women are cutting back. In the land of sumo and tempura, it is now against the law to sport a waistline over 33.5″.

The Japanese government is anticipating a catastrophic rise in the state’s health care costs due to growing waistlines. They have been generously footing the hospital bill for its citizens thus far, but can this continue?

Read more about this in the New York Times…

Photo by Tara Lane

Last month on Tuesday May 6th, the kitchen at the Jane Addams Hull House museum re-opened as a a place for people to gather to eat food and talk about food politics.
This is taken from their website..

“..Please bring your hunger for free soup and conversation every Tuesday. Hull-House Kitchen: Rethinking Soup is a communal event where we will eat delicious, healthy, soup and have fresh, organic conversation about many of the urgent social, cultural, economic and environmental food issues that we should be addressing. We will meet in the historic Residents’ Dining Hall, where Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B.Duboise, Gertrude Stein and other important social reformers met to share meals and ideas, debate one another and conspire to change the world..”

I was there for the first time on Tuesday June 10th for the discussion on Immigration and its undeniable connection to our food supply. There were 2 guest speakers, James Thindwa of Chicago Jobs With Justice and Lexi Carlson of the Student-Farmworker Alliance.

James started his presentation talking about NAFTA and the more recent DR-CAFTA, The Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement. He stated that these trade agreements never accounted for human rights and worker’s rights violations when they were written and eventually implemented. He argued, in the case of NAFTA, that the result of this was an exploitation of Mexican workers and farmers since United States corporations were always more profitable when doing business with Mexican companies that exploited workers and forced farmers off their land by raising commodity crop prices. He also argued that the massive rush of illegal immigrants from Mexico to the United States could be directly linked to NAFTA and its negative effect on the Mexican economy, and that the United States government needed to address this issue of illegal immigration with responsible legislation. In other words, let’s work on solving a problem we started in the first place.

Lexi led the discussion about illegal immigration into harvesting and migrant field workers. Yes, the people that pick our tomatoes, oranges, and strawberries are illegal immigrants. She informed us about some of the conditions in the fields: high levels of toxic pesticides, extremely low wages, and modern-day slavery conditions. I was very interested in her news about the Taco Bell Campaign, where tomato pickers in Florida led a boycott against Taco Bell to improve their basic working conditions. I worked at Taco Bell for a week when I was in high school and I have NEVER made a run for the border since.

The recent tomato-salmonella outbreak was even addressed when a fellow soupie asked if the contaminated tomato supply could be linked to below standard conditions on tomato farms in the United States. And the US Food and Drug Administration still hasn’t been able to trace the source. They are now also issuing warnings about tomatoes imported from Mexico, according to this CNN article.

It was a truly enlightening experience, sitting down for a bowl of the day’s soup, a very delicious chicken soup with crimini mushrooms and cavolo nero, all locally grown and/or raised ingredients.

My parents were both farmers when they lived in Mexico and until very recently, were also illegal immigrants. My grandfather was a migrant worker under Kennedy’s worker program in the 1960’s and today he is still raising swiss dairy cows in the mountains of Jalisco. My uncle buys the milk from him for his cheese business. On my visits to my grandfather’s ranch, there is never talk of free range eggs or organic milk. The milk is organic because the cows graze on grass and drink rain water. The eggs are free range because the chickens just run around where ever they want.

All of these issues hit very close to home for me. The discussions and the delicious soups will definitely keep me coming back to the Hull House for more.

To check out more info about the Hull House Kitchen and for details about their upcoming events, check out their website-> http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/Events/kitchen

Senator Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination.

So now, its McCain vs Obama. We will be watching this one very closely…

I just got this in my Inbox.

If you’re in Chicago, make it over to the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum for a conversation with Mark Winne.

Mark currently writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment, and food policy.

Here are the details…

The Hull-House Kitchen presents:
CLOSING THE FOOD GAP
Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty
Conversation with Mark Winne
Thursday, June 5
6pm
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Residents’ Dining Hall
800 South Halsted

This event is FREE.
Paid parking is available across the street.

Reservations are recommended, please call 312-413-5353.

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