This site is getting a makeover and should go live within a few days, in early August. Hopefully, all will go well and it won't have a blackout before then. Stay tuned.
July 27, 2014
July 15, 2014
In Search of a Perfect Loaf Gets Early Notice
Just under two months away from launch of In Search of a Perfect Loaf, reviews are starting to trickle in.
Here's what Library Journal had to say in a starred review (July 1, 2014):
*Fromartz, Samuel. In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker’s Odyssey. Viking. Sept. 2014. 256p. ISBN 9780670025619. $26.95. COOKING
Fromartz (Organic, Inc.) might push the boundaries of what it means to be an amateur baker. The author was, after all, asked by chef Alice Waters to bake the bread for a charity dinner she gave in Washington, DC, after winning a local contest against professional bakers. He’s a bread obsessive, and his exhaustive knowledge of the craft, history, and culture of bread making is on display here. This impressive work falls somewhere between a cookbook, an exploration of bread-baking techniques, and a history of bread. It’s thoroughly researched and engagingly written, and his dedication is inspiring. He uses careful description to impart to the reader something of a craft that can truly only be learned through practice. In addition to writing about his own experience, Fromartz has interviewed (and baked with) some of the biggest names in the bread business, including Chad Robertson of Tartine and bread historian Steven Kaplan. Even those who think they know bread will find something to gain here.
VERDICT: Highly recommended for those interested in food history, the evolution of artisan baking, and learning to make the perfect loaf at home. —Laura Krier, Sonoma State Univ., Rohnert Park, CA
April 04, 2014
Writing to the End
As a writer, I’ve often approached the written word through an instinctual and sometimes painful process. I’ve put a lot of currency into a kind of gut feeling of what works and what does not. But now as an editor, I’m working with younger writers. In many instances, I’ve had to think about what I actually do and how to convey it. So here are some tips to consider on getting your project done.
- Ideas are cheap—but don’t always go searching for the next one. You’ll ignore the ones you already have. Write everything down, pick one and proceed. I use the memo function in my smart phone to take notes. Many never get beyond the jot-down stage. Some do. Like this one on writing.
- Research—yet know when to stop. This is one of the hardest things in the process of writing non-fiction because research and interviewing can be endless. As a writer, I’ve worked with editors who wanted more and more research and then ended up discarding it all. But I think this endless research reflects an inability to see the story. For a writer, it can also stem from a fear of actually writing. As you learn more about your project, you should begin to see a narrative structure and that should inform your research. It forces you to ignore certain paths, avoid potential dead ends and pursue the questions you really need to answer, often with a lot of research.
- Sit down. Everyone says it takes 10,000 hours to become proficient at any craft and writing is no different. You actually need to write, in order to learn how to write. Early in my career, I read a lot of “how to write” books. Some were quite good, but I don’t think I remember one lesson from any of them. All the lessons I learned were from keeping my ass in the chair. When things are especially bad—whether due to distraction or procrastination — I turn on Freedom, an inexpensive software program that disconnects your computer from the Internet for a set amount of time. This tends to work.
- Pick a time of day to write. Many writers are most productive at certain times of the day. That’s true for me and that time usually starts at around 8:30 a.m. and goes until noon or so. As a staff reporter for a news agency, though, I also faced deadlines from 4:30-7 p.m. Years later, my body and mind engages in the early evening and I’m often quite productive at that time. You can tell people you’re booked during this particular period of the day (for some that isn’t a problem, if it’s in the middle of the night). Do your calls and emails in another window. That way, you’ll avoid constant interruption.
- Outline but don’t be a slave to it. I write outlines in essay form. Often, they start with a paragraph or two. Then, they grow and grow. I’ll get obsessed with a detail or explore tangents. Then I’ll pull back and consider the bigger picture. Sometimes this outline writing emerges fully formed and goes into the piece. I don’t obsess over what’s in the outline, because I’m trying to stay loose, almost free associate (more on this in another post). Nothing you write at this stage is wrong, though it might not end up in the final piece.
- At first, try not to care too much. Big projects are intimidating, especially at the beginning. One trick I use is to admit I don’t care what I write, because I know it’s going to be terrible. Since it’s going to be shit, I’m personally not invested in it. I don’t obsess about what other people think, or even what I may think. I can just write. You might surprise yourself and write five quick pages.
- Stop before you’re exhausted. Hemingway advised this:
Here’s another reason to stop before you get tired: if you don’t, you might make a really bad mistake. I’ve deleted text or reworked a day’s worth of writing at the end of the day, only to find the next morning that what I had previously written was much better. I had lost my judgment. I was too tired. So stop before you get to that point. Think about what you’ll do next. And then put your writing away and do something else.
March 28, 2014
October 29, 2013
Who cares about Danish Pork? Danes do, as "Borgen" spotlights the industry
Screen shot from Borgen, episode 24
For the past two years, I've been watching Borgen, a Danish television series which tracks a female politician who rises to become prime minister. The series is quite entertaining and actually addictive, since the stong-willed but principled leader is someone you could relate to: Season 1 began with her riding her bicycle to Parliament. It deals with the conflict of work and home life, and all the intrigue of multi-party politics.
I've only had access to Borgen online, at linkTV, careful to watch the shows in the two-week window after they air on cable. (Season 1
But I was very surprised by the most recent episode, in season 3, which took up the issue of Danish hog farming and the use of anibiotics in confined animal operations. Now, this is pretty wonky stuff in the US, and it hasn't made much headway in breaking out of food and policy circles. But in Denmark, industrial hog farming is obviously the stuff of television drama, including the memorable line from a farmer who says he doesn't eat the confined hogs he produces but rather the swine out back, in a field.
During the episode, when issues of antibiotic use and humane treatment of hogs break out in the media, a right wing politican who is also a hog farmer declares: "We make a product for the supermarket!" (You can almost hear the echoes of agribusinesses declaring, "We feed the world!"). The show had just featured this politician docking the tail of a baby pig. When he's questioned about these practices repeatedly, he finally bursts out: "We produce garbage because that's what people want to eat." But the show is not entirely one sided, and highlights the difficulties these farmers face.
We've got good television writers in the US, so David Simon (The Wire) please take note: there are great dramatic possibilities when it comes to food but this is about the best I've seen. Here's the link to episode (24), but it will expire online within a couple of weeks.
It makes for riviting television.
October 24, 2013
February 14, 2013
Heart Loaf
The crust crackled but the heart is fine. A pain de compagne with white, rye and whole wheat.
January 17, 2013
The warrior: a remembrance of Sol Yurick
Illustration: "Literary Lion in the Winter," by Dame Henriques
By Samuel Fromartz
Shortly after I heard from my mother that our close friend, the novelist Sol Yurick, had died at age 87, the obits began appearing. I was glad that Sol, the first serious writer I knew and a strong influence on me as a teenager, was getting recognition. But I was also chagrined that the obits almost exclusively focused on The Warriors, a work he wrote in 1965 about warring New York gangs based loosely on Xenophon’sAnabasis that went on to became a movie and cult hit. Sure, it was a fast read and his most popular work, filled with his requisite cast of rogues, misanthropes, disaffected youth and innocents but the gang bang work hardly defined Sol, who liked to remind people that he wrote it in all of three weeks. His more substantive novels that made a stir in the ‘60s and ‘70s—The Bag, Fertig, and his short story collection, Someone Just Like You—and his later works such as An Island Death, Richard A. and extended nonfiction essay, Metatron, were hardly considered though they defined Sol far more than the Warriors.
Taking Someone Just Like You down from my bookshelf after years of neglect, I’m impressed by the writing, though it’s hard for me to separate the work from the man. I can’t really judge his literary merit against the backdrop of the ‘60s. I’ll leave that to the Ph.Ds. I can just appreciate the words, like the opening of the short story, “The Annealing”:
She lived from day to day and didn’t much care which day it was. If she laughed once or twice, laughed big that day, she had it made. If she cried more than she laughed, she knew it wasn’t her day. Sometimes it wasn’t her day, not really, for weeks on end. Sometimes, with that liquor sloshing around in her, it was her day, her night, her everytime.
This is the sordid tale of a woman with five kids caught up in the welfare bureaucracy who becomes the victim of a state-employed psychiatrist. It’s related to his longer work, The Bag, which he felt was his best novel, and from the first words displays a richness that came from close observation. The only contemporary I can think of that’s mining a similar vein, with a dogged eye and compassion for the powerless, is the non-fiction writer Katherine Boo. Sol, though, was a trenchant critic of society, of capitalism, and of the ideology that underpinned it, and he often let his rage show. As the novelist Brian Morton wrote in The Nation back in 1983: “Yurick has always been fascinated by the myths that mask relations of power and prevent a dominated population from understanding its condition. His novels are filled with deluded true believers, passionate adherents of ideologies that leave them incapable of seeing what’s in front of their eyes.”
Fertig, which caught the eye of actor Alec Baldwin, was also made into a movie, “The Confession.” The book tells the story of a father whose son died because of medical neglect in the ER. Driven to despair and then rage, Fertig turns on the doctors and administrators to eke out his revenge. But the movie twisted the story, which was really too bad, because Sol was three or four decades ahead with this tale of an out-of-control medical system that could cause a person to snap.
If Sol targeted malevolent institutions, he also had no patience for poseurs, especially the literati, who traded on their name and access. In a scathing February 7, 1966 Nation review of Truman Capote’s celebrated novel In Cold Blood, he skewered the myth that Capote had created a new “art form” with the non-fiction novel. “Like the newspaper approach,” he wrote, “the poverty of Capote’s ‘new’ art form is appalling, the shallowness stupefying…. A work of art should, presumably, continue to shape our easy acceptance of the world, make us see in new ways, create new metaphors with which to view the world; new art should go beyond engineered reality.”
By the 1980s, he had largely left fiction writing behind. His interests focused on history, metaphysics, cybernetics, genetics, mythology and the information economy, bringing this into a long theoretical work, Burning, that took him a decade to write and ran to more than 1,000 pages, as I recall. I heard a lot about it while I was away at college, but never read it. “Parts of it were brilliant,” said Ron Hunnings, a close friend of Sol’s (and my brother-in-law) who often met him in Village cafes. Sol spun off a portion into Metatron, but the bulk of it never was published, and I think that took a toll on his psyche. Part of this may have been due to the wide scope and density of his thinking, which could not be compartmentalized. As his friend, Robert Shapiro, a computer scientist, told me, “Sol had a totally different take on things. Whether it was Marxism, Darwinism, Greek mythology, or Jewish mysticism, he was always interconnecting things at so many different levels.”
This had its costs. Morton says in his review of Metatron: “At times all this makes-for forbidding reading. At times, too, Yurick ascends into regions of abstraction where I can’t follow … I lose him in the mists.” He wasn’t alone. We all had a hard time, because Sol’s writing—and thinking—was at times akin to free-jazz improvisation, the Ornette Coleman of the non-fiction essay. When it worked, it really worked. But sometimes you just had to give the musician time to find his way.
Because of his wide swath of interests, it would be inaccurate to peg him as a Marxist or anything else—sitting at his oak kitchen table on Garfield Place in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, the ever-present pot of coffee on the stove, the three cats lounging on the parquet floor, the hand-rolled cigarette-making machine nearby, he railed against the powers that be, whether political, bureaucratic, literary, military-industrial, scientific or misguided leftist. In the past few years, he reserved a few choice digs for the pragmatic Obama. In this respect, he was closer to Groucho than Karl Marx: he wouldn’t belong to any club that would have him as a member (PEN was the exception). I even recall one time, when The Nation failed to cut him a check in a timely manner, he exclaimed—“the gonifs!” To which his wife Adrienne would inevitably say, “Oh, Sol, stop it.” He would just smirk.
But the lack of money was a perennial problem and I saw it close hand, for years, especially as Park Slope gentrified and rents got out of reach. The family actually moved into my mother’s house on the Flatbush side of the Prospect Park, when she left for Japan on a Fulbright fellowship. From there, they moved again to a brownstone on Lincoln Road, helped out by close friends who bought the house and rented it to them. Sol’s living example of the writing life was a cautionary tale, so when I chose to do “something with writing” post-grad school, I sought a job on a reporting beat that I knew would always attract a pay check: business. Plus, I had an inherent interest in economic arcana (maybe that was influenced by Sol, too). When I later turned to food and agriculture, Sol had a lot to say, though it was often on the Biblical and historical echoes to contemporary agro-ecological concerns.
During this prolonged period of infrequently published work, The Warriors kept popping up, with the attendant out-of-the-blue interview requests, but despite the delight he got in its cult status, it did not mean a lot more to him. He often referred to it as a “pot boiler,” and sell it did. The book was amazing, really. After the movie brought the novel back to light in 1979, it was reissued time and again; then there were the video games based on it, as well as action figures, memorabilia, comic book, fan web site and still another planned remake of the movie. Over this past Thanksgiving, Sol mentioned that a British production company had optioned it for a musical. The Warriors on stage with singers and dancers! He would have liked to make the London premier, but it was probably all well and good: it would just be another opportunity to rail at a remake. Aside from the Warrior royalties, which trickled in for four decades, Adrienne supported them and then family money finally came their way. After years of just making ends meet, they no longer had to worry about the bills.
I sensed that he mellowed in his final years. Was it his close family and friends, an especially animated grandson? He still raged at the machine, but the deep bitterness, the sting, seemed gone. Mostly I remember him enjoying his bagels and lox on Sunday morning, or the lucious Grand Marnier mousse his daughter Susanna made without fail for Thanksgiving dinner. He ate three or four of those rich desserts at the last gathering. “And why not?” he’d say. Why not, indeed. He had his way until the end. He still spit out the outrageous statement, never one to shirk from intellectual shock value. And while he talked about his writing, it had been years since he had published anything. I sensed that he had lost interest in the whole process of editors and publishing companies, though he still shared his work with friends.
Last year, he sent me an unfinished piece, “A Meditation on the Theories of Accounting,” which revisited his critique of In Cold Blood, putting the murder story of the farm family in the much wider context of, to grossly simplify, industrial agriculture. The essay, like much of his work, doubled back on itself and has digression upon digression. I recognize the ideas, and the approach: he’s trying to change the context of In Cold Blood to illuminate it; to see how by using a wider lens he can reinterpret “fact.”
Perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do too, having read the obits. He had thought a lot about storytelling, so wouldn’t be surprised. In 2011, he wrote this in an unpublished piece:
Zig zag, that’s how memory-retrieval works. Significant events get distorted when looked at through time’s and ideologies’ truth-bending lenses, like light traveling through curved space. Indeed nothing is straight in our universe, other than the idealistic paths of logic and mathematics. And while traumatic events become etched in the very synaptic spaces, events of no significance also remain. And dreams – eruptions from the mysterious realm of the unconscious which, as Freud would have it, knows everything – become mixed with scenes from books read, films, paintings, etc., compounded into a soup that includes excerpts from history, as well as religious and secular mythologies. Add to this that no story – technology notwithstanding – can be told again in exactly the same way. For each time we return to a memorable moment, be it individual or collective, or a mix, we are in a different context and this alters the story.
One of the last photos I have of him is sitting on the couch with a three-year-old niece, who had decided that Sol was now her best friend. They made an unlikely pair. Sol, with his deep, dark eye sockets and serious mien. Elina, with her kind, innocent smile. Before going to bed that day, Elina asked her parents to make sure they invited Sol to her birthday party. We all got a chuckle out of that because she didn’t mention anyone else. Though he promised to come, Sol died too soon. Maybe she saw something in him so many others missed.
December 06, 2012
July 20, 2012
Cantaloupe from the garden, after three attempts
For the past three years, I've tried to grow cantaloupe in my community garden plot in Washington, DC.
The first two years, I planted my seeds in late May or early June and then transplanted the plants to the garden a few weeks later. All would go well. The vines would spread on the ground, the flowers would appear, the bees would show up to help pollinate the plants, and then I'd see tiny fruit. The fruit would get bigger and bigger -- and then, I'd leave for vacation in August.
Once, I picked the fruit while still green hoping that it would ripen fully on the trip. It tasted awful. But when I left the fruit to ripen on the vine, the melons were usually half eaten by the time I returned. After all, these melons were extremely fragrant. If I were a rodent prowling the neighborhood, I'd want a bite too.
This year, I took a different approach. I planted the seeds in early April, and transplanted the seedlings in May, under row cover for warmth. I began to get fruit by June. By July, when DC was basking in 100-plus temperatures, everything was humming.
Then I went to extreme measures. I bought a solar powered owl
- Samuel Fromartz
July 18, 2012
What's the link between bladder infections, CAFOs and Missouri farmers?
I want to highlight a couple of stories we recently produced at the Food & Environment Reporting Network (@FERNnews on Twitter), where I serve as editor in chief. I'm pointing them out because I'm particularly proud of these stories and they took some time to come to fruition.
The first, which appeared last week in a joint investigation with ABC News was reported by Maryn McKenna, a brilliant science journalist who focuses on nasty microbes (check out her recent book Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA). This past spring, she told me she had come across a number of studies that genetically linked the microbes in antibiotic-resistant bladder infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in chicken. I immediately sensed there was a good story here, because bladder infections affect, as the story points out, one-in-seven women.
What was new, Maryn told me, was that the number of antibiotic resistant infections appeared to be rising, at least based on anecdotal medical evidence, since they are not officially tracked. Secondly, there was this curious link to the microbes in chicken, which develop resistance because chicken are fed antibiotics to promote growth and prevent illness. (For a more in-depth look at this issue, read Maryn's story FERN produced in collaboration with The Atlantic.)
Although the researchers had, in effect, genetically fingerprinted the bacteria, the question arose whether chicken causes the infections. The researchers assert that chicken are a likely and important source of these highly resistant infections, although as Maryn points out, establishing that in a scientific experiment would be unethical because it would risk infecting healthy subjects with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The chicken council also issued a press release questioning the link and we quoted these scientists in the Atlantic item mentioned above.
The second story, "Whose Side Is the Farm Bureau On?", which ran at The Nation, concerned the big agricultural lobby (and insurance firm) known as the Farm Bureau. The Farm Bureau puts itself forward as the voice of family farmers but reporter Ian Shearn, a Pulitizer Prize winner, focused on a case in Missouri that showed how the bureau actually operates. When giant CAFOs were polluting the waters around small farms, not only did the bureau support the CAFOs, but it pushed for state legislation that would limit civil suits against such operations. Those suits were being filed by small farmers.
Unlike Maryn's health story, Ian's focused on farmers, but the link between both of them were the practices of concentrated animal operations. While these operations produce plentiful and inexpensive food, they have costs that ripple through society -- whether in being the likely source of recurrent bladder infections commonly suffered by women or in the pollution suffered by Missouri farmers. In short, these stories put a cost on cheap food.
- Samuel Fromartz
Here's the video from the joint investigation between FERN and ABC News.
June 18, 2012
May 24, 2012
Baking baguettes - the Afar article
For those who missed it when it came out in the premier issue of Afar, the magazine has now posted my article on baking baguettes with the winner of the Grand Prix de la Baguette de la Ville de Paris. (This then led to a baguette competition back home and my winning recipe -- which can be demanding). Here's how the article, Time to Rise, opens:
In Paris, the 9th arrondissement is popular, hip even, dotted with wine shops, boutiques, and boulangeries, but still has the close-knit feel of a residential neighborhood. The streets are lined with old apartment buildings that seem to lean onto the sidewalks. Inside intimate bistros on these quiet, narrow lanes, maître d’s chat with locals as they arrive. One Sunday afternoon last winter, when I visited, the streets were crowded with couples and families out for a leisurely stroll. By 3 a.m. the next day, however, Rue des Martyrs, a main artery in the district, was empty, the stores dark except for a slit of light coming out of the side entrance of the Boulangerie Arnaud Delmontel. Everyone was still asleep. Everyone, that is, except for the bakers—whose ranks I was about to join.
Over the centuries, how many bakers have walked Paris’s dark avenues at night, heading to the fournils—baking rooms—to provide the city’s daily bread? In the 18th and 19th centuries, les geindres (the groaners) began before midnight, each laboring over hundreds of pounds of dough that they kneaded by hand and baked in basement wood-fired ovens. The poorest slept by the hearth, inhaling flour and often suffering from tuberculosis. Yet many did their jobs superbly, faithful to the demanding task of coaxing bread out of levain, or sourdough—a process that took days. As I walked toward the bakery that morning, I felt as if I were following in the footsteps of ghosts.... (read the rest)
- Samuel Fromartz
May 22, 2012
Is American agriculture really efficient?
Last week, I attended the Sustainable Foods Institute, hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. As in the past, the session-packed affair of panels and keynotes did not disappoint, even though the outlook -- for fisheries, for food production, for humanity in general -- was pretty sobering.
Among the speakers was Jonathan Foley, a professor of ecology and director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Minnesota. He gave a big picture view, noting that agriculture is not only the single biggest factor in global warming but obviously crucial to feeding a growing world. If there was one surprising takeaway, it was that the highly efficient machine of American agriculture -- and modern agriculture in general -- doesn't measure up to the hype. As Foley stated, "yields from the Green Revolution have stagnated and what we're doing isn't sustainable anyway."
This discussion of how to feed the world often begins and ends with the question of whether we're maximizing crop production per acre of land -- something American farmers do quite well. But what yield doesn't tell us is whether that land could be used even more efficiently to produce more calories of food. Foley pointed out that crops such as corn and soybeans which are then fed to livestock -- or cars -- amount to a grossly inefficient use of land resources. "The elephant in the room is the cow," was the way he put it.
Measured this way, it takes 32 pounds of corn to produce a pound of fillet mignon -- a 3% conversion rate of the calories in feed. (He specified that he was talking about muscle meat, not the leftover parts of the animal that are rendered.) What happens to the other 97% of the calories? It is wasted by this grossly inefficient calorie producer -- the cow. Only 15% of the the Midwest's grains are consumed by humans. "We throw away five-sixths of what we grow," he said. This isn't a rap on farmers, for they are doing precisely what the market or government signals them to do and are quite good at it. The question Folely was raising was whether the entire aparatus is the best way to produce calories for growing populations on a finate amount of land.
Now, I have, on occassion, enjoyed a good steak, but if was clear from his presentation that if the world feasted on steak, as growing numbers of people are doing, there would not be much of a world left. (He also noted that this equation would be different for a cow raised on pasture, since forage grasses cannot be directly consumed by humans. The measurements were less dire for dairy, eggs and poultry which are more efficient at converting feed to calories.)
While farmers and researchers focus on improving yield, the entire equation is actually stacked against the efficient use of land because the process in the end is so wasteful. He noted that 10 percent of the world's cropland is in GMOs and yet even those yields have stagnated. And since these crops grow animal feed (corn and soybeans) and fiber (cotton), "they're not feeding the world's poor," he said.
Water is another wasted resource, with the differences in efficiency between Israel and India differing by 100-fold. Recall that highly efficient modern drip irrigation was developed in Israel because water is such a scarce resource.
Foley also noted that organic farming still represented a minute fraction of agricultural production, and suggested a middle way in which organic methods would be used but augmented by targeted use of chemical inputs, not unlike taking medicine when you're sick. The better path is to stay healthy, only relying on medicine when needed. He likened the modern model of agriculture to a constant IV drip, an apt metaphore considering the use of sub-therapeutic antibiotics in animal feed.
"I want organic to be the default farming method if we can pull it off," he said, but he noted that no one has a monopoly on the discussion. Useful solutions will have to come from both conventional and organic methods (which I've seen in the adaptation of organic methods by conventional farmers because they can be cheap and effective).
The bigger issue, though, is that forests are being razed to grow crops, especially in Brazil and Indonesia. This burning of forests is by far the greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions that agriculture emits -- and agriculture alone accounts for 30-40% of greenhouse gasses. Transport of food doesn't even come close. If this land is then used to grow soybeans, as it is in Brazil, these dramatic emissions are created in order to feed this inefficient livestock machine, which is another potent contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
So what might be a better use of land?
"Potatoes," said Charles Mann, the author of 1491 and its sequel, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
If Foley, though, was implicitly pointing to a more vegetarian diet, he did not explain how we would get there. That he gave us only two decades to fix the current dire state also left me scratching my head about how such rapid change could be achieved. I doubt whether people with the money will forgo a steak for a potato (they tend to want both), unless there is a dramatic reworking of incentives. But it was clear from Foley's talk that those sorts of cultural changes -- rather than simple agricultural science aimed at boosting yield -- will need to be part of the equation. "The choice is between the world we've had and the world that should be," he said. But he left open the question of how we will actually get there.
- Samuel Fromartz
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