[News] Michelle Obama To Author A Book on Local Eating, what whaaaat?

Cardigan-Gardening: I Can Get Behind That

One more reason to adore MObama: She's writing a book about local eating and the White House garden. Way to bring it on home, Michelle! The book will be published by Crown, a division of Random House and Barack is even planning on writing a sidebar or two (no, I have no idea what he's going to write in it, but there's word that he will help out).

Read the article at The Washington Post.

Photos via Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty, Win McNamee/Getty

[Green Thursdays] Eating Animals

I was a vegetarian for a couple of years before two cute boys took me to Betty's Burgers and I had a juicy, juicy burger. And then later than day, one of them made me a steak. So now I'm a carnivore. Just kidding. I don't eat meat every day or even every other day. I usually have meat once or twice a week. I'm trying to get back to vegetarianism but dealing with the guilt whenever I reach for bacon has continually worn on me. However, I attended a lecture by Jonathan Safran Foer on his new book, "Eating Animals," and it made me much more comfortable with my choices. The fact is that, yes ideally, for the world, we would all be vegans. And the truth is that you can be happy, healthy and make easy choices when being vegan, despite the propaganda against such a life choice. But you can also help on a daily basis when you do eat meat. Cutting down meat consumption and being aware of where your meat comes from is an important first step and an easy one at that. And I shouldn't feel that if I have bacon for breakfast, that the rest of my day is shot and I can eat meat like a starving lion. Every choice is an individual one and keeping this in mind has made me an "ethical omnivore."

Check out Foer's book here.

"Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood—facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf—his casual questioning took on an urgency. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.

This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.
Marked by Foer’s moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the humor and style that made his previous books, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Foer’s latest tour de force informs and delights, challenging us to explore what is too often conveniently brushed aside. A celebration and a reckoning, Eating Animals is a story about the stories we’ve told—and the stories we now need to tell."

Bay Area Book Expo Starts Tonight!

And by tonight, I mean tomorrow night.

[Green Thursdays] Eco-Friendly Reads via Design Sponge

Design*Sponge offered up some reviews of green reading earlier this week. Check out the list here.

Definitely adding some of these books to my reading list via Design*Sponge

[Girl Crush] Jhumpa Lahiri

1. Her writing is beautiful and vivid. Her characters are always well-developed. And her stories always make me tear up or get angry. Yeah, I admit it! I'm an emotional reader! My favorite book of hers right now is the short story collection Unaccustomed Earth because it's so varied, but The Namesake is a beautiful novel about love and growing older as a second-generation Indian-American. 

2. Her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies won the Pulitzer in 1999. You go, girl.

3. She struggled with her cultural identity and then came to own it. 

"I always felt so embarrassed by my name.... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are."

4. She's beautiful and talented? What a gold mine.

Photo from robertarood.wordpress.com

Books that Changed My Life

Some are predictable, some are random. But they made me who I am.

Macbeth - My first Shakespearean play, read in my fourth grade class. And yes it was unabridged. My teacher was insane, but that early life challenge made high school and college literature a breeze. The complexity of the characters, the balance between sympathy and hatred never ceases to amaze me. Tragic and haunting, I will never enjoy another play as much as I enjoy Macbeth

I am Charlotte Simmons - Tom Wolfe's dissection of the word fuck inspired my undergraduate thesis. Biting and realistic, my years in college seem to reflect the ups and downs of Charlotte Simmons, except a little less cool.

Life of Pi - Raised in a biracial and thus, bicultural family, my feelings toward religion were always apathetic. My mom is Sikh, by dad was raised Christian until he decided he was atheist. Anywho, LIfe of Pi, in addition to be extremely poetic and yet approachable, catalyzed my thoughts on spirituality.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Just an effing gorgeous book. Within pages, it would bring me to the extreme of emotions - happiness to grief in just sentences. A book of mourning, politics and modern world. Love it.

Little Women - I read it every year and every year, I relate to a different sister. Idyllic and yet relatable.

The Great Gatsby - I want to write like Fitzgerald. All his work is perfection.

The Blue Sweater - Inspired me to work for NGOs for the rest of my life. Gave me a blueprint of opportunities around the world and affirmed my desires to help others.

Slaughterhouse-5 - Dealing with trauma and the resulting emotions. Comforting in its craziness.

Favorite writers: Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jane Austen

In other news, I love this print from Vol. 25.