Now settled in Seattle, Cook does most of his foraging in the mountains and waterways near Puget Sound, but sometimes even a stroll around his urban neighborhood leads to an unexpected edible encounter. (Case in point: The dried buds of the lowly pineapple weed, a common sidewalk crack-filler and relative of chamomile, makes excellent iced tea.) Salon spoke with him recently about recession-proof dining, the large-scale sustainability of foraging, the hidden charms of the stinging nettle, and why it's time we all got out there and started searching for our suppers.

How did you begin foraging? Was it something you did with your family growing up?

Not at all. I grew up in Connecticut, where I had a typical suburban upbringing and heard all the traditional warnings about not eating anything growing wild, especially mushrooms. Cooking was not a big part of my early life. We did, however, have a few acres of land, and I spent a lot of time playing in the woods.

My wife, though, who is of Polish and Italian extraction, came from a very different tradition. Mediterranean and Eastern European cultures have had a long and affectionate relationship with wild edibles. So it really wasn't until I met her, and we started foraging, that I got serious about becoming a better cook. In part that was because when you bring home ingredients from the wild -- especially animals, like fish and shellfish -- you really want to honor them by making a good meal. And of course, when you discover just how much some premium ingredients -- like morels and porcinis and truffles and things like that -- are going for in the market, you also want to make sure that when you do find them, you use them well.

In the book you explain that foraging really became cemented as part of your life during a year in which you and your family lived off the grid in southern Oregon. Was that move -- and your concentration on foraging -- part of a deliberate attempt to change your own consumption?

There definitely was a philosophical element to it. I'd been working for corporate America for years, and in that environment a typical lunch was nasty reheated Chinese food from the food court that you'd wolf down in 20 minutes at your desk. So, yes, I used the opportunity of living off the grid to eat healthier and more thoughtfully. When you are two hours from the nearest town, foraging becomes a great way to supplement what you have, so that you're not always driving back and forth from the market. We had a huge vegetable garden and an orchard with several varieties of apples, pears, plums and cherries, and we pretty much canned everything that we didn't eat the day that we picked it. We fished for salmon and steelhead from the Rogue River, and we would go to town every 10 days to get basic necessities. But mushrooms and wild greens like fiddleheads and stinging nettles -- those we could gather right outside the back door. It was definitely a concerted effort to live a little more close to the bone and closer to the land.

But you're living in Seattle again now, right? How have you integrated foraging into your urban life?

When we got back from the boonies, I immediately went into a deep funk. I love Seattle, but civilization was a bit of a culture shock. So, I pulled myself out of it by continuing my foraging excursions -- though now they are usually around the mountains or the Puget Sound region. But sometimes I even take urban foraging trips around my neighborhood.

During my year in the woods, I really thought about the problem of sustainability, and I think living off the grid really helped me clarify some of my ideas. Because the truth is that if at this moment everyone started foraging on a large scale, it would wreak havoc on the ecosystem. But there are certain things that we can all forage almost anywhere -- for example, weeds -- that wouldn't have the same kind of environmental impact. Weeds are incredibly nutritious, a lot of them are very tasty, and they're everywhere. I can name several -- dandelions, lamb's-quarters, chickweed, purslane, cat's-ear  -- that all grow around people. What's more, certain weeds, like stinging nettles and lamb's-quarters, have many more nutrients than any domestic vegetable we grow. They really do make spinach look like junk food. You can just sauté lamb's-quarters like you would kale from your garden, and it's delicious.

You live in the Pacific Northwest, though, which is basically an agricultural Eden. What about folks who live in New York or Nevada? Do you really think foraging is something people can do anywhere?

I think that certainly up and down the West Coast it's possible. I've foraged in Oregon and California and in Colorado and the Rockies, though that's a little tough because you're at a high elevation. If you're asking, can I do this in Brooklyn, or even just, can I do this in the Northeast, you can. It may be on a smaller scale, and your catch may be different, but you can.

I've always thought of foraging as gathering, but in your book you include fishing and catching and squid and mollusks. How do you define foraging?

My definition is pretty broad -- basically anything you can gather or catch that doesn't run away, like shellfish, like clams or oysters. I'm not orthodox about it. I really don't think of myself as a modern-day Euell Gibbons or the book as a modern-day "Stalking the Wild Asparagus." I really just want to introduce readers to the forager's milieu. In general, I think even if you just forage a little in your local area, it will raise your awareness about food in general, and the politics surrounding it.

Do you think foraging is the natural next step in the local and seasonal food movement?

Absolutely. Foraging keeps you acutely aware of the seasons, and to develop a forager's eye, you really do have to be cognizant of the natural history of your surroundings. If you're mushroom hunting, you need to know about the landscape -- the trees, the soil composition, the weather, the microclimates -- all the conditions that figure into finding mushrooms. In a way, it's kind of like a puzzle to work out.

How has focusing on foraging changed the way you cook?

What I think foraging does is help keep you in tune with the source of your food -- and that carries into other areas of eating. So, even if you're buying seafood or vegetables in a shop, you think a little bit more about where they came from, because you've become more intimately involved with food gathering yourself. Nutrition is part of it as well. A lot of foods that we grow have been selected over time for taste and hardiness, and have lost some of the nutrients they started off with, whereas a lot of wild foods are very nutritionally rich. For example, huckleberries are full of antioxidants and stinging nettles are high in protein -- in fact, they have more protein than just about any other plant in the plant kingdom.

And I think eventually my foraging will probably lead to hunting, which up until now I've never done. I've never used a rifle or a gun to take an animal. But I'm a carnivore, and I just feel like I can't spend my entire life buying meat at the store wrapped in plastic. I'm going to have to get my own at some point. It just seems a little more honest.

It's also a cost-conscious way of eating ethically.

Foraging really is the ultimate budgeter's solution. For instance, on my kitchen counter right now, because we've been doing a lot of canning lately, I can see jars of elderberry syrup and rose-hip syrup and thimbleberry jam, which in a few months will become recessionary Christmas presents. But the thing about thimbleberries is that they're tiny to pick -- it took me a full day to get enough for 12 very small jars! When you start processing foraged food you realize why hunter gatherers basically spent all their time doing that, not building towns or making art. Hunting, gathering and processing are a never-ending job.

What advice would you give to novice foragers?

There aren't a ton of deadly poisonous plants and mushrooms out there, but there are some. So, the golden rule of foraging is to never eat anything, especially plants and fungi, that you can't identify with 100 percent certainty. In order to do that I recommend that people join mycological societies -- they exist all over the country and are a great source for would-be mushroom pickers. Also, look for people in your area who are leading plant tours and check out nearby horticultural societies. Unfortunately, field guides -- even ones with pictures -- don't always tell the whole story, and a plant can look a lot different when you're holding it in your hands than it does in a book. That's why it's really best to learn from someone who is an expert in the field. That said, there are all kinds of delicious plants and fungi that are really easy to identify once you learn them the first time. Mushrooms like morels, chanterelles, porcini, lobster mushrooms and oyster mushrooms -- they're all really simple once you know what they look like. But for that first time, it's important to learn them from someone else.

That makes a lot of sense, since over history these skills have largely been learned experientially, from parents or grandparents or neighbors.

Right, that's how my wife learned -- from her family. Of course, when we were all in rural societies, we all had access to that knowledge. Now we have to trust so-called experts. As far as plants go, again, there are several species that are really easy to identify. Anyone can go out and collect dandelions -- I'm not going to say you need an expert for that!

What's the Holy Grail of foraging? Is there something you're always looking for but haven't found?

Well, for the first time other day, I dug a geoduck. It's basically a giant clam -- it's certainly the largest clam in the Pacific Northwest. Going after them involves digging a hole around three feet deep and just as wide, and trying to get at the neck of the geoduck, which is extended, because they can't pull their neck all the way into their shell. You can only get them during the low, low tide, and I went on what was one of the last days in the season that low tide would occur during daylight hours. I took my time and was chatting with some friends, and the next thing I knew, the tide was coming in. I was on my belly, up to my neck in water, reaching around in the hole, when I finally grabbed ahold of the neck and wrestled it out of there. The geoduck I got was about two pounds. I took it home and used the neck to make a ceviche with red onion and papaya and cucumber and a lot of lime juice. Then I used the rest of the body to make a really nontraditional kung pao that I called surf and turf, because I included a few chicken of the woods mushrooms in it, too. It was a long, wet day -- but it was so good.

---------------

Creamy Chanterelle Pasta

Adapted from "Fat of the Land"

You can use store-bought cremini mushrooms, but this dish is far superior with fresh chanterelles, which offer a fruity counterpoint to the bacon, and it's nearly as good with chanterelles that have been previously sautéed and frozen, so you can eat it in the depths of a cold, dark winter, when the chanterelles in the northern latitudes have long since returned to the earth. Green peas add a dash of color.

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter

4 slices (1/4 pound) thick, quality bacon, diced (or the equivalent of pancetta)

1-2 shallots, finely chopped

1 pound shaped pasta (I prefer bow ties)

1 pound fresh chanterelles

Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

1 pint heavy cream (or less)

4 ounces garden peas, fresh or frozen

1/2 cup grated Parmesan, with more for the table

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. In a large skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of the butter over medium heat and add the diced bacon. Do not drain fat. As bacon begins to crisp, add shallots and cook until tender, a few minutes. Meanwhile, bring a pot of water to boil and add pasta. Add chanterelles to skillet and cook several minutes, stirring occasionally, until they have released their water. Season with salt and pepper. In a large glass or ceramic mixing bowl, add 2 remaining tablespoons of butter and half the cream. Place mixing bowl in warm oven. Slowly add remaining cream to skillet and simmer, continuing to stir occasionally while pasta cooks. When pasta is nearly done, add peas to chanterelle sauce. Remove pasta from heat, drain, and pour into warmed mixing bowl. Mix in sauce along with grated Parmesan and serve immediately. If you're worried about all that butter and cream, open another bottle of red wine. SERVES 4 

Well, what if it did? What if we could reorder our priorities such that we had dramatically less impact on the environment -- and led happier, less stressful lives at the same time? That was the question that led New York writer Colin Beavan to propose a quixotic, charming, maddeningly naive and borderline-nuts project to his wife, Business Week reporter Michelle Conlin. It's the project that came to be called "No Impact Man," which is the title of Beavan's long-running blog as well as his just-published book and the documentary film about his family's adventures made by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein.

In 2006, Beavan suggested that he, the reality-TV-addicted, espresso-guzzling Conlin and their daughter, Isabella, not yet 2 at the time, should interrupt their relatively normal Manhattan creative-class existence in order to live for an entire year while making no net impact on the environment. None, as in zero. No air conditioning, no TV, no electricity, no gas or oil heat. No takeout containers, no plastic bags, no recycled paper cups from Starbucks. No food grown more than a day's drive from New York City, which meant hardly any winter vegetables beyond cabbage and potatoes. (And no coffee whatsoever, a stark change for Conlin, who sometimes imbibed three or four iced quad-espressos a day.) No commercial soaps, shampoos or cleaning products, "natural" or otherwise. No journeys on planes, trains or automobiles (including the New York subway). Infamously, no toilet paper.

Beavan's book -- its full subtitle is "The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process" -- and Gabbert and Schein's "No Impact Man" documentary are remarkably different experiences. I recommend them both, but where Beavan offers an earnest, searching account of the project's religious-cum-philosophical roots and logistical difficulties, the movie is a hilarious, riveting must-see about a family as it breaks down almost all the way and then reinvents itself.

As Beavan presents her in print, his wife is almost a stock-comedy figure, a shopping-obsessed "Sex and the City" gal who can't tear herself away from the plasma screen and has never so much as cooked a pot of pasta in her life. (Actually, that last part appears to be true.) On screen, though, the quick-witted, winsome, self-effacing Conlin is most definitely the star of the show. Where Beavan is a cloaked persona who can come across as diffident and judgmental, Conlin is completely relatable, as they say in TV, and also follows a far more dramatic and emotional trajectory than he does.

Before the No Impact project begins, Conlin buys a pair of boots for a sum so obscene I won't print it -- and before it ends, she has not merely adjusted to but embraced a lifestyle free of TV shows or new clothes, where instead of eating takeout in front of "American Idol" she eats her husband's cabbage-and-eggplant frittata (again) after walking up nine flights of stairs to their candlelit, unheated apartment.

After a March 2007 New York Times Home Section profile bearing the unfortunate but irresistible headline "A Year Without Toilet Paper," which painted a medium-snarky portrait of the couple's low-wattage existence, Beavan and Conlin first became the center of a media feeding frenzy. Of course their household did not literally reduce its carbon footprint to zero, and of course their year of self-enforced asceticism did not affect global climate change in any meaningful way. But it's unfair to argue that they haven't made a difference.

Beavan's blog and the media coverage have inspired many people to emulate their example, and have provoked disproportionately angry responses from many others. A lot of  environmentalists who were initially suspicious of the publicity-stunt aspect of "No Impact Man" have warmed to its effects, and Beavan is highly in demand as nonprofit fundraiser and speaker. That doesn't mean that the rancor has abated from other people who feel criticized, lectured or insulted by Beavan, his worldview and his project. One poster on Gawker suggested that mowing down the Beavan-Conlin family with an Uzi would benefit the environment, and I imagine commenters on this article will come up with colorful images of their own.

If the No Impact Man project was partly a marketing opportunity from its inception -- Beavan intended to write a book all along -- that doesn't make it less sincere, or less of a threat to the dominant ideology of American consumerism. In their foolhardy plunge into uncharted terrain, Beavan and Conlin pose a fundamental challenge to a central tenet of American life: the idea that the "pursuit of happiness" is permanently and necessarily attached to economic growth, to the manufacture and consumption of ever larger quantities of stuff.

If any significant number of Americans downscale their consumption to any significant degree (setting aside the Beavan model) we would see a widespread economic collapse that would make the current downturn look like a glamorous European vacation. If some of those people actually decided, as the Conlin-Beavan household genuinely seems to do, that they were happier with a low-stress, low-consumption existence -- that working all the time and buying more junk did not correlate with happiness -- well, then we'd be forced to deal with a massive restructuring of our social and economic lives. But isn't that day of reckoning coming, one way or another?

Beavan and Conlin called me from their Manhattan apartment, where they were nursing Isabella, now 4, who was home with a bad cold. She broke in occasionally with requests for a drink of water or a bathroom visit, but didn't seem interested in answering my questions. Conlin says that Isabella adjusted seamlessly to the No Impact project, and then to the electricity being switched back on: "She was very Zen or gnostic about it. She just grooved with the moment."

Colin, having read the book and seen the movie, I think they paint really different portraits of the same experience. How do you evaluate the differences and similarities?

Colin Beavan: You know, the book is me telling what I consider to be important about the story. The movie is basically Laura and Justin telling what they consider to be important about the story, and they don't entirely overlap. There's places where I watch the film and go, "Geez, I wish we could have emphasized that more." But given the ideas we're trying to promote, there's tremendous value in having both. The book is in the world for audiences who are likely to be interested in the book, and the movie provides an entry for a completely different audience.

In the book, for example, you gradually out yourself as a Zen Buddhist, and it gradually becomes clear how much that informs your thinking and your decisions. Now, the viewer of the film can watch whole thing and have no idea that that's part of who you are and the choices you've made.

Honestly, the film is 90 minutes long, so it can't accomplish as much. It does provide a certain sense of intimacy that the book cannot, and the book can provide a certain depth that the film cannot. In truth, there were many, many conversations about the values that went into No Impact and they didn't make the cut of the film, and I miss those sometimes. Not necessarily my involvement with Zen Buddhism per se, but the thematic commonalities between religions that "No Impact Man" is based on -- I would have liked to see more of that in the film.

You write a lot about the fact that you see No Impact as rooted in various religious traditions.

There are many commonalities between the religious traditions. They're the ancient roots of wisdom. They're all struggling to tell us how to deal with human existence, and that's what we're struggling with now. All the great religions tell us, at root, to do less harm and more good. Probably the biggest consolation that all the religions give me is the understanding that we're all intimately connected, and not only are we intimately connected, but at a very real level we can't always see, we're actually one. The only thing that really makes any sense is trying to figure out how to get through this together. That is very much at the root of "No Impact Man."

You've had a lot of time to think about why this project pushes so many people's buttons. I mean, a lot of people have been inspired by you. But there are also these violent, negative reactions, and I wonder what you think about those.

There's at least two elements. One is that so many people are just working so hard, trying to do the best by themselves and their families, the people that they love. They don't have any time to themselves, and this so-called American dream is not turning out to be everything it's cracked up to be. So they're not as happy as they thought they would be. And then somebody comes along and says, "Hey, I'm living as environmentally as possible!"And there's an inference that you're not.

So basically, people are like, "I'm working my rear end off, I'm doing my best, and now you're telling me that the way I'm living my life is destroying the planet. Leave me alone!" People are overwhelmed, and I totally get that. We live in overwhelming times. Sometimes the natural reaction is to push the problem, and anybody that's discussing the problem, away from us.

On another level, there are people in the environmental movement who sincerely believe that absolutely the only way forward is through collective action leading to regulatory change, and they consider any emphasis on individual action to be a distraction. My belief is that collective action has not yet reached the head of steam that we need, and therefore that regulatory change is not as strong as we need it to be. We need to find ways of rallying people who are outside the choir and getting them involved. That means cross-aisle support, and part of the way to get that is to examine the intersection between the personal and the political, to say, "How is your life contributing to the problems our culture has?" Once people have skin in the game by examining that level of detail, then you can get them involved in the politics too.

Michelle, both the book and the film present you as going into this almost unintentionally, as if you were barely aware of how big an undertaking this was. Is there a degree of shtick to that, or was it really that way?

Michelle Conlin: Basically, Colin had been writing books and they were historical nonfiction. He told me, "I don't want to do that anymore. I want to write about global warming," and then he figured out a way to write about it. He was so excited about this idea, and I was so excited for him and wanted to be supportive and wifely and all that. So I just said yes, and I didn't fully think through what it would mean. I also didn't really have any idea what I was getting myself into. I just impulsively said yes.

C.B.: To be fair, at that stage of the game neither of us knew what we were getting ourselves into. We didn't understand just how unsustainable our systems were, and how much you have to withdraw yourself to make anything approximating no impact.

In some ways, you seemed to discover and bring together all these themes or trends that already existed, whether it was the local-food movement, the voluntary simplicity movement, the DIY crafting movement. Not to mention cooking at home and growing your own vegetables, which hardly qualify as new inventions or rediscoveries. To what extent were you genuinely naive about that stuff?

As far as the local food movement goes, I was absolutely and completely unaware of it. Of course I knew that the farmer's market existed, but I had always been flummoxed by the farmer's market. You know, a rutabaga. What does one do with a rutabaga? [Laughter.] I was genuinely flummoxed by that. When I say that neither of us knew what we were getting ourselves into, I think that in some ways I believed we'd just buy organic food. And then when I started to research the impacts of our food system, I realized that organic food was an insufficient standard, and we had to move to local food.

I mean, the conceit of the book is that I'm an armchair liberal who spouts off about everything but doesn't do much about it. Of course I had been involved in some political actions but I really didn't know what to do about it. So this really was a journey of enlightenment, in the sense of learning the details.

I get the sense that there are some people in the environmental movement who view you with some bad blood. They see you standing on the shore like Christopher Columbus, saying, "I've discovered a new world!" And they're like, wait a minute. There's already people living here.

M.C.: Honey, let me jump in here, OK? Andrew, I think Colin makes it really super-clear in the book that, like, we really didn't know anything, and there are people who've been working on this stuff for decades, who have dedicated their lives to it. We in no way consider ourselves to have discovered any of this. We're very aware that there's a huge legacy of people who've worked on these issues forever, and we stumbled into all of this in 2006.

C.B.: Basically I'm a communications professional. I'm in the lucky position of taking the work of people who've come before us and to communicate what they've learned. As far as I'm concerned, I'm largely popularizing other people's work.

In terms of that ability to communicate, I wonder if it's actually helpful that before you started this you guys were much closer to the lifestyle of your average urban professional couple. You weren't environmental activists or super-educated organic consumers or whatever.

M.C. I think it is. I don't think we were environmentally awake. I mean, intellectually we knew what was going on, but I don't consider that we were active in the movement or super-conscious in our own life. I think that made the whole thing more interesting.

C.B.: You know what it's like when you're going to write a piece. You start to get obsessed and you want to research it. There was a time period between when we decided we were going to do it and when we actually started, and I deliberately didn't start doing research ahead of time. I thought that story about a naive person who cares but has no idea what to do was really important. I wanted to be like everybody else. I am like everybody else.

M.C.: That was a story I was looking for and wanted to read about, because that was a story I could relate to.

Now, how does your family live today, with the official No Impact project in the past? Have you made permanent logistical and physical changes, or are the effects found somewhere else, in spiritual or psychological ground?

M.C.: I'll answer first just because my answer will probably be shorter. Yes, there are specific physical manifestations to it; we bike and eat local food and all of that. But for me, the spiritual and psychological benefits and dividends were just as deep, if not deeper.

C.B.: There are so many adaptations we made that we kept, but one of the big spiritual or psychological changes for me was the understanding that all of our voices count. All our voices count, and we have a right and a responsibility to talk about how we want to live together. Actually, if we start doing that then change will happen.

M.C.: Can I add one more thing, Colin? I realized early on that we were redesigning our whole lifestyle. That's pretty exciting, and now that we've had that experience, it makes for a very intoxicating adventure, to approach life that way.

Do you honestly wish, in retrospect, that you had never 'fessed up on the whole toilet-paper question?

C.B.: Yeesh, that's a good question. If I have any regrets, it's that at the time of that early publicity blast I was a little bit apologetic about the idea that we need to change our lifestyles as Americans. I didn't say as forcefully as I do now that we need to change substantially -- we emit five times the carbon of the average Chinese person -- and not all of that's going to be achieved by regulation. We have to live more environmentally, and we also have to address our quality-of-life crisis. We need to figure out how to be happier and more environmental at the same time.

As for the T.P. thing, I do prefer that we talk about the kinds of issues that are brought up by the No Impact Man project: individual action or collective action, quality of life vs. standard of living. All sorts of things that have nothing to do with bathroom hygiene.

"No Impact Man" is now playing at the Angelika Film Center in New York and the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. It opens Sept. 18 in Chicago, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.; Sept. 25 in Denver, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Calif., Seattle and Washington; Oct. 2 in Boston, Charlotte, N.C., Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, San Diego and St. Louis; Oct. 9 in Cleveland; Oct. 16 in Kansas City; Oct. 23 in Dallas and Houston; and Oct. 30 in Atlanta, with more cities to follow.

The entire piece is worth reading for its nuanced, careful, and comprehensive look at the science of swine flu, but I was struck by one fact that had little to do with science, per se. CAFO workers are considered to be a major vector for human-to-human virus transfer, but CAFOs aren't routinely inspected by the government agency that is supposed to look after worker safety, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

However, OSHA typically exempts facilities with fewer than 11 employees from routine inspection unless otherwise requested by employees or other agencies. Yet, like many other modern production facilities, CAFOs are largely automated, so a typical factory farm housing 2,000 sows requires a crew of just 7 people, according to Don Butler, director of government relations and public affairs for Murphy-Brown, the livestock production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods.

The operators concentrate the animals, automate their feeding and waste disposal and staff them with so few people that they slip under OSHA's net. Beautiful.

"Cook Food" is what you would get if you combined CliffsNotes of Michael Pollan's foodie insta-classic "The Omnivore's Dilemma" with the vegan parts of Mark Bittman's "The Minimalist" cooking column in the New York Times, added a healthy pour of DIY attitude and ran it all through a blender. The book's subtitle calls it a "manualfesto," and that's just about right -- it's a nitty-gritty how-to with a political agenda: to give those of us with good intentions but limited budgets, skills, confidence or time a chance to participate in the burgeoning local food revolution.

 Jervis' approach to what she calls "healthy, light-footprint eating" is refreshingly non-doctrinaire. She confesses her own food sins up front ("I indulge my junk food cravings when I really want to, and I end up eating cheese of unknown provenance much more often than I'd like to admit") and takes an informal, let's-just-do-our-best tone throughout. She's still a food geek -- from her detailed shop talk about kitchen equipment to her "novellini on the art of roasting vegetables," you can tell she's clocked plenty of hours thinking about, cooking and eating food -- and loving every minute of it. But she doesn't expect you to share her obsession. She just wants you to put aside your resistance long enough to share her technique for sautéeing dried herbs in oil, and her recipes for "chili-style beans 'n' greens" and "spicy brownies."

So how does a gal go from feminist icon to food writer? I caught up with her (disclosure: I've worked with Jervis on several projects) recently to ask -- appropriately enough, right around dinnertime, when she was snacking on almonds and preparing a hasty, nonfoodie meal: whole wheat pasta with sauce from a jar.

 So how does a feminist pop culture critic become a locavore cookbook writer?

 First, she likes to eat a lot. And likes to cook.

I've always been extremely skeptical of mainstream messages about what's healthy and acceptable and also very skeptical about the profit messages behind those messages. I mean, the diet industry is a multi-billion-dollar industry that tells people that having a larger body makes them automatically unhealthy, that they have the capacity to change their large body through different food choices and that if they just follow the "right" plan, they will be successful in that. And all of those things are basically lies, and all of them are things that ultimately result in profit for pharmaceutical companies and diet food companies.

The sensibility I bring to food and cooking and thinking about what's healthy is very feminist, in that it's all about: How does this make my body feel? I really don't care about how it makes my body look. I'm interested in giving people the tools they need to eat what makes their bodies feel good and function better.

How is "Cook Food" different from all the other locavore/food ethics books out there right now?

 I think the main thing is that it actually has instructions. You can't read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and then go cook dinner unless you already know how to cook dinner. It's really hard to make better choices if you don't have basic cooking skills.

It seems like the stereotype of the person who cares about these issues is a white, upper-middle-class liberal NPR listener with two small children who eat nothing but organic. Why does the pro-food movement come off as precious and smug so much of the time?

 Farmers' markets do tend to spring up in places where middle-class and upper-middle-class people live. There's some truth to that. Organic food is obviously just more expensive than conventionally grown food.

As far as smug goes, one element of the current pro-food culture is that there's this focus on fancy ingredients and celebrity chefs and complicated preparations, and it makes people feel like cooking is this really specialized skill set. So I think people are intimidated by the idea that, if I'm going to cook, it has to be something special, and I have to have an excellent palate to see what's good. And you know what? You've been eating all your life. You know what's going to taste good to you. That is good food. It doesn't have to be what Alice Waters thinks is good food. What I really set out to do is to show people that it's in fact incredibly easy to put together a simple meal with fresh ingredients.

But it's not always that easy. Tonight I had to choose between going to the gym and cooking myself a healthy meal, even with all your handy easy recipes. Should I have planned better? What is going on there?

What's going on there is that you're a busy person, and a lot of people are busy, and we do have to make choices. I told you what I'm going to make for dinner, and that's because I had long day at work, and then I had a meeting, and now I'm having another meeting. We can't do everything every single day. And I'm all about accepting that, and being like, OK, this is how it is today, but tomorrow I can make beans and greens and have it for the rest of the week. Lightening your footprint and feeding yourself more healthy, whole foods is something that you have the opportunity to do three times a day, every day. That doesn't mean that you've failed if you aren't able to take that opportunity three times a day, every day.

For me, the concept of harm reduction is key. There's no way to feed, house or clothe yourself without doing some level of damage to the environment or other beings -- but reducing that harm in whatever way you can is still meaningful. I'm a fan of "aspiring," as in "aspiring locavore" or "aspiring vegan."

When Michael Pollan recently called for Americans to get back into the kitchen, a lot of feminists pointed out that, given the division of labor in American households, that would likely mean women getting back into the kitchen. Are you at all worried about the gendered implications of your work?

I love Michael Pollan, but the way that he talked about American feminists' attitude toward cooking was incredibly reductive and, frankly, pretty ahistorical. Articles like Pollan's (and anything that makes people feel like they are failing their obligations to themselves and their families by not cooking) produce a lot of guilt, and that guilt is gendered. That is a problem.

But I don't think the solution to that is to stop trying to get people to cook. The solution is to make sure that the household work is distributed more equitably. And I say that with full understanding of how little things have changed since the '70s, in terms of getting men to fucking do their share around the house. And I also think that it's no accident that the kind of rarefied, chef-dominated cooking discourse that I was talking about earlier, that often makes people feel like they can't cook rather than helping them feel that they can, is very male-dominated. Whereas the quotidian meal prep in this country is still mostly female-dominated. The feminist movement has generated a lot of good analysis around that. However, we have not moved the needle very much. I don't have an answer for that.

I also have a lot of frustrations with the way Pollan talks about "obesity." He talks about how obesity rates rise as rates of cooking fall. And I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't actually matter. Because obesity is not a good measure of health.

What really saddens me about the state of the pro-food discourse about obesity right now is that when Monsanto says genetically modified soybeans are not an environmental problem or a health problem, the pro-food movement is extremely skeptical, and they call that out as total bullshit. Whereas when the medical industry says "fat kills," they're not like: Actually, no, diabetes may kill, but the cause and effect relationship between the two is not as uncomplicated as you'd have us believe.

Speaking of Monsanto, doesn't all of the talk about individual meal choices distract us from focusing on the big-picture problems with our food supply, at the industry and policy level?

 I see this cookbook as an organizing tool. People get very overwhelmed when they start talking about food politics and they feel like, well, I don't know what to do about this. It goes back to -- this is something that people do three times a day every single day. That adds up to a lot of actions. I am no fan of market solutions as a rule, but we're still living under capitalism. There has to be a market component to any support for local farmers. So encouraging people, and giving them the concrete tools they need in order to purchase fresh food locally and use it well -- that adds up to a lot as far as concrete support for local food economies. Ditto giving people the tools they need if they want to cook animal-free meals. Movements are made up of individual actions.

Let's talk about the kinds of people who may be resistant to your message. What would you say to someone who hates to cook?

 I would want to know what they don't like about it. Do they feel like they're going to produce something that's not good? Are they nervous about the result? Does their hand cramp when they hold the knife? Are they afraid they're going to cut themselves? Are they too tired at the end of the day? Maybe it's lonely in the kitchen. There are solutions to a lot of those problems.

What about someone who doesn't live near a grocery store?

That is a really tough one. I was in Detroit recently, and there are no big grocery stores in the entire city of Detroit. But there are also 600 community gardens in Detroit right now. That's one solution -- start a garden. Another one is: Get to know your neighbors, find out who has a car, try to figure out ways to band together with other people to source some better food for your neighborhood. These answers are not going to be realistic for everybody. But as awareness is raised about these issues, there are more and more places to turn to get help with this stuff. I'd recommend foodfirst.org and healthycornerstores.org to start.

And someone with a severely limited food budget?

A lot of farmers' markets take food stamps -- that's really important to know. Also, dried beans are your friend. They're incredibly cheap, and they're actually better for you than canned. If you can go to a market where stuff is available in bulk, you'll pay a lot less. Again, team up with your friends. Have a potluck cooking fest where everyone just brings one ingredient. You get together and you can make a really hearty meal and you may even have leftovers.

People do talk a lot about how expensive fresh food is, but packaged food is really expensive, too. A box of cereal is like five or six dollars, and that's crazy when you think about what you're paying for. You could get several times more breakfast for that money with just a bag of rolled oats, some nuts and some dried fruit.

Where did you learn how to cook?

I spent a lot of time as a kid and even as a teenager hanging out in the kitchen with my mom, watching her cook, talking to her about it, learning stuff about how food works. (And I have to point out here that my father always cleaned up after dinner, because my mother always says when you talk about it like that, you make it sound like we had this totally gender-normative household. And we didn't. My father is an ace kitchen cleaner.) And my mom's pretty improvisational, too; she'll turn leftovers into several different meals just by adding things. So I really learned to trust my instincts in that way. From so much observation and helping.

But a lot of it was also trial and error. I did not emerge from my parents' household knowing how to cook. I spent a lot of time making bad stir-frys in my early 20s.

A man from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) gives the first presentation. Colorful graphs travel up and down his PowerPoint charts. Some are headed downward as the year 2050 approaches. They represent the farmland that is disappearing as a result of climate change, soil desolation, urbanization and the shortage of water. The other lines, which point sharply upward, represent demand for meat and biofuel, food prices and population growth. There is a growing gap between the two sets of lines. It represents hunger.

According to most prognoses, there could be 9.1 billion people living on Earth in 2050, about 2 billion more than today. In the coming 20 years alone, worldwide demand for food is expected to rise by 50 percent. "These are pessimistic prospects," says the OECD man. He looks serious and even a little sad as he describes the future of the world.

But for the audience in the Stuyvesant Room, mostly men and a handful of women, all of this is good news and the mood is buoyant. How could it be any different? After all, hunger is their business. The combination of more people and less land makes food a safe investment, with annual returns of 20 to 30 percent, rare in the current economic climate.

These are not Wall Street experts, nor are they people who shoot money across the continents like billiard balls. On the contrary, these are extremely conservative investors who buy or lease land to grow wheat or raise cattle. But land is scarce and expensive in Europe and the United States. Solving the problem means developing new land, which is available only in Africa, Asia and South America. This combination of factors has triggered a high-stakes game of real-life Monopoly, in which investment funds, banks and governments are engaged in a race for access to the world's arable land.

"The final frontier for finding alpha"
Susan Payne, a red-haired British woman, is the CEO of the largest land fund in southern Africa, which currently includes 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres), mainly in South Africa, Zambia and Mozambique. Payne hopes to raise half a billion euros from investors. She talks about fighting hunger, but the headings on her PowerPoint slides, embellished with photos of soybean fields at sunset, tell a different story. One such heading refers to "Africa -- the last frontier for finding alpha." The word "alpha" signifies an investment for which the return is greater than the risk. Africa is alpha country.

That's because land, which is extremely fertile in some regions, is inexpensive on the impoverished continent. Payne's land fund pays $350 to $500 per hectare ($140 to $200 per acre) in Zambia, about one-tenth the price of land in Argentina or the United States. For a small farmer in Africa, the average yield per hectare has remained unchanged in 40 years. With a little fertilizer and additional irrigation, yields could quadruple -- and so could profits.

These are perfect conditions for investors. Payne sees it that way, and so do her investors. In fact, there has been so much demand for this type of investment that Payne recently had to establish a new sub-fund.

A great deal of capital is currently available. It is the second year of the global economic crisis, and investors are seeking sound and safe investments, which is why the audience in New York includes not only hedge fund managers and agriculture industry executives, but also the representatives of large pension funds and the chief financial officers of five universities, including Harvard.

Thousands of investment funds, from small to large, have recently begun applying the most basic formula in the world: People must eat.

The U.S. investment management company BlackRock, for example, has established a $200 million agriculture fund and has earmarked $30 million for the acquisition of farmland. Renaissance Capital, a Russian investment company, has acquired more than 100,000 hectares in Ukraine. Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs have invested their money in pig-breeding operations and chicken farms in China, investments that include the legal rights to farmland.

Food is becoming the new oil. Worldwide grain reserves dropped to a historic low at the beginning of 2008, and the ensuing price explosion marked a turning point, just as the oil crisis did in the 1970s. There were bread riots around the world, and 25 countries, including some of the biggest grain exporters, imposed restrictions on food exports.

Then came the second crisis of 2008, the economic crisis. Two fears -- the fear of hunger and the fear of uncertainty -- converged, triggering what some are already calling a second generation of colonialism.

A win-win situation?
What is different about this colonialism is that countries are readily allowing themselves to be conquered. The Ethiopian prime minister said that his government is "eager" to provide access to hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland. The Turkish agriculture minister announced: "Choose and take what you want." In the midst of a war against the Taliban, the Pakistani government staged a road show in Dubai, seeking to entice sheikhs with tax breaks and exemptions from labor laws.

All these efforts have two hopes in common. One is the hope of poor nations to achieve the development and modernization of their ailing agricultural sectors. The other is the world's hope that foreign investors in Africa and Asia will be able to produce enough food for a planet soon to be populated by 9.1 billion people; that they will bring along all the things that poor countries have lacked until now, including technology, capital and knowledge, modern seed and fertilizer; and that these investors will be able to not only double crop yields but, in many parts of Africa, increase them 10-fold. Previous estimates had in fact forecast a decline in production capacity by 3 to 4 percent in 2080 compared with the year 2000.

If the investors are successful, they could achieve what development agencies have been unable to do in the past few decades: reduce the hunger that now afflicts more people than ever, namely 1 billion worldwide. In the best-case scenario this could be a win-win situation with profit for the investors and development for the poor.

It is not just bankers and speculators, but also governments that are acquiring land in other countries, seeking to reduce their dependence on the world market and imports. China is home to 20 percent of the world's population, but it has only 9 percent of the world's arable land. Japan is the world's largest corn importer, and South Korea is the second-largest. The Persian Gulf states import 60 percent of their food, while their natural water reserves are sufficient to support only another 30 years of agriculture.

Modern-day land grab
But what happens in a globalized world when colonies arise once again? What if, for example, Saudi Arabia acquires parts of Pakistan's Punjab region or Russian investors buy up half of Ukraine? And what happens when famine strikes these countries? Will the wealthy foreigners install electric fences around their fields, and will armed guards escort crop shipments out of the country? Pakistan has already announced plans to deploy 100,000 members of its security forces to protect foreign-owned fields.

Because of the political sensitivity of the modern-day land grab, it is often only the country's head of state who knows the details. In some cases, however, provincial governors have already auctioned off land to the highest bidder, as in the case of Laos and Cambodia, where even the governments no longer know how much of their territory they still own.

No one is sure exactly how much land is at stake. The number cited by the International Food Policy Research Institute is 30 million hectares, but this estimate is impossible to verify. Even United Nations organizations have to resort to citing newspaper reports, while the World Bank is trying to persuade countries to pay closer attention to the fine print on agreements.

Klaus Deininger, an economist specializing in land policy at the World Bank, estimates that 10 to 30 percent of available arable land could be up for grabs, although only a fraction of the potential number of lease and sale agreements have been signed. "There was a huge jump in 2008, when plans and applications in many countries more than doubled, in some cases tripled," Deininger says. In Mozambique, he says, foreign demand is more than double the existing cultivated farmland, and the government has already allocated 4 million hectares to investors, half of them from abroad.

The most spectacular deals are not being made by private investors, however, but by governments and the funds and conglomerates they promote:

• The Sudanese government has leased 1.5 million hectares of prime farmland to the Gulf states, Egypt and South Korea for 99 years. Paradoxically, Sudan is also the world's largest recipient of foreign aid, with 5.6 million of its citizens dependent on food deliveries.
• Kuwait has leased 130,000 hectares of rice fields in Cambodia.
• Egypt plans to grow wheat and corn on 840,000 hectares in Uganda.
• The president of the Democratic Republic of Congo has offered to lease 10 million hectares to the South Africans.

Saudi Arabia is one of the biggest and most aggressive buyers of land. This spring, the king attended a ceremony where he took delivery of the first export rice harvest, produced exclusively for the kingdom in hunger-stricken Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia spends $800 million a year promoting foreign companies that cultivate "strategic field crops" like rice, wheat, barley and corn, which it then imports. Ironically, the country was the world's sixth-largest wheat exporter in the 1990s. But water is scarce and the desert nation aims to preserve its reserves. Exporting food also means exporting water.

Part 2: "The investor needs a weak state"
Rich nations are exchanging money, oil and infrastructure for food, water and animal feed. At first glance, this seems to present a solution for many problems, says Jean-Philippe Audinet of the International Fund for Agricultural Development. In principle, he is pleased about the agricultural investments and says he fought for them for years: "What was bad was the period when markets were being flooded with cheap food products."

But many of the countries where land is being snapped up -- Kazakhstan and Pakistan, for example -- suffer from water shortages. Sub-Saharan Africa has adequate natural water reserves, but the only country in the region currently producing a food surplus is South Africa. Most countries, on the other hand, are importers and, with rapidly growing populations, will likely be even more dependent on food imports in the future. Can such countries truly become important food producers?

Audinet knows the risks: "The way these agreements are structured can harm the country and the farmers in the long term, robbing them of their most important asset -- land." Olivier De Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, warns: "Because the countries in Africa are competing for investors, they are undercutting each other." Some contracts, says De Schutter, are barely three pages long -- for hundreds of thousands of hectares of land. These types of agreements stipulate what products are to be cultivated, the location, and the purchase or lease price, but they include no environmental standards. They also lack the necessary investment regulations and the stipulation that jobs must be created, De Schutter says.

Some investors agree to build schools and pave roads, but even when they live up to their promises, the benefits to the host governments and local farmers are often short-lived. In the long term, however, they must suffer the consequences of over-fertilizing, deforestation, the overconsumption of water, a reduction of ecological diversity, and the loss of local species. To boost harvests and achieve annual returns of 20 percent or more, the foreign large landowners must operate their farms on an industrial scale. And when the soil becomes depleted after a few years, many investors simply move on. Land is so cheap that they are not forced to value sustainable farming practices.

Rejecting the old model
Because of these risks Audinet and De Schutter, like most other experts, favor contract farming instead of land acquisition. In other words, the foreign investors provide the technology and capital, while the local farmers own or lease the land and supply rice or wheat at fixed prices. This is the classic, tried-and-tested model, but it is not what the new investors want. They want control, ownership, high returns and, most of all, security -- objectives rarely compatible with the interests of thousands of small farmers.

Senegal has decided in favor of contract farming and against large-scale land sales, but it happens to be a stable democracy. This cannot be said of many of the countries where land acquisition is taking place.

"When food becomes scarce, the investor needs a weak state that does not force him to abide by any rules," says Philippe Heilberg, an American businessman. In other words, the investor needs a state that permits grain exports despite famines at home, that is consumed by corruption or deep in debt, ruled by a dictatorship, racked by civil war, or obliged to send millions of workers abroad and while being dependent on those workers receiving visas and jobs.

Heilberg has found such a nation: South Sudan, which is in fact a pre-nation, autonomous but not independent. The 44-year-old American, son of a coffee merchant and the founder of the investment firm Jarch Capital, is now the largest land leaseholder in South Sudan, where he leases 400,000 hectares of prime farmland in Mayom County.

The mere mention of the words "South Sudan" conjures up images of civil war, refugees and famine, not of a place where one would consider growing tomatoes. But Heilberg raves that his project will be more beneficial to people than the U.N., and that he will create jobs and produce food. And he is adamant that Paulino Matip, from whom he has leased the land for 50 years, not be referred to as a warlord, but as a "former warlord" or "deputy army chief." Heilberg neglects to mention that the rebels led by Matip are suspected of having committed war crimes.

Instead of buying stocks, the former banker is now speculating on the political future of South Sudan, which he insists will be an independent country in 10 years, at which point land will be far more expensive than it is today.

Land acquisition is already a step further along in western Kenya, home to Erastas Dildo, 33, the kind of person the New York investors would probably characterize as a risk factor: a small farmer who owns three hectares of land. It is fertile land, where the corn turns bright green and grows 2 meters (6.5 feet) tall, where the cattle are as fat as hippos and the tomato plants bend under the weight of their fruit. The nearby Yala River flows into Lake Victoria. There are three small brick houses on the property. Erastas harvests his corn twice a year, and vegetables and tomatoes grow year-round. One hectare produces more than $5,000 worth of corn a year, a lot of money by Kenyan standards.

"They drove out 400 families"
But things changed when Erastas was contacted by Dominion Farms, a US agricultural producer that established a colony in the Yala delta, where it has leased 3,600 hectares of land for 45 years, at the ludicrous rate of €12,000 (almost $17,000) a year. Dominion, which plans to grow rice, vegetables and corn on the land, wants to include Erastas Dildo's three hectares in its venture.

The Dominion representatives offered to pay him about 10 cents per square meter. Erastas turned them down, and now they are making life difficult for the farmer. Their most effective weapon is a dam they have built. When Erastas tried to harvest his corn last year, it was under water. "They are playing with the water level to get rid of us," he says. And when that doesn't work, Erastas says, Dominion sends in bulldozers, thugs and sometimes even the police.

Under its contract, Dominion has agreed to renovate "at least one school and one medical facility" in each of the two local districts. "They drove out 400 families instead," says Gondi Olima of the organization Friends of the Yala Swamp. According to Olima, at first the Dominion venture created new jobs, as day laborers were hired to clear the site with machetes, but then the company brought in more and more equipment. "Now they have so many machines that workers are no longer needed," Olima says.

Dominion Farms denies the farmers' accusations and points out that it has already built eight classrooms, donated gateposts and awarded educational scholarships to 16 children, as well as providing beds and electricity for a hospital ward.

Perhaps Erastas and his family will be forced to make way for the development soon, as is already happening in many other places. The World Bank estimates that only 2 to 10 percent of the land in Africa is formally owned or leased, and most of that is in cities. A family may have lived on or occupied a piece of land for decades, but it often has no proof of ownership.

The hunt for land continues
Nevertheless, the land is almost never left unused. The poor, in particular, live off the land, where they collect fruits, herbs or firewood and graze their livestock. According to a joint study by several U.N. organizations, land grabs are often justified by defining the land as "fallow." As a result, according to the report, land grabs have the potential to dispossess farmers on a large scale. In many countries, there may be enough arable land available for everyone, but the quality is not uniform -- and the investors want the best land. That, as it happens, is the land where farmers usually live.

Because more than 50 percent of Africans are small farmers, large-scale land acquisition could be disastrous for the population. Those who lose their fields lose everything. The fact that the large investors can substantially improve harvests with their modern agricultural technology is of little use to Africans who, once they have lost their land and livelihood, cannot afford to buy the new farms' products.

The World Bank and others are now developing a code of conduct for investors. A declaration of intent had been planned for the July G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, but the heads of state in attendance could not agree on binding standards.

And so the hunt for land continues. Dominion has secured another 3,200 hectares, and Philippe Heilberg is in the process of leasing an additional 600,000 hectares in South Sudan. Back in New York, in the Stuyvesant Room, one of the speakers is reciting numbers to illustrate how fast the global population is growing: By 154 people per minute, 9,240 per hour or 221,760 per day. And each one of them wants to eat.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

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