I had the pleasure of spending last Thursday night with a group of women who happen to write about food in New York City.

I was there to speak at a cookbook conference, and a friend had connected me with Rachel Wharton, the Edible Manhattan editor who, along with Amanda Kludt of Eater New York and Alyssa Shelasky from Grub Street, coordinates this casual happy hour. We met up at a newish bar on Bowery called the Wren, which was my first real outing on a three-day trip to the Big Apple.

This was their third get-together, so I wasn’t the only new face in the crowd. Some of them, like the go-team of Kat Kinsman and Sarah LeTrent of Eatocracy, I’d met at South by Southwest. I even persuaded the elusive-yet-everywhere-at-once Penny De Los Santos to join us for a New York minute. But most of them were talented, driven women who were the driving force behind online food journalism in one of the biggest food cities in the world.

I couldn’t help but bring up the Austin Food Blogger Alliance, a group that I’ve been involved with since its inception in late 2010 that brings together food bloggers of all stripes. “That could never happen in New York,” a number of them said. “New York food bloggers are too competitive. They are just doing their own thing.”

But as I looked around, I realized that they were already building such a group. When the Austin bloggers first started getting together, it was an attempt to set aside the competition part of what we do to focus on the connecting part of it that, thanks to social media, happens far more than it used to.

If there ever was a word that was more overused than “sustainable,” it’s “community,” but the cliched term doesn’t make you cringe so much when you’re smack dab in the middle of it, drinking cocktails with people you previously only associated with a screen name and realizing that we’re all just trying to do a good job.

It also makes you think a little harder before you spew some negativity out in the vast Interweb and think that it won’t come back to you.

Who knows if the group of a dozen or so female writers — yes, it’s a no-guys-allowed group at this point, or at least that’s the impassion I got — will move beyond a string of emails and on to a Facebook group, which is what several of them were talking about at the end of the night. I hope it does. There was a lot of goodwill being passed around, and the more of that in this big wide food world, the better.

This 25 minutes or less post is my latest attempt to continue to blog in my increasingly crazy life. It’s not exactly original content, but hopefully you’ll enjoy my mom’s original content until I find some time to create more of my own.

So, my mom started a blog.

She’s still trying to find that balance of personal and public, so she hasn’t announced it from way up high on a mountaintop, but the overlap between Feminist Kitchen readers and, say, the parents of kids who go to her school is pretty small, so I think she’d be OK with me telling you all about it here.

Blogging — and by extension, our social media livelihood — is a virtual fishbowl that we all seem to be swimming around in these days, and my mom is pretty good at living in a fishbowl. Ever since she was a kid, as the daughter of the high school principal, the middle sister of two brothers and now the school official married to the town’s up-and-coming real estate star, her life as been on display.

And now that she and my dad are living with my grandmother in the house she’s lived in for 50 years, it’s like she’s in a fishbowl inside a fishbowl.

Back on Pleasant Street is a place for her to explore what it means to be living in that same house, where the land line telephone number is still the same as when she was a child.

Being so brazenly open about somewhat personal matters is still pretty foreign to a person of her age in a place like her town, which is the kind of place where you talk about things, but you don’t really talk about things. (Even without modern communication tools like Facebook and Twitter, that town runs on chatter.) She was apprehensive about not only the new medium, but about bearing her journal-like writing for everyone to see.

But within five posts, you can tell she’s a natural. It’s obvious why she was my first writing mentor. Both she and my dad would help me write papers, but there was something evocative in her own writings that taught me something entirely different than how to use a Thesaurus and have a marketer’s ear for how something sounds. (Thanks for that, too, Dad.)

So far, she’s written an ode to my father’s silver hair and inspirational posts about being brave enough to hunt for new cheese and about going back to school (again) to pursue her professional dreams.

In this most recent post, she writes about family dogs, including my grandmother’s beloved dachshunds and Shiva, the salt and pepper blue heeler we had to give up when Julian was 2. Through those dogs you can get a glimpse of my mom’s corner of the world, a multi-generational household in the middle of America with three very unique individuals and one ailing puppy dog who isn’t a puppy anymore.

If only we could all capture our stories so well.

The same people who’ve created a successful campaign with the oh-so-thin Jennifer Hudson are using Barkely to try to reach the simingly untapped market of overweight men wanting to slim down. (Belly fat ads, weird exercise devices and anything Men’s Health touches are the current offerings.)

Barkley talks about his own weight loss, and the commercial ends with the “Lose Like A Man” tagline.

The message: Be a man, lose some weight. And don’t cry like a girl while you’re at it.

What do you think it means to (or what do you think they meant by) “lose like a man”?

Last night’s book club meeting on “The Help” was a huge success. Like any good book club should, we didn’t agree on everything, but we shared opinions and insight about this very controversial book and, hopefully, learned something new about ourselves or the world around us along the way.

To get an idea of what we talked about, check out the book club’s Facebook group, where I posted several videos, including a recent interview on the Colbert Report with Melissa Harris-Perry, the “Sister Citizen” author who is getting ready to start her own show on MSNBC, and a “60 Minutes” clip that profiles several white women who, after seeing the movie or reading the book, reconnected with the African American women who raised them.

(I’ve started channeling more book club-related content into the Facebook group, which you can join by clicking here. It won’t replace book club blog posts here, but it’s easier to quickly share content on Facebook rather than building a completely new post on the website.)

At the end of the meeting, we decided that our next book would be “Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life,” by Kim Severson, the New York Times food writer who recently moved off the food beat to move to Atlanta, which is her home base as she travels throughout the South writing more newsy stories for the Times.

Severson is a delight to follow on Twitter, and her book is one of my favorite food books of the past few years. She explains how cooks, from her own mother to celebrities like Alice Waters and Rachael Ray, influenced her both in the kitchen and out of it, and she beautifully weaves those stories in with her own about her struggles with alcohol, coming out to her family and becoming a parent. (Here’s an excerpt of the chapter on Rachael Ray, which you might consider a surprising choice until you read why she picked her.)

Because the second Tuesday of February is Valentine’s Day, let’s plan on meeting at 7 p.m. on Feb. 7, at Thrice Cafe, 909 W. Mary St. See you all there!

News flash! Men are doing more of the grocery shopping than ever before.

The story from the LA Times’  Emily Bryson York that ran in the business section of today’s Statesman certainly isn’t a revelation, but it’s nice to see news articles about how our domestic roles are changing. York’s news hook isn’t just that more men are shopping; she wanted to find out how grocery stores and manufacturers were responding to this change.

She only found a few that were making minor changes to accommodate men, who, according to one source in the story, “were terribly uncomfortable with the shopping experience.” Proctor and Gamble started playing around with “man aisles” in 2009, which grouped the personal care products targeted toward men in a single place instead of spread across the entire health-care section. Whee, so exciting, I know.

She tracked down a VP of “breakthrough innovation” at Kraft Foods Inc. who was quite proud of the “liquid flavor droplets” that his company had come up with to make water more appealing.

With somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of men doing the primary shopping for their households, I can’t imagine that mega food companies like Kraft or P&G will stop with water-flavoring droplets.

My favorite part of the story came from Phil Lempert, a grocery store expert who has built a crazy successful  consulting business called the Supermarket Guru. I’ve interviewed him for stories before, and the man knows his grocery stores. Lempert pointed out that many men are cooking to connect with their kids and, if they happen to be victims of the “mancession,” help provide for their families even when they don’t have a paycheck coming in.

“It’s very different from the whole metrosexual phenomenon of six, seven, eight years ago, but a much more down-to-earth [approach], not trying to show off, but trying to be part of the family,” Lempert said.

The above photo appears to be from such a dad. Dave77459 of Houston posted this photo on Flickr way back in 2007 with the caption: “Hitting the grocery store after dance to stock up for the weekend. I have the kids which means food flies out of the larder.”

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A reminder about the Feminist Kitchen book club meeting this week: On Tuesday (Jan. 10), we’ll gather at 7 p.m. at Thrice Cafe, which is located in the former Cafe Caffeine space next to Thai Fresh at 909 W. Mary St., to talk about both the book and the movie adaptation of “The Help.” Even if you know the general idea of the plot, you’ll be able to follow along our discussion. Come have a glass of wine (or a beer or a pot of tea or a plateful of Thai food) and join us!

If you haven’t seen The Scene (three words: sex, butter and Brando), then you’ve probably heard about it, and if you haven’t heard about it, then you’re probably better off.

It’s a vulgar movie. The true beginning of the end for Brando, who had become as loathsome as he was appealing in those first few films. The 19-year-old who played the young Parisian lover, Maria Scheider, died in February of last year.

In the New York Times Magazine’s year-end obituary issue, she was among the people whose lives were honored. Victims of the Joplin, Mo., tornado, the man who invented cryonics, Jack LaLane, and Schneider, whose will forever be remembered as the young woman in “Last Tango in Paris” who, to be frank, appeared to be sodomized by stick of butter. In the graphic scene I don’t care to watch again, her character’s unwillingness and her own unwillingness are the same. “I instinctively felt I would be the one to suffer for it,” she later said.

She got paid $4,000 to play that role, a pittance compared to the wealth it earned Brando. She did star in another movie with an A-List chauvinist, Jack Nicholson, in “The Passenger,” but, like the majority of actresses in Hollywood, had a hard time finding decent work after the twenty-something glow wore off. (She even worked for an organization that helped older actors find work.)

As author Susan Dominus points out, the men (Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci, specifically) around her, who were as much paternal figures as colleagues, failed to protect her and she didn’t feel she could get out of the situation. This movie would be her breakout role, and she knew that you don’t just have to be sexy, you have to be but edgy and shocking, too.

But it went too far, and she knew it. They knew it, too, but Bertolucci didn’t even hint at apologizing until after her death.

Artists, especially young starlets in the public eye, will always challenge the norm, and I think they should. That’s where innovation comes from. But the Joaquin Phoenix stunt, the Olsen twin-Kisses-Ben-Kingsley scene, Lady GaGa’s whole persona, et al, didn’t do what this single scene did to this woman.

My only solace after I read the NYT piece was to realize that I don’t think a scene like this would fly today. Not that seriously kinky, weird shit isn’t happening in the very vast world of porn, but I don’t think such relatively mainstream actors, directors and producers would go that far. There are more women in power and, while we seem to have an increased desire for graphic sex, nudity and near-nudity (like the almost bare-breasted pinup at a new fried chicken restaurant in Austin and the dancing women in bikinis on the Mexican variety shows on TV), my instinct says we have a lower tolerance for twisted sexual violence. (I did, however, once see a man raped by a horse on a Spanish-language telanovela in the middle of the day. That, I cannot explain.)

Bernardo Bertolucci was so proud that he’d sexualized something as commonplace as a stick of butter, an already slippery ingredients that had long been used as a lubricant and didn’t need sexualizing. It was about taking a woman’s dignity and capturing it on camera.

Even though Nigella Lawson insisted that her lusty caramel cover shoot was anything but food porn and we all knew better, she was still in control over that image. Rachael Ray has said she’d do the infamous FHM shoot again. Paula Deen can throw the butter sex joke right back at Maxim magazine.

Schneider didn’t seem to get that chance. “I was with Maria when she saw the film for the first time,” her best friend is quoted as saying on Schneider’s IMDB page. “She was absolutely shocked. She had no idea what they were going to do with her. She ran from the cinema screaming and I had to run after her into the street and comfort her. That film ruined her life.”

I’d like to think that as ridiculous as things can seem now in this whole world of women and food, at least it’s better than it was. Rest in peace, Maria Schneider.

Photos from IMDB.com, Daily Mail and by Addie Broyles.

It’s always interesting to see how such games evolve. Most of the time, like with the new Candyland, they pale in comparison to the original.

But Guess Who? is — or rather it’s development crew is — downright baffling in it’s inability to evolve. The game consists of 24 characters. Each player secretly picks one, and you ask elimination questions to try to guess the other’s choice.

When I was a kid, the diversity of characters was predictably out of balance, with an emphasis on white men, of course. It’s almost 2012, and this is passes for realistic in my kid’s fictional Guess Who? world:

Almost half of the characters (10 of 24) have facial hair…

and only five of the 24 are women.

This has nothing to do with food, but it annoys me all the same.

Image from Picky Grouchy Non-Cook.

I found myself having lunch this week with my boss.

Not just my immediate boss or her boss, but the boss’s boss’s boss. Turns out, she’s a nice woman who is doing her best to lead the company in trying times.

I can’t remember what made me mention The Feminist Kitchen, but as soon as I did, she offered up that she doesn’t cook. Period. She even told a story about screwing up cheese toast for her daughter. She didn’t sound apologetic, but certainly confessional, and I went out of my way to try not to make her feel badly for not enjoying or knowing much about cooking.

And then I read this New York Times story by Jennifer Steinhaur complaining about the lack of homecooked foods at potlucks and bake sales. You lazy, misguided women, she seemed to be saying. You must not love your children or the women who cooked before you enough to prepare food from scratch when it matters most: When other people can judge you for what you do (or don’t) make.

Emily Matchar has written a much more thorough post about the ridiculousness of the article (what’s next? Complaints about moms who don’t sew their kids’ clothes?) on her wonderful New Domesticity blog, but for the purposes of this space, the article reminded me of all the times I’ve been trying to make non-cooks around me not feel badly for being non-cooks. Maybe it’s the holidays or the fact that I called this blog The Feminist Kitchen and not The Feminist Eater, but it seems like I’ve had a dozen exchanges recently like the one this week with powerful, enlightened women who throw down the guises and say — in the face of this growing food movement that includes too much shaming of people who either don’t cook or don’t know much about, say, sushi — “I don’t cook.”

Last month, another proud non-cook, Evan Harris, emailed me about her site, Picky Grouchy Non-Cook, which is part blog, part resource for other non-cooks. She has a series of profiles of non-cooks to help prove that “just because you are lame in the kitchen does not mean you are lame in life,” and an FAQ and manifesto that dig deeper into the psychology of what it’s like being a non-cook today. (Harris hints that non-cooks are as ostracized as smokers.)

The longer I’m in this food writing business, the more I see how snobbish even the well-meaning food world can be. There are lots of ways to keep yourself challenged and engaged with the world around you. Food is just one of them, but if it’s not at the top of your priority list, that doesn’t make you any less of a feminist in this kitchen.

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