Articles liés à My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape...
L'édition de cet ISBN n'est malheureusement plus disponible.
Afficher les exemplaires de cette édition ISBN
Extrait :
Amuse Bouche
Over the past thirty years at Restaurant Nora, as I’ve made the rounds in the dining room, countless people have asked me, “Why do you care so much about organic food?” They want to know why I am so passionate about this subject that I was driven to create the world’s first entirely organic restaurant, where everything—from the produce and meat to the oil, salt, and coffee—is certified organic.
The quick answer is simply health: organic food is better for our bodies and our environment.
The longer answer begins with a side of beef.
In the early 1970s, not long after I had moved to Washington, D.C., from my native Austria with my French husband, Pierre, we began entertaining a lot. We didn’t have much money to go out to restaurants, so I started giving dinner parties. These turned into catering jobs and then small cooking classes in my home.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I needed to buy meat wholesale rather than retail in order to make my catering and classes profitable. So I looked up “beef” in the Yellow Pages and found some ads for sides of beef, which could be stored for me in a freezer locker. This was all new to me: I pictured a side of beef hanging, whole, in a locker, with my name written on it, and wondered how I’d even begin to butcher it.
I called up one place on the Eastern Shore and asked about its meat.
“It’s Angus beef,” the woman who answered the phone told me. “Wonderfully marbled.”
She knew the secret, she said proudly, to turning out the most succulent meat I’d ever tasted: she fed her cattle corn for the last two months of their lives so they’d be fat and tender. “It’s prime Angus beef, honey,” she said. “It melts in your mouth like butter.”
I was taken aback. Where I grew up, cows ate grass. Corn was for chickens. That seemed like a fundamental rule of nature.
“Corn?” I asked. “Cows don’t eat corn.”
Normally, no, she agreed, cows don’t eat corn, because they can’t digest it. So she fed them antibiotics to help them digest the corn without getting sick. The antibiotics—laced into the feed—also prevented illnesses that came from the “feedlot lifestyle.” She also told me she administered growth-promoting hormones through a funnel inserted behind the animals’ ears so they would eat more and get fatter faster.
I felt ill. All this time, I had been feeding my husband, two young children, and friends meats that were marbled not only with extra fat—who needs extra fat?—but with hormones and antibiotics. I felt as if every steak I’d thrown on the grill had been slowly poisoning them. As I hung up, I was ready to swear off meat forever.
Then I noticed another ad in the Yellow Pages: “I Sell Natural Beef.” Who knew? At this point, it seemed worth a shot. The man who answered, a Mr. Koenig, was a farmer from Pennsylvania. When I asked about his beef, instead of telling me all the things he did to his cows, he told me all the things he didn’t do. He did not give his animals antibiotics. No growth-promoting hormones. No corn feed, only grass or hay. No confining pens, no fumigating the carcasses. (Imagine: fumigating the carcasses!)
He told me how he treated his cows. “I’m very careful not to stress my animals when I take them to slaughter,” he said. This was not only for humane reasons, he explained. “If an animal is frightened, the adrenal glands overproduce fight-or-flight hormones, which affect the taste and texture of the meat in a bad way,” he said. “Basically, you’re eating stressed-out muscle.”
I told Mr. Koenig I wanted to buy some of his natural beef, but the transaction would prove much more complicated than I had expected. “I’ll call you back with directions for where to meet me,” he said. The next morning, he called with instructions to meet at a spot in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “Three o’clock sharp,” he said. “Wait for me.”
The following day, I set out with my young sons, Alexis and Olivier, in the backseat of the car. When we arrived, there was no mistaking the pickup spot: five station wagons were already waiting. When Mr. Koenig arrived in a lumbering white van, the women in the cars opened their doors simultaneously and ran to circle the van’s back door. Mr. Koenig, ropy and small with wire-rimmed glasses, began calling out last names as he doled out cooler boxes and stuffed checks into his jacket pocket. He kept glancing around anxiously, as if he were selling coolers full of fake watches or marijuana. It was all over in a moment, and he tore off in his van.
“You’re new,” observed the woman parked next to me as she closed her trunk. I nodded. When I remarked that it had all seemed like a drug deal, she laughed and explained that while it wasn’t the same thing, it was in fact illegal to transport across state lines meat that hadn’t been slaughtered in a federally inspected facility, especially in an unrefrigerated vehicle. It hardly mattered to her. “I have to eat clean food,” she said. She had just finished treatment for cancer a few months before. Several of the people waiting for the meat, she told me, were recovering from serious illnesses. She was convinced that the chemicals lacing her food were at least partly responsible for making her sick. And it wasn’t just beef, she told me. Antibiotics and hormones were also pumped into our chicken and pork. “Pesticides and fungicides are on our fruits and vegetables, and chemical fertilizers are in everything. We’re poisoning every cell in our bodies.”
As I drove home with my children, I felt certain that I was right to seek out alternatives to what was commercially available at the time. I felt strongly that animals should be able to wander freely and eat grass, as I remembered from my childhood in the Austrian countryside. My suspicions about the food we ate every day—the squishy white bread with no nutritional value, the mayonnaise-laden sandwiches, the packaged snacks, the TV dinners, the canned-soup casseroles—seemed justified. These foods were too far from nature, too processed, too removed from the fresh, just-picked produce I’d grown up with.
And so I decided I wasn’t just going to teach my students how to cook. I was going to teach them how to cook healthfully, to make natural, wholesome food that also tasted delicious. From that moment on, as much as I could, I was going to seek out food free from pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and other chemical additives. I wanted my family and friends to be healthy. I had a new mission, and though I couldn’t fully articulate it at the time, it was to lead an organic life and to help others to do the same.
Chapter 1
Tyrol
I am a war child. Although the war ended when I was just eighteen months old, I am surprised by how much I remember. Maybe it is because the events were so traumatic; maybe it is because the deprivations of the war years blended into those of the postwar years. My earliest memory is of a terrifying sound: a high-pitched siren blaring through our house in Vienna. My mother would grab my older sisters, pick me up, and rush us all down to the cellar. There, we would sit on benches or on the dirt floor, huddled with our neighbors, awaiting the explosions. Shivering and closing my eyes tight, I would try to tune out the noise. I would breathe in the damp, earthy smell of the cellar, where my mother stored fresh apples, pears, potatoes, and glass jars filled with eggs from our chickens to last through the winter. Those rich smells transported me to a quieter place—the warm, sunny farm in the mountains where the fruits and vegetables grew—and comforted me until the raid was over.
The war disrupted everything, and because I was very young, disruption was all I knew of life. My memories, like Vienna at the time, are shadowy. I know, partly through the stories my family members have told me, that people on the streets were hungry, some were disappearing, and there was a hushed sense of desperation. Everywhere, food was scarce. Farmers had gone to war and left their fields fallow. Food was not something that you could take for granted but rather something that had to be rationed, saved, bartered, or traded on the black market. In Vienna, food seemed very distant from the country fields where it was grown.
But I was lucky to be able to spend most of the war outside the city, in the place I dreamed about during those air raids: a farm in the Tyrolean mountains. Even before I was born—in 1943—my father had decided that he needed to send his family away from Vienna while the war raged. He was a successful businessman and able to lease a working farm a day’s distance away so that my mother, my two older sisters, and I would have a safe place to weather the devastation and its aftermath—and have plenty of fresh food to eat. My father was an outdoorsman who loved hiking and healthy eating, so a remote farmhouse in the Alps seemed like the best place for him to send us.
Later, I came to understand there was another reason he had sequestered us in such a remote place: we were also hiding Jewish friends from the Nazis. But I knew nothing of that then. For the duration of the war, with the exception of occasional trips to Vienna, we were tucked away high in the mountains of Tyrol.
I lived in the mountains, off and on, from just after I was born until I was eight years old. The farm my sisters and I grew up on was one of those magical places of childhood, not only because it was safe and comforting—the opposite of war-torn Vienna—but also because it was the place where I awoke to the world with a sense of wonder. More than anything else in my first decade of life, the experience of living on a working farm profoundly influenced the person I was to become. There, in fields on steep mountain slopes, with a chalet-style log house, I discovered how food is grown and how it tastes just pulled from the soil or warmed by the sun. Far from the rubble of Vienna, the food in Tyrol gave me my first taste of nature’s bounty—something that has stayed with me all my life.
Mutti, my mother, always loved to tell the story of how I was born, and she repeated it every year on my birthday. The farmhouse in Tyrol was a two-hour hike down steep mountain trails to the nearest village, Kirchberg. Right before I was born, Mutti hid pork, bread, and other food from the farm in her suitcase and the lining of her coat—you were not allowed to carry food back and forth to Vienna—and thus encumbered, nine months pregnant, clambered down the mountain to the village. She was headed for Vienna so that she could give birth in the same hospital where my sisters were born and be closer to my father. From Kirchberg, she caught a train to Vienna, which lasted six or seven hours, or perhaps even longer, because of all the military inspections. The train was frequently halted so that the officers could check everyone’s papers; when the Germans annexed Austria in 1938, my parents had to produce documentation going back three generations in order to prove they had no Jewish blood. My mother’s papers were in order, but she still held her breath to see if she would be searched and caught smuggling food. Anything could happen to you in those days for the slightest infraction; everyone lived in fear. Eventually, she made it to the hospital, which was marked on the roof with a big X to make it clear it should not be bombed. Amid the explosions going off all around in Vienna, I was born, and a couple of weeks later my mother made the long trip back to Tyrol with her new infant.
Later, on occasional trips to and from Vienna, I would learn for myself what an adventure it was to reach the farm. I recall leaving Vienna at dawn in my father’s car, driven by “Herr Krakover” the chauffeur, and driving for hours along winding icy roads. Today the journey would take five hours, but then it took all day. The trip was long, boring, and probably dangerous, but all I can remember is what I ate. Throughout the long journey, my sisters and I savored the Wiener schnitzel sandwiches that Mutti had prepared on dark bread, making them last as many miles as possible. Sometimes we would stop at a butchers for our favorite Leberkäsesemmel, which is a kind of roasted-liver pâté. You slice it like cheese, but it’s more like a mortadella. You serve it hot, in thick slices. It’s baked so it has a crunchy crust, and you eat it with mustard and pickles on a kaiser roll. This was a real highlight for us.
Finally, when it was night, we would arrive in Kirchberg, where my parents had friends who owned a grocery store and where we could sleep overnight. You couldn’t just pull up to an inn at the time; there were very few places to stay, and people were cautious and fearful, wary of strangers who might denounce them to the Germans. Only old acquaintances would risk taking you in. We were tired, cold, and hungry by then, so it was wonderful when the owner’s wife would give us thin slices of Kletzenbrot—a dark sourdough bread filled with dried apples, pears, and hazelnuts—which we spread with her homemade butter. Several slices of Kletzenbrot, with a glass of fresh milk, were our dinner. At that point in time, you couldn’t find Kletzenbrot in Vienna; it was truly a regional specialty. They used what they had on hand to make it—rye flour, along with the fruits and nuts—and incorporated it into their daily sourdough bread and made something special out of it. To us, it tasted delicious—an almost fancy snack that gave us a feeling of comfort and safety at a time when traveling was precarious.
Revue de presse :
Over the past thirty years at Restaurant Nora, as I’ve made the rounds in the dining room, countless people have asked me, “Why do you care so much about organic food?” They want to know why I am so passionate about this subject that I was driven to create the world’s first entirely organic restaurant, where everything—from the produce and meat to the oil, salt, and coffee—is certified organic.
The quick answer is simply health: organic food is better for our bodies and our environment.
The longer answer begins with a side of beef.
In the early 1970s, not long after I had moved to Washington, D.C., from my native Austria with my French husband, Pierre, we began entertaining a lot. We didn’t have much money to go out to restaurants, so I started giving dinner parties. These turned into catering jobs and then small cooking classes in my home.
It wasn’t long before I realized that I needed to buy meat wholesale rather than retail in order to make my catering and classes profitable. So I looked up “beef” in the Yellow Pages and found some ads for sides of beef, which could be stored for me in a freezer locker. This was all new to me: I pictured a side of beef hanging, whole, in a locker, with my name written on it, and wondered how I’d even begin to butcher it.
I called up one place on the Eastern Shore and asked about its meat.
“It’s Angus beef,” the woman who answered the phone told me. “Wonderfully marbled.”
She knew the secret, she said proudly, to turning out the most succulent meat I’d ever tasted: she fed her cattle corn for the last two months of their lives so they’d be fat and tender. “It’s prime Angus beef, honey,” she said. “It melts in your mouth like butter.”
I was taken aback. Where I grew up, cows ate grass. Corn was for chickens. That seemed like a fundamental rule of nature.
“Corn?” I asked. “Cows don’t eat corn.”
Normally, no, she agreed, cows don’t eat corn, because they can’t digest it. So she fed them antibiotics to help them digest the corn without getting sick. The antibiotics—laced into the feed—also prevented illnesses that came from the “feedlot lifestyle.” She also told me she administered growth-promoting hormones through a funnel inserted behind the animals’ ears so they would eat more and get fatter faster.
I felt ill. All this time, I had been feeding my husband, two young children, and friends meats that were marbled not only with extra fat—who needs extra fat?—but with hormones and antibiotics. I felt as if every steak I’d thrown on the grill had been slowly poisoning them. As I hung up, I was ready to swear off meat forever.
Then I noticed another ad in the Yellow Pages: “I Sell Natural Beef.” Who knew? At this point, it seemed worth a shot. The man who answered, a Mr. Koenig, was a farmer from Pennsylvania. When I asked about his beef, instead of telling me all the things he did to his cows, he told me all the things he didn’t do. He did not give his animals antibiotics. No growth-promoting hormones. No corn feed, only grass or hay. No confining pens, no fumigating the carcasses. (Imagine: fumigating the carcasses!)
He told me how he treated his cows. “I’m very careful not to stress my animals when I take them to slaughter,” he said. This was not only for humane reasons, he explained. “If an animal is frightened, the adrenal glands overproduce fight-or-flight hormones, which affect the taste and texture of the meat in a bad way,” he said. “Basically, you’re eating stressed-out muscle.”
I told Mr. Koenig I wanted to buy some of his natural beef, but the transaction would prove much more complicated than I had expected. “I’ll call you back with directions for where to meet me,” he said. The next morning, he called with instructions to meet at a spot in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “Three o’clock sharp,” he said. “Wait for me.”
The following day, I set out with my young sons, Alexis and Olivier, in the backseat of the car. When we arrived, there was no mistaking the pickup spot: five station wagons were already waiting. When Mr. Koenig arrived in a lumbering white van, the women in the cars opened their doors simultaneously and ran to circle the van’s back door. Mr. Koenig, ropy and small with wire-rimmed glasses, began calling out last names as he doled out cooler boxes and stuffed checks into his jacket pocket. He kept glancing around anxiously, as if he were selling coolers full of fake watches or marijuana. It was all over in a moment, and he tore off in his van.
“You’re new,” observed the woman parked next to me as she closed her trunk. I nodded. When I remarked that it had all seemed like a drug deal, she laughed and explained that while it wasn’t the same thing, it was in fact illegal to transport across state lines meat that hadn’t been slaughtered in a federally inspected facility, especially in an unrefrigerated vehicle. It hardly mattered to her. “I have to eat clean food,” she said. She had just finished treatment for cancer a few months before. Several of the people waiting for the meat, she told me, were recovering from serious illnesses. She was convinced that the chemicals lacing her food were at least partly responsible for making her sick. And it wasn’t just beef, she told me. Antibiotics and hormones were also pumped into our chicken and pork. “Pesticides and fungicides are on our fruits and vegetables, and chemical fertilizers are in everything. We’re poisoning every cell in our bodies.”
As I drove home with my children, I felt certain that I was right to seek out alternatives to what was commercially available at the time. I felt strongly that animals should be able to wander freely and eat grass, as I remembered from my childhood in the Austrian countryside. My suspicions about the food we ate every day—the squishy white bread with no nutritional value, the mayonnaise-laden sandwiches, the packaged snacks, the TV dinners, the canned-soup casseroles—seemed justified. These foods were too far from nature, too processed, too removed from the fresh, just-picked produce I’d grown up with.
And so I decided I wasn’t just going to teach my students how to cook. I was going to teach them how to cook healthfully, to make natural, wholesome food that also tasted delicious. From that moment on, as much as I could, I was going to seek out food free from pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and other chemical additives. I wanted my family and friends to be healthy. I had a new mission, and though I couldn’t fully articulate it at the time, it was to lead an organic life and to help others to do the same.
Chapter 1
Tyrol
I am a war child. Although the war ended when I was just eighteen months old, I am surprised by how much I remember. Maybe it is because the events were so traumatic; maybe it is because the deprivations of the war years blended into those of the postwar years. My earliest memory is of a terrifying sound: a high-pitched siren blaring through our house in Vienna. My mother would grab my older sisters, pick me up, and rush us all down to the cellar. There, we would sit on benches or on the dirt floor, huddled with our neighbors, awaiting the explosions. Shivering and closing my eyes tight, I would try to tune out the noise. I would breathe in the damp, earthy smell of the cellar, where my mother stored fresh apples, pears, potatoes, and glass jars filled with eggs from our chickens to last through the winter. Those rich smells transported me to a quieter place—the warm, sunny farm in the mountains where the fruits and vegetables grew—and comforted me until the raid was over.
The war disrupted everything, and because I was very young, disruption was all I knew of life. My memories, like Vienna at the time, are shadowy. I know, partly through the stories my family members have told me, that people on the streets were hungry, some were disappearing, and there was a hushed sense of desperation. Everywhere, food was scarce. Farmers had gone to war and left their fields fallow. Food was not something that you could take for granted but rather something that had to be rationed, saved, bartered, or traded on the black market. In Vienna, food seemed very distant from the country fields where it was grown.
But I was lucky to be able to spend most of the war outside the city, in the place I dreamed about during those air raids: a farm in the Tyrolean mountains. Even before I was born—in 1943—my father had decided that he needed to send his family away from Vienna while the war raged. He was a successful businessman and able to lease a working farm a day’s distance away so that my mother, my two older sisters, and I would have a safe place to weather the devastation and its aftermath—and have plenty of fresh food to eat. My father was an outdoorsman who loved hiking and healthy eating, so a remote farmhouse in the Alps seemed like the best place for him to send us.
Later, I came to understand there was another reason he had sequestered us in such a remote place: we were also hiding Jewish friends from the Nazis. But I knew nothing of that then. For the duration of the war, with the exception of occasional trips to Vienna, we were tucked away high in the mountains of Tyrol.
I lived in the mountains, off and on, from just after I was born until I was eight years old. The farm my sisters and I grew up on was one of those magical places of childhood, not only because it was safe and comforting—the opposite of war-torn Vienna—but also because it was the place where I awoke to the world with a sense of wonder. More than anything else in my first decade of life, the experience of living on a working farm profoundly influenced the person I was to become. There, in fields on steep mountain slopes, with a chalet-style log house, I discovered how food is grown and how it tastes just pulled from the soil or warmed by the sun. Far from the rubble of Vienna, the food in Tyrol gave me my first taste of nature’s bounty—something that has stayed with me all my life.
Mutti, my mother, always loved to tell the story of how I was born, and she repeated it every year on my birthday. The farmhouse in Tyrol was a two-hour hike down steep mountain trails to the nearest village, Kirchberg. Right before I was born, Mutti hid pork, bread, and other food from the farm in her suitcase and the lining of her coat—you were not allowed to carry food back and forth to Vienna—and thus encumbered, nine months pregnant, clambered down the mountain to the village. She was headed for Vienna so that she could give birth in the same hospital where my sisters were born and be closer to my father. From Kirchberg, she caught a train to Vienna, which lasted six or seven hours, or perhaps even longer, because of all the military inspections. The train was frequently halted so that the officers could check everyone’s papers; when the Germans annexed Austria in 1938, my parents had to produce documentation going back three generations in order to prove they had no Jewish blood. My mother’s papers were in order, but she still held her breath to see if she would be searched and caught smuggling food. Anything could happen to you in those days for the slightest infraction; everyone lived in fear. Eventually, she made it to the hospital, which was marked on the roof with a big X to make it clear it should not be bombed. Amid the explosions going off all around in Vienna, I was born, and a couple of weeks later my mother made the long trip back to Tyrol with her new infant.
Later, on occasional trips to and from Vienna, I would learn for myself what an adventure it was to reach the farm. I recall leaving Vienna at dawn in my father’s car, driven by “Herr Krakover” the chauffeur, and driving for hours along winding icy roads. Today the journey would take five hours, but then it took all day. The trip was long, boring, and probably dangerous, but all I can remember is what I ate. Throughout the long journey, my sisters and I savored the Wiener schnitzel sandwiches that Mutti had prepared on dark bread, making them last as many miles as possible. Sometimes we would stop at a butchers for our favorite Leberkäsesemmel, which is a kind of roasted-liver pâté. You slice it like cheese, but it’s more like a mortadella. You serve it hot, in thick slices. It’s baked so it has a crunchy crust, and you eat it with mustard and pickles on a kaiser roll. This was a real highlight for us.
Finally, when it was night, we would arrive in Kirchberg, where my parents had friends who owned a grocery store and where we could sleep overnight. You couldn’t just pull up to an inn at the time; there were very few places to stay, and people were cautious and fearful, wary of strangers who might denounce them to the Germans. Only old acquaintances would risk taking you in. We were tired, cold, and hungry by then, so it was wonderful when the owner’s wife would give us thin slices of Kletzenbrot—a dark sourdough bread filled with dried apples, pears, and hazelnuts—which we spread with her homemade butter. Several slices of Kletzenbrot, with a glass of fresh milk, were our dinner. At that point in time, you couldn’t find Kletzenbrot in Vienna; it was truly a regional specialty. They used what they had on hand to make it—rye flour, along with the fruits and nuts—and incorporated it into their daily sourdough bread and made something special out of it. To us, it tasted delicious—an almost fancy snack that gave us a feeling of comfort and safety at a time when traveling was precarious.
“Nora’s wonderful story closely parallels the important rise of organic food in our country and provides hope that this commitment to responsible food will continue to be a choice for more and more Americans.” —Tom Colicchio
“As founder of America’s first organic restaurant, and tireless advocate of local food systems (not to mention a brilliant chef), Nora Pouillon is one of the pioneers of the Food Movement.” —Michael Pollan
“Nora takes us on a delicious journey of food memories while bravely and candidly sharing personal and professional stories of her early life in Vienna during the war, adventures throughout Europe and her path to opening the first certified organic restaurant in the country, Restaurant Nora in Washington, DC. Nora’s drive, dedication and passion about whole, organic foods has fueled a much needed movement that is felt all around the country.” —Carla Hall, Co-Host, ABC's The Chew, Author Carla's Comfort Foods: Favorite Dishes from Around the World
“Reading Nora Pouillon’s riveting memoir is like eating in her restaurant: a feast for the senses, with sentences and stories so deep and flavorful you can almost taste them. Her book is a memorable tour de force that reminds us of what a pioneering influence Nora has been, on so many levels, since she first set up shop with her (then-crazy) ideas about organic cooking nearly forty years ago.” —Howard Schultz, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Starbucks Coffee Company
“In this candid memoir, renowned chef Nora Pouillon tells the story of how she created Restaurant Nora, a Washington, D.C. landmark, and, more importantly, how she raised the consciousness of Americans about the quality of food and the importance of eating and living organically. I consider her a true pioneer of the organic movement and inspiration for leading a healthy lifestyle.” —Andrew Weil
“I loved reading this revealing and entertaining memoir from the Godmother of the organic food movement. Chef Nora’s appetite for life and story behind how she cooked up and created the nation’s first organic restaurant and the sacrifices she made along the way is a tale every working mother should read.” —Susan Ungaro, President of the James Beard Foundation
“Nora sparked this food revolution long before anyone was thinking about it, and in doing so inspired decades of other chefs, thought leaders, and innovators to change our food system. Nora’s compelling life story of how she changed our food system takes us back to the origins of this sustainable food movement. She’s not only a thought-provoking chef, but a great writer.” — Nicolas Jammet, co-founder of sweetgreen
“A sparkling memoir. . . . Much more than a memoir of one woman's career in food, the book also provides a picture of the growth of the organic food movement in the U.S.—a movement that Nora is still very much a part of. She organizes farmers markets, brings chefs and farmers together, works with consumer advocacy groups, and attends conferences at home and abroad. Pouillon's story is also a feminist one, showing a woman with young children dealing with a failed marriage, working successfully in a male-dominated business and helping other women to succeed in it. An inspiring account and great fun to read.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Implicit in Nora’s insistence on quality organic ingredients is care for the family, friends and customers who are nourished at her table. She has extended this deep care and respect to the Earth and to the farmers and ranchers who steward its resources. Whether working to shorten the distance between high integrity producers and like-minded eaters, undertaking a journey that resulted in the nation’s first certified organic restaurant, or raising her voice to advocate for sensible food policy, Nora Pouillon is a revolutionary and a vital presence in our modern food culture.” —Laura Batcha, Executive Director/CEO, Organic Trade Association
“This is the best book! Reading it is a multi-sensory experience; Nora serves up another delicious organic feast that you will just love. . . . The result is the chance to fully experience My Organic Life and savor the memory as you would a delicious organic meal at Restaurant Nora. Nora offers us the chance to learn firsthand what has happened to our food and health, and what one can and must do to be part of the solution. I want everyone I know to read this book.” —Ashley Koff RD, author of Mom Energy
"Riveting. . . . A very personal history of the evolution of the local and organic food movements over the last 50 years." —Organic Spa Magazine
“How does a young girl growing up in war-torn Vienna become the visionary who led the movement towards cooking with only fresh, healthy, and local ingredients and whose own namesake restaurant became the first in the country to be certified organic? In My Organic Life, Nora Pouillon brings us along on her incredible journey. With verve, honesty, and refreshing modesty, each page celebrates a zest for life.” —John Fahey, Chairman, National Geographic Society
“Long before organics were on store shelves, before farmers markets were sexy and before farm-to-table was a thing, Nora created a food revolution in her kitchen and the surrounding farmlands. This book tells the remarkable tale of where good food really began.” —Eric Kessler, Trustee, James Beard Foundation and Co-Founder, Chef Action Network
“Way before Michelle Obama picked up a trowel and told a nation to change its eating habits, there was Nora Pouillon. . . . Pouillon’s spare, clearly written memoir is built around two complementary narratives. One involves the culinary journey of a country where you can now buy organic sugar by the bag at your neighborhood grocery. The other involves her more personal journey from ingénue housewife to self-made restaurateur. . . . Without being preachy, her memoir is also the story of an uncredentialed female cook making her way in the sexist highchef culture, the story of a natural-born problem solver working to build a small enterprise before there was talk of startups or woman-owned businesses. It’s also a testament to the personal consequences—not good ones—for a wife and mother who succeeded at becoming a breadwinner before that, too, was a thing. . . . Brave but also poignant.” —Liza Mundy, Washingtonian
“Pouillon has been a pioneer in locally sourced foods and in the organic movement. . . . Food historians will gain insight here as to what it meant to be in the forefront of a now unstoppable movement.” —Booklist
“Pouillon often led the charge for government standards in organics and environmentally conscious foods. Her restaurant today is an institution and the unofficial meeting place for many politicians and journalists in the nation’s capital. . . . [My Organic Life is] for those interested in a restaurateur’s life or those wishing to know more about the field of organics.” —Library Journal
“As founder of America’s first organic restaurant, and tireless advocate of local food systems (not to mention a brilliant chef), Nora Pouillon is one of the pioneers of the Food Movement.” —Michael Pollan
“Nora takes us on a delicious journey of food memories while bravely and candidly sharing personal and professional stories of her early life in Vienna during the war, adventures throughout Europe and her path to opening the first certified organic restaurant in the country, Restaurant Nora in Washington, DC. Nora’s drive, dedication and passion about whole, organic foods has fueled a much needed movement that is felt all around the country.” —Carla Hall, Co-Host, ABC's The Chew, Author Carla's Comfort Foods: Favorite Dishes from Around the World
“Reading Nora Pouillon’s riveting memoir is like eating in her restaurant: a feast for the senses, with sentences and stories so deep and flavorful you can almost taste them. Her book is a memorable tour de force that reminds us of what a pioneering influence Nora has been, on so many levels, since she first set up shop with her (then-crazy) ideas about organic cooking nearly forty years ago.” —Howard Schultz, chairman, president and chief executive officer of Starbucks Coffee Company
“In this candid memoir, renowned chef Nora Pouillon tells the story of how she created Restaurant Nora, a Washington, D.C. landmark, and, more importantly, how she raised the consciousness of Americans about the quality of food and the importance of eating and living organically. I consider her a true pioneer of the organic movement and inspiration for leading a healthy lifestyle.” —Andrew Weil
“I loved reading this revealing and entertaining memoir from the Godmother of the organic food movement. Chef Nora’s appetite for life and story behind how she cooked up and created the nation’s first organic restaurant and the sacrifices she made along the way is a tale every working mother should read.” —Susan Ungaro, President of the James Beard Foundation
“Nora sparked this food revolution long before anyone was thinking about it, and in doing so inspired decades of other chefs, thought leaders, and innovators to change our food system. Nora’s compelling life story of how she changed our food system takes us back to the origins of this sustainable food movement. She’s not only a thought-provoking chef, but a great writer.” — Nicolas Jammet, co-founder of sweetgreen
“A sparkling memoir. . . . Much more than a memoir of one woman's career in food, the book also provides a picture of the growth of the organic food movement in the U.S.—a movement that Nora is still very much a part of. She organizes farmers markets, brings chefs and farmers together, works with consumer advocacy groups, and attends conferences at home and abroad. Pouillon's story is also a feminist one, showing a woman with young children dealing with a failed marriage, working successfully in a male-dominated business and helping other women to succeed in it. An inspiring account and great fun to read.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Implicit in Nora’s insistence on quality organic ingredients is care for the family, friends and customers who are nourished at her table. She has extended this deep care and respect to the Earth and to the farmers and ranchers who steward its resources. Whether working to shorten the distance between high integrity producers and like-minded eaters, undertaking a journey that resulted in the nation’s first certified organic restaurant, or raising her voice to advocate for sensible food policy, Nora Pouillon is a revolutionary and a vital presence in our modern food culture.” —Laura Batcha, Executive Director/CEO, Organic Trade Association
“This is the best book! Reading it is a multi-sensory experience; Nora serves up another delicious organic feast that you will just love. . . . The result is the chance to fully experience My Organic Life and savor the memory as you would a delicious organic meal at Restaurant Nora. Nora offers us the chance to learn firsthand what has happened to our food and health, and what one can and must do to be part of the solution. I want everyone I know to read this book.” —Ashley Koff RD, author of Mom Energy
"Riveting. . . . A very personal history of the evolution of the local and organic food movements over the last 50 years." —Organic Spa Magazine
“How does a young girl growing up in war-torn Vienna become the visionary who led the movement towards cooking with only fresh, healthy, and local ingredients and whose own namesake restaurant became the first in the country to be certified organic? In My Organic Life, Nora Pouillon brings us along on her incredible journey. With verve, honesty, and refreshing modesty, each page celebrates a zest for life.” —John Fahey, Chairman, National Geographic Society
“Long before organics were on store shelves, before farmers markets were sexy and before farm-to-table was a thing, Nora created a food revolution in her kitchen and the surrounding farmlands. This book tells the remarkable tale of where good food really began.” —Eric Kessler, Trustee, James Beard Foundation and Co-Founder, Chef Action Network
“Way before Michelle Obama picked up a trowel and told a nation to change its eating habits, there was Nora Pouillon. . . . Pouillon’s spare, clearly written memoir is built around two complementary narratives. One involves the culinary journey of a country where you can now buy organic sugar by the bag at your neighborhood grocery. The other involves her more personal journey from ingénue housewife to self-made restaurateur. . . . Without being preachy, her memoir is also the story of an uncredentialed female cook making her way in the sexist highchef culture, the story of a natural-born problem solver working to build a small enterprise before there was talk of startups or woman-owned businesses. It’s also a testament to the personal consequences—not good ones—for a wife and mother who succeeded at becoming a breadwinner before that, too, was a thing. . . . Brave but also poignant.” —Liza Mundy, Washingtonian
“Pouillon has been a pioneer in locally sourced foods and in the organic movement. . . . Food historians will gain insight here as to what it meant to be in the forefront of a now unstoppable movement.” —Booklist
“Pouillon often led the charge for government standards in organics and environmentally conscious foods. Her restaurant today is an institution and the unofficial meeting place for many politicians and journalists in the nation’s capital. . . . [My Organic Life is] for those interested in a restaurateur’s life or those wishing to know more about the field of organics.” —Library Journal
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
- ÉditeurAlfred A. Knopf
- Date d'édition2015
- ISBN 10 0385350759
- ISBN 13 9780385350754
- ReliureRelié
- Nombre de pages288
- Evaluation vendeur
Acheter neuf
En savoir plus sur cette édition
EUR 20,80
Frais de port :
Gratuit
Vers Etats-Unis
Meilleurs résultats de recherche sur AbeBooks
Image d'archives
My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today
Edité par
Knopf
(2015)
ISBN 10 : 0385350759
ISBN 13 : 9780385350754
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : New. . N° de réf. du vendeur 52GZZZ010AHG_ns
Acheter neuf
EUR 20,80
Autre devise
Image d'archives
My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today
Edité par
Knopf
(2015)
ISBN 10 : 0385350759
ISBN 13 : 9780385350754
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : New. Book is in NEW condition. N° de réf. du vendeur 0385350759-2-1
Acheter neuf
EUR 24,12
Autre devise
Image d'archives
My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today
Edité par
Knopf
(2015)
ISBN 10 : 0385350759
ISBN 13 : 9780385350754
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. N° de réf. du vendeur 353-0385350759-new
Acheter neuf
EUR 24,13
Autre devise
Image d'archives
My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today
Edité par
Knopf
(2015)
ISBN 10 : 0385350759
ISBN 13 : 9780385350754
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. N° de réf. du vendeur Holz_New_0385350759
Acheter neuf
EUR 20,61
Autre devise
Image d'archives
My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today
Edité par
Knopf
(2015)
ISBN 10 : 0385350759
ISBN 13 : 9780385350754
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : new. New. N° de réf. du vendeur Wizard0385350759
Acheter neuf
EUR 25,58
Autre devise
Image d'archives
My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today
Edité par
Knopf
(2015)
ISBN 10 : 0385350759
ISBN 13 : 9780385350754
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Hardcover. Etat : new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. N° de réf. du vendeur think0385350759
Acheter neuf
EUR 27,05
Autre devise
Image d'archives
My Organic Life: How a Pioneering Chef Helped Shape the Way We Eat Today
Edité par
Knopf
(2015)
ISBN 10 : 0385350759
ISBN 13 : 9780385350754
Neuf
Couverture rigide
Quantité disponible : 1
Vendeur :
Evaluation vendeur
Description du livre Etat : new. N° de réf. du vendeur FrontCover0385350759
Acheter neuf
EUR 28,99
Autre devise