Posts with Category Where Am I Eating

Unfortunately Ugly Produce Wins Hearts of French Consumers

Supermarkets checkout lines are filled with magazine covers of photoshopped, liposucked, and unnaturally enhanced specimens of biology and reality. But the unrealistic expectations in our supermarkets don’t  end there.

We like ’em big, round, smooth, and shiny. And of course now I’m talking about fruits and vegetables.

I love big beets and I cannot lie

 

Forty percent of food in the United States goes uneaten. This includes ugly fruits and lumpy vegetables. The cost to transporting food to our tables accounts for 10 percent of the U.S. energy budget, uses half of our land and 80 percent of the freshwater consumed. Yet, if a potato has an extra lump or an orange a strange phalange, they get tossed without a second thought.

More than 20 pounds of food per person is tossed every…

Read More >
 
6 comments

Cocoa Farmers Who’ve Never Tasted Chocolate – GASP!

The above video of cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast tasting chocolate for the first time has been making its rounds, and, in fact, has  been pointed out to me about eleventy thousand times already. (Seriously, thanks for thinking of me folks; I’m not complaining.)

Like the reporter in the video, I traveled to Ivory Coast to meet farmers and lugged along some chocolate. I assumed they had never eaten chocolate too and that I would blow their taste buds with Hershey bars and Hershey kisses.

I assumed wrong.

Here’s a video from my own experience followed by an excerpt from Where Am I Eating? An Adventure Through the Global Food Economy:

In much of the reporting on Ivorian chocolate, a reporter asks if…

Read More >
 
32 comments

John Oliver’s takedown of Dr. Oz is awesome

In WHERE AM I EATING? I came to Dr. Oz’s defense, but that doesn’t mean I’m a supporter of his. Dr. Oz pointed out that imported apple juice (2/3rds of which is from China) had high levels of arsenic. He was blasted because arsenic is natural in apples, but later vindicated by a Consumer Reports study that found high levels of inorganic arsenic from pesticides present in apple juice.

Dr. Oz for the win!

But as Oliver, points out, Dr. Oz is in the business of giving people what they want — magic pills and magic beans. And his snake oil salesman routine landed him in a congressional hearing.

Are you watching John Oliver’s new show Last Week Tonight?

We don’t get HBO,…

Read More >
 
3 comments

Winthrop University adopts EATING as Common Read!

Yes! I get to corrupt more freshmen! My evil plan to make people give a damn continues.

Winthrop University made the announcement in April:

ROCK HILL, S.C. – Winthrop University’s 2014-15 Common Book author will be a familiar name for much of the campus community. The selected reading is a second book, “Where Am I Eating,? by author Kelsey Timmerman. Winthrop’s previous Common Book was Timmerman’s “Where Am I Wearing?”


University College Dean Gloria Jones said she and members of Winthrop’s Common Book Committee wanted a book that focused on an issue of global concern. This year’s selection was food.
The book…

Read More >
 
3 comments

Ball State Sophomores, You should enter this contest!

Ball State University, in my hometown of Muncie, used WEARING as a freshman read last year, and this year they are using EATING. They are having a whole host of EATING related events, and on April 16th I’ll be on campus to speak at Pruis Hall.

 

WIN $500

 

In conjunction with all of these events, the Freshman Connections program is hosting an essay and video competition for sophomores. Here are all the details:

Description:
This contest is designed to provide students a platform to use creative video to demonstrate this year’s Freshman Connections theme, The Difference You Make, and the themes of the book Where Am I Eating? By Kelsey Timmerman, who will be visiting Ball State April 16, Pruis Hall, 7:30pm.

The short film and/ or essay…

Read More >
 
14 comments

Caffeine: Made in China?

Think your Coca-Cola is America’s nectar? Wrong!

I never really thought where caffeine came from (and I think about where stuff comes from a lot) until I heard Murray Carpenter on NPR this morning discussing his new book Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us.

Caffeine comes from plants and acts as an insecticide. So it can be natural, but most of the caffeine in soft drinks is produced in a factory, and the largest caffeine factory in the world is in…. China.

Carpenter described the factory he “got close to one”:

It was sketchy. It was not what I expected. It was sort of a run down industrial park.

I’m drinking caffeine right now, and you probably are too. Carpenter’s interview is worth a…

Read More >
 
Add a comment

Including an author in the common read experience

One of the coolest experiences I get to have as a storyteller is when one of my books gets used as a common reader in a community or as part of a first year experience on a campus.

When I started to get invites to common reading programs, I couldn’t believe it:

“You want me to visit with and speak to a few hundred or a few thousand folks who’ve read my book?”

That’s like the best day of an author’s life, right?

I enjoy diving deeper into a discussion with folks who’ve read my work, and exploring larger takeaways from multiple disciplines and perspectives. Participating in common reading programs has enhanced my understanding of my work. I’ve had the chance to talk with historians, philosophers, economists, and freshmen across the…

Read More >
 
1 comment

Why now is the time to start drinking Fair Trade coffee

Being a coffee farmer isn’t easy.

This was one of the thoughts racing through my head as I straddled a shivering coffee tree on a steep, crumbly volcanic mountainside in Colombia’s Narino district. However, mostly I was thinking: “Don’t die! Don’t die!”

The “grande Gringo” as I became known to my coffee farmer hosts did not fall to his death, but, following my visit, coffee prices did.

In 2012, while I traveled to Honduras and Colombia researching my latest book Where Am I Eating? An Adventure Through the Global Food Economy, the global price for a pound of coffee beans stood at $1.60 . By November of 2013, prices fell to $1.00 per pound a six-and-a-half year low.

When I read the reports, I couldn’t help…

Read More >
 
2 comments

Autographed copies of my books for Christmas

I’ve signed thousands of copies of my books over the past few years.  I’ve also signed a few arms, shirts, posters, and even a Kindle once.  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to folks wanting my scrawled signature in their books.

But since I love having autographed copies of books myself, and I’ve had a few recent requests for books for the holidays….

How to get an autographed copy of EATING or WEARING for Christmas!

Send me a copy of the book you want signed. Please include what you’d like me to write in the book and to whom I should address it. Also include the address where I should mail it. If you have the book sent directly from the book buyer, leave the address info in the comments section.

Mail…

Read More >
 
2 comments

Shutdown threatening our already questionable food security

Marion Nestle author of SAFE FOOD: The Politics of Food Safety writes that the American food system is “breathtaking in its irrationality: 35 separate laws administered by 12 agencies housed in 6 cabinet-level departments.” She calls the fact that more of us aren’t dropping over with food borne illnesses “nothing less than miraculous, a tribute more to our immune systems, the benefits of cooking and food preservation, and plain good luck than to federal oversight.”

I wrote about this in Where Am I Eating?

In 2001, the United State’s Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) inspected less than 1 percent of imported foods. After the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001, they doubled the amount of imported food inspected. But still in 2004 Tommy Thompson, the then…

Read More >
 
1 comment