Watching TV and Reading

Netflix: A History of the New Yorker Magazine 

Watching a documentary about the famous New Yorker magazine.
It brought back memories of reading it since I was in college.
I haven’t read it recently as much as I used to. Maybe start again?

Reading This Week

Concentrating on this book seemed very challenging as I read it, because the authors range widely through history. The seven cheap things are: “nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives.” (p. 7) The time frame is the last several hundred years. The geographic extent of the phenomena that the authors cover is also broad: “although Europe features in it, capitalism’s story isn’t a Eurocentric one. The rise of capitalism integrated life and power from Potosí to Manila, from Goa to Amsterdam.” (p. 90) I’ve tried to select some quotes to capture some of the key points of the book, though I admit that I’m very challenged by reading it, and I might not understand it very well.

Cheap money is at the heart of history, say the authors: “Although, as Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789, ‘in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,’ cheap money links the two. The modern art of war became a way to turn gold and blood into capital.” (p. 80)

The authors think in terms of categories of people, mainly binary categories that defined humanity and all its activities: “At the origins of capitalism, strategies used to corral Indigenous Peoples into the pen of Nature were also used to create and manage a category of humans who would perform unpaid care work: women. Human bodies were forced, sometimes medically and always juridically, into one of two inescapable categories: man and woman. The resulting entangled binaries—of Society-Nature, Man-Woman, and paid work–unpaid work—have left us with a way of thinking that has committed humans in capitalism’s world-ecology to making spectacular oversights: we continue to think of ‘real work’ solely as wage work and forget the care work that makes it all possible.” (p. 116)

Food to feed the people who did the work is another important consideration: “Cheap food is ‘cheap’ in a specific sense: more calories produced with less average labor time in the commodity system.” (p. 143) Through cheap food, societies succeed. Hunger in contrast “began to matter politically only when the poor came to the cities and translated it into anger, and thence potentially into insurrection and a challenge to the rule of cheap nature.” (p. 149) However, “cheap food regimes … guarantee neither that people are fed nor that they are fed well—as the global persistence of diet-related ill health and malnutrition can attest.” (p. 158)

“Capitalism may have claimed the New World with guns, germs, and steel, but the New World’s order was kept through race, police, and profits. …  Capitalism’s ecology has shaped the modern nation-state and vice versa, through the colonial frontier, through the interactions between early capitalists and ‘savages,’ and through the technologies of communication that capitalism fostered at its inception.” (p. 180-181)

All in all, I’m overwhelmed by the enormous amount of detail in this book. Do I really understand it? 

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

Iceland

 

The overpowering theme of this book by the only Icelandic Nobelist — Halldor K. Laxness — is hunger. It’s a hunger that modern readers have almost surely never experienced. Especially in spring (a season of hunger for farming people everywhere that’s been forgotten by people like us) the lack of fresh food or perhaps the lack of any food is unimaginable. The food that was put away in the fall (or the money put away to buy food) may not last until the first produce of spring comes in. 

In Independent People, the entire focus is on one sheep-raising family who are trying to make a living from a farm in the wilds of Iceland. Sheep are their livelihood and their obsession. The author describes their spring expectations:

“They would feel reasonably sure of surviving the winter, and of getting enough rye meal, refuse fish, and coffee to rear the kids on, those at least that didn’t die (the others were forgotten), always provided that they restricted themselves to the customary one meal a day in the spring.” (p. 17)

The central character, Bjartur of Summerhouses, lives in this extremely isolated area some time in the early 20th century, beginning before the First World War and continuing until shortly afterwards. Bjartur is a semi-secret poet and his verses are part of the novel. He seems naive in many ways.

His story, in brief: his first wife dies, he remarries, several children are born, and some other people live with the family on the farm. They always seems isolated by the distance from the isolated farm to the small settlement nearby, the incredible distance to Reykjavik (where none of them have ever visited), and the unimaginable distance to the wider world, which hardly seems to them even to exist. Eventually, they are made rich by the war and its need for the local resources, and then made poor by the aftermath when their products were no longer demanded by the wider world.

Bjartur has a number of fixed ideas that vary between comic and tragic. 

“You should beware of believing things you see in books. I never regard books as the truth, and least of all the Bible, because there’s no check on what they can write in them.” (p. 64)

In a recent introduction to the English edition of Independent People, here is a summary of this character: “Bjartur is for me one of the great twentieth-century literary characters—one of the immortals, like Humbert Humbert or Jay Gatz/Gatsby or Gregor Samsa or the four Makioka sisters. He is petty-minded and heroic; brutal and poetic; cynical and childlike.” (p. xvii) I don’t agree with this comparison, but I’m including it because it’s probably more standard than my own views.

Bjartur isn’t the only character in the novel whose desperate poverty and eccentric views define him — here’s a description of one of the others, a Bailiff:

“His trousers were so worn that the original cloth no longer held the patches and was giving way at the stitches. Turned up over the bottoms was a pair of yellowish socks, undyed, and the down-at-heel horsehide shoes on his feet lent support to the theory that he was newly returned from a thoroughgoing inspection of the stables, stronger testimony being provided by the smell. In clothing and general appearance Bjarter of Summerhouses was far superior to this tramp-like Bailiff.” (p. 104) 

Also, a description of Bjartur’s second wife: 

“She would go drooping off home just before nine to boil the fish, but very often she could not get the fire to draw. She brought him his fish, rye bread, and coffee out to the meadow. ‘There’s no need to be stingy with that muck,’ he said of the sugar, for he always spoke slightingly of sweet things.” (p. 38) 

And a description of some of his fellow farmers and craftsmen:

“New men on the croft, famous master builders who turfed the ewe-house walls in such a fashion that the courses took on a herring-bone pattern; a journeyman carpenter with foot-rule, pencil, and saw, mental arithmetic in his eye; the fresh scent of shavings blending with the smell of autumn’s mud and rain; boisterous conversation at meal-times, fragrant snuff, poetry, merchants and co-operative societies, sheep, sheep again, interesting information from irrelevant quarters, unknown phrases, brawls, sweet coffee.“ (p. 239) 

The novel Independent People is one of those sagas of the early 20th century that now seems to develop with painful slowness. Characters die. Children grow up and try to understand the world around them. Life is hard, and from their earliest years they all have to work in terrible conditions, sometimes with their clothing soaked and freezing, sometimes when they are too tired to continue, etc. etc. The character sketches vary between irony (even satire) and sympathy. Their concerns are sometimes taken seriously and sometimes — I think — viewed as primitive or even childish. It’s not a book that satisfies current tastes any more, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it except for historical curiosity, as it’s extremely long, repetitive, and overburdened with descriptions.

Birds and Sheep

A pair of phalaropes we saw in Svalbard, another island in the far North.

Birds are everywhere in the landscape of this novel, and I was fascinated by the author’s descriptions of them. Though I did not see the specific birds on my trip to Iceland, I did see many in Norway. Of the many species named, I especially like hearing of the phalarope:

“On every pool of the river there was a phalarope to make her a bow; no bird in all the marshes is so courtly in its demeanour on Midsummer Eve.” (p. 193)

“Soon the marshes would be green and humming with life the same as they were last year, with the phalarope preening itself in courtesy on the surface of the deep pools. And the little waterfall up in the mountain would be flowing backward in the sunny breeze.“ (p. 246)

Of course there’s also constant mention of the sheep.  

These sheep we saw on Runde, an island in Norway,
 but the landscape is comparable to that in Iceland. 

Some photos of Iceland that I thought about when reading:

From our trip to Iceland in 2021.

Blog post and photos © 2021, 2025 mae sander

October Wrap-up

In my kitchen in October I have two new refrigerator magnets among all my bird magnets.

New: flamingos and an eagle.

UPDATE: Jeanie asked where retired magnets go. The answer: I have a big plastic box on a high shelf and they all go in there. Some years ago the theme (now birds) was Mona Lisa. All the Mona Lisa magnets are in a separate box in a closet somewhere. I like Jeanie’s idea that there’s a big wall covered with magnets somewhere, but my house isn’t big enough for that.

Len’s Latest Bread

 Good Dinners from My Kitchen

Apple crisp.

Alice and Len with the apple crisp.

Cabbage salad, stuffed mushrooms, and pork tenderloin.

Savory corn pancakes with lettuce and cottage cheese.

Pastrami with tomatoes and lemons, garlic bread, spaghetti, and chocolate pudding with biscotti.

Lamb chops and salads.

Salad — note the purple carrots!

Outside the Kitchen Door

Beyond the kitchen door: the last of the potted herbs. The first frost this year is very late.

Happy Halloween

One more photo of the giant pumpkin (with me to show how huge it is).

New York Times Headline about decreasing chocolate quality
due to very high prices.

About those chocolate prices:  

 

”Experts say high cocoa prices have triggered a wave of ‘reformulations,’ the industry term for recipe changes. As the Halloween season boosts demand, some candy companies are replacing expensive cocoa butter with other fats, a swap that means their products no longer meet the U.S. regulatory definition of milk chocolate and can no longer be called that on packaging.” (source) 

 

What’s Missing From Our Nation?

Will Congress and the Nation really let this injustice prevail? 
A last-minute reprieve is a somewhat distant possibility.
Some states have acted to provide funding for food programs, but others can’t afford to do so.

As I survey my own food for this month and next month, I realize how lucky I am. Heartless actions by the government and our leaders threaten large numbers of citizens with hunger and desperation. SNAP, the federal food assistance program, is critical in the lives of many Americans. This headline is local, but the disaster is national. What’s missing from our nation is compassion and generosity,

“The threat of food assistance disappearing for 42 million Americans, even for a month, has exposed how threadbare the nation’s social safety net has become at a time of persistent inflation and deep federal funding cuts. Filling the void in the coming weeks will strain many food banks and other organizations that were already stretched thin.” (source)

Friday Afternoon Update: 

Crisis may be over

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

I’m sharing this post with Sherry’s kitchen round-up, 

with Eileen’s critter round-up, 

and with Deb’s weekly round-up.

Virtue

The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think is a book about ethics by a very opinionated journalist, Julian Baggini. He’s really quite preachy. But I still enjoyed reading the first half of it, because I like his way of challenging commonly-held ideas. The second half was a bit tedious, rehashing a lot of concepts that are often mentioned about food and cuisine, and I kind of speed-read it.

Here are some quotes that appealed to me. (Note, the Kindle edition doesn’t have page numbers).

“The idea that novelty is a cardinal virtue in food can only emerge in a culture where the food tradition is weak and the daily menus not packed with favourites passed down the generations. Routine need not lead to boredom, but ironically, the constant pursuit of novelty can. There is nothing more tedious than culinary innovation for the sake of it.”

 

“In the 1950s and 1960s the Spanish costas were ruined by tasteless developments built to attract mainly British holiday-makers in search of a cheap break. Now, behind the beaches, the foothills are being ruined to provide tasteless food to, often British, consumers in search of cheap meals. The Spanish have blown their inheritance in search of quick rewards.”

“Excessive rigidity about the desire to cook everything from scratch is not a character trait I wanted to reinforce. It would be wrong to become moralistic about what is in essence a luxury. Before the widespread use of domestic ovens, the poor did little home cooking as we would now recognise it. In the slums of the developing world, takeaways and simple restaurants are the cheap option, not an indulgence, since it is more expensive to buy the fuel to cook at home for a single family than it is for one person to cook for many. In the modern West, doing a lot of home cooking is the privilege of the time-rich, or at least time-flexible.”

Time Marches On

The essays in this book were collected for publication in 2014, meaning they were written and in some cases published elsewhere earlier than that. I’m surprised at how many of the ideas were being explored in detail back then (as I recall) but have gone dormant now, though they would be just as relevant. I think the whole question of ethical eating was discussed much more a while ago than it is now. When was the last time I saw the term "food miles" and heard all the fuss about eating local? No longer an obsession, I guess.

I’m also surprised at how several of the “facts” known a decade ago are now very much in question, especially those theories of weight control and hunger that have been demolished by the widespread use of GLP drugs like Wegovy. 

“Why do people seem to think that people ought to lose weight by willpower alone?” asks the author when discussing weight-loss surgery. He argues that such surgery should be a perfectly respectable and unquestioned procedure, but he didn't think it was accepted. 

The same judgy question comes up for people on weight loss drugs now, but the whole issue has shifted as it’s become apparent that the control of food thoughts and hunger is simply much more difficult — or not possible — for many people, whose problem can now be solved by drugs, not surgery with all its risks. Reading the viewpoint from a decade ago sheds light on how much things have changed because of effective weight-loss drugs.

I wish I knew what inspired me to get this book! The author is still producing many articles, so maybe he mentioned it himself? I can’t really recommend it, though it has some good chapters.

Julian Baggini (Wikipedia)

Review © 2025 mae sander

Kitchens, March 2025

New in My Kitchen in March

New spoon rest or teabag holder that Evelyn made me.

What’s new on the refrigerator this month? Just one new and timely magnet.
For a thought-provoking essay on Orwell see: “We are all living in George Orwell’s World Now”
in the New York Times Magazine.

Things We Ate in March

Vietnamese shrimp and snap peas. Recipes from Andrea Nguyen.

Favorite dish: au gratin potato casserole prepared in my French baking dish that I’ve had for many years.

Roast lamb, roast potatoes, broccoli, and a glass of red wine.

An omelet and a pita bread.

In our kitchen one morning. Toast, jam, butter, orange juice, coffee. Other mornings, other selections.

Alice at our favorite bakery, Tous Les Jours — lunch. Yes, we three ate all these pastries!

A visual recipe from the website Recipe Tin Eats. It was very good!

A great meal from Carol’s kitchen.

Recently opened in Ann Arbor: one of a small chain of Vietnamese/French coffee shops. 

Beyond my own Kitchen: US Food Aid Disrupted

Destructive actions by our government have been constantly increasing. 

“Last week, the USDA cut an initiative called the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, which helped schools receive fresh ingredients from small farms.” (source)

Food-insecurity is a major concern that has been addressed by some very effective programs during the past five years, but those programs are being abruptly discontinued. Farmers have suddenly been abandoned by government programs that purchased their goods on behalf of food banks. Agencies like Feeding America are struggling to cope with these losses. 

“USDA had previously allocated $500 million in deliveries to food banks for fiscal year 2025 through The Emergency Food Assistance Program. Now, the food bank leaders say many of those orders have been canceled.” (source)

Food banks throughout the country, which have struggled to help those in need as their numbers increased, are now profoundly challenged as many millions of dollars in food aid has been cut off: 

“USDA’s cancellation of the Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance programs has garnered headlines, but they are just two of more than a dozen programs supporting small farms and regional food infrastructure that have been impacted. (source)

Source: “Feds cancel #4.3M worth of poultry, cheese, eggs to Michigan Food Banks” (March 29, 2025)

Here in Ann Arbor, throughout our state of Michigan, and in most other states, needy families that relied on USDA food supplies for nutritional help are facing a grim future. 

“Nearly $5 million worth of food for Michigan food banks has been cut by the Trump Administration, according to the CEO of one of Battle Creek's food banks. Although that number accounts for about 4% of food distributed to Michiganders across eight counties, South Michigan Food Bank CEO Peter Vogel is hopeful the cuts won't cause southwest Michiganders to go hungry. Canceled meals, including products such as chicken, eggs, pork, turkey and cheese, were expected to be delivered this spring and summer.” (source)

Farmers, already jeopardized by international trade cancellations in the tariff wars, are additionally faced with these newly cancelled orders. (The impact on farmers of new tariffs scheduled to begin this week is a major issue, separate from the various program cancellations.)

“Funding pauses at the U.S. Department of Agriculture are affecting sustainable agricultural programs in Michigan. The program Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities funds 41 projects, including 28 in Michigan. Grants support programs that increase economic opportunities for farmers who use sustainable practices. The disbursement of those funds has been stopped, according to two of those projects in Michigan.” (source)

Thinking of my own kitchen, where I am so extremely fortunate, makes me also think of the less fortunate people in my community, my state, and my country — one of the tragedies that is unfolding in the tsunami of federal injustice.

Blog post and original photos © 2025 mae sander.

Other photos as credited.

Shared with In My Kitchen at Sherry’s blog.

Cruelty: A Story of Vietnam and Cambodia

 

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon (published 2024) is one of the most brutal stories I can remember reading. Born in Cambodia to a Vietnamese mother, she experienced the early days of the hideous events in Cambodia in the 1970s; she fled to Saigon where she suffered as the Vietnam War ended and dictatorship and poverty overtook the once-prosperous country. She lived perilously in Vietnam and then again in Cambodia and Thailand where she was in a wide variety of urban slums, refugee camps, and other places of suffering. As I read, I often had to stop and take a symbolic breath of air to clear my mind of the anguish, as well as to recollect the history of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Genocide, which I haven’t thought about recently.

A quote that the author uses throughout the book: “Rice is what you eat when you have nothing and when you have everything.” (p. 16)  Remarkably, Nguon’s narrative of want and desperation is nevertheless filled with food descriptions. This may be the strangest embedding of food memories I’ve ever read! Each chapter has its own recipes, usually for the traditional foods of the countries where she lived, and usually of a fascinating exotic nature with many local and unfamilar-to-me ingredients. Some of the recipes, however, are written in irony with instructions like this: “Buy the least rotten fish you can find in the communal store or from your neighbor in the market.” (p. 109) or “Recipe: A Taste of Poverty: This dish is easy to prepare, but the regimen is very difficult to maintain—unless you must.” (this recipe is only rice, p. 226)

Life for Nguon until age nine was happy and prosperous; even after the early death of her father, her mother was able to provide a pretty good home and appealing food. Her mother’s many varieties of hand-made noodles are an especially vivid memory. She later contrasts these delicious creations to the packets of instant noodles that were available in some of the refugee camps where she was confined. The instant noodles that her mother disdained were a luxury in these later bad times.

The family escaped from Cambodia to Vietnam just before the situation in Cambodia became impossible: the Khmer Rouge dictators of Cambodia drove the educated urban population from their homes into the countryside where they had nothing and where one fourth of the people died of starvation or worse. (I have included a historic note about these events at the end of this blog post). 

Nguon describes this flight from the city: “You pack your things and walk out of the city with your family. You ask no questions. A sea of humanity is on the move: children, grandparents on cyclos, the sick and wounded in wheeled hospital beds.” (p. 71)

As the Vietnam war ended, Nguon experiences another era of losing everything, becoming a refugee in a camp. “We slept in two rows of thirty bamboo beds in a long, open-air bamboo hut with a thatched roof and earthen floor.” (p. 82) Still, she recalled dreaming of food at that time saying: “my fondest food memories are more of food-dreaming than of the actual meals we ate. It was the dreaming that sustained our minds, if not our bellies.” (p. 65)

Image of boat people fleeing Vietnam, 1975. (source)

After fleeing from Vietnam in a small dangerous boat (that is, becoming “boat people”) she and her husband spent a decade waiting in another refugee camp in Thailand, hoping to be accepted to go to Europe or the US. In the camp, they were given a few necessities:

“Again, a UNHCR official issued us two cookpots. This time we also got a small wood-burning cook stove, two blankets, a mosquito net, a spoon, and a plastic plate. Someone showed us to a long, narrow structure with concrete floors, tin roofs, and thin cement walls on three sides. ‘This is your house,’ the man said. The shelters were designed for forty people, so each person was allotted a rectangle of concrete about the size of a single bed.” (p. 190)

Eventually, they realized that they had no chance of escape from the refugee camp, and in desperation they returned to Cambodia, which was emerging from the genocide nightmare and becoming civilized again. After several years of various endeavors, they founded a women’s weaving studio where they helped to create a better life for other people, and where they raised their two children, though there’s only a fairly brief summary of this time of her life.

Refugee Camps Still Exist: Waiting at the US Border This Month

As I read the stories of the expulsions 50 years ago as people were forced from their homes and were walking long distances in search of a place of refuge, I thought with horror of the fact that the same thing is happening right now. Long lines of displaced people in Mexico are heading for the US border, and as of this week, their hopes of asylum have been destroyed. The camps where they wait are eerily like the ones the author experienced in Southeast Asia a generation ago.

Historic Note on Events in Nguon’s Memoir

In case the history is unfamiliar to you, here is a summary of the Cambodian Genocide: 

”Lasting for four years (between 1975 and 1979), the Cambodian Genocide was an explosion of mass violence that saw between 1.5 and 3 million people killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a communist political group. The Khmer Rouge had taken power in the country following the Cambodian Civil War. During their brutal four-year rule, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of nearly a quarter of Cambodians.

“The Cambodian Genocide was the result of a social engineering project by the Khmer Rouge, attempting to create a classless agrarian society. The regime would ultimately collapse when the neighboring Vietnam invaded, establishing an occupation that would last more than a decade.” (source)

Review © 2024 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com