Baking day

I last baked bread for myself sometime in elementary or middle school…about 20 years ago, unbelievably.  (The church I grew up in used to be small enough that we always had homemade bread for communion, which I made once, and also once or twice for school projects.)  But somehow I’ve kept finding myself badly craving the feeling of kneading bread dough, or the need to make something incredibly intense with my hands, the past couple weeks.  So with an unexpected whole day off today, I made some bread.

It felt as incredibly good as I’d been missing.  I’d also forgotten how much I love the smell of the yeast in rising dough.

I made some thyme butter to go with it.  The second loaf is going to make incredible French toast next week.

I fear I could get addicted to this.

About that apple cranberry sauce from last night…

I’m blushing a bit that this was the hit that apparently it was at last night’s Harvest Celebration potluck.  A few people asked me for the recipe, so here it is! (Not being a closely guarded national secret or anything.)

2 tablespoons butter*
4 smallish apples, sliced
1 bag cranberries (12-16 ounces)
1 cup liquid (I used a mix of water and some pomegranate juice drink I wouldn’t normally have bought, but had leftover from Hurricane Sandy preparations.)**
2/3 cup sugar
Spices (cardamom, cinnamon, Chinese Five Spice, black pepper)

Wash the cranberries and pick out the bad ones.  In a saucepan, melt the butter over low-medium heat.  Add apples and cook till fairly tender, but not falling apart.  Add water and bring to a low boil.  Add sugar slowly and stir till dissolved.  Add cranberries.  When the liquid returns to a low boil, the cranberries will start to pop, and the apple slices are probably starting to fall apart by this time, too.  Continue simmering and stirring until liquid is mostly cooked off and cranberries are all exploded.  Spice as desired.  (I used a dash of cinnamon, about 1/2 teaspoon cardamom, 1/2 teaspoon Chinese Five Spice, and a lot of black pepper.  I don’t know how much, but I like black pepper.)  Let stand and cool for about half an hour.

And even though I ate so much last night that it literally hurt to breathe, I am now going to make another batch of this just for me.

*This recipe is not vegan but could easily be made so.  I think the butter adds a depth of flavor that I like, but you could probably use olive oil, grapeseed oil, or vegan butter substitute with good results.

**I wish I could tell you that it’s worth using wine in place of water for the liquid in this recipe…but it’s pretty much not.  I’ve tried with both red and white.  Most of the liquid boils off in cooking, and the flavor is really lost under the intensity of the cranberries.  Save your wine for making other recipes inappropriately boozy.

Pumpkin chowder

The end of actual summer tends to be slightly preceded every year by me getting literally bored of eating summer fruits and vegetables, falling into a malaise in which I can’t even figure out what to eat, and then developing a craving for large, serious squash.

I was inspired to try this for the first time last year, when I was in a similar mood and craving a hot, thick soup, and thought first that I’d try my hand at potato soup or potato chowder.  I can’t say where the inspiration came from to make it pumpkin instead, but I thought of Barbara Kingsolver’s lamentation in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, that in most recipes involving pumpkin these days, the recipe will call for one 15-ounce can of pumpkin.  No one knows how to hack up a large vegetable to eat rather than use for decoration anymore.

I asked advice of a couple friends, followed some of it, and setting forth without recipe, hacked up a pumpkin.

We’ve been enjoying a crisp, lovely fall in NYC, and so I made this for the second time last week, refining my technique slightly from my first experience.  (Protip: using the food processor for this is not worth it.)

You will need:

A large stock pot
One smallish cooking pumpkin
One or two large onions, sliced
One large white potato, or 3 or 4 small red potatoes, diced
About 4 cups chicken stock (I make a batch from the leftovers every time I roast a chicken, so I always have some in the freezer and don’t have to buy it.)
Half a stick or so of butter.  Or more.  Usually more, in my case.
A couple tablespoons olive oil
A couple tablespoons flour
About half a pint of half and half or heavy cream

1. Preheat the oven to 400.  With a sharp, sturdy knife, cut the pumpkin in half.  Scoop out the seeds, and cut the halves in half again.

I always forget how long that part takes.

2.  Put the quartered pumpkin sections on a baking sheet and rub with olive oil.

And put into the oven.  Roast till tender and starting to caramelize, probably around an hour.

3.  When the pumpkin is cool enough to handle, scoop the flesh out of the skins and shred well with a fork.  It should be soft enough that this is fairly easy.  (This is where I discarded advice to use a food processor, which I tried my first time through, and made a mess.)

5.  In the stock pot, melt the butter, and sauté about half the onions until tender.  Move the onions off to one side, add the flour to the butter, and whisk until it’s incorporated.  This creates a roux that will help the soup thicken later.

6.  Now add the chicken stock and bring to a low boil.  Add the diced potatoes and cook till those are tender.

And now start adding the pumpkin, in small amounts at a time, cooking till each addition is incorporated.  It’ll disintegrate a good bit as it cooks, but I like it to keep some of its rough, shredded texture.  I’ve wound up only using about half the cooked pumpkin in the chowder, and saving the other half for use in other delicious baked things.

Add the rest of the sliced onions, and cook till tender.  Add salt to taste.

7. Turn the heat down so the pumpkin-y broth at this point is just simmering, and slowly add and stir in the cream.  Cook on low heat–don’t boil–until the chowder is heated through.  More salt and pepper to taste.

And I garnished mine with fresh thyme.

It’s fabulous with some toasted crusty bread and glass of white wine, and presidential debates or Doctor Who on television.

Seeking website designer for a project of passion

Dear friends and readers,

A friend of mine, Salvador Speights, who might be the most brilliant person where food is concerned that I know, is in the beginning processes of launching a podcast project based on food culture and politics, and we are seeking all sorts of people who might be interested in lending a hand, but most importantly at the moment, a website designer.  Read more:

I am creating a podcast with the ultimate goal of transitioning to radio. I am looking for creative, passionate people to help lift this project off the ground. We currently have a budget of $200 dollars, but we will be actively fundraising. I need people who are willing to invest their time into the project to build it up to a place where we can start to earn money. Until then, this project will operate on a volunteer basis. I need sound engineers, writers, producers, and web designers. The podcasts will explore contemporary issues regarding food stories. For example, the first podcast will be titled First Meal and it will be discussing the importance of milk, the issues evolving around industrial dairy farming verses alternative dairy, as well as investigating the raw milk debate. We will host interviews with new and expectant mothers regarding breast feeding and the emotional connection created with their child via mother’s milk. Other podcasts will include, but are not limited to, politics, economics, popular culture – how do these transitory climates interact with our permanent necessity for food and sustenance? Each individual podcast will explore topics of food regulation and legislation, agriculture, personal stories and more. If you fit the creative, passionate, food lover we represent.

If anyone’s interested in getting involved (particularly with website design/building!), or knows someone who might be, please get in touch with me, or the Facebook page of the Alvarado School for Sustainability and Community Development.

Thanks, and hope you all are having a happy holiday season!

Winter Food

I’ve been looking forward to fall and winter this year.  I’ve been craving cool, damp, blustery weather.

I love it when the nighttime temperatures start dipping low enough, usually in October, to justify making my favorite warm and filling wintertime meal: stuffed acorn squash.  This year it happened about a week ago, right before I started tech rehearsal for the current show, so I got one last decent meal before my week of 13-hour days started.

Take an acorn squash and use a heavy knife to knock off the stem and cut it in half lengthwise.  Scoop out the seeds.  Turn the halves upside down in a shallow pan with about 1/8-1/4″ water in the bottom.  Roast in the oven at 350° for about 45 minutes; they’re done when tender enough that you can fairly easily stick a fork through the outer skin.

It’s good if it starts to caramelize a little bit around the edges.

While the squash is roasting, slice up an apple and a small onion.  In a skillet, melt butter and sauté one or two links of sweet Italian sausage, crumbled out of its casing.  When the sausage is almost cooked through, add the onions and apples and cook until tender.

Turn the cooked squash halves right side up and shred the flesh inwards with a fork.  Season with salt and pepper.  Fill the hollows to overflowing with the sausage/apple mixture, and spice with cinnamon, nutmeg, or cardamom.

Enjoy, and stay warm.

Strawberry!

I got home from a short trip to Chicago last week to find this in one of my railing planters.

It’s my very first ripe strawberry of the season that the pigeons didn’t get.  It had a much subtler sweet flavor than grocery store strawberries, a little watery, but with a sour note that I was fond of.

Hopefully many more to come!

Frustrations in urban container gardening, part 2

In late March/early April this year, I was overjoyed to see little strong dark green shoots of peppermint starting to come up in my railing box from last year.  Even though I know that mint is a perennial, and an invasive one at that, the ability of such seemingly tender and vulnerable living things to thrive in a city like this never ceases to take my breath away.  Though there were a couple cold snaps, we were having a much warmer early spring than last year, and I was excited to try to grow a few more things out on the fire escape.  In the box of herbs, last year’s peppermint, English thyme, and basil.  In the next box, arugula/mixed baby greens, and strawberries.

And then the pigeons struck.

I had taken the boxes inside for a few days during a cold spell; the peppermint especially liked the warmth inside, and in a few days, the box was nearly filled with bright green stems a few inches tall.  I put them back outside when it was warmer again, came home from rehearsal one day, and to my horror, found almost all of them tattered, harassed-looking, or snipped off almost completely at the soil line.  The strawberry had been putting out a couple of huge brand new leaves, which were gone, and the arugula had been practically uprooted and looked battered within an inch of its life.

The pigeons didn’t do this last year…and I still can’t understand why this year.  When I first put in plants last summer, they did nip at them mildly for a few days, but then stopped.  So I was frustrated, but figured that they’d get bored of it this year as they had last year and stop.  I replaced the first arugula, which did soon perish, with four more robust looking plantings of baby greens.  The mint started to regrow, and I put everything back outside again.

And they did it again.  The greens just vanished, not pecked at but uprooted entirely, and the mint got bitten back down again, many of the remaining shoots tattered and broken.  The basil was picked at, too, but not damaged nearly so badly.

The one thing that pigeons don’t seem to enjoy is thyme.  It was not touched.

A confession here: Yes, I could get metal wire cages, or one of those plastic decoy owls…but, being usually pretty broke, I was reluctantly unwilling to spend far more money protecting these plants than I spent on the plants themselves, or the value that I was ever likely to get from them in harvest.  Looking online for cost-effective solutions, I found that supposedly, there is no natural pigeon repellent.  At all.

Unwilling to accept this, I thought “I’ll bet I could download an owl,” and sure enough, some Googling found several solid black owl silhouettes.  I printed one out and blew it up a little, cut it out and taped it to the window in front of the planters.

It looks really good, a little bit sinister, from inside–and even frightened one of my roommates one night.  And I held out hope for a few days that it was sort of working; I wanted to believe I was seeing less pecking damage over the next few days.

But from outside the window, I could tell that it was so much dimmer inside than out that this black silhouette was not very scary looking.  Still, I hoped that pigeons were more innately owl-aware, and this vague shadow might prove dissuasive.

Then my other roommate caught sight of this thing one morning while working at home.  She said this pigeon was the size of a chicken, and not apparently afraid of anything.  Shadow-owl fail.  My best option was starting to seem like catching this monster pigeon and wringing its neck.

The next thing I tried was a simple physical barrier–we have lots of clear plastic salad containers, so I set a few over the newly recovering shoots, in a way that would allow them both light and a little air.

This did prove a little more effective.  The covers proved just enough of a hassle to the pigeon hoards that they must’ve judged that the food value they were getting for the effort wasn’t worth it.  They could push them around, but after a couple of weeks, it looked like they’d actually gotten bored and more or less given up.  And the new shoots were getting too tall to be smushed under the covers.

But I was disheartened.  The thrice-destroyed mint was growing back much more slowly than at the beginning of the spring, I had one remaining little salad plant, and it looked so lonely that I couldn’t bear to eat it.  The strawberry has shown not one flower; I think I will probably not get a single berry this summer.

And then I made a pot of black-eyed peas one weekend.  I’d been craving them.  I soaked the pot overnight, as per package directions.  But it was a hot night in June, and in the morning, the whole pot of beans was not just softened, but sprouted.  Feeling like a gleefully experimental kindergartner, I took three of them, while I boiled the rest, and planted them in a little glass pot outside.  They grew so fast, the white shoots turning green in the sunlight and then flourishing unbelievably-sized leaves for such a short time, that I had to transplant them within a couple of days.  Within 48 hours, I couldn’t believe that these things had been dry peas in a plastic bag in the grocery store barely a couple days ago.

I have no idea what the time to maturity of peas is, but they’re now little bushes and still rapidly growing.

Figuring I better get something to salvage the rest of the space in box number 2, I finally got a tomato plant, whose pungent and toxic leaves I thought would be less likely to be found acceptable food by the pigeons (I admit, the smell of tomato plants has always been one of my favorite smells).  So far, so good; they don’t seem interested.  The variety is “Mr. Stripey,” which I’ve never heard of before; I’m sort of excited to see how they’ll come out.

So it’s been an experimental but not very productive summer.  Since most of my now-successful plants went in so late due to false starts, I don’t know how much if anything I’ll get by fall–maybe a few handfuls of peas and tomatoes.  Maybe enough mint for a cocktail; it’s all grown back again, but nowhere near as tall and robust as it should’ve been by this time of year.  The basil is just starting to get bushy, so I’ll have it with some pasta or eggplant.  The thyme alone is doing wonderfully.  I like snipping it over grilled lamb or pork chops, or just on tomatoes with a little salt.  I had good results earlier this year with a rosemary-infused simple syrup I devised, which I think I’ll try next with thyme, to use in some kind of drink with Hendricks gin and berry herb iced tea.

That sounds like a good plan for August, no?

Frustrations in urban container gardening, part 1

I like to believe that if the economy or food supply chain were ever to seriously, catastrophically tank, I’d be one of those hardy people who’d be able to grow or forage enough of my own food to get by.

Sadly, this hypothesis is not supported by the results of my efforts at fire escape container gardening this summer.

The location presents several not-insurmountable challenges: first, we’re north-facing, but with tall buildings on both sides.  I guess the resulting light situation would best be described as “part sun,” in that it’s fully sunny from dawn till about noon…and then it’s shady.  (I haven’t been able to sustain anything inside; the apartment is very long and narrow–what’s termed a “shotgun” apartment–and gets almost no real sunlight since we’re faced on both sides by adjacent apartment buildings across narrow alleys.)

Challenge #2: The landlord.

I had put out a window box and a couple pots the second summer I lived here, mostly of flowers.  Shortly, we got a letter from our management office stating that all objects had to be removed from the fire escapes, or they would be removed.  I thought I would be a little recalcitrant and see if they actually meant it, so I ignored about three of those letters.  They did mean it.  Disheartened, I didn’t try to have window boxes again for a couple of years, but finally, the demands of my mental health to have plants won out.

I thought I’d get smarter and put them up on the railings of the fire escape; that way, they’d have no excuse that anything was blocking fire egress.  So I got one box and a railing bracket, and as detailed below, battled the bizarro weather all summer to grow a few herbs.

Sure enough, about September, we got another letter from the landlord.  Remove all objects from the fire escapes.  This time I fought back, though.  I wrote a letter back to the effect that a.) there are no city fire codes that prohibit railing boxes, only boxes that block fire escape walkways, and b.) that there is no provision in our lease prohibiting railing boxes, so, therefore, please leave my stuff alone.  And so far, it looks like I’ve won.  I haven’t heard back from them, and my boxes haven’t been bothered.

Anyway…last summer was complicated in New York by very late cold weather (like, it didn’t really stop feeling like winter until about May), followed by daily torrential rain through July.  The peppermint did just fine; it’s an invasive weed that behaves much like kudzu and is almost impossible to kill.  The basil was okay–it will put up with a lot as long as it’s consistently warm, being a Mediterranean plant.  The sage did not do okay.  I actually did not detect any growth from the time I planted it until it died in November.  Sage is a dry weather/desert plant, so although it was warm, eventually, I think it was just in a state of near-drowning almost constantly, and couldn’t recover.

But somewhat happy with what I did get–a lot of peppermint (which mainly went into Firefly sweet tea vodka lemonades) and basil (snipped over fried eggplant with tomato sauce, or on top of egg/cheese/tomato sandwiches)–I wanted to try to expand this year into some of the 12 feet or so of railing space I still had and try some more varieties of produce.

I wanted to go for baby eggplants, but the sunlight situation, I thought, probably wouldn’t serve them well.  I had always shied from tomatoes in window boxes because of their tall gangliness.  Some other commenters over on the Possum Living blog suggested that lettuces working surprisingly well for containers without consistent sun.  And I had had good luck with strawberries in my Midwest backyard as a teenager, despite woefully neglecting them.  So I settled on some arugula mix baby greens, and an alpine strawberry plant (I just got one, because they send out runners like mint does, so I figured I’d have a whole box by the end of the summer from one plant.)  For the herb box, there was plenty of peppermint coming up again (it’s a perennial, which will return year after year), and I added basil again, and thyme.

And then came challenge #3: The Pigeons.

I have never hated pigeons before this summer.  People call them flying rats that eat trash, but I couldn’t blame them for doing their ecological part in cleaning up the mess that humans make of this city.  People accuse them of carrying like 120 different diseases…but I was at a loss as to how that makes them more disgusting than humans.  And I’ve always found them pretty, especially here–we don’t just have the standard gray ones, but all shades, patterns and combinations of white, black, brown and violet–and even sometimes unnervingly intelligent.

And then they destroyed everything.

{To Be Continued……}

Long Live the Food Revolution

Like many, I’m sure, I’ve been enjoying Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution reality show the past several weeks, and was disappointed that it was such a short series.  At one point I remarked to my roommate that if the entire horrific, sordid history of reality television in America has led us to this point, it’s been worth it.  Much as I had qualms about one town being used as the embodiment of American ill-health, I thought it had real potential to get people interested, and angry, concerning food issues and especially how we feed children.

Of course I’m also aware that people and situations had to have been manipulated in the interest of making exciting television; it was still television, after all.  Jamie had a more than slight tendency towards mild hysteria and blowing situations out of proportion, notably his assertions that if the local hospital wasn’t impressed enough to donate $150,000 to his cause, or if Alice was negative with a visitor, or if DJ Rod wouldn’t come over to his side, then the Food Revolution would be OVER.

He was wrong, of course.  Not insofar that the support of elected officials, local popular figures or lunch ladies is important to changing our food culture, but that the kind of overblown, invented competitions that make for suspenseful reality television will be what accomplishes the food revolution.

A friend of my roommate’s–a kindergarten teacher–was visiting over her spring break and watched a couple episodes with us.  She e-mailed recently to say that when she went home and back to work, she asked her own kindergarten class to take the plain milk at lunch instead of the chocolate milk.  Not only did they do it, they said that they liked it better.

This will be how we actually accomplish the food revolution–incrementally and cumulatively, person to person, by parents parenting (and getting together to put pressure on their own school lunch programs) and teachers teaching, through confidence that we are capable of making small but meaningful changes to make our food culture better.

Jamie frequently asks his fans and readers to learn two of his recipes, and then teach them to two other people; if everyone did that, it wouldn’t be long before we all knew how to cook again.  Well, I already enjoyed cooking before the Food Revolution came along, having started making my own food, and baking, when I was about six, and most of the people I’m close to here already cook as well.  So in the spirit of spreading the revolution, dispelling the myth that good cooking must be difficult or expensive, here are a couple of my own recipes I love making and sharing.

Chicken and mushroom cream sauce
I threw this together from stuff I had in my kitchen one day.

6-7 cloves garlic
2-3 stalks fresh rosemary
8-10 oz. baby portobello mushrooms
4 chicken legs (with thigh and drumstick)
About 1 stick of butter
About 1 cup white wine
1/2 cup heavy cream
Black pepper

Heat oven to 450°.  Melt about 2 Tbsp. butter and brush over chicken legs in a baking pan.  Put chicken in oven to brown.

Mince garlic, slice mushrooms, and snip up the rosemary or strip it off its stalks if they’re woody.  In a big skillet over low heat, melt the rest of the butter.  Add garlic and rosemary and simmer a few minutes (don’t let the garlic burn!) until they start to get fragrant.  Add the wine, return to a simmer.  Add mushrooms.  Continue simmering and stirring gently.  Add cream, and keep stirring and simmering until the sauce is thickened and very fragrant.  It may be a little brown from the mushrooms; that’s okay.

Check the chicken.  When it’s very nearly cooked all the way through, take it out of the oven, pour the sauce over it, and put it back for 10 minutes or so more, until it’s completely done.  Pepper to taste.  Serve with lightly steamed green beans or asparagus.

Italian Bread Salad
My mother taught me this.  It’s a stretch to even call it “cooking,” but it’s an easy, light but substantial meal, wonderful in the summertime.  It came about as a way to not let stale bread go to waste.  I made it all the time when I worked in a little Belgian café here and was always coming home with half-stale baguettes.

1 stale baguette or Italian bread.
Any combination of the following: sliced Roma tomatoes, red onion, cucumbers, and olives
A little crumbled feta cheese
A couple tablespoons olive oil
A dash of balsamic vinegar
Black pepper

Cut the hard bread into chunks about 1″ square.  Place in large bowl or pot with all the veggies and cheese.  Add just enough olive oil to coat the bread mixture and a dash or two of balsamic vinegar.  Cover the pot and shake to mix well.  Leave covered in the refrigerator overnight.  The bread will become tender and chewy again from the oil and moisture from the vegetables.

*****

I’m always on the search for simple, good recipes myself, so share yours, and support the Food Revolution, in the comments.

Food and Self-acceptance

Peggy Orenstein’s columns annoy me on a regular basis, and yet, to be honest with myself, I had to read this one twice just to be sure of why it annoyed me so, so much.

Orenstein is wondering how she can raise a daughter with a healthy relationship to food and her own body when she herself has so many weight and body issues, and whether it’s even possible to raise a daughter to love her body while still watching her weight.  “How can you simultaneously encourage your daughter to watch her size and accept her body,” she asks?

Well, you can’t.  At first I wanted to rail against the surface hypocrisy inherent in the question; no, you can’t always be bothering your daughter to stay thin, and still raise her to accept her body, thick or thin.

I appreciated that Orenstein wants to do whatever it takes to not pass on her own pathologies to her daughter, though I thought, it shouldn’t be that complicated: encourage eating for health, not for weight control.  Don’t keep junk food in the house.  Turn off the TV.  Make sure she knows how to cook.

But the truth is that I too worry about being able to raise children to be healthier, physically and emotionally, than I am in so many ways.  I wonder how not to obsess about not obsessing about something that you are in fact concerned about.  Because I so rarely really identify with or understand the worries or preoccupations of other women, I find myself expecting not to be able to sympathize with pieces like this.  I want to believe that things are simple, but I know the facts are that for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, they aren’t, especially when you become a parent.  So to be intellectually honest with myself, no, I don’t think her concerns about how to impart both healthy body acceptance and good health are unfounded.  Especially when what’s all around us in the media, in ways we don’t even fully grasp, is so profoundly damaging.

Upon second reading, what I realized caused my visceral reaction of irritation, was that she raises the issue of, but then doesn’t really challenge or criticize in any way, how parents use their children in competition against each other, and in defense of their own self-image and social status.

We are not only what we eat, we are what we feed our children. So here in Berkeley — where a preoccupation with locally grown, organic, sustainable agriculture is presumed — the mom who strolls the farmers’ markets can feel superior to the one who buys pesticide-free produce trucked in from Mexico, who can, in turn, lord it over the one who stoops to conventionally grown carrots (though the folks who grow their own trump us all).

If this is what it’s like to live in Berkeley (and I don’t necessarily take her word for it that it is), that’s a toxic environment for raising emotionally healthy children with a decent self-image, regardless of how organic and local the vegetables are, or how well she manages to suppress her own insecurities about food and weight.

She writes about a study which found that mothers are more likely to notice a daughter’s excess weight than a son’s, acknowledging the expectation of girls more than boys to project the right image:

For organic-eating, right-living parents whose girls are merely on the fleshy side of average, “health” may also mask a discomfort with how a less-than-perfect daughter reflects on them. “ ‘Good’ parents today are expected to have normal-weight kids,” says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of the book “The Body Project” and a professor of history and human development at Cornell University. “Having a fat girl is a failure.”

But does she feel this way?  She doesn’t seriously question the presumption that having a fat girl is a parental failure, and that the girl, by implication, is a failure.  I don’t think she’s saying that that’s true, but she legitimizes the prejudice by taking it for granted.  (And she’s engaging in some nasty assumptions herself about the motivations of the “organic-eating, right-living” parents in her community.)  She’s pretty clear; while she doesn’t want her daughter inheriting her own disordered thinking about food, she does want her daughter to stay thin.  Why?  Just for health reasons?

She seems to recognize the wrongness of it, yet still tacitly engages in it, if the first paragraph of the article is any indication.  Whether or not she actually sees having a fat daughter as a failure, she’s seeing life and child rearing in terms of competition over image and reputation, and I think that’s potentially just as damaging to a child’s self-acceptance as being saddled with a parent’s food issues is–the knowledge that you’re never valuable, sufficient, or truly loved, apart from the image of the family that you project.  That more than being healthy, content, and comfortable with yourself, you need to worry about what other people might think of you, or might think of us because of you.  And that’s what it means to a child to say, “be healthy, but watch your size.”  Having healthy kids isn’t a competition.  Living well isn’t a competition.  Orenstein doesn’t quite seem to understand that, and I’m not sure that it’s Berkeley’s fault.