New York Times Magazine Targets Food Topics
The New York Times Magazine featured several prominent food writers in its October 12, 2008, food issue, which covered topics ranging from agricultural production to marketing strategies. Author Michael Pollan penned an open letter, titled “Farmer in Chief,” addressing the numerous food security challenges facing the next U.S. president. Pollan tells the president-elect that even as he copes with rising food prices and decreasing production, he must also “make reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.” Going on to explain the complexities of modern agriculture and its dependence on oil, Pollan recommends that the administration adopt one core idea: “we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” Although he acknowledges that “this is easier said than done,” Pollan ultimately argues that “[i]f any part of the modern economy can be freed from its dependence on oil and successfully resolarized, surely it is food.”
The Magazine’s food issue also included articles discussing a “nascent Jewish food movement” focused on sustainability and the decline of North American catfish farming. In “Kosher Wars,” Times contributing writer Samantha Shapiro contrasts the “$12.5-billion-a-year business” of kosher food production with an emergent market emphasizing “the natural intersections between the sustainable-food movement and kashrut: a shared concern for purity and an awareness of the process goes through before it reaches the table.” In addition,
Shapiro notes, “more than 70 percent of kosher-food consumers in the United States are not observant Jews; they choose kosher products
because they view them as safer or rely on the strict ingredient labeling for their food allergies or other religious concerns.” Her article highlights recent allegations that the largest independent kosher meat facility, Iowa-based Agriprocessors, engaged in unethical slaughter practices and hired underage workers. According to Shapiro, the revelations have raised questions among many Jewish consumers about “the purpose of religious observance: Does God require adherence to his laws because they are just, or is following God’s laws a good unto itself whether or not the laws serve a moral purpose?”
W.G. Kellogg Foundation food- and society fellow Paul Greenberg also traces market shifts in his piece, “A Catfish by Any Other Name,” which describes the efforts of North American catfish farms to survive an influx of cheaper white-fish products from Asia. Greenberg points to evidence that high-density fish farms in Vietnam, which is “grabbing up huge swaths of the global white-fish market,” are often “maintained at the expense of environmental and consumer safety.” He also follows the intricate trade negotiations between the United States and Vietnam in their battle over Asia-farmed tra – a relative of channel catfish that can better survive low-oxygen pools and competes with its American cousin in the domestic white-fish market. Although American fisheries won their trade battle to prevent tra from being labeled “catfish” in the United States, they have nevertheless encountered a new rival in China, as well as rising feed and fuel prices. As a
result, Greenberg concludes, the industry recently rolled out a last ditch effort to woo back consumers – “a specially filleted Grade-A piece of the best of the farmed North American channel catfish” called Delacata and endorsed by “Iron Chef America” star Cat Cora.
