Hard to swallow, indeed

I don’t think I could have guessed a year ago, when I first applied to work at SustainAbility and decided to go for the position focusing on Food rather than Healthcare — partly because I love food, but mostly because I wanted to work on the other focus of that position, Social Enterprise — how much more than ever I’d be thinking about food in the months to come, and how much I’d start losing my appetite. So many are looking at our food system with a critical eye. Went to see Our Daily Bread at the ICA with Summer last month. Staggering out of the theater an hour and a half later, what struck us both was speed and steel. Later that same week, I came across a piece in the Atlantic Monthly, “Hard to Swallow“, subtitled “The gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms.”

Organic Thai eats

P’Book and I had a delicious lunch the other day in Bangkok at Anothai Restaurant, an organic, mostly vegetarian café and bakery that’s been around for a few years (second entry on this page). I haven’t had food this good, original and fresh in a while. We had:

• two tofu appetizers
• organic salad greens with miso dressing
• spaghetti with salted fish
• green curry fried (brown) rice
• lemonade with mint
• peach and mint sorbet
• pumpkin & orange cake with cream cheese topping
• lemongrass and rose petal tea

I didn’t know that in 2002, Thailand had implemented a five-year masterplan to become a global production center for organic food. Here’s the situation now – growing, but still a long way to go.