Calling It Like She Sees It

I've always found anger (or, to put it more nicely, extreme annoyance) to be a great motivator. This blog wouldn't exist if I hadn't read a certain icky-girly, badly written local e-mail newsletter and become peeved that adult women would be writing (much less reading) such immature trash. And I figured I couldn't do worse.

My editor at FoodDay, Martha Holmberg, seems to have had one of those moments when she listened to an interview on NPR's Day to Day with Christiane Jory about her book titled "The 99¢ Only Stores Cookbook." After listening to the author (and host Alex Cohen) wax poetic about how delicious all this food tasted that was made from stuff that comes from cans and boxes, and how cheap it was, Martha got busy.

She wrote "there are plenty of bogus cooking ideas out there; I should be inured to that. My problem is that while Jory contends there's great and inexpensive food to be had at the ultra-discount stores, and that the book is infused with some sense of fun and irony, she's sending a really dangerous message. Leaving aside the whole debate over what the true cost of cheap food is, the implication is that if you don't have much money, you have to eat inferior, unhealthful, unsavory, uncelebratory, uncool and downright icky food. And that is so not true."

Her solution was to devise her own recipes from decent ingredients from real stores that actually cost less per serving than the author's. And then she wrote about it for the paper. You go, girl!