Book Review: Confessions of an Eco-Sinner

Let's get one thing out of the way first. Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce (Beacon Press, Boston, 2008; $16.00 in paperback) is not well written. Pearce likes lists. And sentence fragments. Lists of fragments. Ideas and stories, names and places, flotsam and jetsam. Pearce also likes drop words, or maybe editor just missed something.

And doing little to mark a new story than a change in paragraph. Throughout the book, Pearce travels around the world, and often you don't realize you are in a new place until a few sentences in. Like when he teleports to Nairobi. From Mandoli. Or Xiamen. Hmph. Pearce intersperses his text with personal commentary, grunts and all.

In addition to his slightly schizophrenic style, I think the thing that bothered me most about Fred's writing is his proclivity to use first names. Most of Fred Pearce's stories include meeting, at least briefly and in their places of work, non-Western people who are involved in the manufacture or disposal of products for the Western markets. Usually these workers are first introduced by full name, but sometimes I get a paragraph in, realize that I've lost track of who is who, and cannot find the original introductions: I think that's why I lost track, as I never had it to begin with. For the bosses and entrepreneurs in charge of plants, those with offices and a familiarity with the language of global commerce, Fred Pearce generally sticks with full names. However, Fred's favorite characters are the assembly-line workers and poor farmers, and they are invariably referred to, after the initial introduction, by first name. Only Europeans are called by their last names. (Of course, for Chinese characters, you should reverse all references to "first" and "last": when I say "last name" I mean the more formal family name, and by "first" I mean "familiar" or "given".) These names, and sometimes the international organizations that the corresponding people work for, are the only references and citations Pearce gives for the copious facts strewn throughout the book. The final failing of Confessions of an Eco-Sinner is its lack of footnotes, in-text citations, and a bibliography.

In spite of all this, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner is not a bad read. Frenetic writing leads to easy skimming, and the content is interesting enough. Pearce visits Uzbekistan, for example, to discuss how the forced-labor production of cotton, still ongoing, has depleted the countryside of water, moving the edge of the Aral Sea by 60 miles. Of course, this information is "known", but not commonly discussed here in the states. Next time I'm accosted by one of those "environmental activists" littering the Berkeley streets and hoping that I'll give them money to assuage my liberal guilt, I intend to start discussing the manufacture of blue jeans.

Pearce's diatribe can be condensed into a few main theses. The first is one I think any local-foodie should appreciate: when you look at a product, you should try to see the people behind it. I appreciate that Pearce did the legwork necessary, and throughout the book he brings up parts of products you probably aren't used to thinking about. The global economy is truly astounding, when the cotton for a pair of socks can be farmed in one country, shipped to another for spinning, to another for dying, to yet another for knitting, and to yet another for packaging. Pearce's details won't match the footprints of most products on the American market — Pearce is English, living car-free in London but flying a lot — but the message applies throughout the rich developed world.

A second thesis is that as rich consumers, our sociological footprints are as important as our (intimately connected) ecological footprints. Are we contributing to child labor? Do our purchases fund wars? Or perhaps our participation in the global economy helps people improve their lot. Many of Pearce's heroes are poor women, working awful factory jobs under conditions that would not be tolerated in the US, for dollars a day. But if the market dries up, they will have no option but to return home to the countryside, where their farming families are even poorer and much more misogynist.

Thus, the third and perhaps most-important thesis in Confessions of an Eco-Sinner is in response to the perennial question of What To Do? Pearce's answer is essentially: It's Complicated. Pearce spends 200 pages documenting the many footprints Western consumers have, and concludes with about 60 with titles like "How We Can Save The World". These final chapters are unconvincing, largely because nobody really knows what to do. But the roller-coaster of a book does a good job of documenting some of the ways that global trade is good, and some of the ways that it's bad. England buys most of its green beans from Kenya, and Pearce is very supportive of this: the Kenyan farmers have good lives and are helping the environment with their polyculture farms. Bangladeshi prawns, on the other hand, seem to be causing no end of evils, but this is not inherent to the prawns; rather, it's a problem of graft and mis-managed monoculture swamps. Chinese paper recycling in Pearce's eye is incredibly positive. On the other hand, Pearce points out that given the carbon cost of trucking paper to the recycling plant, the most environmentally friendly way for Britons to dispose of their old paper is to walk it downstairs to the building's incinerator, where the paper can be turned into heat. After all, trees are a biofuel.

I wish that Confessions of an Eco-Sinner were better edited, indexed, and referenced. It would make an amazing "e-book": a collection of web pages, with internal links and external citations. I wish that producers would make it possible to "track down the sources of our stuff" electronically. Michael Pollan, in an op-ed for the New York Times, proposed a wonderfully low-cost way to help the world, although it would require the government force producers to adopt it. Namely, every product should have a bar code and number, which we could either type into a web-browser, or, more usually, scan with our smart-phone camera (all smart phones have, or at least can have, bar-code scanning technology). Then a well-documented web site would pop up with details and photographs of the production of the product.

Pearce tells lurid stories, and clearly traveled with a camera, although no photographs make it into the final book. If not as a web-site, I could imagine Confessions of an Eco-Sinner as a series of magazine articles. Then again, every week The New Yorker includes exceptionally well-written stories from correspondents around the world. Those stories are much more humanizing that Pearce's — The New Yorker is like a global This American Life — but as far as I know no magazine has taken up the same project that Pearce has. I don't recommend that you buy a copy or read it yourself, but I do recommend more authors try their hand at books like this.

Our Dinner with Toulouse-Lautrec

B found for me the most wonderful of cookbooks: The Art of Cuisine, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Joyant. The recipes are good, and the book is littered with artwork, including full-page reproductions of the invitations that Toulouse-Lautrec would send — apparently, he was quite the gourmand. The book was put together shortly after his death by Maurice Joyant in homage to Toulouse-Lautrec; the English-language version was translated in 1966, and the artist's voice survives (indeed, may have been amplified) by the translation. Check out in particular such recipes as "How to make chicken tender" (chase it around the barnyard) and "Grilled saint" (find one like St. Lawrence, who will tell you when it's time to rotate the spit).

A Francophile friend was coming over, so we made two recipes from Toulouse-Lautrec: caramelized onions and pumpkin gratin (we used butternut squash rather than pumpkin). Heat the oven very hot.

For the onions, put together a bed of butter, salt, and pepper at the bottom of your smallest cast-iron pan. Peel onions, one or two per person, and pack tightly into the pan, halved, with the cut side down for the prettiest presentation. Cook on extremely low, just enough to melt the butter. Let it simmer for a long time, then cover with red wine. Let the wine reduce. Sprinkle the onions liberally with sugar, and transfer the cast-iron to the oven to finish.

For the gratin, de-seed, peel, and slice thin (1/4 inch) a medium squash. Coat each piece with flour, and lightly sauté the squash in olive oil, working in batches so that the squash pieces do not overlap. Place half the squash in a baking dish. Sauté sliced onions and then add tomatoes to make a sauce (don't add other ingredients besides salt and oil: Toulouse-Lautrec is very insistent), and pour it into the casserole. Finish with the second half of the squash. Move the baking dish to the oven.

Finally, finish dinner with a tarte tatin, not from Toulouse-Lautrec. We had only persimmons handy, so a French purist would not approve. But never mind them. Melt butter in a large cast-iron pan, turn off the heat, and arrange 1/8 wedges of fuyu persimmon (the non-astringent type), making a few layers (for a ten-inch pan, we used eight fruit). Sprinkle with sugar and lemon juice, and put on high heat. Meanwhile, make a pastry dough with flour, sugar, lots of butter, and cold water. Roll the dough out on a floured surface until it is the size of the pan and place on top of the persimmons. Move the pan to the very hot oven, cook ten minutes, and then finish in the broiler to brown the crust. Let the tarte cool just a bit, then invert onto a large plate.

In addition to providing a lovely French dinner, this meal had the benefit of using every cast-iron pan I own.

Happy New Year!

Over the last four months, my boyfriend and I have cooked daily, shopping twice or thrice per week at our incomparable farmers' markets. We have moved into a cottage of our own, and will begin (container) planting in the spring. We also have continued to pursue our respective PhDs; being full-time students and teachers on top of that really is a full-time job. Fortunately, we have photographed almost every meal we have shared. Unfortunately, we have utterly failed to post the pictures or recipes.

In the meantime, he has helped me expand my cookbook collection, to the point that I now have easily more than a thousand pages of recipes to read and remember. A good cook, I believe, should read a good cookbook cover-to-cover. These and recipes on the internet and from friends should inspire our own recipes, not dictate them. My boyfriend has taken over the dessert-baking in our house (and often prepares the dinners and breakfasts — he is already the better cookie chef, and I worry that at the current rate he will soon be the superior cook in every way), and makes cookies without referencing recipes, eye-balling the butter and chocolate in the double-boiler. I prepare meals with whatever vegetables are at the Market this week.

Of course, we regularly look in our cookbooks and online for ideas. The books by Alice Waters are our most regular source of inspiration. I have long referenced Chez Panisse Vegetables, and my boyfriend's Christmas present for me was the sequel Chez Panisse Fruit. (He also gave me an abacus.) For him, I found a lovely Pyrex Flameware double boiler, and a copy of Bakewise by Shirley Corriher. I expect that he will often produce her desserts, but more often read her discussions of the underlying chemistry and then create sweets of his own.

At an incredible used bookstore, I found a gorgeous inexpensive copy of Cooking from the Garden, by Rosalind Creasy (her other books look awesome too), which I have begun reading. It is in the same theme as many other recent publications, most particularly Barbara Kingsolver's sometimes preachy but always enjoyable Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: grow your own food, and cook it well, because this will lead to the best tasting meals and most fulfilling lifestyle. What seems remarkable about Creasy's books, since it was only in the few last years that the national media became so interested in local foods, is that they were written when Chez Panisse was much younger. Cooking from the Garden, for instance, is exactly two decades old, first published by the Sierra Club in 1988.

The book, from what I've read so far, is highly recommended. Every page includes mouth-watering full-color glossy photos of vegetables, vegetable dishes, and vegetable gardens. The text is well-written and well-researched: Creasy says she took close to three years putting together the material for the book, traveling across the country and consulting with master chefs and gardeners from disparate traditions. The book is organized around "theme gardens" created to highlight particular cuisines, climes, and food types, each with its own recipes, and ends with an "Encyclopedia of Superior Vegetables".

I am a relative newcomer to the local-foods-home-gardening-organic-agriculture scene — I am, after all, only 23. The New York Times would have me believe that I'm on the front of a national movement, and I would like to believe it. But I really don't have a good sense of the extent to which these issues were popular twenty years ago. Cooking from the Garden reads as if it were written yesterday.

Regardless, eventually I hope to own a farmhouse with a large plot of arable land, one which I can grow most of the food for my family. I've already started canning — this fall we put up tomatoes, pickles, and marmalade — and will eventually learn to make cheese. I hope I will have the time for such a life; I also intend on a consuming academic career. Books like Creasy's will be a huge asset in achieving a working garden/farm.

In the immediate future, although we have a cottage, we live in a dense neighborhood with little space for more than herbs. So the recipes here will remain farmers'-market-fed. I do hope to get back into the habit of posting my meals. As I said, I have a photo-diary of dinners from the last fall, and these will be posted here and on flickr soon. But we will be traveling for the first three weeks of January. Look for new updates then.

Post-Christmas cabbage and cookies

Originally posted on 26 December 2007.

Possibly my favorite Christmas gift was Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Vegetables, an indispensible reference. I've been reading it non-stop: each vegetable (sorted alphabetically) is described, including how to judge freshness, how to store, how to prepare, and how to grow in a kitchen garden, and many recipes are suggested. Tonight and tomorrow we will be eating leftovers before leaving for a family trip to the Coast; tonight's dinner was lasagna. But dinner should include a fresh vegetable. A trip to the local organic grocer yielded a gorgeous and very fresh and sweet red cabbage. What, we asked Alice, should we do with it?

After removing the outermost leaves and washing the cabbage (I would only save cabbage for a beef stock; it's fine to compost this), remove the core and slice into very thin strips, a few inches long. Thinly slice a leek, and in the bottom of a heavy large saucepan, cook the leek in three tablespoons butter or duck fat for five minutes. Add the cabbage along with a large spoonful of sherry vinegar, a healthy handful of salt, some black pepper, a bay leaf, and half a cup of water. Stir, bring to boil, reduce to simmer, cover, and let the cabbage reduce for twenty minutes.

While the cabbage cooks, wash, peel, and grate (with a coarse grater) an apple. Toss with a little sherry vinegar to keep the apple from oxidizing, and eat the peel and core. When the cabbage has cooked for twenty minutes, stir in the grated apple and cook another five minutes. Serve hot.


In the days after Christmas, one should never be long without a good cookie. The following is from The Joy of Vegan Baking, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau:

Three cups flour should be combined in a large bowl with a quarter teaspoon salt, one and a half teaspoon baking powder, one tablespoon aniseed, and one cup pine nuts. In a separate small bowl, whisk to combine seven eighths of a cup of pure maple syrup with half a cup canola oil, one quarter cup water, two tablespoons anise extract, and one teaspoon vanilla extract. Combine wet into dry, roll by tablespoons onto a parchment-lined cookie tray, and bake twenty minutes in a preheated three-hundred-fifty-degree oven.

Addtionally, after Christmas we eat an endless supply of pfeffernusse, gingerbread, and the many cookies left with us after our annual Cookie Party, a wonderful potluck at which we have eggnog with and without rum, hot mulled wine, ciders, and homemade cookies with all our friends and neighbors.