20 Food Experiences for 2020 | Netflix and Shill | Recipe: Berry Oat Bars
Issue No. 27
We have some exciting plans for 2020 (interviews with community leaders! a kids issue!). But first, let’s end the first month of the new year with a BIG LIST for eating your way through 2020. We’re also lovin’ these engrossing podcast episodes about McDonald’s and picking fresh strawberries for some berry oat crumble bars.
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Has life’s daily grind taken the pizazz out of your meals? Too much overpriced takeout? Too many bland bowls of pasta? Too much shoveling of food into your mouth while driving? We get it. You gotta hustle.
But when looking for a culinary adventure, let Sunshine + Microbes help add a little va-va-voom to your eats. We’ve created this fun checklist ✅of 20 food experiences to enjoy in 2020.
This is not about trendy foods to try or hip dining destinations. We are not the arbiters of what’s good or bad in your neighborhood. Instead, we want to inspire new ways of thinking about food. Use this list as a jumping-off point to build connections, support your community, and try something new. We promise it will be memorable and delicious.
Host a cook-off with your friends. See which of your crew is the Grand Dame of Grilled Cheese, the Pizza Prince, or the Sultaness of Salsa.
Organize a communal food prep event. Many hands make light work. Especially when it comes to tamales.
Make yogurt from scratch. You’ll feel so smug about making something you usually buy at the store. Afterwards, try your hand at homemade pasta, ice cream or bread.
Have a picnic in a state park. Florida State Parks are just wonderful. So are fancy sandwiches. Combine for increased effect.
Cook over an open fire. This is a good excuse to have a fire, which is the most fun.
Start composting. It’s time to turn those kitchen scraps into garden gold! Consider a tumbler for maximum ease.
Bake the gift of chocolate chip cookies. That person at work that always puts a smile on your face? Your kid’s favorite teacher? Your friend who always lets you vent without judgment? They deserve a surprise batch of cookies.
Cook your way through an entire cookbook, Julie and Julia-style. Try this one. Or this! Or this if you fancy. Trying new recipes will get you out of your comfort zone and build up your culinary arsenal.
Get friendly with one of the makers at your local farmers market. Grow the local food economy by supporting producers in your community. Learn the names of the folks that grow your lettuce and bake your bread.
Eat an entire meal sans utensils. Eating with your hands is a surprisingly joyful sensory experience.
Recreate a special food memory. Use your senses to recreate your grandmother’s tomato sauce, your friend’s mother’s famous ratatouille, or those coconut ice pops you devoured on hot summer days.
Take yourself out to dinner. Nothing tops the leisurely pleasure of dining solo. You deserve a delicious meal and some quality time with yourself.
Perfect the poached egg. They are so classy, and once you get the hang of it, they’re a cinch.
Make vegan cheese. You heard it here first. Vegan cheese is having a moment, from simple spreadable numbers to fancy, aged mock-camembert.
Stop in for some gas station boiled peanuts. Seriously. A Southern classic. They are so delicious. Be sure to get ‘em spicy.
Try BK’s Impossible Whopper. Or another vegan fast food item, like Dunkin’s Beyond Sausage Sandwich or Chipotle’s sofritas. Money talks, so let the fast food industry know you support the move towards more meatless menu options.
Make your own oat milk. First, start using oat milk in your morning coffee. Second, no need to spend on fancy mylks at the store when you can make your own in a flash.
Grow some herbs. A whole garden is a big commitment, but you can handle a pot of rosemary.
Join your local Slow Food chapter. Support the work of this fabulous organization that promotes good, clean, and fair food for all.
love,
Jackie
Maybe share this list with your friends. Post it on social media. Tell all your cousins. Those seem like great ideas!
LISTEN TO THIS
Add these tales from Mickey D’s to your queue
Whether or not you personally frequent the Golden Arches, McDonald’s matters, feeding roughly 1 percent of the world’s population every day. Here are two great stories about the humans that eat at, work for, and get rich off of the more than 37,000 McDonald’s around the world.
The United States of McDonald’s | Gastropod
Focusing on the work of Marcia Chatelain, author of Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, this story explores the deep economic, social, and cultural impacts the fast food chain has had on African American communities. McDonald’s was ahead of its time in regards to black representation in their national marketing campaigns, and has funded cultural, academic, and athletic scholarships and opportunities in the black community. But it’s far from a happily meal ever after. The McJob has become a symbol of the lack of economic opportunity available to African Americans and people of color in general. The history of how the U.S. government subsidized black franchise ownership instead of funding education, housing reform, and other meaningful civil rights policies is another fascinating example of the limits of capitalism to solve our problems.
Liberté, Égalité and French Fries | Rough Translation
Travel across the pond to France with Liberté, Égalité and French Fries from Rough Translation. This captivating episode explores the personal histories of several McDonald’s employees, and the incredible impact a job with the company had on their lives. These different stories collide in an epic workers-right battle, in which one store’s employees take extreme actions to block the sale and closure of their restaurant.
Fresh links
🎞️Netflix Loves Pseudoscience Documentaries. Don’t Fall for Them. | Wired
Pushing back against “wellness” trends has been one of our primary missions from the start. And of course, Gwyneth Paltrow’s product line Goop is one of the worst offenders — with its hawking of vaginal eggs and cold therapy and various alternative medicines. Now Paltrow is helming her own Netflix series “The Goop Lab.”
Reviews of the show view it as an extremely boring promotion of Paltrow’s dangerous wellness belief. Unfortunately, this is not Netflix’s only foray into highly produced pseudoscience. As Wired notes, ether programs like “What the Health”, “The Magic Pill” and “Heal” “start with a conclusion, and merely go through the motions before ending up at an inevitable destination” that’s usually not based in any scientific reality and potentially harmful.
These shows unfairly target “people who might be looking for an answer to their very real health issues.” Be skeptical: There’s no escape from wellness bullshit.
🔥🔥🔥🎾Sports in the Time of Climate Change | The Nation
In the middle of Australia’s devastating brushfires, the continent’s most high profile international sporting event — the Australian Open tennis tournament — began in Melbourne. Smoke from the fires soon invaded the “the normally hermetically sealed entertainment chamber that is the world of sports.”
It didn’t look pretty.
Players suffered asthmatic symptoms, chest pains, vomiting and dizziness as they played through smoke and ash at a time when Australians were warned not to go outside due to the conditions. Tournament officials subsequently issued an air quality policy that would prevent play if air pollution reached elevated levels.
Climate change is a specter that has been hanging over the world of sports. The Australian Open implemented new heat restrictions after temperatures topping out at 108 degrees caused “players to pass out, vomit, and burn their skin on chairs.” Outdoor events that require superhuman endurance like marathons and cycling will strain cardiovascular systems as competitions literally heat up. Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics as a whole are threatened by warming. Hundreds of golf courses are vulnerable to sea level rise. As Dave Zirin concludes:
“[Sports] can either strive to be a part of the solution or it can be an instrument of distraction. If they choose the latter, the minders of our games will be obscuring the severity of the problem even as their own sports sink into the sea or simply burn.”es Rural Fire Service went on a confidential mission to save a prehistoric tree species as fire enclosed on the area
🌳🌲🌴Trees Won’t Save Us | MIT Technology Review
Some eco-friendly bipartisan initiatives have been earning support across the globe: from the billionaires in Davos to members of the U.S. congress. What do these drives plan to do? Plant trees. Trillions of them.
Trees do of course absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, trees also take a long time to grow and offset emissions. The scale of planting a trillion trees is nearly impossible too. Where will suitable land come from? And even if space is found for a trillion trees, how do they stay safe from bushfires or loggers or other catastrophes (i.e. beetle infestations) that will be exacerbated by climate change? Tree planting feels like a way for conservatives and Davos elites to make gestures toward tackling climate change without actually implementing the radical changes needed to save the planet.
We should plant trees of course, but we must also encourage solutions for reducing emissions and capturing and storing carbon. Trees alone are a seductive idea. But, Temple writes, the “appeal of natural-sounding solutions can delude us into thinking we’re taking more meaningful action than we really are.”
Berry Oat Crumble Bars 🍓🍓🍓
Many of the fruits found in grocery stores are picked in an unripe state (often chemically-ripened off the vine, although not in the case of strawberries). This increases their shelf life and their ability to survive transport. But these shortcuts rob the fruit of vital maturation time on the plant, where it develops the sugars that make it delicious. That’s why strawberries from the supermarket often taste like clouds of nothing.
But it’s strawberry season in Florida, and the farmers markets I frequent are dripping with sweet, just-harvested fruit. I could talk about why you should turn them into these crumble bars, which are sweet enough for dessert but not so decadent that you couldn’t eat one for breakfast...or we could all collectively listen to The Crumble Song.
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen, who adapted it from somewhere else.
Ingredients
For the oat mixture:
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup brown sugar
2 cups rolled oats
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
2 sticks butter, cut into 1-inch pieces (or make it vegan by substituting 1 1/2 cups olive oil)
For the berry mixture:
1/4 cup brown sugar
Zest and juice of one lemon
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons whole wheat flour
1 pound berries of choice (slice strawberries, leave others whole)
2 tablespoons olive oil
Step-by-step
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 9x13 baking pan with parchment paper.
To make the oat mixture, combine ingredients in a food processor and pulse until combined but still crumbly.
Firmly press 3/4 of oat mixture into the pan to form the crust, reserving the remainder for topping. Bake for 15 minutes until golden brown.
While the crust bakes, make the berry mixture by combining all ingredients together in a bowl.
For a crunchier crumble, allow crust to cool once it comes out of the oven. But if you don’t mind a softer bottom, go ahead and top the crust with the berry mixture, then sprinkle the remaining oat mixture evenly over the top.
Bake for approximately 45 minutes until things start to bubble and the crumble on top looks golden brown.
Alpha 💪Carotene
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the current Chef-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a freelance reporter based in Colombia. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.