good Food Book Club
The Good Food Book Club is an avenue for Moscow Food Co-op owners and the greater Palouse community to foster civil dialogue, connection between people, and community engagement through thoughtful book club subject matter. We aim to provide an open, inviting venue to share educational and entertaining information critical to our food system and other pressing social issues.
For detailed information on the book of the month as well as past books, please visit the Good Food Book Club section of Community News.
Questions? Want to join? Email Rachel at mfcbookclub@moscowfood.coop.
September 2021 | Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat
By David Hall, Moscow Food Co-op Volunteer Writer
The book we have chosen for September is Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet. We will meet outdoors on Sunday August 29 at 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. Details on the meeting location and method will come in the Good Food Book Club e-mail updates. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for reminders about the Good Food Book Club. Sacred Cow is available through your local library – or check the area’s local book stores, including BookPeople of Moscow, where Book Club members receive a discount. For more information about the Good Food Book Club, visit moscowfood.coop/book-club.
“Beef is framed as the most environmentally destructive and least healthy of meats. We're often told that the only solution is to reduce or quit red meat entirely. But despite what anti-meat groups, vegan celebrities, and some health experts say, plant-based agriculture is far from a perfect solution. In Sacred Cow, registered dietitian Diana Rodgers and former research biochemist and New York Times bestselling author Robb Wolf explore the quandaries we face in raising and eating animals—focusing on the largest (and most maligned) of farmed animals, the cow.”
“Rodgers and Wolf reveal contrarian but science-based findings, such as:
• Meat and animal fat are essential for our bodies.
• A sustainable food system cannot exist without animals.
• A vegan diet may destroy more life than sustainable cattle farming.
• Regenerative cattle ranching is one of our best tools at mitigating climate change.”
Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet Hardcover – July 14, 2020. BenBella Books. 320 pages. Diana Rodgers & Robb Wolf. Read more here.
July - August 2021 | Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption
By David Hall, Moscow Food Co-op Volunteer Writer
The Good Food Book Club will have one book spanning July and August to provide members more time to read following a later meeting in July, and early summer activities and holidays.
Rachel Clark, our regular Book Club volunteer organizer, will continue to be the club organizer, but will no longer be writing related articles for this newsletter.
““A hilarious and moving story of unconventional entrepreneurialism, passion, and guts.” ”
““Food writer turned entrepreneur Levine tells of how he launched the James Beard Award–winning website Serious Eats website at age 54 in this passionate personal business history. Levine found his calling while writing a book titled New York Eats on the best non-restaurant food in New York City ... When writing opportunities for him started to dwindle around 2006, he began blogging and soon launched Serious Eats in an attempt to educate food lovers … but struggled at first to run the business. He writes of an “insane thrill ride” through office robberies, failed buyouts, and family investments that put his personal relationships at stake. “We were changing the way people cooked and ate,” he writes. ... Foodies and tech junkies will tear through this fast-paced tale from a food-loving entrepreneur who changed the course of food media.” ”
Watch your email for meeting details and related announcements. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for reminders about the Good Food Book Club. Serious Eater is available through your local library – or check the area’s local book stores, including BookPeople of Moscow, where Book Club members receive a discount on purchases. For more information about the Good Food Book Club, visit moscowfood.coop/book-club.
Levine, Ed. 2019. Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption. Portfolio.
June 2021 - Food Fix: Saving Our Health, Economy, Communities, and Planet -- One Bite at a Time
By Rachel Clark, Good Food Book Club Coordinator
““Read this book if you’re ready to change the world””
Greetings and may the emergence of summer 2021 on the Palouse bring blessings, comfort, and nurturance to you and your loved ones.
To herald this new emergence – a new kind of dawn as we move beyond the initial 2020 stages of the coronavirus pandemic – for July, we’ll be reading a book that helps define a much-needed shift in our harmful and intensely damaging approach to industrial agriculture. Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet--One Bite at a Time by Dr. Mark Hyman MD was released early in 2020, just before the world went on lock down.
The book examines where we are now, how we got here, how it’s all interconnected, and what we can do about it, right now. From an unleashed virus resulting from destroyed native forests and ecosystems, to human health, to community resilience and food insecurity, to climate change. All brought forward by a respected doctor, and best-selling author, the book is a kind of declaration and call to action for communities, citizens, and law-makers as we move into this new era.
Consider a few of the endorsements:
From climate visionary Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown, “"Food Fix is a brilliantly researched feast of facts about the most critically overlooked cause of chronic disease, global warming, and environmental degradation. It is also the Fix, demonstrating that the food sector is an astonishing yet overlooked basis for transforming agriculture, health care, mental illness, biodiversity loss, education, and economic well-being. It is a rare book, a momentous work that will inform and improve the lives of every reader, society, and country.”
To Dan Glickman, Former Secretary of Agriculture (1995-2001) who writes, "Food Fix by Dr. Mark Hyman is a provocative yet transformational analysis of our food system, from farm to table. While some of the proposals to change our food system are controversial, the book represents one of the first substantive and thoughtful attempts to tie the often stove-piped subjects of food, medicine, health, and sustainable agriculture into a holistic approach to feed a hungry and healthy global population."
To Governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Administrator of the EPA, who says, "In spite of daily breakthroughs in medicine, we continue to see an increase in cancers, heart disease, and other chronic conditions. It's time to consider not just what we eat, but how it's farmed and how we are using our land in the process. Food Fix gives us an outline of what we need to consider to both fulfill our needs and preserve our planet."
Please join us – outdoors and distanced – to discuss FOOD FIX by Dr. Mark Hyman (Little, Brown Spark, 2020) on JULY 11 from 4:00- 5:30 p.m (we’ll meet the Sunday after the July 4 holiday weekend). The Moscow Food Co-op will provide snacks and beverages. Watch your GFBC email for location details and related announcements. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for reminders about the Good Food Book Club. FOOD FIX is also available through your local library – or check the area’s local book stores, including BookPeople of Moscow, where Book Club members receive a discount. For more information about the Good Food Book Club, visit moscowfood.coop/book-club.
AUGUST Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption by Ed Levine and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2019)
SEPTEMBER Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet by Diana Rodgers (2020)
OCTOBER Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks through Many a Conundrum by Leah Eskin (2014)
NOVEMBER A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (1991)
DECEMBER Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart (2001)
April 2021 - Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture
By Rachel Clark, Good Food Book Club Coordinator
“Few books I’ve read would be considered life-changing… [This] is one of them.”
““Restoring the productivity of agricultural land is one of the most urgent imperatives of our time. In this landmark book, Gabe Brown explains, step by step, how farmers and ranchers can transform lifeless dirt to healthy topsoil, offering a profound yet elegantly simple blueprint for reversing land degradation across the globe.””
Hello, April! This month brings a special book aligned with an exciting paradigm shift and threshold: our world may be on the verge of adopting regenerative agriculture… Our author (and book) this month is a key voice helping to open that doorway!
Dirt to Soil: One Family's Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown (2018) is that book. And Gabe Brown, is that author. He’s also an author/farmer featured in the new-ish Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground.
Brown’s book – and Kiss the Ground – are only one part of a groundswell of change. Case in point: almost immediately after the Presidential Inauguration, Brown testified before Congress on the value of regenerative farming practices. And the Biden administration has already taken action to incentivize these healing, biomass and biodiversity building, carbon sequestering practices into United States agriculture practices. Brown’s Ranch, which we’ll read about in Dirt to Soil, actively promotes and works towards, “Regenerating Landscapes for a Sustainable Future.”
From the book’s introduction:
"Our lives depend on soil. This knowledge is so ingrained in me now that it’s hard for me to believe how many soil-destroying practices I followed when I first started farming. I didn’t know any better. In college I was taught all about the current industrial production model, which is a model based on reductionist science, not on how natural ecosystems function. The story of my farm is how I took a severely degraded, low-profit operation that had been managed using the industrial production model and regenerated it into a healthy, profitable one. The journey included many trials and constant experimentation, along with many failures and some successes. I’ve had many teachers, including other farmers and ranchers, researchers, ecologists, and my family. But the best teacher of all is nature herself."
Temple Grandin says, “Dirt to Soil confirms my belief that animals are part of the natural land. We need to reintegrate livestock and crops on our farms and ranches, and Gabe Brown shows us how to do it well.”
Please join us via Zoom to discuss DIRT TO SOIL: ONE FAMILY’S JOURNEY INTO REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE by Gabe Brown (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018) on APRIL 25 from 4:00- 5:30 p.m. Watch your GFBC email for Zoom details and related announcements. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for reminders about the Good Food Book Club. DIRT TO SOIL is also available through your local library – or check the area’s local book stores, including BookPeople of Moscow, where Book Club members receive a discount. For more information about the Good Food Book Club, visit www.moscowfood.coop/community-news.
TITLES FOR 2021:
MAY: Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain's Food Culture by Matt Goulding (2016)
JUNE Chickenshit: How a City Girl Does Country All Wrong (Volume 1), by Amy Stinnett (2017)
JULY Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet--One Bite at a Time by Dr. Mark Hyman MD (2020)
AUGUST Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption by Ed Levine and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2019)
SEPTEMBER Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet by Diana Rodgers (2020)
OCTOBER Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks through Many a Conundrum by Leah Eskin (2014)
NOVEMBER A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (1991)
DECEMBER Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart (2001)
March 2021 - Grab Your Coffee! Here are the year’s upcoming titles (And for March? The Devil’s Cup)
By Rachel Clark, Good Food Book Club Coordinator
““Stewart Lee Allen is the Hunter S. Thompson of coffee, offering a wild, caffeinated, gonzo tour of the World of the Magic Bean. His wry, adventurous prose delights, astonishes, amuses, and informs.””
Greetings friends. Turns out this article gets filed as the Palouse receives a mid-February dump of heavy, beautiful snow. Snow deep enough it may well still be here when the March edition of the Community News goes to press. So, grab your cup of coffee and settle in for a midwinter review of the fun titles our club picked for the rest of 2021.
First off, though, we definitively and by consensus, chose a riveting book about coffee to inspire and warm us through March. To fuel this wintery month, we’ll read The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee by Stewart Lee Allen.
Get a taste with this tempting excerpt from Allen:
“The book, Mon Journal, was written by social critic and historian Jules Michelet, and in it he essentially attributes the birth of an enlightened Western civilization to Europe’s transformation into a coffee-drinking society: ‘For this sparkling outburst of creative thought there is no doubt that the honor should be ascribed in part to the great event which created new customs and even changed the human temperament—the advent of coffee.’
How French, I’d thought at the time, to attribute the birth of Western civilization to an espresso. But Michelet’s notion is curiously similar to modern research indicating that certain foods have affected history in previously unsuspected ways. Specialists in the field, called ethnobotany, have recently theorized that eating certain mushrooms can alter brain function. Others have reported that the sacred jaguars depicted by the Mayans are actually frogs that the priests consumed en masse for their hallucinogenic properties. Recent research has indicated that the sacred violet of the pharaohs was considered holy because of its intoxicating powers. These foods are all drugs, of course. But so is coffee—as an addict, I should know. Perhaps Michelet had been on to something. When had Europeans started drinking coffee, and what had it replaced? … All I knew … was that the logical place to start looking for confirmation of Michelet’s proposition was in the land where coffee had first been discovered over two thousand years ago, the country I’d been waiting to revisit for a decade.
It was time to head to Ethiopia and get that second cup.”
After March, and our caffeinated coffee-soaked travelogue, we have more fun reading ahead.
TITLES FOR 2021:
APRIL Dirt To Soil: One Family's Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture by Gabe Brown (2018)
MAY Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels Through Spain's Food Culture by Matt Goulding (2016)
JUNE Chickenshit: How a City Girl Does Country All Wrong (Volume 1), by Amy Stinnett (2017)
JULY Food Fix: How to Save Our Health, Our Economy, Our Communities, and Our Planet--One Bite at a Time by Dr. Mark Hyman MD (2020)
AUGUST Serious Eater: A Food Lover's Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption by Ed Levine and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (2019)
SEPTEMBER Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet by Diana Rodgers (2020)
OCTOBER Slices of Life: A Food Writer Cooks through Many a Conundrum by Leah Eskin (2014)
NOVEMBER A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (1991)
DECEMBER Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Spain by Chris Stewart (2001)
Please join us via Zoom to discuss THE DEVIL’S CUP: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD ACCORDING TO COFFEE by Stewart Lee Allen (Ballantine Books, 2003) on MARCH 28 from 4:00- 5:30 p.m.
Watch your GFBC email for Zoom details and related announcements. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for reminders about the Good Food Book Club. THE DEVIL’S CUP is also available through your local library – or check the area’s local book stores, including BookPeople of Moscow, where Book Club members receive a discount.
For more information about the Good Food Book Club, visit www.moscowfood.coop/community-news.
January 2021
By Rachel Clark, Good Food Book Club Coordinator
Welcome to our second annual Good Food Book Club “Cookie Book Night.” With an eye to the momentous year that was 2020, this January of 2021 we’re taking a moment of rest; letting the field go fallow, if you will. And, we’ll use this time to cultivate the riches of our growth and learning of last year, take the turning of the wheel as a marker of new growth and new beginnings, and bring new books to the table for 2021. We’ll have a cookie night, via ZOOM.
For our January gathering, please bring book titles, cookies if you like, and most especially, your lovely warmth to our ZOOM gathering.
More specifically, please pick 2 or 3 relevant titles of books you want to read, and bring those to discuss. We’ll discuss these together, then we’ll decide on the next 11 books for 2021. Remember, the basic theme is “Good Food” but anything within range is fair game, especially now in the new world we all find ourselves in. We are picking for the New Year and post-pandemic era - what is already an entirely new time in human history as we see our food and other structural systems continue to change rapidly in so many ways, for so many reasons.
Please join us to make our 2021 book list on Sunday, January 31, 2021, by ZOOM, from 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. Watch your email for a reminder, ZOOM link, and instructions. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for reminders about the Good Food Book Club.
November 2020
By Rachel Clark, Co-op Volunteer Writer
Like Water for Chocolate: The magical comfort of food in grief & love
Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves ~ Laura Esquivel
Greetings in this season of drawing inward during the fall of 2020 and pandemic. We hope this finds you and yours safe, healthy, and well, and finding warmth and comfort in the ways that feed you most.
Our group had the opportunity to meet in person, masked and distanced, in East City Park in September. We revisited the purpose of the MFC Good Food Book Club, and we all agreed: We want to continue the club, via Zoom, through the winter months.
We also all agreed: We are here for fellowship and connection more than anything else in these times, so, if you want to join us and have not read the book PLEASE COME ANYWAY!!!
And as these things sometimes happen, the November book we picked a million years ago back in January, may be a perfect book to read right now. Now, in this time of increasing dark when all of us need more light, magic, and solace. We find ourselves in need of deep comfort together, while apart, in a moment that history will take a long time to make sense of.
AND I have good news. We will not only meet on Zoom to talk about November’s book – the now classic, Like Water for Chocolate by first-time Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel – we’ll also have a watch party together, for the movie! If you want to prepare food from the book for our dinner Zoom meeting and movie, please feel free to do so! If not, there is absolutely no pressure, none. Frozen TV dinners, popcorn, and peanut butter and jelly are all most welcome. Most of all, we gather to spend time together.
If you read Like Water for Chocolate a lifetime ago, it’s a landmark tale of magic, the power of love, family, food, passion, and much more. The book and writing were considered a marvel of culture and romance, in the way Esquivel lit the page on fire through her extraordinary use of recipes, language, and love. Like Water for Chocolate Like Water for Chocolate has sold more than four and a half million copies, and has been translated into 35 languages.
No spoilers from me; this is a reading experience much more fun without knowing what’s coming. For now, please mark your calendar for Sunday, November 29 at 5:00 pm. We will meet via Zoom, and will plan to talk together for about an hour, then I’ll show the movie at 6pm in a way that allows us to stay connected (either via Zoom or a different form of watch party.) Details to come later in the month, watch your email.
Please join us to discuss LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE by Laura Esquivel (Doubleday, 1992) on NOVEMBER 29 from 5:00-8:00 p.m. Watch your GFBC email for Zoom details and related announcements. Email bookclub@moscowfood.coop for reminders about the Good Food Book Club. LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE is also available through your local library – or check the area’s local book stores, including BookPeople of Moscow, where Book Club members receive a discount. For more information about the Good Food Book Club, visit moscowfood.coop/book-club.