Meg’s short list of solutions to the tomato crisis:
1. Shop farmers markets or locally grown sections in your grocery for regional tomatoes
2. Grow your own
3. Be the person that creates the Tomato of the Month club
4. Buy lesser processed tomatoes (like those still on the vine)
5. Write the FDA and encourage more regionalized produce inspection processes, like the ones the USDA has for meat processing plants
6. Vive la difference: take this moment of doubt as an opportunity to try other veg. I’m a fan of peaches for similar texture and tart. Try a peach, swiss, turkey burger with lots of pepper, and red onions (if onions are your thing). Fruit is pretty awesome in salads, and makes a wicked salsa when you combine it with the right herbs.

Somewhat detached from the series, Sally Squire’s regular column, the Lean Plate Club, talks about her trip to Yorktown High’s home ec class. The students are all loving it. The guys are having a great time learning to cook for themselves, and they actually outnumber the girls in the particular class Squires visited.

One student’s mom says, “It’s perfectly fine for him to learn to cook on his own and not make his mom cook all night every night,” said Sukhbaatar Sanjdorj, whose son, Turmunkh, 17, is in one of Molle’s [the teacher] classes. On Mother’s Day, Turmunkh prepared chicken fajitas for his mother. He also regularly makes spanikopita, the Greek spinach pie. “He never ate spinach before,” said Sanjdorj. “Now he even goes out and buys all the different ingredients.”

Buys the ingredients? As in, knows what vegetables actually look like? Understands how things combine to make a finished product? Whoa, revolutionary.

My foodie and I are totally addicted to this BBC America show You Are What You Eat with Gillian McKeith. She’s fabulous. It takes “Britain’s biggest eaters” and cuts them down to size with better nutrition, a little exercise, and dry British sass. Nearly every episode, on the soon-to-be-reformed eater’s first trip to the grocery to buy real food–they have no idea what actual vegetables look like. They have to ask for help to identify anything more exotic than an onion it seems. On another couple episodes, Gillian takes her charges to the farm to see veg growing in the ground. The less detached you are from your food, the more up close and personally you know it, the more likely you are to care about what goes into your body. I won’t even get into her laying out of the weekly eatings in the beginning of the show…

It’s the same with PETA’s Meet Your Meat series: you see what happens to the meat you eat before you eat it, and (they hope) you won’t want to anymore. (It’s almost worked for me–I’m a cage free egg buyer, at the very least).

So then, I posit that if you’re not cooking your food, or at least understanding where it comes from, you’re less likely to care about what you’re eating because you’re too detached from the process. Get intimate with your food, love you food, and in turn, love yourself.

–25 percent of all vegetables eaten in the United States are french fries or chips.
–Soft-drink consumption has increased 300 percent in 20 years and is the leading source of added sugars for adolescents.

Ew? I’m not sure I buy the 25% of all vegetables eaten are french fries or chips bit, but I believe the soda part. My question is: why? Cheap and easy, yes. Convenient: no question.

But when did people stop caring about what their food tastes like, and how it makes them feel? That’s the one thing I want to know most, and I suspect it’s the one thing the Post isn’t going to cover.

* I’d like to note that it certainly hasn’t been a slow news year: why all the feature series above the fold at the Post? Real life is still happening, right? Just checking…

This morning I was pleasantly greeted with a really easy recipe for broccoli pasta.

I’m a big fan of cooking vegetables in with pasta. This one cooks the broccoli and the pasta together. I’ve got another Martha Stewart recipe that flash cooks onions with the pasta water. It just gives everything such a nice flavor, and you don’t have to get crazy with the heavy sauces.

Brocc: hamsters love it, so should you.

I think I’m in love. Must steal my foodie counterpart and take the Dragon Bus to NYC!

He says,

It is embarrassing to note that, from 1995 to 2005, the richest 10 percent of cotton growers received more than 80 percent of total subsidies. The wealthiest 1 percent of American cotton farmers continues to receive over 25 percent of payouts for cotton, while more than half of America’s cotton farmers receive no subsidies at all. American farmers are not dependent on the global market because they are guaranteed a minimum selling price by the federal government. American producers of cotton received more than $18 billion in subsidies between 1999 and 2005, while market value of the cotton was $23 billion. That’s a subsidy of 86 percent!

And how.

This week’s Economist is about the end of cheap food thanks to farm subsidies (among other things). They say,

The trillions of dollars spent supporting farmers in rich countries have led to higher taxes, worse food, intensively farmed monocultures, overproduction and world prices that wreck the lives of poor farmers in the emerging markets. And for what? Despite the help, plenty of Western farmers have been beset by poverty. Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land. Even a vast subsidy cannot reverse that.

“The Economist’s food-price index is higher today than at any time since it was created in 1845 (see chart). Even in real terms, prices have jumped by 75% since 2005.”

Enter agflation. There are certainly other things that drive up food prices (change in global diet, the weather, the rest of the market economy), but subsidies, subsidies, subsidies are the prime factor. They started out with the best of intentions, but at this point, they are not working and should be abandoned, or drastically revamped. The trifecta of Meg, Jimmy Carter and the Economist agree: it must be true. But how change?

The Farm Bill is being discussed again this week in Congress. If only Iowa weren’t so important right now, we could discuss wildly inefficient ethanol subsidies for what they are, and not the votes they have the potential to win.