With a nudge toward further thread-drift, Sam Wasson has a new book out on the making of the film:
His bio of Fosse was pretty damn great; I’ve put my name down at the library for The Big Goodbye but am now thinking I need to drop by Vromans and grab it.
Yes I think I heard an interview with him on KPCC maybe. Super interesting
“A MANSION IN THE HILLS ABOVE Glendale, a man named Mardiros Iskenderian rose from his bed one morning and put on a white silk suit he hadn’t worn in 20 years. He stuffed a 9mm handgun into his waistband and a .38-caliber revolver into his coat pocket and walked step by small step down the stairs. His wife, Rita, who had fallen in love with him when she was 12, couldn’t believe the sight. For a man who was so near death, cancer everywhere, he looked beautiful. It had been months since he had ventured outside by himself, months since he had driven one of his fancy cars, and she fretted that he was too weak to go anywhere. He told her not to worry. He was feeling much better now, and besides, he was only going to Zankou Chicken to see an old friend.”
Published in Los Angeles Magazine April 2008, a version of this piece (or perhaps the whole of it) appears in Arax’s West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State.
I had no idea this was happening, @robert - it’s been added to my ever-burgeoning “Want It Now” list, yet next October seems so far away.
"As the earth’s population approaches 9 billion, the Malthusian prediction that humans will outgrow our ability to feed ourselves seems increasingly plausible. Meanwhile, agriculture faces a slew of environmental challenges: erosion, desertification, salinization, water scarcity, and, of course, climate change.
Quinoa might be a big part of the solution. It provides significant amounts of calcium, iron, fiber, essential fatty acids, and vitamin E, and is (unlike any other plant food in the world) a complete protein, with adequate stores of all nine of the amino acids that the body can’t synthesize itself. More to the point, it is remarkably resilient. It thrives in soil saturated with salt. It tolerates cold and drought. Sven-Erik Jacobsen, a Danish agronomist who has studied the plant for more than twenty years, put it this way: “If you ask for one crop that can save the world and address climate change, nutrition, all these things — the answer is quinoa. There’s no doubt about it.”
Except for one problem."
“The story of water is not local – it’s hyper, hyper, hyper-local.”
"The cost of sustainability appears set to hit the valley’s most modest players first.
There are roughly 8,000 small farms between Fresno and Tulare counties alone, according to the 2012 agricultural census, many of them farmed by immigrants. Ruth Dahlquist-Willard, small farms adviser with the University of California Fresno Extension, worries about how those small farms will fare over the next 20 years, as the water table continues to drop.
For farms that can’t rely on surface water, local Sgma plans in their current form could mean the difference between making it another season or selling the farm. The growers with the short straws will continue to lose."
Edited to add:
Explainer on Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (Sgma)
Also, the article in the first link mentions the Westlands Water District. It’s worth tracking down articles about Westlands, the Shasta Dam, and the Bureau of Reclamation. (I tried to find a good summary/overview but am short on time.)
"2018 was a year of tectonic shifts in restaurant writing. Both the critic and the criteria came under scrutiny. The #MeToo scandals sparked a national reexamination of the field’s food-first values. Media outlets across the country debated how to cover restaurants owned by Mario Batali, John Besh, Paul Qui, and other alleged abusers. Eater : “Maybe Don’t Review Restaurants Run by Bad People?” Philadelphia Inquirer : “It’s Not My Job to Pass Judgment on a Chef’s Character.” In the middle of this headline battle, across an eight-day span in July, revered Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold died and San Francisco Chronicle critic Michael Bauer announced his retirement. These events triggered a full-on succession crisis in West Coast criticism.
Fast forward five months, and three young female critics of color had started new positions at major newspapers: Patricia Escárcega succeeded Gold at the Los Angeles Times , Soleil Ho joined the Chronicle , and Tejal Rao became the first-ever California Restaurant Critic at The New York Times — prompting a wave of “next generation” headlines before they’d even published a word. The sheer pace of change was staggering. On April 1, 2018, Michael Bauer wrote in the Chronicle , “As a human, I condemn harassment [but] when I wear my critic’s hat, I’m not evaluating what happens behind the kitchen door.” Three hundred and thirty-eight days later, Soleil Ho inaugurated her Chronicle tenure by announcing she would not cover compromised chefs in an editorial touting “ethical eating in the age of #MeToo.” In less than a year, the restaurant review had left the Country Club and embraced Cancel Culture.
This critical triumvirate is leading a literary reformation of the field. Building on the pioneering model of Jonathan Gold, they promise to tackle greater civic and social questions than the cooking on the plate. The old ideal of critic as neutral arbiter gives way to a modern vision of the critic as hip, multicultural storyteller. “I don’t see the critic’s task as one of simply deciding if a food or restaurant experience is pleasing,” writes Soleil Ho, “but rather using an aesthetic evaluation of restaurants to tell stories about the connections between people, cultures, and communities.”"
“… the threat to pollination and our food systems and the threat to the economic survival of the honey producers from honey fraud are intimately connected. In the United States, bees help produce 90 commercially-grown crops and push more than $24 billion into the United States economy, according to a White House press release from 2014. The honey producers in the United States are in “a state of crisis,” Roberts wrote in his white paper, “even while the popularity and demand for honey products soars.”
In 2008, the European Parliament recognized the symbiotic relationship between a beekeeper, their ability to make money from honey, and their ability to manage honey bees as pollinators. “The White House, the USDA, the EPA have all recognized the threat to pollination, yet they didn’t make the connection to the honey producer and the economic fraud,” Roberts said.
Instead, the USDA, under the Trump administration, said that it stopped collecting data for the Honey Bee Colonies survey for budgetary reasons, only a few weeks after scientists found that almost half of bee colonies were lost in the previous winter.
“Adulteration will cause American food production to falter,” Gawenis said."
“Building on the pioneering model of Jonathan Gold” followed by a quote from Soleil Ho … ugh. If she walked the walk instead of just talking the talk she might have been an improvement over Bauer.
What an interesting article. It has everything: ecology, economics, the majesty of the law, and much nefariousness. Very good read. 
Two pieces from the Washington Post, both related to food service and wages.
First article, about a cook and gig work:
“Because diners are largely kept in the dark about the well-being of kitchen labor, at The Washington Post’s request Sheikh kept a diary of three weeks of life as a Pared worker. Since joining last May, he has worked more than 160 gigs at more than 70 restaurants, earning $18,845.10 over 1,156 hours as a prep cook, line cook, event cook and dishwasher. Pared is essentially his only job (in that time, he has worked only nine gigs with other apps), and he has been favorited in Pared by 14 venues. But the diary clarifies why Sheikh also has founded Restaurant After Hours, a mental health nonprofit group for kitchen workers. Pared and its digital ilk highlight the industry’s open secret that every dish is built around the same three ingredients: blood, sweat and tears.”
Second piece, about a Waffle House server:
"She had been both employed and poor for her entire adulthood, but only in the past few months had she learned that officially made her a part of something: the low-wage workforce, the fastest growing segment of a splintering American economy that continues to expand at both extremes. There were a record 53 million low-wage workers last year, or about 44 percent of all active workers in the United States. More than half were women. Two-thirds were in their prime earning years. Forty percent were supporting children at home. They earned a median annual salary of $17,950.
Sara’s own version of those statistics meant awakening at 4:40 a.m. to catch the first city bus of the day because she didn’t have a car, and asking friends to share medications because she didn’t have health insurance, and working the past 11 years without taking a vacation because she couldn’t afford the time off. But what she resented most about being one of the working poor was the constant anxiety that came from having no margin for error. At every moment, the smallest problem threatened to upend the fragile balance of her life, and now on a day when she had $28.42 in savings and $2.09 in checking, she arrived home from the bus station to find a big problem waiting in an envelope on her porch."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/08/living-without-living-wage/?arc404=true
Two pieces on foraging for wild foods:
"Riyad looked around the room, gauging the mood. This restaurant was his life’s work. He’d learned to cook these meals in his grandmothers’ kitchens and in the “tribe houses” of his hometown in Raqqa, Syria. Now his grandmothers were dead, his native city destroyed by war. But his restaurant still stood, and with it a piece of his tribe’s culture, finding new life thousands of miles away in a Tennessee strip mall. But with the virus in the air, business was eroding. The restaurant was bringing in 23 percent of projected weekly revenue. “The ship was sinking slowly,” he would tell me later. “We were choking. Going underwater.”
That night, he looked around at his employees. They ranged in age from their early 20s to their 50s. A few were white, native Hendersonvillians. Others were immigrants from Jordan and Ecuador and Mexico and elsewhere. “This is my new tribe,” he likes to say about himself and his staff. Together, they’d built a restaurant consistently named the best in their mostly white and conservative suburban county. But now, he looked around the room and he saw that they were afraid. Of illness. Of unemployment. Of how the virus could destroy life in so many cruel and unpredictable ways."
(This is cross-posted here: Assorted Articles about Covid-19 and Food - #51 by ElsieDee)
There’s a rawness to this - how could there not be - that’s difficult to read, but also some real assessment of what was and what might be.
I read this earlier today. wow…incredible on so many levels.
“For some reason, I can’t see wanting deuces anymore: No more two-tops? What will happen come Valentine’s Day?” 
Gabrielle Hamilton seems no bullshit to begin with. Glad she was honest.
“The conversation about how restaurants will continue to operate, given the rising costs of running them has been ramping up for years now; the coronavirus did not suddenly shine light on an unknown fragility. We’ve all known, and for a rather long time. The past five or six years have been alarming.”
The restaurant bubble is like the dot com bubble of the 90s and housing bubble of the 00s. Probably better for it to burst this way, with Coronavirus to blame, than to actually acknowledge that having so many restaurants was unsupportable.
“If Covid-19 is the death of restaurants in New York, will we be able to tell which restaurants went belly up because of the virus? Or will they be the same ones that would have failed within 16 months of opening anyway, from lack of wherewithal or experience? When we are sorting through the restaurant obituaries, will we know for sure that it was not because the weary veteran chef decided, as I have often been tempted myself in these weeks, to quietly walk out the open back door of a building that has been burning for a long time?”