Plus: true American heroes, villainous husbands, and some Oscars fun
Hey, all! Kate took the reins on Food with Mark Bittman this week to talk about kids and eating, with Eden Grinshpan and Aliza Sokolow.
Eden is the host of Top Chef Canada and mom of two young kids, and she’s very funny and warm. Aliza just wrote a book about food for kids called This is What I Eat; she got her start working with Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and cares deeply about healthy eating and helping people to follow that path. Kate makes three, and this is a great trio. Have fun with this one — it’s also got some special guests (hint: Holden is one of them). Weekly Marksisms — see what we did there? — below.
“I do butter noodles all the time. Because I have no time. It’s not even what the kid wants — it’s what I’m capable of.” — Eden Grinshpan
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This Week in Marksisms
A TRUE HERO IS DYING
I’ve been busy playing with a sous vide wand, which I will tell you about next week—so most of my reading has focused on my Watergate obsession (I’m reading Watergate: A New History), leaving me with no fun links for you just now.
Along those lines, though, came the sad news that Daniel Ellsberg is dying. In case you don’t know who he is, Ellsberg was an employee of the RAND Corporation when he gained control of a secret set of documents later called the Pentagon Papers. This consisted of 3000 or 7000 pages (depending on whether you count appended documents) of horrifying or at least cynical information about government policies regarding the Vietnam War. After trying and failing to convince a number of US Senators to make the documents public, Ellsberg finally released them to the Times and the Washington Post in 1971.
Like Edward Snowden, Ellsberg was a heroic whistleblower and, like Snowden, he was prosecuted.
Even though they reflected on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the Pentagon Papers made Nixon so uptight that some of his subordinates broke into Ellsberg’s office and even planned to kill him. This could be seen as the beginning of the Watergate era – it was certainly part of the same pattern of illegal acts on the part of the President’s henchmen – which resulted in Nixon’s resignation.
This, below, seems to be among Ellsberg’s last public messages, published last week. It’s not good news, but to read a little about the life of a pretty ordinary man who became justifiably seen as a hero, here’s the opening paragraph and then the second half of this ultimately uplifting document.
A message from Daniel Ellsberg:
Dear friends and supporters,
I have difficult news to impart. On February 17, without much warning, I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer on the basis of a CT scan and an MRI. (As is usual with pancreatic cancer–which has no early symptoms–it was found while looking for something else, relatively minor). I’m sorry to report to you that my doctors have given me three to six months to live. Of course, they emphasize that everyone’s case is individual; it might be more, or less.
. . .
It is long past time–but not too late!–for the world’s publics at last to challenge and resist the willed moral blindness of their past and current leaders. I will continue, as long as I’m able, to help these efforts. There’s tons more to say about Ukraine and nuclear policy, of course, and you’ll be hearing from me as long as I’m here.
As I look back on the last sixty years of my life, I think there is no greater cause to which I could have dedicated my efforts. For the last forty years we have known that nuclear war between the US and Russia would mean nuclear winter: more than a hundred million tons of smoke and soot from firestorms in cities set ablaze by either side, striking either first or second, would be lofted into the stratosphere where it would not rain out and would envelope the globe within days. That pall would block up to 70% of sunlight for years, destroying all harvests worldwide and causing death by starvation for most of the humans and other vertebrates on earth.
So far as I can find out, this scientific near-consensus has had virtually no effect on the Pentagon’s nuclear war plans or US/NATO (or Russian) nuclear threats. (In a like case of disastrous willful denial by many officials, corporations and other Americans, scientists have known for over three decades that the catastrophic climate change now underway–mainly but not only from burning fossil fuels–is fully comparable to US-Russian nuclear war as another existential risk.)
I’m happy to know that millions of people–including all those friends and comrades to whom I address this message!–have the wisdom, the dedication and the moral courage to carry on with these causes, and to work unceasingly for the survival of our planet and its creatures.
I’m enormously grateful to have had the privilege of knowing and working with such people, past and present. That’s among the most treasured aspects of my very privileged and very lucky life. I want to thank you all for the love and support you have given me in so many ways. Your dedication, courage, and determination to act have inspired and sustained my own efforts.
My wish for you is that at the end of your days you will feel as much joy and gratitude as I do now.
Love, Dan
FIFTY YEARS ON…
And now for the cultural part of our program. I lived through Watergate, of course, but I barely remembered it. So when I watched Gaslit (unfortunately on Starz), a series about Watergate and specifically about Martha Mitchell (nicely played by Julia Roberts, with Sean Penn as her ineptly villainous husband John), I was compelled to watch The Martha Mitchell Effect, a terrific brief doc on Netflix. At that point I began reading Watergate: A New History by former Washingtonian writer Garrett Graff, which covers all the bases (and then some), and reads if not quite like a thriller than certainly like the good popular history it is.
Finally, the last tidbit for your liberal education, a quote from Lowell Weicker, the Republican Senator from Connecticut on the Senate Watergate panel, when he began to grasp everything that the White House had done in the name of protecting the President: “I say before you and before the American people that I’m here as a Republican. And I think I express the feelings of the 42 other Republican Senators and the Republicans of Connecticut and the feelings of the Republican Party far better than those who committed illegal, unconstitutional and gross acts.”
He continued, his jaw firmly set, “Republicans do not cover up. Republicans do not go ahead and threaten. Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts. And, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.”
Here we are, fifty years later. Lowell would be harassed to death were he not dead already.
AND FINALLY
Do not miss the second annual Oscars podcast by Hannah Frith and her mother (my partner), Kathleen Finlay. Fun and funny and insightful.
See you next week, friends.
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