Recently, I started watching Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on ABC. In his enthusiasm and optimism, Oliver amazes. Sometimes, for the same reasons, he also annoys. He really started making me wince in the second episode, when he was frantically goading on a sweet, morbidly obese sixth grader's cooking efforts with the fairly far-fetched promise that stir-fry expertise would endear him to the young ladies he coveted. Still, the third episode focusing on high-schoolers was more moving than it was excruciating. Some corny moments aside, his mission to improve the quality of the meals that kids and their parents wolf down is commendable and daring; to see it stretch to the United States' most nutrient-deprived corners is satisfying. While the point of their inclusion may have been a by-product of Oliver's primary intent to reform Huntington, West Virginia's diet, the footage of elementary school students tossing all greenery and non-processed items from their trays into huge gray garbage bins especially resonated with me. I'm a part-time substitute teacher for the San Francisco Unified School District, and I have seen that scene before, in very high-definition: industrial-strength receptacles stuffed to the hilt with perfectly good apples, salads, rolls, and unopened milk containers.

Sadly, the ritualized dumping only scratches the surface of what increasingly appears to be a food waste pandemic in the state of California. Each year, California farmers, restaurants and supermarkets toss six million tons of edible food. To put the amount in perspective, Oakland's Oracle Arena, or the Staples Center in Los Angeles, sports and entertainment venues with capacities approaching 20,000, could be filled to the brim, 35 times over. According to Hunger in the Golden State, a collaborative endeavor by California Watch and USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, food products represent 15.5% of our state's waste. Last week, the project reported on its findings, alleging that major "shortcomings...at every step...along California's food distribution chain [allows] vast amounts of food to go to waste in landfills despite laws and tax incentives that encourage food donations." Sharing the evidence in detail would exhaust the confines of this meager forum, but I'll let you chew on a few stirring nuggets, presented succinctly:

Last year, only 940 of the 90,000 eating and drinking establishments operating in California worked with Food Donation Connection, overwhelmingly the largest program linking food service donors with hunger relief agencies. In 2009, such wonders of sustainability as Pizza Hut and KFC accounted for over half of the participants. Why? Mom-and-pop restaurants and single-owner franchises aren't eligible for a tax deduction for food donations, and thus often elect not to get involved.

California grows half our country's fruits, vegetables and nuts, yet experts guess that farmers plow under millions of tons of produce after each harvest. While farmers don't exactly avoid efficiency, when a crop carries a price incapable of paying for its harvest, few trying to make a living off sales see the point in doubling down on a loss. Although food bank donations and gleaning operations have helped, a shockingly high percentage of most commercial crops never leave their fields. Thousands of pounds of produce are abandoned -- enough to feed whole cities. According to Hidden Harvest, a Coachella-based outfit, one local effort managed to "save" 14,000 of approximately 140,000 pounds of carrots left above ground. A 2004 study by University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy Jones claims that up to 10% of some crops, like cauliflower for example, simply rot. The overall figure for crop waste across the country, he says, may be even higher -- closer to 20%.

Many grocery stores -- like Safeway, for example -- participate in some kind of hunger relief program. At the same time, many chains only donate bakery items, or at least balk at donating perishable produce. Even though a 1996 federal statute protects donations made in good faith against liabilities, stores reportedly worry they'd be held responsible if anyone fell ill after eating donated meat or vegetables. "Many grocery stores decline to give food because they're either unaware of the liability protection in place or they feign ignorance of the law because they don't want to bother," Jonathon Bloom, author of the blog Wasted Food, was quoted as saying. "Almost as often, stores know they'd win such a lawsuit, but are afraid of the negative publicity they'd face if such a suit happened."

Restaurants, farms, stores and schools aren't the only culprits. Perfectly edible food represents a quarter of all waste tossed away by California households.

"A certain amount of waste is inevitable in all forms of business," write the piece's authors Tina Mather, Kim Daniels and Shannon Pence. "It’s built into the economics of every production and manufacturing cycle -- whether it is clothes-making, home-building or newspaper printing. But the commodity of food takes on added significance...Health officials, researchers, economists, farmers and corporate leaders interviewed for this project say that more efficient production and distribution of our food could help feed millions of families."

On a large-scale, organized level, non-profits are trying to stem the tide of edible refuse.

According to Hunger in the Golden State, "numerous volunteer organizations work to 're-harvest' California's vast produce landscape and divert edible food that would be wasted from grocery stores and restaurants into California's food banks and soup kitchens." On a local and personal level, individuals and fledgling groups engage in a broad spectrum of holistic efforts to ensure less food ends up in the garbage.

As outlined in Twilight Greenaway's Free Falling blog, dumpster diving less frequently evokes unpopular punk bands from meth-y Pacific Northwest enclaves scrounging half-eaten pizzas at rest stops, instead feeling more and more like a responsible practice on the part of people who are simultaneously thrifty and serious about what they eat. A Monday article in the Chronicle tipped a hat to Food Runners, a 23-year-old San Francisco organization redistributing food that "would be otherwise discarded." Websites like Neighborhood Fruit connect San Franciscans weighed down with bounty from backyard trees to fellow citizens happy to take some off their hands. On Sundays, from one to three p.m., Free Farm Stand holds court at Treat and 23rd, giving away produce grown in urban farms and gardens -- according to the website, over 6,700 pounds so far.

The free food movement is gaining momentum for a lot of reasons. For one, it's cheaper to pick up a bag of free apples than go to a farmer's market. While no one has ever liked the idea of wasting good food, taking direct steps to actually cut back on and use existing food waste have required a heightened state of consciousness and crummy economic circumstances compelling even financially secure folks to trim costs. I explored urban gardens last week, but I've been thinking about it more. Along with foraging, it's the sort of noble and attractive pursuit that easily comes off as elitist. Home and community gardens can make produce cheaper and encourage self-sufficiency independent from food-ferrying corporate systems, but most home gardeners sowing heirloom lettuce seeds aren't in it to save a buck. Time is a luxury, and gardens often necessitate commitments poor, hard-working people with families can't muster. Nonetheless, the organized mopping up of waste, the gardens and the webs of community activity materializing amongst these efforts -- they coincide with a cultural shift -- certainly in the Bay Area, and, to some extent, nation-wide, in large cities -- pushing back to a time when food production was not industrialized, when pathways from farms to tables were clearer, more straightforward and less harmful to the environment.

The push carries with it a whiff of fear. Making use of all the food we do produce is important certainly, not just because the less fortunate need to eat and we must put systems in place to feed them, ideally with food that's already being grown and raised, but because the less fortunate are growing in numbers. Unemployment woes and public service cuts impact everyone one way or another. From collapse, to war, to terrorism, to disease and earthquakes, our giant food supply system is vulnerable. The other day, I read about a new book by Brett L. Markham called Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre. I haven't read the book itself, but the promotional website casts the mission in a somewhat somber tone:

"Let's be honest. The economy is a mess and likely to remain so for some time. The GAO has reported that Peak Oil is a real and proximate phenomenon that will make things even worse. Wages, even in high tech industries, have been stagnant for several years. We have no idea what challenges the future might bring. The time to start raising your own food is not when people are already starving."

Maybe there's a grim survivalist tint to all this. Last week, Oakland Local peddled a pretty fine April Fool's joke about street pigeon becoming the signature dish at a new Oakland restaurant. Free-range domesticated squab is one thing; a mangy pigeon raised on bottle caps and cigarette butts is another. It's not so far-fetched though. A 2008 Wired article only half-jokingly suggested we start eating these "waste-scavenging, protein-generating biomachines" that so hardily populate our urban landscape. Someday, maybe la cucina povera will be a necessity, and it will be truly poor. We stay alive on bugs and vermin -- things we can't kill off, things that often scrape by -- fittingly -- feasting on our garbage. In the Twitter-free food-verse of our Mad Maxian future, perhaps we'll all push grocery carts through alleys filled with shredded feathery pigeon carcasses, stopping to harvest whatever sprouts up through cracks in the concrete.

Related Links:

Hunger in the Golden State
Twitter: @hunger_in_CA
Facebook: Hunger in the Golden State

Waste on The California Report
Part One: Hunger in the Land of Plenty
Part Two: The Food Stamp Quandary
Part Three: Waste

California Watch
Twitter: @CaliforniaWatch
Facebook: California Watch
Flickr: California Watch Photo Pool

Jonathan Bloom's Wasted Food blog
Twitter: @WastedFood
Flickr: Food Waste photos

I suppose we can thank Anthony Bourdain for the stereotype of the wild man chef. In Kitchen Confidential, his descriptions of "whacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees...and psychopaths" haphazardly gobbling substances and screwing on flour sacks between shifts made cooking in a restaurant kitchen seem like both the worst and best job imaginable. He romanticized the depraved hangover-to-hangover existence of a clock-punching turner-and-burner even as he cast his world in a hyper-realistic light, widely disseminating a broad colorful portrait of the journeyman chef, specifically a male one, that quickly congealed in the public mind. He popularized an archetype young chefs may even aspire to emulate -- like fledgling rock singers copping Jagger's pout and other well-traveled performance tropes.

In July 2009, Lev Grossman wrote of Bourdain in Time:

"It was invisible then. Now we recognize it right away: this is Anthony Bourdain's world...He changed our whole cultural idea of what a kitchen is. Pre-Bourdain, it was a warm, cozy, maternal place. Now it's a profane, brutal, masculine crucible, where human frailty is rendered away like so much tasty bacon fat."

Of course, Kitchen Confidential didn't tell chefs anything they didn't already know. I also doubt the book would have been such a sensation had it not arrived at a time when cooking and eating were becoming popular fodder for entertainment on the Food Network, and chefs were more and more in the public eye. Today, celebrity chefs are brands -- swollen, polished amplifications of the managerial personalities they cultivated actually manning kitchens. I'm not trying to write a college paper here, but I have noticed (as have many others) that nearly all of the high-profile celebrity chefs are men. While female Food Network hosts -- like Rachael, Giada, and the newly minted Melissa-- focus on saving time, shopping frugally, and feeding families -- clear extensions of the domestic arena -- male celebrity chefs focus on the craft itself, food for its own sake, cooking as an endless array of skills to acquire and adventures on which to embark in the carrying on of tradition and technique. They can approach food from an intellectual perspective. You learn about salumi. You study pizza. You get your education one cream-laden sauce at a time. You come of age in a French kitchen helmed by a venomous, insult-spewing maniac. You soak up abuse like a crostini, work awful hours, and get paid little to no money, but it's what you expect -- because you're an apprentice. You have to be man enough to take it. Some day, you'll be an executive chef yourself, and you'll have your own cadre of serfs to kick around. Until then, you mince onions and practice cursing. While women obviously pass through similar rites of passage in kitchens all over the world, in the realm of food entertainment, they're relegated to clipping coupons, dumbing down complicated dishes to satisfy some producer's market-tested vision of the American housewife, and attracting no shortage of she-can't-really-cook mockery from their male counterparts. Older female celebrity chefs -- like Lidia Bastianich, for example -- are motherly and comforting. They learned to cook from their mothers, and that's what they're sharing with you.

Everything on television is deliberately orchestrated, of course, but many of the common signifiers of male chefness -- the cursing, the drinking, the fighting, the screaming, the preoccupation with large pieces of meat -- whether expressed on camera, in memoirs, or reputation via third-person anecdotes -- endow a traditionally feminine role with coarse, conventionally masculine trappings. Producers want men to feel safe watching their shows. They don't want the women to appear shrill, unattractive, bossy, or otherwise threatening, or for the men in aprons to come off as effete. Over the course of six seasons of Bravo's Top Chef, some of the show's most reviled male contestants have been wheedling, effeminate men. Likewise, when Padma Lakshmi, host of Top Chef, did a tour of Spain for the Food Network way back in early 2000s, she was not tripping around, Bourdain-like, shit-faced on sherry, taking bullfighting lessons, making subtle references to gastrointestinal distress. Instead, cameras zoomed in again and again as she slowly lowered strips of fine jamon into her mouth, oohing and cooing, her face bathed in a soft, warm lamp-lit glow. In one segment, she rode a horse, in another, a donkey. She did go to a bullfight, which the bull managed to win against all odds. Relieved, Lakshmi repaired to a nearby restaurant, where she ate the balls of one of the victorious bull's less fortunate comrades.

Men who have become famous cooking and eating in the public eye go out of their way to project a masculine image, and their carefully constructed personalities stud every crevice of the machismo spectrum. Ginger-coiffed Bobby Flay, proprietor of what Grub Street deems the 13th largest chef empire, is a wise-talking Jersey dude. He's richer than an oil tycoon but he has real friends. How do you know? They come over to his modest-seeming house for sausage party cook-outs. Sometimes, when he's smirking his way through a Throwdown episode, he looks like guys I've seen at bars late at night, red-faced, a little sweaty, leering at ladies between shots of Patron. 8th on Grub Street's list, Mario Batali, corpulent, jolly, and orange-clogged, is renowned for Falstaffian excesses. With his Tourettic interjecting of idiotic catch phrases, Emeril Lagasse, locked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Nobu Matsuhisa for #5 through #7, strikes me as a man who always speaks louder than he has to. With his Stray Cats-meets-Swingers-in-the-back-of-a-Sunglass Hut shtick, Guy Fieri apparently wowed audience members at this year's Great American Food and Music Festival in Mountain View with what Bay Area Bites contributor Stephanie Im called a "highly entertaining blowout performance complete with loud rock n'roll, gratuitous hot chicks on stage, big machinery, power tools, and pyrotechnics." The owner of 27 restaurants around the world, Gordon Ramsey has bounced over some financial ruts lately, but Grub Street still has him in the #1 slot. His shows are crude spectacles of theater Artaud, would find unwatchable. Ramsey berates chefs, spits food on the floor, and picks fights. Off-screen, he's compulsively disrespectful, particularly towards women. Bourdain? Well, he doesn't actually cook much anymore, but he drinks a lot on No Reservations and makes a point of eating anything put in front of him, regardless of how strange or off-putting it may be. When he's not going shooting with Ted Nugent, he's a culturally sensitive daredevil -- an Evel Knievel of antacid-defying degustation. I can eat this gigantic sandwich, these bulbous eyeballs, and this disgusting warthog anus, he seems to say -- could you? When he and Eric Ripert venture back into the Les Halles kitchen to char beef and sauce sole for Season Four's "Into the Fire" episode, they're in the war zone, brothers sloshing through the trenches, dunking freedom fries in spitting oil and hustling out steak au poivre as the foes -- the diners -- descend in overwhelming numbers. Interestingly, Jamie Oliver, who on several occasions has been the target of Bourdain's bullying, was the subject of a 2003 academic article published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies: "Oliver's Twist: Leisure, Labor, and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef". The writer, Joanne Hollows of Nottingham Trent University in England, frames Oliver as a construction of the masculine domestic cook. According to Hollows, in his professional capacity, Oliver avoids associating cooking with labor; instead, it's a fun, leisurely, and "recognizably manly" activity.

You'll never see a man on a cooking show gasping and groaning over the way something tastes -- over-sensualizing their pleasure from food. "Oh that's serious," Bourdain will say, wiping some beastly innards off his face, taking a swig of Heineken. Emeril and Fieri will bark as if they're at a ball game. Batali will explain why something is good, rather than simply express how happy he is to eat it. Some kinds of cooking -- grilling, artisanal curing, brawny offal-centric preparations -- tend to have hyper-masculine devotees. Molecular gastronomy -- food science, art, and fantasy in a delicious jumble -- is safe too -- because it's so dramatically removed from the drudgery of home-cooking. Every now and then, you see a gentle man cooking on television, and the effect is jarring. In March, celebrated Manresa chef David Kinch schooled Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. Even though his restaurant is a destination, the soft-spoken and terroir-enthused Kinch will never have product tie-ins -- commercial mayonnaise, kitchen gear, spice rubs, etc -- on Flay's level -- even in the unlikely event he wanted to in the first place. He'd rather build "tide-pools" of fresh shellfish and sea beans languishing in dashi-laced green tomato broth and go surfing in his spare time. One of my favorite cooking shows was Charlie Trotter's original Kitchen Sessions on PBS in the late 1990s. Amid a loose jazz soundtrack, Trotter very softly presented his thesis: cooking is a cycle of improvisations where time-tested techniques meet endlessly changing circumstances and opportunities for adjustment. The food was high-concept, challenging but within reach. As a host, he was a soothing presence -- murmuring vaguely poetic asides, often looking away from the camera, frequently indulging in tangential digressions appropriate to his show's statement of purpose. Trotter has been very successful, but his show, at least in that incarnation, didn't last more than a year or two. Ironically, Trotter actually made a cameo in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he convincingly played the stereotype of a blustery chef, bellowing at an assistant: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right!" It's a better joke now, twelve years later.

Gourmet magazine recently picked their top cookbooks for 2007. I agreed with some of their picks, but not all of them. One book that was missing from the list was Cook with Jamie. If you are a Jamie Oliver fan, and I admit I am, this book is a must. But if even if you're not, this book is really worthwhile and very different from other cookbooks on the market. Subtitled "My guide to making you a better cook" it's filled with all the little secrets that chefs learn in the kitchen.

So what kind of secrets are revealed? How to perfectly dress a salad so there is just the right amount of dressing, how to make really good schnitzel (a recipe taught to him by David Bouley), a technique for knowing when fish is cooked through that doesn't involve breaking it apart, how to pick leeks in the market, how to properly store things in the freezer. I could go on and on.

In addition to all the tips and techniques, explained in the typically "easy-peasy" Jamie Oliver manner, there are the recipes. The thing I like about Jamie Oliver recipes is that they each seem to have that added element that elevates them into something special. It might be an extra sauce, or topping of crispy herbs or even an unexpected ingredient. There are 160 recipes that range from Ultimate Rib of Beef with Rosemary and Garlic Potatoes to Slow Roasted Pork Belly with the Sweetest Braised Fennel to Roasted Baby Leeks with Thyme. If you are like me, these are recipes you will want to cook. At just under $25 on Amazon, I highly recommend this book.