Jervis - Cook Food: a Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating

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Praise for Cook Food
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Overwhelmed by all the politics on your plate? Paralyzed by guilt every time you shop for food? In this delectable guide, Lisa Jervis shows not just how easy it can be to eat with your conscience and with the planet, but also how cheap, how swift, and how delightful it is to feel at home in the kitchen. Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battlefor the World Food System

With a heavy emphasis on local and unprocessed eating, Cook Food will help you overcome your hesitations about going veg or passing on the vegan bologna. A great resource for those stepping into the kitchen for the first time and vegetarians who want to go the distance to make this a healthier planet. Siue Moffat, author of Lickin the Beaters: Low FatVegan Desserts

Want an opportunity to make the world better several times a day? Learn to feed yourself using the rational, witty, simple, and ethical guidelines in Lisa Jerviss manual, Cook Food. Its the Dennis Kucinich of cookbooks: petite, political, powerful, with a profound lack of b.s. Read it and eat. Jennifer Baumgardner, coauthor of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism,and the Future and author of Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics.

Cook Food is equal parts inspiration, call to arms, cooking school, and guide to making everything more yummy. It also demonstrates, powerfully, how to marry important ideals about food with the realities of day-to-day living. Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, author of Surprised By God:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion

Finally! A thoroughly smart and useful book on the topic of food and social justice that fat people (and people of all sizes) can enjoy. Lisa offers so very many good, convincing reasons to make a smaller footprint that its clear we can discard as unnecessary all of those arguments made on the backs of fat people. Thank you, Lisa, for a delicious, truly cruelty-free book! Marilyn Wann, author of FAT!SO?Because You Dont Have toApologize for Your Size!

Lisa Jerviss head, heart, and taste buds are all so exactly in the right place, and reading Cook Food is like having her in your kitchen with you. This book feels like a strong, sane, healthy, funny friend, chatting with you while you cook and saying try a pinch of that. It may well prove to be just the kind of companionship people need in order to make that step toward really changing the way they shop, cook, eat, and think about food. Thisbe Nissen, author of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook and OspreyIsland

With good humor and a level head, this little treatise strips the elitism and the nutrition-fascism out of fresh, honest, vegetable-centric food, and offers robust, immensely usable recipes to teach and inspire both the whole-foods newbie and the experienced cook. Hanne Blank, author of Virgin: The Untouched History and Unruly Appetites

Lisa Jervis has convinced me that I can be a great cook. We cant come close to being perfect when it comes to preserving the planet or our health, but this persuasive, friendly, and usable book gives us the impetus to be the best we can. We cant change the world overnight, but we can change our eating habits. Amy Richards, author of Opting In: Having A ChildWithout Losing Yourself and cofounder of Third Wave Foundation.

Cook Food is an informative, accessible, and downright fun guide to cooking healthily, locally, and responsibly. In addition to the many tasty recipes, Lisa Jervis demystifies the kitchen experience by explaining basic cooking tools and techniques, and encouraging improvisation. A must-have for progressive-minded foodies everywhere! Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoatingof Femininity

Sure, I appreciate a cookbook with a social conscience. Plus, on a very practical level, Cook Food is just useful to have around. But, hands down, I most value this book for its sense of flavor. Lisa Jervis serves up simple yet sophisticated taste combinations with a global flare that make it easyand even funto do the right thing with ones diet. Paula Kamen, author of Feminist Fatale and Finding Iris Chang

Cook Food

a manualfesto for
easy, healthy, local eating

Lisa Jervis

Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating
By Lisa Jervis

ISBN: 978-1-60486-073-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2009901376
Copyright 2009 Lisa Jervis
This edition copyright 2009 PM Press
All Rights Reserved

PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org

Book & cover design by Benjamin Shaykin
Author photo by Drew Beck
Printed in the USA on recycled paper.

to my mother
.................

who taught me how to be at home in the kitchen

contents

what you need in your cabinets
and on your pot rack

what you need in your pantry,
refrigerator, and spice rack

(a.k.a., introduction)

IN A NUTSHELL , THIS BOOK IS AN ATTEMPT TO MAKE LIFE easier for people who want to cook and eat healthy homemade food without spending a ton of time and money. But thats not all it is.

It could also be described as an attempt to provide some basic tools for people who want to be healthier and lighten the footprint of the way they eat by emphasizing whole foods (meaning unprocessed things, not the union-busting grocery chain), local ingredients, and cooking without animal products.

It could be seen as a call to action against our wasteful, unjust, destructive, unhealthy, industrialized, corporate-dominated food system (with recipes).

It could just be a vegan-friendly cookbook. Or a quick-cooking cookbook. Or an improvisational cookbook. Or a farmers market cookbook.

Or an overly complicated way to get my friends to stop asking me to tell them how I made the dinner were eating.

To synthesize all those things, this book is a short, quirky education in simple cooking; healthy, light-footprint eating; and the politics of food.

It is also, and I cant stress this enough, totally flexible. All the recipes are approximate (except the two for baked goods, cause though the flavors in there are substitutable, the proportions of flour, oil, etc. are not). If youre not crazy about any ingredient or flavor, use less of it than I call for (or eliminate it altogether). If you love it, use more. If you like an ingredient or flavor that I dont call for, and you think it would be good in whatever is it youre making, throw it on in there. If theres a vegetable listed that you dont have in the house, but you do have something else, make a swap. Experiment, try new things, make the recipes your own. Cooking is about principles and techniques, not rigid ingredients and directions. Trust your instincts. If youve done any amount of cooking beforeor even if you havent, because, no matter what, youve doubtless done plenty of eatingyou already have a sense of whatll be good. Something as simple as your knowledge of what you like to eat, combined with the simple tools in this book (see Tips and Techniques, ) will guide you to a good meal with any ingredients and flavors you like.

So what does that mean, healthy, light-footprint eating?

The concept of a light footprint is one I stole from other sustainability conversations because I think it most accurately describes what Im aiming for with my food choices, which cant be adequately or accurately described with words like vegan or vegetarian. Basically, Im trying to be as healthy as I can and minimize my negative impact on the environment and on other beings. So I try to choose foods that are locally produced, minimally packaged, minimally processed, and organic whenever possible. I avoid sweets and junk food (most of the timeIm only human, after all). I source my animal products very carefully. Its a lot easier to say Im a healthy, light-footprint eater than it is to say Well, I try to avoid white flour, refined sugar, and hydrogenated things; I buy a huge percentage of my food at the farmers market; and although Im not vegetarian or vegan I stay away from animal products unless I know where they came from and under what conditions the animals lived. Because I buy almost all my fruits and vegetables at the farmers market, Im always eating in season, and everything else (grains, tofu, nuts, spices, beans, etc.) comes from a local independent grocery store with a great bulk section.