Tracie McMillan Plenty • June 29, 2007
“All right, when you’re starting your seedlings, you don’t need to go buy those trays, right?” Ashley Atkinson, a bespectacled and freckled 29-year-old, is quickly wrapping a piece of newspaper around a bottle of water, talking to a dozen tables of Detroiters eating through a potluck dinner as she works. “Because what are those trays made out of?”
The room chuckles: “Plastic!”
City Limits • June 25, 2007
Thousands of workers in New York City – from payroll staff in high-end restaurants to undocumented immigrants helping to build new housing – aren’t earning minimum wage or overtime pay, a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice has found.
In addition to minimum wage and overtime violations – researchers found the latter so common in most of the restaurant industry as to render overtime pay “purely optional” – researchers identified a string of other common violations. In interviews with 326 workers, employers, agency officials and advocates conducted between 2003 and 2006, researchers found consistent problems ranging from slippery floors and unpaid meal breaks to outright human trafficking.
Plenty • June/July 2007
With her rare mix of storytelling skills and a social conscience, best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver has built a career on the premise that a well-told story can move mountains. Her latest effort, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, tells an entirely new tale: her own. Spun around her family’s move to Virginia and their subsequent decision to eat only foods grown and raised in their county—including their own farm—Animal marries Kingsolver’s narrative gifts with reported essays from her husband, biologist Steven Hopp, and recipes from her then-19-year-old daughter, Camille. Plenty caught up with Kingsolver to talk about the local food movement, taking your dinner seriously, and why eating well is for everyone—not just the elite.
Plenty • June/July 2007
With her rare mix of storytelling skills and a social conscience, best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver has built a career on the premise that a well-told story can move mountains. Her latest effort, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, tells an entirely new tale: her own. Spun around her family’s move to Virginia and their subsequent decision to eat only foods grown and raised in their county—including their own farm—Animal marries Kingsolver’s narrative gifts with reported essays from her husband, biologist Steven Hopp, and recipes from her then-19-year-old daughter, Camille. Plenty caught up with Kingsolver to talk about the local food movement, taking your dinner seriously, and why eating well is for everyone—not just the elite.
Saveur • June/July 2007
The novelist Barbara Kingsolver, whose latest book is a memoir-cum-treatise that documents a year during which she and her family grew almost all their own food or purchased it from farms nearby, is not the first writer to note that Americans tend to approach eating more as distracted consumers than as participants in a natural process. Indeed, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle joins a growing canon of food-based personal chronicles and social critiques, and it will inevitably yield comparisons with Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press, 2006), which chronicles his own DIY quest.
Plenty • June/August 2007
There’s a subtle irony embedded in our current national craving for locally grown food: Cities, the antithesis of the countryside, have arguably become the easiest place to indulge it. The rise of farmers’ markets and buying clubs has transformed urban food possibilities and the economic viability of small American farmers. It’s a radical shift, and one driven not by market forces or government, but by the work of a burgeoning cadre of activists from coast to coast. Driven by the belief that everyone should have access to fresh, local food, these visionaries are changing the contents of city shoppers’ carts from Philadelphia’s tony Society Hill to the gritty edges of Oakland, California. Enjoy!
The American Prospect • May 17, 2007
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, with Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp (HarperCollins, 384 pages)
On a spring morning several years ago, I made a final visit to a politicized cooking class for New York City public high school students. During earlier visits, I had watched teachers promulgate a body of then-eccentric ideas about food: the benefits of local and organic produce; the dangers of a diet based on McDonald’s; the environmental destruction wrought by conventional agriculture. During those initial visits, the teens handily dismissed their lessons. One young man, after declaring his love for daily visits to McDonald’s, declared simply, “I’m not going to change what I eat.”
Daily Intelligencer • April 24, 2007
It’s nerve-racking enough to find a nanny in this city — well, at least so we’re told — and now it seems you can’t even trust the agencies that are supposed to help ease the process. The City Council released a study last week showing that about half the nanny agencies surveyed break the law: A four-month survey of 37 out of the city’s 52 nanny agencies (as well as interviews with a handful of nannies) turned up infractions running from the bureaucratic (leaving license numbers off public advertisements) to the dubious (overcharging both parents and nannies for services; operating without a license).
Daily Intelligencer • April 18, 2007
New York State has a new record-low welfare enrollment. There were 541,503 on the dole at the end of February, the lowest number since 1963, as state welfare officials announced neatly in sync with tax day. While the city has been posting similar trends for the last several years, this marks the state’s first big milestone. The state secret? In addition to benefiting from welfare shrinkage in the five boroughs — the city makes up the bulk of the state’s welfare cases — state officials are pointing to $665 million paid out via the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, which is available to working poor filing federal or state taxes, plus a new state credit for low-income, non-custodial parents up-to-date on child support.
The Huffington Post • April 17, 2007
It’s common knowledge that tax day inspires a nationwide grumble, but it’s beginning to be known for bringing annual cheers from the country’s working poor. In recent years, the Earned Income Tax Credit–a stealth antipoverty program with broad bipartisan support–has become one of the country’s most successful efforts to help the poor: Last tax year, the EITC put $41.4 billion into the pockets of workers who earn too little to get by, more than we ever spent on welfare. That work-first hook has made the program a bipartisan favorite, but a closer look suggests that the EITC isn’t the panacea its often touted to be.
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