Okay. I'm not sure why Amy Adams' hair looks filthy, and her shoes look too narrow for her feet (I know the lateral squash all too well) but digging on the crisp frock!


Obviously Julie Powell and Amy Adams looks absolutely nothing alike (and it can't be fun to have to dress for one of these things as the token non-actor, I always think.) But Julie looks terrific, and her shoes fit way better, too.


It took me a moment to determine whether Giada De Laurentiis' top had a weird kangaroo pocket or just a weird fan ruffle, sur-crotch. Methinks it's the latter. But can I say how much I love the food celebs here?


I despise so many things about the lovely Ashley Greene's ensemble that an itemized list would rival the Key to All Mythologies in length.


I'm not normally a major fan of the Valley of the Dolls-style evolution of maternity-chic - and this fabric is pretty susceptible to wrinkling, considering it's gotta sit through a film - but Jane Lynch looks comfy, happy.


I don't think I've ever seen Mary Lynn Rajskub look better than she does in this soft Grecian.


I'd sort of like to see Meryl Streep's easy jersey sans cardi, but heck, a gal's gotta protect against the drafts.


Okay, this is from his website and I don't think I can improve on it: "Suave, sophisticated Emrhys Cooper delivers a one-two punch of brooding good looks and versatility with a dash of playfulness." He also adds a dash of Tab Hunter hair.


You know who this event needed? Brittny Gastineau. And, thank goodness, she's also showing her bra. Now everyone can relax and enjoy the movie!


As regards 80's nostalgia: I don't remember the 80's being that good. It involved a lot of graham crackers and a severe limit on the amount of TV I was allowed to watch. (I chose David the Gnome.) Nina Bergman disagrees.


I kind of love how Kate Flannery always does "approachable but commanding boss" on the red carpet.


When, Yvonne Strahovski, did it become okay to wear a transparent shirt on the red carpet? Or did it...not?


I can't tell whether Maria Menounos is headed to a disco, a playpen, a tractor or a Mormon temple. I guess this really is all-purpose!


Rob McElhenney, meanwhile, can apparently go fly-fishing directly from the premiere.


Nora Ephron may feel bad about her neck, but there's certainly no reason to worry about her classic uniform of clean basics! (Yes, that was cheesy. And made no sense.)


The Alice Waters seal of approval! I'd love to see her closet and touch all the silks. I'll bet it smells of sage. Sorry, creepy!


I'm starting to think it's not a premiere until perma-guest Kat Kramer shows. How? Why? Maybe she's become such an institution that all the PR people figure everyone must know something they don't. Whatever, I love her.


Looking at Molly Sims' myriad straps gives me sympathy pangs: Can you imagine wrestling with this in a store dressing room, breaking out in a cold sweat and wondering if you'll ever extricate yourself?


[Images via Getty, Bauer-Griffin]

What differentiates Phillips's experiment from the legion of others of its ilk is that Phillips and her husband decided to "eat conscientiously for a month, not just on our regular grocery allotment but on the government-defined, food-stamp minimum: $248 for two people in our hometown of New Haven, Conn." They started with zero food and bought "the SOLE-est products available — that is, the sustainable, organic, local or ethical alternative." They made dal, chili, and biryani, and finished the month with $1.20 left over.

But what exactly does "they" mean here? It's possible she's just using the first person singular for simplicity's sake, but it sounds like it fell to Phillips, not her husband, to implement most of the changes. "I relied on the sort of reasonably flexible schedule that is a luxury in far too many households," she writes, "and I started with some basic cooking knowledge" [emphasis ours]. She also refers to "my Chinese fried rice and Italian risotto." She mentions only one contribution from her husband: microwaving his own oatmeal, after she shows him how. One Salon commenter sums up the apparent inequality this way:

Now women are being called upon not only to manage the eco-cleanliness of their families domiciles, but also to manage the ethical qualities of their families food choices: a leftist version of "Better Homes and Gardens".

Not every household where the woman does the cooking is an inequitable one, but from personal experience it seems to me that the current pressure to eat locally, organically, sustainably and well weighs much more heavily on women. My ex was into bike-riding and recycling, but he thought farmers' markets were lame — if I wanted us to eat local tomatoes, I had to go and get them by myself. And my dad, an environmentalist and general bleeding-heart who has always done half the childcare, cleaning, and cooking, used to refuse to cook for me after I went veggie.

This imbalance happens because women still cook and shop for groceries more than men, but also because some men — even men who are otherwise progressive — look down on sustainable eating, or the work that goes along with it. Plenty of guys still agree with Jessica that vegetarians are sissies, and riding a bike or even retrofitting a car to run on vegetable oil may seem cooler than picking out locally grown fruit. So while eating sustainably benefits everyone by slowing climate change, right now it may also make things harder on women.

There's hope, though. Vegan Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and his foe, omnivore/sustainable food advocate Michael Pollan, are both dudes. And my dad, once a die-hard meat-eater, recently purchased a vegan cookbook as part of his new project to "eat lower on the food chain." Perhaps caring about food miles and pesticide runoff will one day be considered manly. For those of you who think about such things, do you notice a gender gap in ethical eating? And what do you think we can do to close it?

Can We Afford To Eat Ethnically? [Salon]

Earlier: Can Female Vegetarians And Male Carnivores Ever Find True Foodie Love?

The premise of the article is that Alice Waters, the Queen of Green and the earth mother of the food revolution, is experiencing an unfair backlash. But, says Namkung, she doesn't deserve it, because the good she's done outweighs any sanctimony.

The hard words comes as a result of Waters' recent appearance on 60 Minutes, in which her passion for organics for all brought tears to her eyes. She's been vocal, lately, too, in her support of an organic garden at the White House - calls which have been heeded. In response, apparently Anthony Bourdain said, in an interview with DCist,

Alice Waters annoys the living s%#* out of me. We're all in the middle of a recession, like we're all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market. There's something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters that has become unrealistic. I mean I'm not crazy about our obsession with corn or ethanol and all that, but I'm a little uncomfortable with legislating good eating habits.

In response, NPR (et tu, NPR?!) critic Todd Kliman was emboldened to denounce Waters' movement as somewhat intransigent: "Waters, like a lot of radicals, believes the movement will never end. She simply can't see that the revolution she helped lead has calcified into something doctrinaire and even repressive, not liberating and uplifting." The only other critic I could find (by searching "Alic Waters, smug" and "Alice Waters, annoying"), a food blogger, explained his aversion thusly: "I've been unsympathetic to Alice Waters in the past, if only for her California sanctimony, and the effortless, tendentious ease with which she conflates her own fame with the cause of sustainable food."

While this hardly constitutes a full-scale denunciation - Bourdain's in the business of stirring the pot with iconoclastic fervor, after all - it's also true that such criticism would have been unthinkable a few years ago. To criticize Alice Waters, after all, is tantamount to criticizing puppies; what's not to like about organic food, small farms, good nutrition for children? As Victoria Namkun avers, the food revolution would not have happened without Waters. And the increasing availability of affordable organics can be laid directly at her door. The charge brought against her is generally an oblivious elitism that displays a lack of knowledge of the real priorities and opportunities of everyday people. And it's true both that Waters lives in a mecca of the movement she spawned and that her acolytes are not, as a rule, impoverished: to the extent that "good eating" has acquired the taint of moral superiority, the movement is indeed problematic. But can Waters be blamed for this?

In a sense, Waters seems to be falling prey to the pitfalls of any radical who is around long enough. She's damned for a single-minded commitment that now seems simplistic; at the same time she's criticized for an elitist complacency. On the one hand, some of the criticism is surely contrarian, pure and simple: Waters is one of the few sacred cows we have left to us (an organic one, to be sure), and as one with a particularly earnest and rabid fan base, probably an irresistible target for troublemakers. There are those amongst us who can't tolerate the existence of bedroom saints, and maybe they're right. I'd regard Waters' recent challenging not as problematic but as necessary and important; even a sign of her importance. She created a movement, and like a culinary Dorothy Day, she's stayed true to its principles. This is, perhaps, as it should be, and what she should be revered for; it's also what needs to be challenged, discussed, analyzed, evolved, rethought if necessary. What's the point of founding a philosophy if it doesn't spawn new ideas? So where Namkung says "give Waters a break"; I say she can take it.

Let's Give Alice Waters a Break [Huffington Post]
Alice Waters Was a Foodie Hero. Now She's the Food Police. [NPR]
Alice Waters Finds Someone Even More Annoying in Lesley Stahl [The Feedbag]
Chewing the Fat: No Reservations' Anthony Bourdain [DCist]

We can't imagine the newly-minted President had a tremendous appetite at the traditional Capital Hill luncheon, served post-inauguration — and we're not even talking about the fact that several senators tragically collapsed mid-meal; the man's got to have been exhausted, and running on adrenaline. But tradition must be honored, even if it's an enormous stress for everyone involved. First of all, putting said luncheon together sounds like a major hassle: beyond the evident stresses of serving a multi-course meal to some of the most powerful people in the country, caterers and servers had to contend with multiple security checkpoints, a makeshift temporary kitchen, and such a congested city that several of the caterers opted to camp out in the capital building so as to be on hand early enough to supervise.
Tables:

were covered with blue damask cloths, the chairs covered with matching blue velvet pillows. On each table were centerpieces of white and lavender hydrangeas and two kinds of red roses, a larger display at the head table. The place plates are copies of the Lincoln china, with the purple border that looked red at the lunch; the silver was gold-plated. Four glasses stood at each plate – two wine, a water glass and a champagne flute.

The menu was also, allegedly, Lincoln-inflected: seafood stew with puff pastry to take off the chill; "platters of perfectly cooked duck and pheasant served on a beautiful bed of carrots, asparagus, wax beans, beets and spinach," pureed sweet potatoes, and "miniature corn muffins, into which a small piece of corn husk had been baked" (and presumably removed by any guest who didn't feel like eating dry leaf.) The dessert was "a cinnamon apple cake with vanilla bean ice cream, sautéed apple cubes and sauce," served, oddly, with Korbel.

As to the kids' menu, served to Malia, Sasha and the numerous grandkids Biden, it was straight-up greatest hits:

Hot dogs
Cheeseburgers
Macaroni and cheese
French fries
Grilled cheese sandwiches
Cheese pizza
Chocolate chip cookies
Apple and orange juices and soft drinks

Not bad! But what of the days to come? White House cookery is a hot button issue right now, as Berkeley slow-food doyenne Alice Waters presses for more emphasis on sustainable foods at 1600. In the process, she's been critical of White House chef Cristeta Comerford, which has angered some of Comerford's friends. While Waters is pushing for a new chef whose focus is sustainability, defenders say the White House is already pretty progressive in this regard: at Waters' urging, the Clinton White House installed a small organic roof garden and quietly began sourcing food from co-ops and local farmers. The trend continued under Bush 2: says one former chef, “To her credit, Mrs. Bush was adamant about organic foods...It goes counter to her perceived personality, but it was never important to her that the information be released.” We're sure the Obamas won't be resistant to anything that promotes healthy eating, especially given their power as role models. But one thing is for sure: If Waters has her way, the sort of kids' menus listed above will be a dim memory.
A Mission to Serve Lunch in the Capitol [NYT]
What’s Cooking at the White House? Who’s Asking? [NYT]

Some people are visual. Some are mathematical. Others of us, like MFK Fisher, are gastronomical. And when you are, you sort of think of everything through the lens of food. As such, food scenes in books get imprinted on your mind, and books without food - however amazing they might be - are always lacking something. The novelist Laurie Colwin loved cookbooks because they're just food, but for some of us, being greedy, we want food and plot, food as vehicle, as plot device, as character illuminator, as window to the soul and tummy. And it can't just be cold, clinical descriptions of food, either, like in Madame Bovary. there has to be palpable relish to the descriptions. Even if, as in The Magic Mountain, you know it's standing in for the complacent excess of modern Europe, the food must be appetizing. In short, the best food descriptions are written by authors who clearly love to eat, even if they conscientiously temper this with philosophy.

A bad book cannot be saved by an amazing meal, obviously, but it's also true that those who can write fictional food well — be it Elizabeth Bishop or Maya Angelou — can generally also convey emotion and style in a satisfactory fashion. And as a food prose glutton, we are always looking for more and better meals to read and remember, be it Barbara Pym's salmon mousses or the Sunday Night Lunches of the Betsy-Tacy series. If this sounds like a call for food scenes, it is: in books, as in life, enough is never enough, and a good meal is worth a thousand words.

The Exchange: Alice Waters [New Yorker]

[Image via fortsanders.net]