Just like this city, New Amsterdam Market is being built on oyster shells.
Last Saturday, The Feed attended the first benefit of the New Amsterdam Market, an organization that is working to re-create an old-style indoor public market in New York City. Titled “Founded on Oyster Shells,” the fund-raiser offered samples of some of the best local artisanal products currently being produced (East Coast oysters on the half shell, pickled foods from Beer Table and Marlow & Sons, a selection of domestic draft beers from Beer Table, bread baked with spent grain and cheese from Saxelby Cheesemongers, among other delicacies). They also held a silent auction, which included prizes like the opportunity to help birth a lamb, and a meal with Alice Waters.
Today we hear from director Robert LaValva about the outcome of the event: Read more »
A young Alice Waters, serving humble pie?
I’ll admit it. I agree with Anthony Bourdain. Sometimes, Alice Waters “annoys the living shit out of me,” too. The Berkeley Brahman, for all of the unequivocal good she has done to promote the cause of healthy and sustainable eating, has had some difficulty talking around the silver foot that occasionally gets lodged in her mouth. Reportedly telling people to deal with high food bills by making “a sacrifice on the cell phone or the third pair of Nike shoes” certainly isn’t the most expedient way to win friends or dispel charges of myopic elitism. And organizing a series of inaugural dinners that celebrate local food by flying in chefs—and ingredients—from all over the country seems a touch, well, out of touch.
But what bothers me as much as Waters’s displays of snobbery and cluelessness is the misogyny that’s been exposed in the fallout from both the dinners and Anthony Bourdain’s comments. Read more »
She promotes a mass-market product? Burn her!
The savaging of Alice Waters has reached a fevered pitch. Once deified, the seasonal-food saint has recently been the subject of searing critiques, sparked by negative remarks from Anthony Bourdain. It seems that his damning comments about what he called “her wildly hubristic letter to the (then) President-elect” have opened the floodgates for people who perhaps weren’t so crazy about Waters to begin with, but didn’t have the courage to speak first. I, for one, understand the origins of the attacks: While I’ve never met Waters, she does exude a certain off-putting self-righteousness in her public persona; her approach often seems heavy-handed and inflexible; and reports of her voting-booth absenteeism are especially troubling. But the deluge of assaults from people who are just piling on has gone too far. Read more »
