Archives for the 'food' tag
Food at the Fore of Cuban Government’s Baby Steps
It’s only taken five decades, and it hardly seems dramatic to outsiders who enjoy daily freedoms, but the Cuban government is finally moving–glacially–to recognize private property and private employment.
In a country where almost everyone works for the communist state, dairy farmer Jesus Diaz is his own boss. He likes it that way — and so does the government.
Living on a plot of land just big enough to graze four dairy cows, Diaz produces enough milk to sell about four quarts a day to the state.
This is independent production on a tiny scale, but it has proved so efficient that Cuba has decided on a major expansion of its program to distribute underused and fallow farmland to private farmers and cooperatives.
More here. IMO, a regime that’s ruined its citizens’ lives for half a century doesn’t deserve any credit for finally accepting the obvious. Learn about the guy at the top of the list of probably billions of people who could have told Cuba so here.
William F. Buckley Dies
William F. Buckley, the National Review founder, died last night.
What’s that got to do with food? Plenty. First, he was discovered at his desk by his cook.
Second, one of my favorite Buckley stories includes what I consider to be the greatest, most evocative food sentence of all time, by Tom Reiss in a 2005 New Yorker profile of Buckley:
Buckley’s housekeeper, a stout Slovak woman, served us hamburgers, on fine china, with ramekins for ketchup and mustard on each plate, and I asked Buckley how he felt about conservatism’s current course.
That, my friends, is writing.
The NY Times obit notes Buckley’s own food writing, from Cruising Speed: A Documentary:
For example, in “Cruising Speed: A Documentary,” published in 1971, he discussed the kind of meals he liked to eat.
“Rawle could give us anything, beginning with lobster Newburgh and ending with Baked Alaska,” he wrote. “We settle on a fish chowder, of which he is surely the supreme practitioner, and cheese and bacon sandwiches, grilled, with a most prickly Riesling picked up at St. Barts for peanuts,” he wrote.
Obit here.
Update: NBC anchor Brian Williams remembers Buckley as a kind and affable man with a love of good peanut butter.
