For better or worse, I’m unduly reliant on Mark Bittman’s cooking tomes when I’m in the kitchen. I bought the original How to Cook Everything soon after I graduated college, when I started cooking for myself on a regular basis. 8+ years later, it has pages falling out and food stains in almost every section. That’s a good endorsement, I suppose. These days, with a vegetarian fiance, I’m also making plenty of use of his newer How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.

Some culinary cognoscenti may mock Bittman for gross oversimplification of complex recipes and techniques, potentially an inevitable consequence of his philosophy that everyone can learn to cook anything. I for one have cursed the man more than once for flawed outcomes, even if user error was as likely to have been the cause as flawed directions.

Regardless of these faults, as a fledgling food writer, I was very interested to read this recent profile in New York magazine. There’s plenty of interesting insights into low one goes about building this unconventional career.

Big Ten Burrito opened up in Ann Arbor during my second year in grad school, and they quickly became my top burrito choice in town. They offered appropriately large burritos with pretty high quality fillings, a giant step above Panchero’s, whose one selling point was its close proximity to my department during my first year.

Anyway, Big Ten Burrito had some expansionary dreams– they talked about opening up a burrito shop in every Big Ten college town– which put them afoul of the goliath athletic conference that was the source of their name. Apparently the conference could ignore one piddly little burrito shop, but a potential burrito empire sharing their name was a little too much. Even before any new locations were opened, the conference threatened legal action. The owners of the restaurant contemplated resistance, weighed the cost of the legal fees, and conceded– agreeing to change their name.

The resulting contest, in which Big Ten Burrito asked its customers to contribute new names for the restaurant offered a few winning titles. My favorite– actually the only one I remember– was “Fuck You Big Ten Conference Burrito.” Apparently, this was judged rather impolitic. Ultimately, they decided on the slightly redundant BTB Burrito.

Last time I was in town, about a year ago, I made a point of stopping by the rechristened establishment. The burrito was excellent, as always, but I didn’t give the establishment much more thought until today, when an old friend sent along this news clipping from the venerable Michigan Daily:

The Ann Arbor-based Mexican food chain has rolled out a red “party bus” that runs on vegetable oil and is offering the bus as an eco-friendly taxi. BTB co-owner Adam Lowenstein said converting the bus to run on vegetable oil took about three months and $4,000, but will pay dividends in the long run.

I thought the burritos spoke for themselves, but this still isn’t a bad way to get the name out there. Anyone in Philly want to try this? “All aboard the Geno’s Steak’s Party Wagon.  Only English speakers may ride.” Eh, not so much. Probably a little new agey for Joey Vento.

One of these days I’m going to have enough free time to resume putting up original content up here. Until then, I’m going to have to resort to providing links to relevant articles. Are they always going to come from the New York Times? Let’s just say it’s my first resource when it comes to squandering my time online. Today’s example:

Amid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process.

Greensgrow, a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory, is turning a profit by selling its own vegetables and herbs as well as a range of produce from local growers, and by running a nursery selling plants and seedlings.

They also do honey. This is the type of shit I’ll be writing about in my monthly column in the Philadelphia Weekly, starting tomorrow. But it looks like I got scooped on this one.

Food prices continue to rise in the U.S., as well as around the world, and our President has evidently lumped some of the blame on India. The New York Times reports:

After a news conference in Missouri on May 2, he was quoted as saying of India’s burgeoning middle class, “When you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”Some Indian economists note correctly that India’s economy has been growing at an impressive clip for almost a decade, while the surge in food prices is a much more recent phenomenon. This swiftly invalidates Bush’s pat assertion that growth in the developing world leads directly to price increases.

Still, I’m not ready to fully agree with Pradeep S. Mehta, secretary general of the center for international trade, economics and the environment of CUTS International in Delhi, either, when he argues that “if Americans slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, “many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates.”

Enough time spent in middle-class Indian circles has amply demonstrated to me that obesity isn’t just for the American middle-classes any longer. The continuing deprivation in rural India, on the other hand, remains the real story, and blame can probably be leveled in a number of directions.

Lest my readership assume that I’ve lost every bit of my social conscience, and embraced a lifestyle of decadence, I should reemphasize that not everyone in the world gets to consume in quite the same way that we Americans do.

The NY Times recognized this point bluntly today, in a cogent editorial:

Most Americans take food for granted. Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half. They are in trouble.

So, it’s one thing for me to prattle along about the fancy shit I just ate, but a little global perspective provides a sobering reminder. Just to save a little face, I didn’t stumble on to the Times piece until after I wrote the previous post.