This week's compost

A bit  light on this week – but that’s good for the winter tum, isn’t it.

1.       Food Flicks

If you haven’t seen The Lunchbox yet, the Indian film built around the tiffin lunch system, do go. The food is enticing, the insight (slight though it is) into the system is lovely, the script is subtle and supple and the acting is just wonderful.

Anyone hear anything about the upcoming one The Hundred Foot Journey? This review is kinda what I expected from the trailer:

‘What is it about recent food movies — Jon Favreau's Chef, and now Lasse Hallstrom's The Hundred-Foot Journey — that, despite their virtues, they have to be so darned corny, so dewy-eyed, with everything tied up in a feel-good bow at the end? It's as if all that great food on set had this tranquilising effect, sending everyone off, sated and smiling, with great life lessons learned, into a rosy sunset. - See more at: http://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/reviews/movie-review-despite-om-puri-and-helen-mirren-the-hundred-foot-journey-s-bland/article1-1249235.aspx#sthash.CtJ0zqk6.dpuf’

I missed ‘Chef’ but will try and catch up with it now I have been sucked in to Dendy On Demand.

2.      Blake Lively’s Preserve website made me want to eat the rich

‘Rather than committing to donate a percentage of the site's profits to charity, Preserve invites us to imagine Lively tucking 2,000 orphans into their free blankets with her own hands, perhaps patting them each tenderly on the head. It's the crass noblesse oblige of new money: making a fuss over a pre-specified number of blankets and hot meals, deploying the rhetoric of community, as though Lively couldn't personally fund 5,000 hot meals with the change in her glovebox.’

I had never heard of Blake Ellender Lively and to be honest when I checked out Preserve it didn’t strike me as much more offensive than what other celebs jumping on the goodworks wagon do. The food product range is small and banal but not overpriced compared again with the prices charged for ‘artisansal’ products these days -  a small jar of a beer whole grain mustard for US$7.99, though I couldn’t tell how much of said mustard was in the jar.  Sure, she is likely to make heaps more than her  stated bountiful works are going to cost her, but this article comes off to me as just being narky.

I’d be interested in other’s views.

http://bit.ly/UzUUeJ

3.      How a Kit Kat is classified as healthy

‘Food companies are advertising products such as Kit Kats and Coco Pops to children because they are classified as healthy by their own nutritional standards.’

Quel surprise!

http://bit.ly/1zVFzVX

4.      Food@Sydney Seminar Series 2014

Sponsored and hosted by the Sydney Uni Environment Institute, this series looks promising if the first one I attended, Tackling Food Waste, is an indication. I will be doing a blog post on the forum and will message you all when I do.

Meanwhile you can check out more about the series at sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/food-people-planet

5.      Food and Words 2014

And Barbara Sweeney has just posted details for this year’s Food and Words which as some of you know is establishing itself as a must go to event on the Sydney foodie calendar. Gay Bilson, Christine Manfield, Kate Llewellyn, Feather and Bone, Kitchen by Mike and more...

http://foodandwords.com.au/

6.      Putting food on the table. Food security is everyone’s business.

This is the inaugural conference of the Right to Food Coalition and will be held at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Liverpool, NSW, October 13-14. They are still looking for papers. http://righttofood.org.au/