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Alton Brown: Molecular gastronomy won’t replace cooking basics (Restaurant News)
“My worry about molecular gastronomy, especially with young cooks, is that they will try to use it to replace knowing how to cook food,” Brown said during his presentation. “Show me you can cook a chicken breast properly. Show me you can cook a carrot properly. Now do it a hundred times in a row. Then we can play around with the white powders.”
Molecular gastronomy, he added, is part of the cyclical evolution of food and cooking.
“It’s an interesting skill set, but you can’t live on it. It’s not food,” Brown said. “Don’t think you can replace cooking technique with throwing a whole bunch of flavors on top of something any more than you can making it into a caviar or making it into a foam. If I live the rest of my culinary life without a seeing another foam, I’ll be OK.”
Living The Dream: The Truth About Life Inside Food Carts. (NPR)
Squish Durawa owns Wy’East Pizza in Portland, turning out artisan pies from a 64-square-foot trailer. He tells me he loves what he does, would never go back to his old job at the tile store.
But living the dream?
“No. I work roughly 12 hours a day,” Durawa says. “Twelve, fourteen, sixteen -— it doesn’t matter after twelve .”
And it’s not just the hours that are rough. Durawa deals with rain that drives his customers away, and drafts that keep his dough from rising.
And he shares this small space with an 800-degree oven.
“People say we’re living the dream,” Durawa says. “There are moments where it feels like we may be living a dream – I don’t know if it’s the dream we set out for.
Food Fight! (WSJ)
Why was a small boîte in Copenhagen crowned the best restaurant in the world for the second year in a row? And how does it stack up against the best restaurant in America? Globe-trotting restaurant critic Jonathan Gold judges the year’s biggest taste test.
Somehow, it feels like humanity has lost its narrative.
After Wild Weather, Higher Food Prices On Horizon. (NPR)
Throughout April and May, U.S. farmers faced floods, tornadoes, downpours and droughts — all of which made planting difficult. Now in June, intense heat has been sweeping over much of the country.
The harsh weather likely will reduce the fall’s harvest, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That, in turn, could further drive up grocery prices for consumers.
“Farmers had everything thrown at them” by Mother Nature this spring, USDA economist Gerald Bange said. “Excessive rains led to planting delays, and then some of what was already planted actually got flooded.”
Information is Beautiful: Plenty More Fish In The Sea? (Guardian UK)
So this is a kind of collective social amnesia that allows over-exploitation to creep up and increase decade-by-decade without anyone truly questioning it. Today’s fishing quotas and policies for example are attempting to reset fish stocks to the levels of ten or twenty years ago. But as you can see from the visualization, we were already plenty screwed back then.
Europe’s E. coli Outbreak Continues to Grow. (Food Safety News)
Officials at the University Hospital in Gronigen, Netherlands got a call Tuesday from the Bremen hospital — just over the border in Germany — asking if they’d be willing to take on extra patients in the event Bremen cannot accommodate its growing number of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) patients, those suffering the most serious effects of E. coli illness.
“I said yes, of course,” Dr. Alex Friedrich, head of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Infection Control in Gronigen, told Food Safety News. “We are preparing ourselves because we are the largest hospital close to the German border.”
The fact that German hospitals — among the best-equipped on the continent — are putting international backup plans in place is a sign of how severe the E. coli O1404:H4 outbreak in Germany has become.
A Rave, a Pan, or Just a Fake?
This reads like a rave on Yelp, but it’s actually a sample from a help-wanted ad on another site — specifically, Mechanical Turk, a Web site owned by Amazon.com and a place where companies invite “Mechanical Turk workers” — thousands are registered, worldwide — to complete what could be described as microtasks. Each task pays a tiny sum. In the case of Southland Dental, workers were asked to write a fake, five-star review and post it to Southland’s Yelp page, for which they would earn 25 cents.
Fucking Mechanical Turks.
The “No Nitrites Added” Hoax. (Ruhlman)
Please, if someone can tell me what is wrong with nitrates (in green vegetables) and nitrites (in curing salts and in our bodies, a powerful antimicrobial agent in our saliva, for instance), I invite them to do so here. In the 70’s there were studies finding that at high temps, they could form nitrosamines, cancer causing compounds. I don’t disagree, but burnt things containing nitrite are bitter and unpleasant so we’re not likely to crave them in harmful quatities.
Preach it. On par with the MSG hoax.
Is Sugar Toxic? (Behind NY Times paywall)
It doesn’t hurt Lustig’s cause that he is a compelling public speaker. His critics argue that what makes him compelling is his practice of taking suggestive evidence and insisting that it’s incontrovertible. Lustig certainly doesn’t dabble in shades of gray. Sugar is not just an empty calorie, he says; its effect on us is much more insidious. “It’s not about the calories,” he says. “It has nothing to do with the calories. It’s a poison by itself.
Freeze-dried food and the new frugal frontier. (LA Times)
Costco’s Great Gift Ideas catalogue last Christmas included a one-year, four-person supply of dehydrated and freeze-dried food on sale for $2,999. It sold out.
The fear factor alone can drive families to avoid restaurants and stock up on coffee in ways that would have seemed extreme a few years ago.
“There are all kinds of ways consumers can feel this,” said Scott Hoyt, senior director of consumer economics at Moody’s Analytics. “With unemployment hitting 10%, most people probably know someone who has lost their job. Housing markets haven’t recovered yet and that matters for about two-thirds of consumers who are homeowners.”
Unwanted New Item on Menu: Higher Prices. (WSJ)
At Thomas Keller’s esteemed restaurant Per Se, the prix fixe has quietly jumped to $295 from $275.
At sandwich chain ‘wichcraft, the price of a bag of chips and a turkey sandwich has crept up.
And Hoomoos Asli, a casual Israeli eatery in Nolita, last week started charging a “vegetable shortage surcharge” on its eggplant items.
Where Steaming Fried Noodles Spell Relief. (Behind the NY Times Pay Wall)
Nutritionists and the diet-conscious have made instant ramen a noodle non grata. One packet contains about half the maximum amount of sodium anyone should eat in a day. And most versions are fried, sometimes with particularly unhealthy trans fat.
But attacking instant ramen donated to feed Japanese earthquake victims would be just wrong, said Mr. Chang. It’s still very cold in the north, and there was a recent snow. Although potable water is at a premium, those who can find a source of fuel might melt snow or ice to turn dried noodles into sustenance.
“You are not going to tell a starving person they can’t eat that,” he said. “Now is not the time. For the dire situation they’re in, I can’t imagine a better food.”
Oyster Extinction? Stop Panicking and Get the Facts (In A Half Shell [ Oyster Power ])
This is where I see most secondary news sources come to a fault. They make a giant leap in connecting the decline in global oyster reef to your favorite oysters vanishing from the raw bar. Perhaps it’s to drive more hits on a page or maybe it’s just a lack of understanding. Fortunately, this is not an accurate depiction of today’s oyster consumption trends.
I am not trying to downplay the importance of oyster reefs or diminish the need to scrutinize wild fishery management. I just want to put things into perspective so that unnecessary panic can be nipped at the bud.
Excellent.
U.N. Food Agency Issues Warning on China Drought. (NY Times)
World wheat prices are already surging, and they have been widely cited as one reason for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. A separate United Nations report last week said global food export prices had reached record levels in January. The impact of China’s drought on global food prices and supplies could create serious problems for less affluent countries that rely on imported food.
With $2.85 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, nearly three times that of Japan, the country with the second-largest reserves, China has ample buying power to prevent any serious food shortages.
“They can buy whatever they need to buy, and they can outbid anyone,” Mr. Zeigler said. China’s self-sufficiency in grain prevented world food prices from moving even higher when they spiked three years ago, he said.
Eggs Are Now Naturally Lower in Cholesterol. (PR Newswire)
According to new nutrition data from the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), eggs are lower in cholesterol than previously thought. The USDA-ARS recently reviewed the nutrient composition of standard large eggs, and results show the average amount of cholesterol in one large egg is 185 mg, 14 percent lower than previously recorded. The analysis also revealed that large eggs now contain 41 IU of vitamin D, an increase of 64 percent.
Food Prices Worldwide Hit Record Levels, Fueled by Uncertainty, U.N. Says. (NY Times)
Global food prices are moving ever higher, hitting record levels last month as a jittery market reacted to unpredictable weather and tight supplies, according to a United Nations report released Thursday.
It was the seventh month in a row of food price increases, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which put out the report. And with some basic food stocks low, prices will probably continue reaching new heights, at least until the results of the harvest next summer are known, analysts said.
“Uncertainty itself is a new factor in the market that pushes up prices and will not push them down,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist and the grain expert at F.A.O. “People don’t trust anyone to tell them about the harvest and the weather, so it has to await harvest time.”
There’s been a lot of predictable outrage and gnashing of teeth over an Alabama law firm’s seemingly pointless decision to sue Taco Bell for “false advertising”. Apparently a sneaking suspicion — that the meat slurry used by the fast food juggernaut in their painfully-bad-it’s-good menu offerings contained very little beef — was actually confirmed.
It looks bad but passable… until you learn that—according to the Alabama law firm suing Taco Bell—only 36% of that is beef. Thirty-six percent. The other 64% is mostly tasteless fibers, various industrial additives and some flavoring and coloring. Everything is processed into a mass that actually looks like beef, and packed into big containers labeled as “taco meat filling.” These containers get shipped to Taco Bell’s outlets and cooked into something that looks like beef, is called beef and is advertised as beef by the fast food chain.
In terms of the legitimacy of the class action suit itself, I would say Taco Bell has uniquely and cleverly shielded themselves of culpability by referring to their menu items as “beefy”, which in this case is technically true.
The Internet was similarly abuzz a few years ago when it was discovered that the “guacamole” dip commonly sold in erstwhile supermarket chains contained nary an avocado, and were essentially of the some composition as the crappy french onion dip it sat besides on the shelf, except with a booster shot of pale, artificial green.
If you’re paying attention, this really should come of no surprise. In the case of the supermarket avocado subterfuge, a quick glance at the ingredients of the guacamole container would confirm it always primarily consisted of industrially emulsified vegetable oil, and in the case of Taco Bell any sort of self awareness would have allowed the average person to discern that little of what passes as “ground beef” is actually flesh extracted from cows.
As someone who grew up on Chef Boyardee Ravioli (not because it was forced upon me, but out of pure, misguided choice), I recall being nine years old and marveling at how the first “meat” ingredient was “crackermeal”. I assumed at this young age this wasn’t a slang for what poor white people in Arkansas called beef — this was simply filler. Taco Bell’s “seasoned ground beef” similarly shares the same sort of strangely uniform and smooth texture.
If you’ve ever dared to look at what goes on inside the back of the house of any Taco Bell after placing your order, you’d already know that what goes on in the back-of-the-house doesn’t approach anything that resembles cooking in any conventional sense. Taco Bell is simply an MRE repurposing exercise. I presume the meat (and this includes all the meat, not just the seasoned ground beef) comes pre-cooked in unnaturally large, cryovaced bags, and each morning the opening shift simply cuts open a bag and pours the ignoble contents into a slot on the steam table and allows it to bring it up to temperature.
So how can it be a surprise that Taco Bell’s beef is more filler than meat? This is a place that has guacamole and sour cream loaded into separate chambers of the same squirt-gun. Taco Bell preys off teenagers, inebriated college students, and those of us suffering from bad judgement. Its raison d’etre revolves almost entirely around selling soda at huge profit margins — food is just a necessary means to an end.
Taco Bell President Greg Creed said in a statement that the lawyers who filed the lawsuit got their facts wrong and that Taco Bell plans to take legal action against those making the allegations. He did not explain specifically what type of legal action Taco Bell might take. “At Taco Bell, we buy our beef from the same trusted brands you find in the supermarket,” Creed said. “We start with 100 percent USDA-inspected beef.”
I, for one, am strangely comforted that only 36% of what is found in Taco Bell’s seasoned ground beef is actually meat.
Biannually, the Southern Arizona city of Tucson hosts a street fair along 4th Avenue, just north of the the 4th Avenue Underpass that leads into the downtown city core.
The street fair occurs in December and March, a time when the weather in Arizona is quite lovely. The event features your usual panoply of street fair “circuit” artisans, hippies, and countercultural hoi polloi peddling trinkets, assorted wares, and a provincial sense of whimsy (“Aunt Esther, we went to the homeless district and bought a bedazzled tarot card case sold by somebody from Taos!”).
There’s lots of beer tents serving watery domestic swill, and quite an interesting food scene as well. The following photos give you a taste of what rolls into Tucson twice a year, for only 4 days at a time, only to break down as fast they set up, leaving in their wake a bunch of sunburned rubes and a mountain of discarded paper and plastic detritus.
A vow for 2011: No cheap chicken. (Francis Lam @Salon)
I want to get back to that sense of value, of deliberate appreciation and enjoyment. (And, hopefully, it’s not going to happen from privation.) I’m going to learn about chicken. About how it’s produced, how it’s valued by the people who raise it and by the people who cook and serve it. I’m going to talk and share stories. I’m going to learn how chicken turned from something special to something common to something cheap.
Foodie fatigue. (Chicago Tribune)
“Having more people interested in good food is never a bad thing,” said food writer Amanda Hesser, who recently assembled “The Essential New York Times Cookbook.” But what she can’t stand, she said, is eating dinner with people who “only want to talk about food and every place where they ate, like, doughnuts or something, and where the best doughnuts are secretly found. Knowing a lot about food culture is a good thing. That cataloguing of food experience is becoming tiresome. I’m pro-food experts. I’m just not so sure I want to have dinner with them or have them judge me on the coffee I drink.”
Caffeine and Alcohol: Wham! Bam! Boozled. (NY Times)
Four Loko joins this warped tradition. And what I quickly came to see was that if you set out to engineer a booze delivery system that is as cloying, deceptive and divorced from the usual smells, tastes and presentation of alcohol as possible, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more impressive than Four Loko.
For some reason I ended up at Yelp and ran across this review:
(1-star rating from “Wil. C”): I would have to concur Mindy C. below, this place is NOT authentic. When stepping inside just take a look across the room, when none of your customers are asian that is a red flag right there. Would you consider an Italian restaurant with all Asian customers authentic?
U.S. restaurants starved for business. (LA Times)
The number of restaurants operating nationwide dropped this year for the first time in more than a decade, a survey shows, with California accounting for almost a third of the losses.
Oyster Herpes Deaths Tied to Global Warming. (Discovery News)
A new, virulent form of herpes is killing large numbers of Pacific oysters. Scientists think global warming may be fueling the virus.
It’s a fucking awesome market. If I lived in downtown Seattle, I’d shop here pretty much daily.
Pike Place Public Market
Seattle and stuff. Next to the water. If you’re in the water, you’ve gone too far.
Gourmet Magazine Revived for the iPad. (NY Times)
Jimmy Dean, sausage maker extraordinaire and country music troubadour, has passed.
To commemorate, it’s worth revisiting the best product feedback call of all time.
This chart illustrates succinctly why our country sucks ass.
“Change in price of items since 1978, relative to overall inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. The price of carbonated drinks, for example, has fallen 34 percent relative to all other prices.” (“The Battle Over Taxing Soda“, NY Times)
Marijuana Fuels a New Kitchen Culture. (NY Times)
Ron Siegel, who runs the Michelin-starred dining room at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, said he’s grown past his partying days. But even he is having a little fun with haute stoner cuisine.
To serve slow-cooked quail eggs and caviar, he places them atop plastic film that tightly covers a white porcelain serving bowl. Then he fills the vessel with smoke from grated Japanese cedar packed into the bowl of a fan-driven bong he buys in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. The smoke escapes when the diner lifts a small spoon covering a hole in the plastic.
He calls it the Lincecum, after Tim Lincecum, the star pitcher for the San Francisco Giants who was arrested last fall after police found marijuana and a pipe in his car.
As spotted at a metro-area Fred Meyer superstore.
Chicken, turkey may sicken 55K fewer under new USDA rules. (USA Today)
Under the new standards, only 7.5% of chicken carcasses at a plant would be allowed to test positive for salmonella, down from 20% allowed since 1996. Salmonella levels in chickens were tested at 7.1% nationally in 2009, says Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council.
Emphasis mine.
Double Down by the Numbers: Unhealthiest Sandwich Ever?. (Nat Silver @FiveThirtyEight.com)
We can, of course, be a bit more exacting about this. I’ve created an index based on the amount of fat, sodium and cholesterol that the Double Down and a variety of comparable sandwiches contain as a portion of the USDA daily allowance. (In the fat category, saturated fats are counted double and trans-fats are counted triple.) The index is scaled such that the Original Recipe version of the sandwich receives a score of 1.00, a measure of gluttony that will hereafter be known as The Double Down (DD).*
Sandwich to Be Renamed for Man With Lockjaw. (AOL)
A Georgia man bit off more than he could chew — literally — when he dislocated his jaw while trying to eat a super-sized sandwich.
Chad Ettmueller, a structured settlement broker in Cumming, Ga., suffered a locked jaw for 14 hours after biting into a double meat, double cheese sandwich.
What the world needs now:
- More people who complain about service on Yelp.
- Another Thai restaurant.
- More people who think restaurant food is too salty.
- More blanket media coverage for Korean tacos.
- Another national article on the fact that there are carts in Portland that serve food.
- More people who like to deep-fry things.
- A foot soldier movement to pretentiously over-analyze and thus ruin another beverage-related conceit just like wine, coffee, and beer before it. Candidates include water and milk.
- More places that serve dessert for breakfast and the requisite line of white people that line up to spend dozens of dollars for this privilege.
- More people who think a restaurant should exist solely to satisfy their predilections, whether it’s bringing in their own food/wine to augment their dining experience and expecting no resulting fees, or demanding the coq au vin be made with tofu or that the pizza be made gluten-free, or asking that each course be brought out exactly 78 seconds after I’ve fully and lovingly masticated the last bite from the previous, or expecting a dish to be comped because I tried pig intestines and realized it just isn’t my thing.
- One more food blog.
- Another asshole with an opinion who can make a bulleted list.
MSG: Is This Silent Killer Lurking in Your Kitchen Cabinets?. (Huff Post)
One of the best overviews of the very real dangers of MSG comes from Dr. Russell Blaylock, a board-certified neurosurgeon and author of “Excitotoxins: The Taste that Kills.” In it he explains that MSG is an excitotoxin, which means it overexcites your cells to the point of damage or death, causing brain damage to varying degrees — and potentially even triggering or worsening learning disabilities, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease and more.
Part of the problem also is that free glutamic acid is the same neurotransmitter that your brain, nervous system, eyes, pancreas and other organs use to initiate certain processes in your body.[4] Even the FDA states:
“Studies have shown that the body uses glutamate, an amino acid, as a nerve impulse transmitter in the brain and that there are glutamate-responsive tissues in other parts of the body, as well.
Abnormal function of glutamate receptors has been linked with certain neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Huntington’s chorea. Injections of glutamate in laboratory animals have resulted in damage to nerve cells in the brain.”[5]
Although the FDA continues to claim that consuming MSG in food does not cause these ill effects, many other experts say otherwise.
Of course, I don’t think so.
FDA orders widespread food recall. (MSNBC)
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a recall of a common flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella bacteria.
The product, called hydrolyzed vegetable protein or HVP, is potentially in thousands of food products, including soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips and dressings. HVP is manufactured by a Las Vegas company.
All HVP in the world is manufactured by one company? In Las Vegas?
Imported Beef!
Packaged Salad Bacteria: New Study Finds Salad Can Contain High Levels of Fecal Bacteria. (Huff Post)
Literally.
Ticket Replay: Sarah Palin’s book sparks attack on vegetarian critic. (LA Times)
So it’s not really a surprise that her book, “Going Rogue,” published today, extols the virtues of eating meat.
“If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore,” she wrote. “If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”
But the former Republican vice presidential candidate did not stop there.
“I love meat,” she writes. “I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals — right next to the mashed potatoes.”
“Medium-well-done steak”? Fuck that noise. Not fit to govern.
How safe is that chicken? (Consumer Reports)
You would think that after years of alarms about food safety—outbreaks of illness followed by renewed efforts at cleanup—a staple like chicken would be a lot safer to eat. But in our latest analysis of fresh, whole broilers bought at stores nationwide, two-thirds harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease.
Last Sunday, after that afternoon’s televised American tackle football match had ceased, I was greeted with this wonderful program starring competitive bouncing champion and notable television personality
Mr. T.
I trust you found this as enthralling and educational (not to mention fraught with sexual tension) as I did. Here’s a sample.
The All-Inclusive All-You-Can-Eat Buffet Guide (Eating the Road, a food blog)
In my more gluttonous days this would be invaluable.
Meat is murder on the environment. (New Scientist)
A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.
This is among the conclusions of a study by Akifumi Ogino of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues, which has assessed the effects of beef production on global warming, water acidification and eutrophication, and energy consumption. The team looked at calf production, focusing on animal management and the effects of producing and transporting feed. By combining this information with data from their earlier studies on the impact of beef fattening systems, the researchers were able to calculate the total environmental load of a portion of beef.
Their analysis showed that producing a kilogram of beef leads to the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent to 36.4 kilograms of carbon dioxide. It also releases fertilising compounds equivalent to 340 grams of sulphur dioxide and 59 grams of phosphate, and consumes 169 megajoules of energy (Animal Science Journal, DOI: 10.1111/j.1740-0929.2007.00457.x). In other words, a kilogram of beef is responsible for the equivalent of the amount of CO2 emitted by the average European car every 250 kilometres, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.
The calculations, which are based on standard industrial methods of meat production in Japan, did not include the impact of managing farm infrastructure and transporting the meat, so the total environmental load is higher than the study suggests.
Big Food vs. Big Insurance . (Pollan in the NY Times)
No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.
That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat “preventable chronic diseases.” Not all of these diseases are linked to diet — there’s smoking, for instance — but many, if not most, of them are.
We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.
Burgerville: Get your calorie bill here. (KATU.com)
At the Burgerville on Northeast Martin Luther King Boulevard, they’re serving up more than just burgers and fries.
The new receipts there not only show customers what they order, but also the nutritional value for exactly how they ordered it.
“Guests order and ask for different things: different buns, different cheeses, different sauces, different everything,” said Jeff Harvey, president and CEO for Burgerville. “So to put a label on the menu is not going resolve that challenge.”
Right now this caloric-bill program is just a pilot program. But it could be expanded to more stores in September.
“It’s kind of nice,” said Burgerville customer John Spaith. “If I was watching my weight more this would be very helpful.”
We decided to put the system to the test, to see just how much you can ‘save.’ We ordered up the cheeseburger basket.
The first part of the receipt shows the cheeseburger we ordered that’s 639 calories. The french fries, that’s a regular serving, that’s 360 calories. And the shake, the special one that’s in stores right now, that alone is 840 calories.
My on-again, off-again, on-again boycott of Whole Foods IS BACK IN THE SADDLE, BITCHES.
The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare. (Wall Street Journal)
Personal responsibility…blah blah…people are to blame for not having health care…blah blah…socialezm is teh evil…blah blah…people should buy $1 kumquats at my store if they want to live to be 100.
Fuck John Mackey, who is the world’s most notorious sockpuppet. I’m surprised he didn’t simply byline this op-ed with “I Hump Ayn Rand’s Rotting Corpse.”
North Korea Opens 1st Fast-Food Restaurant: Report. (Huff Post)
The restaurant’s interior appears to be styled after fast-food joints the world over, but the menu is careful not to call its signature fare a hamburger – lest it give the impression North Koreans had embraced the American icon.
North Korea’s authoritarian government is concerned that outside influences could undermine the regime and pose a threat to leader Kim Jong Il’s tight grip on the nation of 24 million. It balks at using foreign words and coins alternatives in Korean instead.
…
The minced beef and bread at the new fast-food restaurant costs only $1.70, the newspaper said, but that would eat up more than half of the average North Korean’s daily income. South Korea’s central bank put last year’s average per capita income at $1,065.
Burrito chain’s Food, Inc. sponsorship generates off-screen drama over farm-worker issues. (Grist)
On July 13, Chipotle Mexican Grill announced it was throwing its marketing weight behind Food, Inc., a documentary that takes a highly critical look at the food system.
The fast-food chain would be sponsoring free screenings of the film at 32 theaters nationwide. It would also be distributing material promoting the film at all its restaurants—thus exposing people in search of a tasty burrito to a film quite different from the super-hero blockbusters that get promoted in typical fast-food chains. In addition, there’d be a Chipotle-related “bonus feature” in the film’s upcoming DVD.
The Chipotle/Food, Inc. tie-up caught my eye, because just a month before, a group of food writers and activists signed a letter to Chipotle CEO Steve Ells sharply criticizing the chain for its inaction on farm worker rights. The two signees who topped the list were Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner and co-producer Eric Schlosser, who is also prominently featured in the film. (I signed the letter as well.)
Hot dogs should carry a warning label, lawsuit says. (LA Times, via PAC@theMerc)
The nonprofit Cancer Project filed a lawsuit today on behalf of three New Jersey plaintiffs asking the Essex County superior court to compel the companies to place cancer-risk warning labels on hot dog packages sold in New Jersey.
“Just as tobacco causes lung cancer, processed meats are linked to colon cancer,” says Neal Barnard, president of the Cancer Project and an adjunct professor at the George Washington University medical school in Washington, D.C. “Companies that sell hot dogs are well aware of the danger, and their customers deserve the same information.”
The defendants in the lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, include Nathan’s Famous Inc., Oscar Mayer-owner Kraft Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp., Marathon Enterprises Inc. and ConAgra Foods Inc., which owns Hebrew National.
I’d be fine with this, as long as they aired a disclaimer before reality television shows that warns potential viewers that watching the program will make you stupid.
Why junk food really is addictive. (Telegraph UK)
Professor Kessler, ex-commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), claims that manufacturers have created combinations of fat, sugar and salt that are so tasty many people cannot stop eating them even when full.
He argues that manufacturers are seeking to trigger a “bliss point” when people eat certain products, leaving them hungry for more.
“It is time to stop blaming individuals for being overweight or obese,” he said. “The real problem is we have created a world where food is always available and where that food is designed to make you want to eat more of it. For millions of people, modern food is simply impossible to resist.”
While at the FDA, Prof Kessler was well known for his criticism of the tobacco industry, which he accused of manipulating cigarettes to make them even more addictive.
The same can be said about porn.
Waiter, There’s Deer in My Sushi. (NY Times)
Sushi made with deer meat, anyone? How about a slice of raw horse on that rice?
These are some of the most extreme alternatives being considered by Japanese chefs as shortages of tuna threaten to remove it from Japan’s sushi menus — something as unthinkable here as baseball without hot dogs or Texas without barbecue.
In this seafood-crazed country, tuna is king. From maguro to otoro, the Japanese seem to have almost as many words for tuna and its edible parts as the French have names for cheese. So when global fishing bodies recently began lowering the limits on catches in the world’s rapidly depleting tuna fisheries, Japan fell into a national panic.
Nightly news programs ran in-depth reports of how higher prices were driving top-grade tuna off supermarket shelves and the revolving conveyer belts at sushi chain stores. At nicer restaurants, sushi chefs began experimenting with substitutes, from cheaper varieties of fish to terrestrial alternatives and even, heaven forbid, American sushi variations like avocado rolls.
“It’s like America running out of steak,” said Tadashi Yamagata, vice chairman of Japan’s national union of sushi chefs. “Sushi without tuna just would not be sushi.”
I’m pretty sure if you stuck cream cheese in it and called it a “Bambi Roll” or a “Seabiscuit Maki” all the fucking retards in Scottsdale (or the Pearl) would buy it.
Pizza Hut to change its name? (MSN Money)
Blame recession cuts. Pizza Hut reportedly is slicing the “pizza” from its name. The fast food chain will now be known simply as “The Hut.”
The chain, which has recently expanded its menu beyond pizza to include pasta, could not immediately be reached for comment Friday. Media and advertising trade publication MediaWeek characterized the name change as an attempt to transform its stores into hip hangouts. There are more than 10,000 Pizza Huts worldwide.
The new “hut” stores will be more than a place to simply pick up some take-out, according to MediaWeek. They will include televisions that broadcast CBS programs such as “Wheel of Fortune” and “Entertainment Tonight.”
The company has tried to become more hip and youth-friendly in recent months. In April, it introduced the Pizza Hut “Twintern,” an employee who uses the online service Twitter to update customers about store events and pop culture news.
This comment is priceless:
Idiots. Simply put, they are idiots. This will backfire. Its marketing 101: dont alter a name the public has come to know well. Now when college guys are sitting around and one of them says, “I wanna go to the hut,” the other guys will think he wants to go to a gay bar.
Oysters in deep trouble: Is Pacific Ocean’s chemistry killing sea life? (Seattle Times)
In a region that provides one-sixth of the nation’s oysters — the epicenter of the West Coast’s $111 million oyster industry — everyone knows nature can be fickle.
But then the failure was repeated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It spread to an Oregon hatchery that supplies baby oysters to shellfish nurseries from Puget Sound to Los Angeles. Eighty percent of that hatchery’s oyster larvae died, too.
Now, as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific Ocean — icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into seaside hatcheries — may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters.
If true, that could mean shifts in ocean chemistry associated with carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels may be impairing sea life faster and more dramatically than expected.
Restaurants on the Ropes (US News)
When Americans get stressed out, one thing they do is eat. But apparently not enough.
The dismal economy has punished retailers, with companies like Circuit City and Linens ’n Things going extinct and dozens of others losing money. Now it’s hitting their cousins in the restaurant industry, too. The Bennigan’s and Steak & Ale chains were early casualties, going belly up last summer. This year, with Americans cutting back on spending, sales at restaurants could fall by 10 percent or more. Analysts don’t expect widespread closures, but some chains are likely to close unprofitable outlets, cut back on service, and look for other ways to reduce costs.
Murder Burger’s staff wear Meat is Murder T-shirts. (The Daily Telegraph via SS’s Twitter)
THERE’S something very confronting about buying a beef burger from a man wearing a “Meat is Murder” T-shirt.
Especially, when it’s his staff uniform.
But that’s how things go at Murder Burger, a New Zealand gourmet burger store that appears to specialise in downplaying itself in that classic Antipodean way, with great results.
I’d rather have the staff wear a shirt that says “Strangeways Here We Come”.
Reasonable Consumer Would Know “Crunchberries” Are Not Real, Judge Rules. (Lowering the Bar, a legal humor blog)
On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased “Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries” because she believed “crunchberries” were real fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently learned to her dismay that said “berries” were in fact simply brightly-colored cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.
Burger King Calls Global Warming “Baloney”. (Memphis Flyer)
Businesses usually don’t court political controversy, but signs at (at least) two Memphis Burger King locations read: “Global Warming is Baloney.” According to one employee at the Burger King on Union Avenue and Pauline, that’s no mistake.
Care to eavesdrop on my incredibly strange conversation with a female BK employee who didn’t identify herself? Read on.
Me: Hi, I’m calling from the Flyer about your sign. Does Burger King really think global warming is baloney?
BK: [Hangup]
Me:(calling back): Your sign out front says global warming is baloney.
BK: I don’t see that sir.
Me: Well it does.
BK: I don’t see that sir… I change the signs and that sign’s been up for a week.
Me: Well, I have pictures that I took this afternoon [cross conversation ensuring I'm calling the correct BK. I am]
Me: So there’s no question that your sign said it and so did one in Midtown. I want to know if it was on purpose or if it was a prank someone pulled on you.
BK: Let me get the manager. [several minutes of dead air then the same or very similar voice picks up.]
BK: Who were you holding for?
Me: A manager, about the sign. I have pictures of the sign and people have called me upset. I just want to know if it’s a mistake or not so I can report it. [rehash of previous conversation]
BK: Let me go outside and look at the sign and I’ll call you right back. [exchange of contact info]
Portland firefighter turned restaurateur sues for disability benefits. (Oregon Live)
A former firefighter is suing the City of Portland for $2 million, claiming that it should have to continue to pay him thousands of dollars a month in disability benefits despite the fact that he has succeeded as a nationally known chef.
Thomas K. Hurley filed suit Thursday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, arguing that the city has been “reneging” on its promise to pay him disability benefits as long as he isn’t physically able to work as a firefighter.
The suit doesn’t say how much Hurley was receiving in benefits before the city cut him off, and the city declined to talk about Hurley’s case because of the pending litigation.
According to a 2005 article in The Oregonian, Hurley was collecting $3,948 a month in late 2004. Meanwhile, he had created a high-profile second career running an upscale French restaurant, Hurley’s, in Northwest Portland. He closed the restaurant at the end of 2007 to move to Seattle to focus full-time on a restaurant he’d started there.
Hurley, a fifth-generation firefighter, has said that he fractured his knee when he fell through a second-story floor that collapsed in a fire. He has said he also suffered another injury, hurting his back when thrown by the force of a fire. He has been on disability since 1993.
The city’s Fire and Police Disability and Retirement Fund helped pay for his training at the French Culinary Institute in New York so he could start a new career. The fund also continued to pay him thousands of dollars a month in disability benefits.
Ah, the memories: Hurley’s closes, but not without parting shot. Shorter Thomas Hurley: “Portland, you are a bunch of rubes, you can suck my knob. But I will continue to take your city’s money.”
“I’m moving on to bigger and better things,” says Hurley. “I need to be in a bigger city with more sophistication, more money…”
“Portland wasn’t ready for me,” says Hurley. “People in Seattle love what we do. They don’t mind paying for quality.”
Maybe Seattle doesn’t mind paying for quality, but I’m pretty sure they would mind if their tax money paid your mortgage.
I guess this is a good idea. Assuming there’s one, you know, for regular old food writing as well.
The Pork Lobbyists, Ready to Reassure. (Washington Post)
For going on two weeks, the Washington professionals who represent the nation’s 67,000 pork producers have been in a mad dash to, as President Obama once said, put lipstick on this pig. Hundreds of people have been infected in more than a dozen countries, prompting the closure of scores of schools across the United States, including four in the Washington region.
In Canada over the weekend, officials said a farmworker passed the virus to a herd of hogs. Although the farmer and the pigs apparently have recovered, and top U.S. and Mexican officials yesterday projected a cautious optimism that the new virus is not as lethal as initially feared, intense worldwide focus on swine flu shows no signs of abating.
Each morning, the pork lobbyists assemble to figure out how bad it got overnight. On this day last week, word came that officials in Egypt had ordered the slaughter of every pig in sight — about 300,000 of them. In Iowa, the first two possible cases of swine flu were reported, and the Russians and Chinese were considering banning pork imports from that Midwestern state, America’s biggest hog producer. On CNN, a news anchor teased an upcoming flu segment with footage of dead pigs.
“Worried about the swine flu?” the anchor asked. “Well, it could be worse. You could be a pig farmer.”
2 Portlanders file class-action suit against Western Culinary Institute. (Oregonian)
According to the complaint, the school failed to warn students that their tuition would exceed their ability, upon graduation, to pay off their federal loans. It alleges the school also misrepresented its job-placement rate and failed to disclose that students would “not obtain material benefit from the course of study.”
“A lot of these people have incurred tremendous debt,” said David Sugerman, the Portland attorney representing the students. “When they get out, they often qualify for jobs that pay very little relative to the debt they incur.”
I’ve always said that the ranks of culinary schools at the turn of the century swelled when the congener that is marijuana was mixed with the Food Network. Add to the mix Top Chef, proliferative food blogs, and America’s increasingly distractive tendencies towards hero worship and easy credit, and we now have an epidemic.
“Alice in Wonderland – The gushing of waters is all Wet. (NRO via Food Dude)
In an interview shortly after the groundbreaking, Alice Waters — the organic-food world’s most active and least humorous spokesperson — commented on the new White House vegetable garden: “The most important thing that Michelle Obama did was to say that food comes from the land. . . . People have not known that. They think it comes from the grocery store.”
Oh, really — is that what people think? To whom, exactly, is Ms. Waters referring? Is she referring to the millions of people living in the grain-belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri — states one cannot drive across without spending hours staring at corn and soybean fields? The millions living along the Pacific Northwest coast and Alaska who are supported by the fishing industry? The fishermen of Gloucester, Mass.? Maybe she is talking about people living in Wisconsin — where dairy farms and cow pastures are as ubiquitous as art galleries in New York. Or perhaps she is referring to the thousands of people like me, who — in the suburbs of an East Coast metropolis — just throw a few Lowe’s-purchased plants in the ground, and hope for some rain to support a small backyard garden. Yes, Ms. Waters, even these “people” know that the grocery store doesn’t spontaneously produce food.
The National Review is dismissive of exponents of post-corporate farming? Color me surprised.
America’s robust agricultural sector has made food cheaper and more plentiful not just for our nation’s citizens, but for the entire world. Environmentalists may dismiss big, industrial farms, but it is these largely American innovations that are helping feed the world, and keeping costs down for coupon clippers like me.
This conclusion is simply emblematic of the National Review’s mindset of Corporatism = Good. No mention of the side effects—intense use of antibiotics and chemicals, the monoculture of commodity agriculture, the circumvention of the natural order—that inevitably result from the mass industrialization of our food chain.
—Julie Gunlock, a former congressional staffer, is now a stay-at-home mom.
How very convenient for her to excoriate Ms. Waters for high-minded condescension and to call her out for casting stones from an ivory tower. I mean, who amongst us doesn’t work from home penning op-eds for a magazine (that is subsidized by ideological largesse) after a career working on Capitol Hill?
I think the point Alice Waters is trying to make, however inartfully it may be portrayed, is that industrialized farming has made everything a commodity, and that is precisely the problem. Food shouldn’t be treated like fungible materials such as petroleum or copper. The mass scale industrialization championed by Ms. Gunlock in practice serves the master of cheap protein. Farm land is usurped by a mostly singular goal to provide calories for livestock in an unnatural setting that requires massive amounts of antibiotics to offset the disease and amelioration that results from taking animals out of existing ecosystems and fattening them in cities that are not unlike an animal husbandry version of “The Matrix”.
The factory farm didn’t exist 50 years ago. Government farm policy in the last half-century has effectively given corporations a massive assist in turning society into a socially engineered petri dish for misbegotten “good” intentions. The result is a strangely bizarre, impersonal and mechanically artificial reality where “efficiency” has trumped common sense.
Proof.
The swine flu crisis lays bare the meat industry’s monstrous power. (Guardian UK)
But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal “drift” and episodic genomic “shift”. But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China’s natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.
In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.
Swine-flu outbreak could be linked to Smithfield factory farms. (Grist)
The outbreak of a new flu strain—a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses—has infected 1,000 people in Mexico and the U.S., killing 68. The World Health Organization warned Saturday that the outbreak could reach global pandemic levels.
Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year, according to the company Web site.
Popeye’s runs out of chicken in Rochester. (Democrat and Chronicle)
“It has been crazy, very busy,” said Maria Ocegueda, manager of a Popeye’s on East Marengo Street in Los Angeles at 7 p.m. Pacific time. “I’m supposed to be open until midnight. I’m not sure we’re going to make it without running out of chicken.”
She said the promotion should be repeated, maybe six months from now.
“Offering chicken at this price is a way to get people who would otherwise not spend — to spend. It’s a good way to stimulate the economy.”
Obama’s ‘Pizza Policy Is Going To Have To Change’: Lou Malnati’s Owner. (Huff Post)
President Barack Obama is having 140 people over to the White House Friday night for a some deep-dish pizza _ St. Louis deep dish pizza.
It seems during his campaign he had pizza from a restaurant called Pi in St. Louis. That’s the story Pi assistant manager Lindsey Tornetto tells.
Whatever happened, the restaurant says the owner and his partner packed dough, cheese and pizza pans in their suitcases and flew to Washington.
It all has Marc Malnati _ owner of 30 Lou Malnati’s Pizzarias in the Chicago area _ shaking his head. He says he likes Obama’s economic policy, but thinks the president’s pizza policy should change.
First lady’s organic garden concerns chemical firms. (The Hill)
But MACA, which represents agribusinesses like Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences and DuPont Crop Protection, is rather less thrilled about the fact that no chemicals will be used to grow the crops. The group is worried that the decision may give consumers the wrong impression about conventionally grown food.
“We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents. Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents,” the letter states. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family’s year-round food needs.”
Mr. Pez@Babblesauce alerted me to the existence of the music video for Ween’s I Can’t Put My Finger On It, which—if not the best music video ever made—is at least the best food related music video of all time.
At the 1:57 mark, after the guy takes a hit of the hooka, you’ll notice a very impressive falafel platter being ladled with a luscious tahini sauce.
Obama Fried Chicken Places Under Fire For Name. (Huff Post)
Two New York City fried chicken restaurants in predominantly black neighborhoods are under fire for putting President Barack Obama’s name on their signs.
City Councilman Charles Barron said Friday that he will organize a demonstration next week outside Obama Fried Chicken in his Brooklyn district. Organizers said they may also target Obama Fried Chicken & Pizza in Harlem.
“People from the community were calling me and saying they were outraged by this racist connection to Barack Obama and fried chicken,” Barron said. “If you think that free speech gives you the right to insult and degrade us and stereotype us, then you’ve got a battle on your hands.”
The Onion is becoming superfluous.
100 sickened after eating at N.Y. Applebee’s. (AP via MSNBC)
SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Health officials say more than 100 people reported getting sick after eating at an Applebee’s restaurant near Syracuse.
The county health department says there are seven confirmed cases of Shigellosis among people who ate at the Applebee’s in Camillus in early March. The bacterial infection is associated with consuming water or food contaminated with fecal matter.
I’m sure there’s a joke about Guy Fieri somewhere in there, but I just don’t have the spirit.
World’s Deadliest Spider Found In Whole Foods In Tulsa. (Huff Post)
TULSA, Okla. — One of the most deadly spiders in the world has been found in the produce section of a Tulsa grocery store. An employee of Whole Foods Market found the Brazilian Wandering Spider Sunday in bananas from Honduras and managed to catch it in a container.
The spider was given to University of Tulsa Animal Facilities director Terry Childs who said this type of spider kills more people than any other.
Childs said a bite will kill a person in about 25 minutes and while there is an antidote he doesn’t know of any in the Tulsa area.
I kinda like spiders, so my on-again/off-again boycott of Whole Foods is, for the time being, OFF.
Food Magazines Begin to Consider Cooks’ Budgets. (NY Times)
After covering eating trends that have included haute pub food, exotic fruits like yuzu, and restaurants that dehydrated, foamed and froze everything from meat to dessert, upscale food magazines are writing about an even more unexpected topic: cheap home eating.
Reflecting the bad economy, Gourmet, which usually writes about expensive restaurants and faraway travel, has added a feature about what to do with leftovers, and put a ham sandwich — albeit a fancy one — on its March cover.
Food & Wine’s March issue includes an essay on buying the cheapest bottle on a wine list. Bon Appétit’s April cover trumpets a “low-cost, big-flavor” pizza party.
Green Your St. Patrick’s Day Partying. (Huff Post)
Well, St. Patrick’s Day is upon us. Can you think of a better time to throw a green party? Nope! You can’t. So here are some fun and easy ways to get started:
…
3. Vegan eatin’: Vegan corned “beef” and cabbage
I’ve never tried this one, but I’ll say this: I’m increasingly impressed with imitation meat meals. Especially vegan junk food (like Foodswings in Brooklyn). But if you want to reduce the impact of your St. Patrick’s Day food — or if you want to cater to your friends who don’t eat meat, here’s a recipe for Vegan corned “beef” and cabbage.
The most insipid thing you’ll read all day, unless of course you happen to visit CNBC.com.
It’s on baby. The boycott is back! Everyone join in on the refuseniking!
FDA Approves Salmonella. (America’s Finest News Source)
WASHINGTON—Calling it “perfectly safe for the most part,” and “not nearly as destructive or fatal as previously thought,” the Food and Drug Administration approved the enterobacteria salmonella for human consumption this week.
The federal agency, which has struggled in recent years to contain the food-borne pathogen, and repeatedly failed to prevent tainted products from reaching store shelves, announced Monday that salmonella was now completely okay for all Americans to enjoy.
“Rigorous testing has shown that salmonella is…fine,” FDA director of food safety Stephen Sundlof said. “In fact, our research indicates that there’s no need to pull any more foodstuffs from the market. Not raw chicken. Not contaminated spinach. Not thousands of jars of harmful peanut butter. Not anything.”
Iron Chef Cat Cora And Wife Both Pregnant. (Huff Post)
I apologize for the title of this post.
Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0. (East Bay Express)
This wasn’t your average sales pitch. At least, not the kind that John, an East Bay restaurateur, was used to. He was familiar with Yelp.com, the popular San Francisco-based web site in which any person can write a review about nearly any business. John’s restaurant has more than one hundred reviews, and averages a healthy 3.5-star rating. But when John asked Mike what he could do about his bad reviews, he recalls the sales rep responding: “We can move them. Well, for $299 a month.” John couldn’t believe what the guy was offering. It seemed wrong.
The WORLD WIDE WEB is an awful place. You best avoid it.
A McNuggets “Emergency. (The Smoking Gun)
Angered that her local McDonald’s was out of Chicken McNuggets, a Florida woman called 911 three times to report the fast food “emergency.” Latreasa Goodman, 27, last Saturday called police to complain that a cashier–citing a McDonald’s all sales are final policy–would not give her a refund. [To listen to Goodman's 911 calls, click here and here.] When cops responded to the restaurant, Goodman told them, “This is an emergency. If I would have known they didn’t have McNuggets, I wouldn’t have given my money, and now she wants to give me a McDouble, but I don’t want one.” Goodman noted, “I called 911 because I couldn’t get a refund, and I wanted my McNuggets,” according to the below Fort Pierce Police Department report. That logic, however, did not keep cops from citing Goodman for misusing the 911 system. Even after being issued a misdemeanor citation, Goodman contended, “this is an emergency, my McNuggets are an emergency.”
Reminds me of the time I forced the issue of an Amber Alert when my daughter ate all my Nutella.
NW wine industry: worries and bargains. (Crosscut)
Indeed, most others in the wine business in Washington and Oregon report that it’s tough out there and likely to get tougher — particularly for new wineries, high-end producers without big reputations and scores, and those that depend heavily on the hard-hit restaurant business. Even giant Jackson Family Wines in California, the parent company of Kendall-Jackson, laid off about 20 percent of its staff in January.
Many wineries are trying to shift their distribution mix away from restaurants and toward retail. Most are carefully nurturing their wine club members, hoping the direct-to-consumer business provides an island of stability. Washington and Oregon wineries questioned are predicting that, at best, sales in 2009 will be about the same as last year. “You’ve got to be really skeptical in this environment that you’ll see any sizable growth in 2009,” says Mark Freund, senior relationship manager for Silicon Valley Bank in California, which works with about 250 West Coast wineries. “If you can maintain flat sales, you’re not doing too bad.”
No Lunch Left Behind. (Alice Waters co-authored Op-Ed in the NY Times)
Many nutrition experts believe that it is possible to fix the National School Lunch Program by throwing a little more money at it. But without healthy food (and cooks and kitchens to prepare it), increased financing will only create a larger junk-food distribution system. We need to scrap the current system and start from scratch. Washington needs to give schools enough money to cook and serve unprocessed foods that are produced without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. When possible, these foods should be locally grown.
How much would it cost to feed 30 million American schoolchildren a wholesome meal? It could be done for about $5 per child, or roughly $27 billion a year, plus a one-time investment in real kitchens. Yes, that sounds expensive. But a healthy school lunch program would bring long-term savings and benefits in the areas of hunger, children’s health and dietary habits, food safety (contaminated peanuts have recently found their way into school lunches), environmental preservation and energy conservation.
The Maggots in Your Mushrooms. (NY Times Op-Ed)
Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation — 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.
Canned mushrooms may have “over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or “five or more maggots two millimeters or longer per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or an “average of 75 mites” before provoking action by the F.D.A.
The sauerkraut on your hot dog may average up to 50 thrips. And when washing down those tiny, slender, winged bugs with a sip of beer, you might consider that just 10 grams of hops could have as many as 2,500 plant lice. Yum.
Great Meals for Two, Under $100 (It’s Possible). (NY Times)
Frank Bruni’s talk about “cheap eats” raises the ire of the masses. It’s getting rough out there.
Italy bans kebabs and foreign food from cities. (Times Online)
The tomato comes from Peru and spaghetti was probably a gift from China.
It is, though, the “foreign” kebab that is being kicked out of Italian cities as it becomes the target of a campaign against ethnic food, backed by the centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi.
The drive to make Italians eat Italian, which was described by the Left and leading chefs as gastronomic racism, began in the town of Lucca this week, where the council banned any new ethnic food outlets from opening within the ancient city walls.
Yesterday it spread to Lombardy and its regional capital, Milan, which is also run by the centre Right. The antiimmigrant Northern League party brought in the restrictions “to protect local specialities from the growing popularity of ethnic cuisines”.
Luca Zaia, the Minister of Agriculture and a member of the Northern League from the Veneto region, applauded the authorities in Lucca and Milan for cracking down on nonItalian food. “We stand for tradition and the safeguarding of our culture,” he said.
Here’s a food you shouldn’t ban: a nice, steaming hot bowl of Shut the Fuck Up.
Hospitals will take meat off menus in bid to cut carbon. (Guardian UK)
Meat-free menus are to be promoted in hospitals as part of a strategy to cut global warming emissions across the National Health Service.
The plan to offer patients menus that would have no meat option is part of a strategy to be published tomorrow that will cover proposals ranging from more phone-in GP surgeries to closing outpatient departments and instead asking surgeons to visit people at their local doctor’s surgery.
Some suggestions are likely to be controversial with patients’ groups, especially attempts to curb meat eating and car use. Plans to reuse more equipment could raise concern about infection with superbugs such as MRSA.
Dr David Pencheon, director of the NHS sustainable development unit, said the amount of NHS emissions meant it had to act to make cuts, and the changes would save money, which could be spent on better services for patients.
“This is not just about doing things more efficiently, it’s about doing things differently, because efficiency is not going to get us to big cuts,” said Pencheon. “What will healthcare look like in 2030-2040 in a very low carbon society? It will not look anything like it looks now.”
Anthony Bourdain Talks Alice Watersgate. (Gothamist)
How fitting that Anthony Bourdain’s controversial interview with DCist, in which Bourdain called organic food proponent Alice Waters’ agenda “very Khmer Rouge,” took place in our nation’s capital. Welcome to Alice Watersgate, a brewing chef on chef scandal that (potentially) has the unexpected benefit of bringing ideas about our country’s food policy to a much wider audience.
Judging from the DCist interview, general timing seems to be part of Bourdain’s overall gripe: “We’re all in the middle of a recession,” he told interviewer Jamie R. Liu, while complaining about the priciness and preachiness seemingly inherent to going green, “like we’re all going to start buying expensive organic food and running to the green market.” Last November, Waters wrote a much-publicized open letter to the newly minted President Elect offering advisory services on choosing a new White House chef. It turned out that the old White House chef had a lot to offer.
Consumers urged to use caution eating peanut butter. (CNN)
Federal officials are urging consumers to put off eating foods that contain peanut butter until they can be they are sure they do not contain products manufactured by the Peanut Corp. of America, some of which were found to contain salmonella.
I’ve been slowly going through a small package of Nabisco brand Nutter Butter Sandwich Cookies all week. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
US roquefort tariff angers French. (Guardian)
Less than a week before it leaves office, the Bush administration has sparked anger across the Atlantic by tripling the import duty rate on roquefort cheese to 300%, a move which the US hopes will “shut down trade” in the sheep’s milk product by making it prohibitively expensive.
Another entry: Man accused of selling daughter for cash, beer.
Police have arrested a Greenfield man for allegedly arranging to sell his 14-year-old daughter into marriage in exchange for $16,000, 100 cases of beer and several cases of meat.
Police said they only learned of the deal after Marcelino de Jesus Martinez went to them to get his daughter back because payment wasn’t made as promised. The man was arrested Sunday on suspicion of human trafficking.
NBC News’ Dara Brown reported that the deal specifically involved 100 cases of Corona beer, 50 cases of Modelo, six bottles of wine, 50 cases of soft drinks and 50 cases of Gatorade.
(Emphasis mine).
In his defense, the several cases of meat turned out to be Steak-Ums.
Mr. Bog reminds us of the implications.
Comments are icing on the cake.
I’m still vacillating on my boycott of Whole Foods. They do have a nice olive bar. And it’s one of the few places where you can see some prepared food available by the pound, figure you’ll just get a little snack, and then end up paying more than you would if you decided to sit down at a proper restaurant.
IKEA sells this wood treatment for its kitchen butcher block.
IKEA tells me it’s approved for use on surfaces that come in contact with food.
Garage Invention Could Turn Restaurants into Power Plants. (Wired)
A new garage-engineered generator burns the waste oil from restaurants’ deep fryers to generate electricity and hot water. Put 80 gallons of grease into the Vegawatt and its creators promise that it will generate about five kilowatts of power.
That’s about 10 percent of the total energy needs of Finz, a seafood restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the first Vegawatt is being tested. At New England electricity rates, the system offsets about $2.50 worth of electricity with each gallon of waste oil poured into it.
Vegawatt’s founder and inventor, James Peret, estimates that restaurants purchasing the $22,000 machine will save about $1,000 per month in electricity costs, for a payback time of under two years.
As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.. (WSJ)
“There’s a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur,” he says. “One could rejoice in that process,” he adds, poker-faced. “But if we’re talking reasonably, it’s not the best scenario — for Russia.” Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces — with Alaska reverting to Russian control.
The 20 Unhealthiest Drinks in America. (Men’s Health, ht Amanda @PF.org)
1. The Worst Drink in America
Baskin-Robbins Large Heath Bar Shake2,310 calories
108 g fat (64 g saturated)
266 g
That’s nothing compared to a holiday tradition in our household: bacon-n-eggnog lard shakes, encased in a 5-inch corn syrup brulee crust and topped with fried cow brains and rocks of crystal methamphetamine.
Big layoffs at Budweiser. (Foyston @Oregonian)
Anheuser-Busch announced plans to cut around “1,400 U.S. salaried positions in its beer-related divisions, affecting about 6 percent of the company’s total U.S. workforce,” three-quarters of which were at A-B HQ in St. Louis. Also, 250 vacant position will now not be filled and 415 independent contractors will also be terminated.
The announced workforce reductions are in addition to the more than 1,000 U.S. salaried employees company-wide who accepted the company’s voluntary enhanced retirement program, which closed November 14 and provided special benefits for eligible employees retiring by the end of 2008.
It’s getting rough out there when American lager is no longer recession-proof.
Cake request for 3-year-old Hitler namesake denied. (AP/Yahoo!)
A supermarket is defending itself for refusing to a write out 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell’s name on his birthday cake.
Deborah Campbell, 25, of nearby Hunterdon County, N.J., said she phoned in her order last week to the Greenwich ShopRite. When she told the bakery department she wanted her son’s name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request.
Karen Meleta, a ShopRite spokeswoman, said the store denied similar requests from the Campbells the last two years, including a request for a swastika.
“We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate,” Meleta said. “We considered this inappropriate.”
The Campbells ultimately got their cake decorated at a Wal-Mart in Pennsylvania, Deborah Campbell said Tuesday.
ZIRP! (NY Times)
From the comments:
Do you have any prediction for when creative lucky people might see the end of this?
— Lynn
December 16, 2008
3:44 pm
Calling All Cars: Trouble at Chuck E. Cheese’s, Again. (WSJ)
In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese’s.
Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child’s birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant’s music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain’s namesake mouse perform.
Classic.
True story: I worked at Chuck E. Cheese for a summer when I was 14 years old. It was run by teenagers, and I would commonly press the token button after hours (I learned this from the Manager On Duty) and harvest hundreds of trinkets which would be exchanged at school for goods and services.
I WAS Chuck E Cheese. Meaning, during birthday parties, I would temporarily discontinue my bussing duties to don a rat costume, make a guest appearance and press some flesh. I would then kick off straggling kids who would commonly attach themselves to Chuck E’s leg as he tried to make his way back to the changing room.
Good times.
I recently took my daughter to Chuck E. Cheese recently and was surprised that the salad bar was actually well stocked and semi-fresh. And the pizza was about 500% better than Pizza Hut. But that’s not saying all that much.
Hard Times for Parmigiano Makers Have Italy Ponying Up the Cheddar. (WSJ, hat tip Sauce Supreme)
The world is bailing out banks and car companies. Italy is coming to the rescue of parmigiano cheese.
In an effort to help producers of the cheese commonly grated over spaghetti, fettuccine and other pastas, the Italian government is buying 100,000 wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano and donating them to charity.
Though demand for parmigiano is strong in Italy and abroad, producers have been struggling for years to make money, putting the future of Italy’s favorite cheese at risk.
“It’s a tragic situation,” said Marco Iemmi, who has been making parmigiano for 30 years in Salsomaggiore Terme, a small town in Italy’s fertile northern Emilia-Romagna region. “I’ll have to close up shop unless things improve.”
Whole Foods Warns of Layoffs and Smaller Stores. (The Stranger)
Blaming a tough economy, Whole Foods executives sent an ominous letter to all employees in its Pacific Northwest stores last month that warns of potential layoffs, announces a hiring freeze, and says new stores are on hold.
“Many teams are clearly overstaffed for their current sales and are at the point where labor needs to be reduced…” the memo says. It adds that as “sales soften,” the company has accumulated $59,000 in labor deficits. “Team sales and labor will be reviewed in January and tough decisions may be made if we are unable to achieve sales to labor balance by that time.” The memo says no layoffs will occur before January.
Apropos to this and this? I dunno. I ended my boycott after a few hours as I needed some salad dressing.
Hard times hit Bay Area restaurants. (SF Gate)
Bay Area waiters have a nickname for many of their customers these days: the non’trée.
Non’trée (pronounced “non-tray”) refers to the folks who order appetizers rather than a pricier entree – a popular practice in economic hard times. In fact, as the value of real estate plummets, the stock market totters and the jobless rate grows, diners are sharing meals, skipping dessert, opting to drown their sorrows in a glass of wine rather than ordering a whole bottle, or staying home altogether.
Not since 9/11 have Bay Area restaurants, whether it be the fancy, white-tablecloth ones or the cozy neighborhood hangouts, seen such a lull in business. But this time, restaurant owners say, it’s worse. Even in an area known for its obsession with food, some restaurants say revenue is down as much as 40 percent. Many restaurateurs are laying off workers; others reducing the days they are open. Then there are those who are just plain calling it quits.
“Maybe restaurateurs should ask for a bailout – more people in the Bay Area eat at Pasta Pomodoro than drive Fords,” said Adriano Paganini, founder of the California bargain pasta chain.
McDonald’s Sales Climb As Consumers Seek Deals. (Huffington Post)
Consumers hungry for cheap meals boosted worldwide sales at McDonald’s Corp.’s established locations by 7.7 percent in November, more proof of how the fast-food leader is thriving in a downturn that has eaten into sales at its competitors.
…
McDonald’s has largely been able to keep its profits intact despite the higher costs. But the chain has had to make changes to its menu to protect its margins, including raising the price of its popular Double Cheeseburger and replacing the sandwich on the Dollar Menu with a new double burger that has one slice of cheese instead of two.
I went to McDonald’s last week looking to try this newfangled double burger, and was disappointed to get the normal ole’ Double Cheeseburger with the extra slice of cheese. True story.
Pilgrim’s Pride files for bankruptcy protection (Bloomberg)
Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the nation’s largest chicken producer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday, hobbled by its debt load and volatile feed prices.
The Pittsburg, Texas-based company sought bankruptcy protection in a filing with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas on Monday, saying that as of Sept. 27 it had $3.75 billion in assets and $2.72 billion in debts.
…
The nation’s meat makers, especially Pilgrim’s Pride, are hurting as their profits shrink in the wake of high commodity prices for key inputs like corn and oil. Those prices are moderating after reaching record highs this summer, but they are still high for producers. Further hurting the industry is weak pricing due to a drop in demand in foodservice and an oversupply of meat on the market.
Depression 2009: What would it look like? (Boston Herald)
And while very few would starve, a depression would change how we eat. Food costs remain far below what they were for a family in the 1920s and 1930s, but they have been rising in recent years, and many people already on the edge of poverty would be unable to feed themselves on their own in a harsh economic climate – soup kitchens are already seeing an uptick in attendance. At the high end of the market, specialty and organic foods – which drove the success of chains like Whole Foods – would seem pointlessly expensive; the booming organic food movement could suffer as people start to see specially grown produce as more of a luxury than a moral choice. New England’s surviving farmers would be particularly hard-hit, as demand for their seasonal, relatively high-cost products dried up.
According to Marion Nestle, a food and public health professor at New York University, people low on cash and with more time on their hands will cook more rather than go out. They may also, Nestle suggests, try their hands at growing and even raising more of their own food, if they have any way of doing so. Among the green lawns of suburbia, kitchen gardens would spring up. And it might go well beyond just growing your own tomatoes: early last month, the English bookstore chain Waterstone’s reported a 200 percent increase in the sales of books on keeping chickens.
At the same time, the cheapest option for many is decidedly less rustic: meals like packaged macaroni and cheese and drive-through fast food. And we’re likely to see a move in that direction, as well, toward cheaper, easier calories. If so, lean times could have the odd effect of making the population fatter, as more Americans eat like today’s poor.
McDonald’s sued over nude photos. (BBC)
A US couple is suing McDonald’s for $3m (£2m) after nude photos of the woman, which were on her husband’s mobile phone, ended up on the internet.
Phillip Sherman says he accidentally left his phone, with the photos, at a McDonald’s in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
He says staff promised to secure the phone until he could retrieve it.
The Shermans claim they had to move to a new home after the woman’s name, address, and phone number appeared online along with the photos.
Not sure why McDonald’s is culpable, unless of course the husband happened to eat a McRib.
About a Bird. (NY Times Opinion)
Now consider the bird that will soon be on your plate. It probably hatched in an incubator on a huge farm, most likely in the Midwest or the South. Its life went downhill from there.
Across France, Cafe Owners Are Suffering. (NY Times)
The plight of Ms. Guérin is being replicated all over France, as traditional cafes and bars suffer and even close, hit by changing attitudes, habits and now a poor economic climate. In 1960, France had 200,000 cafes, said Bernard Quartier, president of the National Federation of Cafes, Brasseries and Discotheques. Now it has fewer than 41,500, with an average of two closing every day.
The number of bankruptcies filed by cafe bars in the first six months of 2008 rose by 56 percent over the same period a year ago, according to a study by Euler Hermes SFAC, a large credit insurance company. No reliable figures are available for the latter part of this year, when an economic slowdown here has been accelerated by the general financial crisis, a collapse in consumer confidence and the quick tightening of credit.
They should go on strike.
12-Year-Old’s a Food Critic, and the Chef Loves It (NY Times via Babble Sauce)
Sign o’ the times.
Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress. (The Onion)
Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.
Amen.
Landmark Genoa restaurant to shut after 38 years. (OregonLive)
In Europe, crisis revives old memories. (IHT)
“I haven’t forgotten history,” says Gert Heinz, a tax adviser in Munich. “If you depend on paper money you can lose everything. We’ve learned that the hard way after two world wars.”
So when Chancellor Angela Merkel went on television recently to tell Germans that their bank accounts were safe, Heinz, who at 68 still remembers the rows of canned food that his mother hoarded in the attic, decided he would rather be safe than sorry.
He converted another chunk of his savings into gold and stocked up on a six-month supply of rice, sugar, flour and a special brand of milk powder that lasts for half a century.
As has been reported elsewhere, the trendy and quirky Portland eatery Rocket has closed.
User lilhuna @PFD.com also reports Mercado in the Pearl has shuttered.
On the heels of all this bad news, we get this:
The economic crisis gripping the nation has claimed a high-profile local victim and sent shock waves through Portland’s restaurant industry.
Izzy’s, a local chain of family restaurants, announced they are closing five locations after a buyer backed out of a deal to purchase the chain due to the credit crunch. That includes the Newberg, McMinnville and Wilsonville locations. The two locations were unclear.
The chain has 23 locations in cities stretching from Seattle to central Oregon.
Customers showing up at the closed locations found the lights off and doors locked and a hand-written note saying simply “sorry, we are closed” on the front door.
Bonus sign-o-the-times: filed under “Related Content” at the aforementioned link was this headline: “Hot dog stand sees sales rise in bad economy“.
Looks like The Food Network has given Guy Fieri a live show in front an audience, appropriately named Off the Hook.
I wasn’t a fan, but in retrospect it makes Emeril Live look like Meet the Press.
WHY IS BAD FOOD CHEAP? (Ezra Klein@The American Prospect)
Eye-opening post on the true cost of food and the “free” market canard.
RNC shells out $150K for Palin fashion. (Politico)
“With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it’s remarkable that we’re spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses,” said spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt. “It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.”
Just like that Seinfeld episode where the homeless were given puffy shirts.
The RNC: Clothing America’s Needy
I need to say something about Dick Cheney in order to add categorical significance to this post. Done.
A Meal Fit For A Candidate: Barack Obama. (NPR)
When Sen. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, want a special night out in Chicago, they often head for the award-winning Mexican restaurant Topolobampo. But don’t equate the word “Mexican” with burritos and refried beans.
Chef Rick Bayless founded “Topolo,” as locals call it, almost 20 years ago to prove to Americans that genuine Mexican cooking can be as sophisticated as French and Italian.
No word on if Obama has a similar affinity for Rick’s brother Skip, who finds wonderfully ornery ways to piss people off with his bizarre and rambling sports opinions.
As Checks Shrink, Restaurants Stretch Hours. (NY Times)
Restaurants that once served two distinct meals a day, lunch and dinner, are acting more like diners, opening early in the morning and keeping their kitchens busy late into the night, and serving in the traditionally slow times between meals. And places that used to close one or two days a week to give the staff a night off now see that as a luxury they can no longer afford. The shift toward all-hours dining has been going on for some time. In part, it reflects the busy lives of New Yorkers, who may start the day with a business meeting over scones and lattes, or spend the afternoon answering e-mail in one of the restaurants around town that offer free wireless connections.
NYC restaurants slammed by financial crisis. (MSNBC via Food Dude)
Sanz, like other restaurant owners in New York City, is seeing the first wave of the financial crisis rocking Wall Street and the world. Industry analysts say people are dining out less often, and when they do they are spending less per check.
Business at full-service restaurants is declining nationwide, according to Technomic, a Chicago-based restaurant consultancy. Preliminary figures for the third quarter show that sales at restaurants open at least one year fell 2.6 percent from year-earlier levels, despite higher prices. The figure is based on restaurants that are part of publicly traded companies.
Adding to the malaise is the soaring cost of food — about 9 percent over the last year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — as well as a fear that the tourism dollars that have buoyed New York’s economy may disappear as the crisis goes global.
I couldn’t help but notice the first ad in the right column:
Ouch.
Basic grocery items rise 10.5% from last year. (WSJ)
Families have been feeling increasing financial pain at grocery-store cash registers, exacerbating their difficulties in the souring U.S. economy.
Here’s how much it hurts: A basket of 16 basic food items cost $48.68 over the past three months, up 10.5% from a year ago, the American Farm Bureau Federation said Thursday.
The latest survey from the nation’s largest farm organization underscores the pressures reverberating throughout the food chain, from the American farm to the executive suites of the largest U.S. packaged-food manufacturers.Besides the elevated costs for basic food ingredients, rising energy prices have boosted processing, hauling, and refrigerating expenses for food makers including Kraft Foods Inc. and Campbell Soup Company.
Potatoes, cheddar cheese and apples posted the largest price gains from the second quarter of this year. A five-pound bag of potatoes cost $3.38, up 83 cents. Cheddar was $4.91 a pound, up 31 cents. Apples fetched $1.80 a pound, up 26 cents.
Among other items that rose are the following: pork chops, up 22 cents to $3.62 a pound; ground chuck, rising 10 cents to $2.95 a pound; and whole milk, costing 4 cents more at $3.92 a gallon.
FDA: Tiny bit of melamine OK in most foods.
Tiny traces of melamine, the chemical that has set off a global food safety scare, are not harmful in most foods, except baby formula, government experts said Friday.
The Food and Drug Administration said Friday its safety experts have concluded that eating a minuscule amount of melamine — 2.5 parts per million — would not raise health concerns, even if a person ate food every day that was tainted with the chemical.
“It would be like if you had a million grains of sand and they were all white, and you had two or three that were black, that’s kind of the magnitude,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s food safety program.
I suppose the same can be said about shit.
Calif. Requires Menus To Detail Nutrition. (Wash Post)
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill Tuesday requiring chain restaurants to put calorie counts on their menus and indoor menu boards, making California the first state to enact such a law in the battle against America’s expanding waistline.
The law requires chains with 20 or more locations — more than 17,000 restaurants statewide — to post the information by 2011. Starting in July, restaurants and drive-throughs will have to offer menus that provide information on the calories, saturated fat, carbohydrates and sodium in each item.
With the amount of medicinal marijuana dispensaries cropping up all over the state, I don’t think this law will do much.
Check out Balla Powder for Men, which is ostensibly talcum powder specifically for your ball sack and, presumably, the entire taint region.
Finally, my prayers have been answered.
Cadbury pulls melamine-laced chocolate from China. (AP/Yahoo! News)
British candy maker Cadbury announced a recall Monday of chocolate made in its Beijing factory after it was found to contain melamine, the industrial chemical that has sickened tens of thousands of Chinese children.
The 11 recalled items were sold in parts of Asia and the Pacific, the company said in a statement. Cadbury’s chocolates sold in the United States were not affected, said a spokesman for Hershey’s, Cadbury’s sole U.S. distributor.
Meanwhile, Kraft Foods, the maker of Oreo cookies, and Mars, the maker of M&Ms and Snickers candy, questioned the findings of Indonesian tests that identified melamine in samples of their products made in China.
Sounds delicious.
What the 21st Century Will Taste Like. (Esquire, via Kottke)
But guess what? The machinery that’s pumped so much meat into our lives over the last half century was never built to last, and now it’s breaking down big-time. Feed is more expensive. Gasoline is more expensive. Milk, rice, butter, corn–it’s all going through the roof. And for the foreseeable future, it’s not coming back down.
What the fuck is “spicy lava sauce“?
Dear Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson:
My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000.
Thanks.
Nathan Kottke
St. Paul, Sept.
17, 2008
Dick Cheney would tell your hippie ass to STFU.
Chilly economy fires up home cooking, experts say. (CNN)
But after years of eating out, many people have found they don’t have a pot to cook in or a cookbook to guide them.
The sudden rush to buy basic cooking necessities has driven up sales of cookbooks, inexpensive cookware and the basic foods needed to concoct a meal. And cooking magazines and Web sites are booming even as magazine sales overall have suffered.
About 45 percent of Americans are eating out less this year to save money, a nearly 12 percent increase from 2007, according to BIGResearch, a Worthington, Ohio-based firm that does consumer research.
I too have noticed an uptick in Sevruga-and-Kraft-singles sandwiches at the GC household these days.
6 Food Mistakes Parents Make. (NYTimes)
Speaking from experience, I’d add a seventh: No cognac with breakfast.
Thai PM Resigns Over TV Cooking Show. (Huffington Post)
Fresno man arrested in spice, sausage attacks. (SFGate)
Fresno County authorities have arrested a man they say broke into the home of two farmworkers, rubbed one with spices and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing.
Fresno County sheriff’s Lt. Ian Burrimond says the suspect, 22-year-old Antonio Vasquez of Fresno, was found hiding in a nearby field wearing only a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks.
The victims told deputies they awoke Saturday morning to the stranger applying spices to one of them and striking the other with an 8-inch sausage.
Burrimond said money allegedly stolen in the burglary was recovered. The sausage was tossed away by the fleeing suspect and eaten by a dog.
The McRib has returned. May God have mercy on our souls.
Food Costs Feed Health Woes. (WSJ)
Relief from the rising cost of food isn’t expected anytime soon. Food prices increased 4% in 2007 and are expected to be up an additional 5% to 6% this year, according to the Department of Agriculture. The food crisis has sparked riots around the world and stretched pocketbooks at home, but it is for some as much a health concern as an economic problem. Since healthier foods, like whole-wheat bread and fresh fruits, are already more expensive than white bread and processed foods, the increases are acutely felt by people trying to fight serious illnesses.
WORLD’S DEADLIEST DELICACIES. (Forbes Traveler)
Italy: Casu Marzu
One of the world’s few illegal cheeses, Casu Marzu looks scary, has an almost un-acquirable taste and may have catastrophic, long-term health results. The Sardinian delicacy is made from rotten goat’s milk and served coursing with live maggots. If you can handle the idea and tactile sensation of eating live larvae, you’re rewarded with a strong sour taste that can reportedly stay with you all day. Unfortunately, the human body has difficulty processing maggots, and in some extreme cases the little guys bore through the small intestine, causing bleeding, vomiting and other cheerful moments.
However, the most surprising entry? Jack-in-the-Box’s E. Coli Milkshake.
Fish Tale Has DNA Hook: Students Find Bad Labels. (NY Times)
In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.
They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.
Burger King Profits Rise 42 Percent As Consumers Stuff Their Nervous Faces. (Huffington Post)
Burger King Holdings Inc., the nation’s No. 2 hamburger chain, said Thursday its profit surged 42 percent in its fiscal fourth quarter, driven by a rise in sales at established locations and a slew of promotions.
Broccoli may undo diabetes damage. (BBC)
Eating broccoli could reverse the damage caused by diabetes to heart blood vessels, research suggests.
A University of Warwick team believe the key is a compound found in the vegetable, called sulforaphane.
It encourages production of enzymes which protect the blood vessels, and a reduction in high levels of molecules which cause significant cell damage.
Brassica vegetables such as broccoli have previously been linked to a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Whole Foods recalling possibly contaminated beef. (Associated Press)
Whole Foods Market is recalling fresh ground beef sold between June 2 through Aug. 6 because the beef might be contaminated with E. coli bacteria.
The company has received reports that seven people in Massachusetts and two people in Pennsylvania who shopped at Whole Foods Market became ill, said spokeswoman Libba Letton.
Letton said the company’s recalled beef was processed at the Nebraska Beef plant linked to the E. coli outbreak this summer. Federal health authorities say there have been 49 confirmed illnesses tied to that outbreak.
I’ll take it! This harkens back to when E. coli was associated only with the consumption of meat, instead of now when it could be spinach or tomatoes or jalapenos or mustard packets or napkins. The salad days.
A Year Later, a Cease-Fire in a Brooklyn Pizza War. (NY Times)
Last summer, John Miniaci Jr., a second-generation pizzamaker, learned that a Papa John’s franchise was opening — right next door to the restaurant his father started in 1968. The fans of the original Johnny — John Sr., who died shortly before the brand-name doppelgänger arrived — were aghast, circulating petitions and bemoaning the sad fate of mom-and-pop businesses in New York.
It was all for naught, since Papa John’s opened anyway, in September.
“Hey, we’re doing O.K.,” John Jr. said the other day, tending to a nonstop line of lunch customers. “We’re not in the red, that’s the main thing.”
Fans of the free market might nod approvingly at how things have gone. The unwanted competitor next door led Mr. Miniaci to make some changes that improved his business. He established a Web site (johnnyspizzeria.com) and a MySpace page, and introduced online ordering — the computer, not the standing, kind. The changes helped. Right now, he’s actually looking to hire two more workers, one for the counter and another for the kitchen.
“What can I tell you?” Mr. Miniaci said. “Life is good.”
Whole Foods Looks for a Fresh Image in Lean Times. (NY Times)
Whole Foods Market is on a mission to revise its gold-plated image as consumers pull back on discretionary spending in a troubled economy. The company was once a Wall Street darling, but its sales growth was cooling even before the economy turned. Since peaking at the beginning of 2006, its stock has dropped more than 70 percent.
Now, in a sign of the times, the company is offering deeper discounts, adding lower-priced store brands and emphasizing value in its advertising. It is even inviting customers to show up for budget-focused store tours like those led by Mr. Hebb, a Whole Foods employee.
Council bans new fast-food outlets in South L.A. (LA times)
A law that would bar fast-food restaurants from opening in South Los Angeles for at least a year sailed through the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday.
The council approved the fast-food moratorium unanimously, despite complaints from representatives of McDonald’s, Carl’s Jr. and other companies, who said they were being unfairly targeted.
Councilwoman Jan Perry, who has pushed for a moratorium for six years, said the initiative would give the city time to craft measures to lure sit-down restaurants serving healthier food to a part of the city that desperately wants more of them.
“I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options,” she said.
The ban covers a 32-square-mile area for one year, with two possible six-month extensions.
With the City Council coming down hard on taco trucks, is there anything you can eat in L.A. anymore?
And what exactly is classified as “fast food”? What sort of alternative dining options are they trying to promote, and what plans do they have in this regard?
City and State Brace for Drop in Wall Street Pay. (NY Times)
A review of the latest statements from the largest financial companies based in the city shows that they intend to hand out about $18 billion less in pay and benefits in 2008 than in 2007. The cutting of payrolls is well under way, but the full effect will not be felt until the year’s end, when bonuses for employees based in New York could shrink by $10 billion or more, according to city officials and compensation experts.
…
“One of the things that highly compensated people do is they spend money,” Mr. Bleiwas said. “So when Wall Street suffers, the pain ripples through the rest of the economy.”The impending decrease in the personal income of so many New York-area residents, Mr. Bleiwas said, “is a significant reduction which will affect not only state and city coffers but also have a direct impact on other sectors.” He said the jobs on Wall Street pay so well that on average, each one spawns two jobs in other fields in the city and a third in the surrounding region.
California becomes first state to ban trans fats. (IHT)
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California signed a bill banning trans fats in restaurant food, making California the first U.S. state to ban the use of the cooking oils linked to artery-clogging cholesterol.
The new law, modeled after a ban implemented in New York City, prohibits the use of partially hydrogenated oils, which contain trans fats, by the state’s 87,000 restaurants beginning in 2010 and in all baked goods sold in the state starting in 2011.
Now if they could only also ban Jingle All the Way.
AP: Food industry bitten by its lobbying success (AP/Yahoo! News)
One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”
The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.
The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak’s source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers’ favorite foods.
The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada have been sickened by salmonella since April.
Rush is playing “Tom Sawyer” on the Colbert Report right now, and I have to sheepishly admit…they are friggin’ RULING.
I love how the crowd (presumably a majority of whom are New York Yankee fans) are jeering their own team’s pitchers, especially when they give up a walk, or a sacrifice-scoring fly ball. Yes, these pitchers are ostensibly from other teams throughout your league. But this is an expedition, and at the very least you’re fighting for home court advantage. Classy.
Men’s Health blesses the fried pig skin–booze–jerky–sour cream–coconut–chocolate hexagonal snack cadre. I usually eat all of those, in one dish. For breakfast.
Wholesale prices soar in June; Sales are sluggish. (CNBC.com)
The economy showed the depth of its twin problems on Tuesday, slow growth and rising inflation, as the nation wrestled with a teetering financial system, a slumping dollar and rising prices for food and fuel.
The Labor Department reported that soaring costs for gasoline and food pushed inflation at the wholesale level up by a bigger-than-expected 1.8 percent in June, leaving inflation rising over the past year at the fastest pace in more than a quarter-century.
Over the past 12 months, wholesale prices are up 9.2 percent, the largest year-over-year surge since June 1981, another period when soaring energy costs were giving the country inflation pains.
McDonald’s Makes Jesus Cry. (Chris Kelly @Huffington Post)
What did McDonald’s do to cross the AFA, its president, Donald Wildmon, and — by extension — Jesus (R-Nz.)? They donated $20,000 to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. McDonald’s’ revenue runs about five billion dollars a quarter, so you can see their profound commitment to destroying the family through sodomy.
The AFA says that by donating one thousandth of one percent of its 2007 earnings,
“McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda.”
Which seems like a kind of shrill definition of “full weight,” but maybe it’s like the Quarter Pounder®, and it’s the weight before cooking that counts.
It feels a little like the American Family Association was looking for someone to boycott and it was just McDonald’s’ turn. They’ve already boycotted Sears, Kohl’s, Kmart, Target, Old Navy and IKEA. As a result, they’re naked and don’t have anywhere to sit. The McDonald’s boycott follows boycotts of Burger King, Carl’s Jr., 7-11, Proctor & Gamble and Kraft, which means Donald Wildmon hasn’t eaten anything for sale in America since the late ’70s. You’d think he’d be dead, but no.
Salmonella signs point to peppers. (Baltimore Sun)
Investigators are seeing more signs that the salmonella outbreak blamed on tomatoes might have been caused by tainted jalapeno peppers and have begun collecting samples from restaurants and from the homes of those who have been sickened, according to health officials involved in the probe.
Jesse Helms died yesterday.
He was representative of the virulent racism, homophobia, and hypocritical mendaciousness that’s all too common in politicians and the American body politic. It is only fitting that he died on Independence Day, as he serves to remind us of a part of ourselves (as a nation) and of the ugly caricature that we may yet shed.
While the American media and fellow politicians go into full hagiography mode, out of respect for the dead, naturally, let’s not whitewash what this man really was. So leave it up to a British publication to really get his obit right.
I’m currently watching “All About Dung” on The History Channel, which is a fascinating look at the history of human excrement.
Join host Monty Halls as he investigates the historical, medical, scientific and evolutionary importance of poop on an excremental safari guaranteed to fascinate even the most squeamish of viewers. You’ll be surprised by the amazing manner in which the world puts dung to use. Discover that through a 14,000-year-old human dung deposit it has been determined that humans inhabited North America 1300 years earlier than previously thought. Climb a 100-foot mountain of bat guano in Borneo that is teeming with insect life. Travel to India and view housewarming rituals using sacred cow dung as good luck. Finally Halls drinks coffee made from poop and investigates, through their large droppings, why mammoths might have disappeared.
I learned that Calcutta, India, has one of the world’s most advanced and “green” systems for dealing with its overwhelming supply of human shit, producing the base fodder from which an abundance of crops and fish are harvested. Dung is truly the heart of recycling, fully exemplified by enterprising Calcutta natives who, using cow poop, repurpose batteries to provide power yet again to the same battery. In Africa, elephant crap is being used to make paper. And here we are, in America, separating glass and newspaper once a week in logo adorned plastic bins. (To our credit, we do recycle our celebrities in cable reality shows).
Did you know if you could harness all of human excrement for energy purposes, you could satisfy 10-20% of the world energy needs? Did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?!? As a case in point, the host of the show took us underground to the London sewage system, where filtered sewage sludge was being fed into a turbine, where it is incinerated and turned into energy.
The engineer who oversaw London’s sewage-to-fuel efforts took the program’s host into the heart of the operation, and pulled out a cylindrical cross-section of the solid waste. Amongst the thick, dark, murky sludge, there was a single, solitary kernel of sweet corn.
A gay guy in California has now been married for a week and is presumably very happy. My kid still hates me and my wife is still telling me to take out the trash AND mow the lawn.
Shit. Piss. Fuck. Cunt. Cocksucker. Motherfucker. Tits.
Hate Groups’ Newest Target. (Washington Post)
“I haven’t seen this much anger in a long, long time,” said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. “Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president.”
…
“What you try not to think about is that maybe if Obama wins, it will create a very demoralizing effect,” Doggett said. “Maybe people see him in office, and it’s like: ‘That’s it. It’s just too late. Look at what’s happened now. We’ve endured all these defeats, and we’ve still got a multicultural society.’ And then there’s just no future for our viewpoint.”
A lesbian in California can now get visitation rights to see her partner of 40 years if she happens to fall into a coma in the ICU, and my wife is still telling me to take out the trash.
Teh Gay have been marrying now for a couple days. My wife is still telling me to take out the trash.
Christ, Lara Logan is hot.
While on a late-night grocery run, after watching the Lakers lay a brick in Game 6 against the Boston Celtics, I got that cheap, tawdry urge that can only be sated by fast food or paying a hermaphrodite for sex. However, I am a weird person in that I need tomatoes on my fast food. In fact, I always tend to ask for extra tomatoes.
I first stopped by Burger King, as I read some news release that BK had returned tomatoes to their menu items, including their popular Whopper™ sandwich. However, the lady behind the counter took an almost exculpatory glee in denying my tomato request, as they indeed did not have tomatoes in the kitchen.
Next was McDonald’s, with the same negative result. Arby’s had their disclaimer plastered on the door of the restaurant, so I didn’t even have to go in.
Taco Bell, however, had tomatoes.
So there you go. Taco Bell, I may not again grace your sterile environs for some time, but don’t take it personally, as I have a newfound respect for you. Yes, your ground meat appears to have been extracted from an industrial barrel-sized can, and close to 43% of the ingredients of your 7-Layer Burrito may not actually exist in any natural state, but when I look back on the Spring of 2008, the Season of the Great Tomato Scare, of $4/gas, of the epochal $5 Submarine Sandwich War, I will always think fondly of Taco Bell, my very own transgender hooker.
Corn Jumps to Record as Floods in Midwest Threaten U.S. Crops. (Bloomberg)
Corn soared to a record in Chicago, extending its rally to a ninth straight session, as floods in the Midwest threatened production in the U.S., the world’s largest producer and exporter. Soybeans rose to a three-month high.
“The U.S. Midwest, including the flood-ravaged mid- Mississippi Valley, will be pounded by another round of severe weather through tonight, private forecaster Accuweather.com said on its Web site yesterday. “Heavy downpours caused by the thunderstorms threaten to aggravate existing flooding or cause new flash flooding problems.”
Lawmakers subpoena 9 food testing companies. (MSNBC)
Lawmakers voted Thursday to subpoena nine companies responsible for analyzing the most dangerous food entering the country as part of an investigation that gained more urgency with an outbreak of salmonella from tomatoes.
…
Stupak said nine of 10 companies declined to submit information voluntarily out of concern that the food import companies that hire them would then sue them for breaching confidentiality agreements. The records sought related to testing of food found not to meet FDA standards for import into the U.S.
Another “free” market success story.
Fat Profits. (Portfolio)
The uniqueness isn’t the only thing that’s hard to get your head around. During the past few years, CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, has employed an audacious go-for-bloat approach that defies just about everything you’ve come to assume about the business of modern fast food. (See nutrition data for CKE franchises and other fast-food chains.) In an age when other chains have been forced to at least pretend that they care about the health of their customers and have started offering packets of apples and things sprinkled with walnuts and yogurt, Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. are purposely running in the opposite direction, unapologetically creating an arsenal of higher-priced, high-fat, high-calorie monstrosities—pioneering avant-garde concepts such as “meat as a condiment” and “fast-food porn”—and putting the message out to increasingly receptive consumers with ads that are often as controversial as the burgers themselves.
Today for lunch I had a roast turkey sandwich with sliced tomatoes from a round fruit that to my knowledge was not vine-ripened and did not hail from California, Tennessee, Israel, or the Netherlands. I used half of the tomato, and chopped the rest for an afternoon-snack salad.
I’m monitoring the situation and I’ll post to this blog tomorrow if I die.
NFL great and world class narcissist Deion Sanders is currently a guest on Paula Deen’s Party on the Food Network. Prime Time is making an oyster stew with his lovely wife, Pilar. Prime Time stole 56 bases in 115 games for the Cincinnati Reds in 1997.
He followed some country singer who made a stuffed beef tenderloin roast with Paula. She compelled him to “beat his meat”, an act which he claimed reminded him of “eighth grade.” She then brought up the curious fact that the country singer in question sang at Anna Nicole Smith’s funeral. He sang “Wings of a Dove.”
They then went to commercial.
The perfectly healthy 15-year-old girl who has eaten nothing but chips for 10 years. (Mail Online)
A girl of 15 has eaten almost nothing but CHIPS for the past 10 years.
Faye Campbell, of Stowmarket, Suffolk, has lived on chipped potatoes and refused to eat nearly anything else since she was a tot.
The Stowmarket High School pupil has a bizarre physical condition which made her ill every time she tried anything other than chips.
I got a letter from the government, the other day. I opened and read it, it said they were suckers…who gave me $600!!!
I bought six pounds of jamón ibérico from from these guys and made a couple Hawaiian pizzas (turned out ok, needed more pineapple and ranch).
What did you do with your rebate check from Uncle Sam?
Caterers find eco-standards tough to chew. (Denver Post)
Caterers praise the committee and the city for their green ambitions, but some say they’re baffled by parts of the RFP.
“I think it’s a great idea for our community and our environment. The question is, how practical is it?” asks Nick Agro, the owner of Whirled Peas Catering in Commerce City. “We all want to source locally, but we’re in Colorado. The growing season is short. It’s dry here. And I question the feasibility of that.”
Agro’s biggest worry is price. Using organic and local products hikes the costs.“There is going to be sticker shock when those bids start coming in,” he says. “I’ll cook anything, but I’ve had clients who have approached me about all-organic menus, and then they see the organic stuff pretty much doubles your price.”
…
Joanne Katz, owner of Three Tomatoes Catering in Denver, cheers the committee’s environmental aspirations and is eager to get involved with the convention, but she wonders if some of the choices the committee is making are really green.
Compostable products, such as forks and knives made from corn starch, are often imported from Asia, delivered to the U.S. in fuel-consuming ships. But some U.S. products are made from recyclable pressed paper. Which decision is more environmentally sound?
It’s becoming increasingly more difficult to parody shit these days. (Link to some batshit insane woman who fashions herself an Ayn Rand-ian deep thinker).
Government asks court to block wider testing for mad cow. (AP/Yahoo! News)
The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority.
I just watched famed magic act (and Las Vegas stalwart) Penn and Teller perform their “act” on David Letterman.
I’ve been more entertained watching my beagle throw up on our new carpet.
Chef wants to outlaw out-of-season vegetables. (Reuters)
Celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay said restaurants should be fined if they serve out-of-season fruit and vegetables.
“I don’t want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home-grown,” he said after raising his concerns with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
“Fruit and veg should be seasonal. Chefs should be fined if they don’t have ingredients in season on their menu,” he told the BBC on Friday.
Ramsay, whose London restaurants include Petrus and The Savoy Grill, said Britain had become a nation of lazy eaters who followed trends and fads rather than substance.
“There should be stringent laws, licensing laws, to make sure produce is only used in season and season only,” he added.
Punishment should include having to watch the same Hell’s Kitchen episode on a continuous loop for 72 hours.
Déjà Vu Dining. (NY Times)
Summary: “Elitists” visit the chain restaurants of the suburban hinterlands; discover the natives are bitter and cling to their Bloomin’ Onions and fried potato skins.
All salmon fishing banned on West Coast.
Salmon fishing was banned along the West Coast for the first time in 160 years Thursday, a decision that is expected to have a devastating economic impact on fishermen, dozens of businesses, tourism and boating.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez immediately declared a commercial fishery disaster, opening the door for Congress to appropriate money for anyone who will be economically harmed.
The closure of commercial and recreational fishing for chinook salmon in the ocean off California and most of Oregon was announced by the National Marine Fishery Service.
It followed the recommendation last month of the Pacific Fishery Management Council after the catastrophic disappearance of California’s fabled fall run of the pink fish popularly known as king salmon.
It is the first total closure since commercial fishing started in the Bay Area in 1848.
Cheeseburger to cost beefy £85. (The Sun, which is a horrible UK tabloid that features topless women)
FAST food chain Burger King are to serve up the world’s most expensive takeaway – costing a whopping £85.
There’s no common old meat in this burger. It will contain top-quality Kobe beef from Japan. And instead of ketchup and cheddar, it will be garnished with foie gras – a goose delicacy – and rare blue cheese.
But BK customers will still be able to buy regular fries and a fizzy drink to help it down.
It will be launched in selected branches next month, with London’s upmarket Kensington and Chelsea tipped to get the posh burger first.
At £85, it is in marked contrast to deadly rival McDonald’s who offer a budget burger for just 99p.
Launching the most expensive takeaway in town may seem odd during the credit crunch.
But Lucy Barrett, of Marketing Magazine, said: “The idea of a burger that no one buys is not as ludicrous as it seems. Burger King will use it to promote a gap in perception between it and McDonald’s. It could lead consumers to reassess the quality of the brand.”
First of all, that’s $136 USD, but could increase steadily as the dollar tanks. Second of all, it doesn’t even include fries and a drink, which probably costs BK pennies?
Third of all…Lucy Barrett? Bill Hicks has some advice for you.
Recession Diet Just One Way to Tighten Belt. (NY Times)
Stung by rising gasoline and food prices, Americans are finding creative ways to cut costs on routine items like groceries and clothing, forcing retailers, restaurants and manufacturers to decode the tastes of a suddenly thrifty public.
Spending data and interviews around the country show that middle- and working-class consumers are starting to switch from name brands to cheaper alternatives, to eat in instead of dining out and to fly at unusual hours to shave dollars off airfares.
Though seemingly small, the daily trade-offs they are making — more pasta and less red meat, more video rentals and fewer movie tickets — amount to an important shift in consumer behavior.
Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World. (NY Times)
Food has moved around the world since Europeans brought tea from China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.
Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of mega-markets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe — like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco — has accelerated the trend.
But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution — especially carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas — from transporting the food.
The wonder fish. (Fortune/CNN Money, via Ezra Klein)
So just what is Kona Kampachi? Think of it as a more versatile cousin of hamachi. It’s not genetically engineered in any way, just well bred. It’s sashimi-grade and sustainably farmed without hormones or prophylactic antibiotics. It’s richer in omega-3 than just about anything else in the ocean and has no detectable mercury. It melts on your tongue, holds up on the grill, and is so rich in oils that it’ll fry in a pan without butter.
Pregnant women, nursing moms, young children: Eat as much as you want of what might just be the best-tasting fish you’ve ever had. Really. It’s that good.
Bakers feeling pinch of short supplies. (Reuters)
Rye flour stocks have been depleted in the United States, and by June or July there will be no more U.S. rye flour to purchase, said Lee Sanders, senior vice president for government relations and public affairs at the American Bakers Association.
A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice. (NY Times)
DENILIQUIN, Australia — Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. “It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety,” he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, “and now it has stopped.”
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.
…
The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
Looks like Cookie McCain knows how to copy and paste.
Is this really a surprise? You can’t really blame her, as you know she didn’t even have anything to do with that website. I doubt she’s cooked anything beyond a hot toddy.
Though, she does seem remarkably not unlike a certain Food Network personality.
Piling on the Food Network is hardly original. I know. It’s practically a cottage industry in the “blogoshpere”, and it’s been done here before and in much more eviscerating fashion elsewhere.
Like most self-absorbed “foodies”, I’ve long tired of the Food Network and their endless attempts to shove perk and pomp up our asses. There was a time when the channel was a mildly interesting conceit, but that ship has longed sailed, punctuated by endless “Food Challenges” that eventually culminated in a contest to determine who can build the the largest agar agar-crusted, cake-like confectionary public works project in the shape of a lovable Disney Character (broadcast from Epcot Center).
Some time in the late nineties, with the ascension of Emeril, the Food Network became decidely personality-driven, which gave way to the rise of other bankable brands such as Tyler Florence and Alton Brown. Bobby Flay was given ample face time, graduating from “Grilling and Chilling” to a myriad of shows, including “Boy Meets Grill”, another show whose name escapes me where he hammed it up with that vaguely hot New York chicksa in front of an audience of metrosexuals and Sharper Image enthusiasts, “Iron Chef America”, and “Throwdown with Bobby Flay”.
The opposite gender was also featured prominently. Giada de Laurentis flashed smiles and breasts in her plucky routine, charming herself into several different shows of late that properly showcase her huge teeth. Ina Garten gave us a slightly creepy Mrs. Robinson, breathily mugging for the camera as if she’s shamelessly coming on to you everytime she makes a salad. I secretly think she keeps a 14-year old Samoan male on the side when Jeffrey leaves for the city to stockbroke or whatever he does to subsidize her Long Island lifestyle of table decorations, effusive gardening, and the endless parade of oh-so talented gay friends.
Sandra Lee seemed like a fusion of the Mary Kate/Ashley Olson Wonder Twins, all grown up and joined together in the shape of a percoset-hungry housewife who lives in the shadow of an abusive husband with a predeliction for cheap bourbon and forced threesomes. You can actually smell the heavy stank of Aquanet and desperation seeping through the television.
The Food Network soon morphed, however, almost entirely into the network of Rachael Ray, whose unbridled, percolating ebullience makes you understand why the Terrorists really hate us. However, with Ray spread thin of late with her own show and magazine and hanging out with Oprah at Chippendales, a void of sorts has been created, a chasm from whose distended belly erupted that peroxide-stained bobblehead toolshed named Guy Fieri.
You might have seen Fieri in “Diners, Dives, and Drive-ins”, where he roams America’s backwoods looking for honest grub. Apparently, despite constantly making the show about him rather than the people he’s in the business of exposing (or maybe because of this), Food Network has decided to give him another show, “Guy’s Big Bite”.
Nothing really prepared me, however, for the “Ultimate Recipe Showdown”. The show itself is kinda like “Iron Chef” for people who think “Iron Chef” is too educational. Three contestants compete to complete the best dish based on a particular theme (in this case, fried chicken).
It was hosted by Fieri and Marc Summers (nee Marc Berkowitz). The latter personality normally talks you through a half-hour look behind the scenes in “Unwrapped”, a show that exposes how industrial grade surimi is produced, thus scarring you for life. Summers was also once the host of Nickelodean’s “Double Dare”, where he similarly vacillated between effortless cipher and cheerful douchebag. There was a moment in the opening intro of “Ultimate Recipe Showdown” whereupon Summers enunciated every syllable of Fieri’s surname with such Italian-inflected patois that you’re simultaneously suprised by the jarring dissonance and astonished that he’s not an android.
Fieri actually used the line “Domo Arigato on that one, Mr. Summers” when describing one contestant’s decision to use panko in creating her chicken katsu. And when he uttered that phrase, a little kitten was mauled by a panther. He later said “Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing” in regards to another contestant’s (this was an African-American woman, incidentally) recipe for fried chicken wings with fruit sauce, exhibiting that Guy Fieri’s erudite Urban Dictionary prowess is dangerous enough to set race relations back half a decade or so.
This is typical of the banter thrown around during a typical episode:
GF: “Summers(1)…I’ve seen meatballs deep fried.”
MS (incredulously): “Really?”
GF: “Oh…slamma damma ding dong!”
I really have a hard time understanding why the Food Network has decided that Guy Fieri was it. He emerged victorious from the scrum that was the second “The Next Food Network Star”2, but never seemed to possess that je ne sais quoi (thx Nancy) that I thought America would require out of its future Applebee’s pitchmen.
But what do I know. Apparently what America really wants is some pear-shaped loser who looks like he totally owns Smashmouth on karaoke night, who buys all his shirts from PacSun and all his Dep gel from The Dollar Tree. He also owns restaurants in California with names like “Johnny Garlic’s California Pasta Grill”, and “Russell Ramsay’s Chop House” and “Tex Wasabi’s Rock-N-Roll Sushi-BBQ”. All of these names are horribly embarrasing. If anybody you knew asked you to meet for some “Killer Shrimp Yaki-Flautas” and a stiff “Kick-Assarita” and at any of the aforementioned places, you would feel immediately compelled to punch that person in the face.
Ultimate Recipe Showdown
Check your local listings.
1 Fieri frat-affectively calls Summers by his last name, which seems rather misplaced considering this name is completely fabricated.
2 By the way, where did they stash the two gay guys who won the first The Next Food Network Star? Did test marketing snuff their nascent Food Network careers? Did they not play well in Peoria? Were closeted gay homophobes who secretly wished Tyler Florence would baste them too threatened by an openly gay couple?
Does this affect you? Do you care?
Here in the U.S., the cost of food has been rising exponentially as we’ve foolishly hitched our wagons (literally) to ethanol. Crops that were once staples in the food cycle, such as corn, are being used to produce fuel in a zero-sum game, and the results are riots in Mexico over the price of tortillas.
A common trope repeated by armchair chaos theorists is that when a butterfly bats its wings, a hurricane can result halfway across the world. However, this appears to be happening at a macro scale in our own country, as rising prices affect everything from eggs to beer.
- Surging costs of groceries hit home
- Grand Rapids-area bakeries hit by rising flour prices
- Rising flour prices send pizzerias scrambling
- Beer Prices Rising Amid Crop Shortage
Working-class Americans are increasingly bearing the brunt of these increased costs (“Middle class Long Islanders turning to food pantries”) as rising wholesale prices are feeding an alarming, worldwide inflationary spike.
We are experiencing a perfect storm, as energy and fuel prices climb, the world’s shaky financial markets continue to deteriorate as a result of greed and malfeasance, and a maturing world population has pushed grain demand to levels unseen. A growing, foreign middle class are patterning their lifestyles much in the way we Americans have been living for decades. This burgeoning affluence has pushed demand for fuel and energy to an all-time high, and millions of middle-class Chinese with a newfound taste for meat are helping to feed a vicious cycle which usurps grain stores at exponential rate (to serve as livestock feed) and burns the massive amounts of fuel necessary to sustain this consumption.
Food riots are breaking out all across the world, which leads to food protectionism as foreign countries limit exports to mitigate domestic upheaval. History indicates (“Rice Riots of 1918”) rising food prices, particularly grain, can be a bellwether from which to gauge growing societal entropy. Just last month, the price of rice in Asia surged 30% in a single day.
The lack of deference to this subject paid by the American mainstream media is disgusting, but hardly surprising. The questions are too myriad to attempt to cogently address, and our current clueless cadre of politicians are hopelessly inept, more concerned with American flag lapel pins and justifying 100 years of troop presence in an area of the world that will soon be ground zero for the entropic decay associated with the eventual end of cheap energy.
With that in mind, Tommy@Macerating Shallots has tagged me for a six word memoir meme. 66.67% of my memoir I will directly rip off from William Butler Yeats:
“The centre cannot hold: we’re fucked“.
As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation. (NY Times)
Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Environmental and hunting groups are warning that years of progress could soon be lost, particularly with the native prairie in the Upper Midwest. But a broad coalition of baking, poultry, snack food, ethanol and livestock groups say bigger harvests are a more important priority than habitats for waterfowl and other wildlife. They want the government to ease restrictions on the preserved land, which would encourage many more farmers to think beyond conservation.
Kerry Dockter, a rancher in Denhoff, N.D., has about 450 acres of grassland in the program. “When this program first came about, it was a pretty good thing,” he said. “But times have definitely changed.”
The government payments, Mr. Dockter said, “aren’t even comparable anymore” to what he could make by working the land. He plans to devote some of his conservation acres to growing feed for his cows and some to grazing. He might also lease some land to neighbors.
For years, the problem with cropland was that there was too much of it, which kept food prices low to the benefit of consumers and the detriment of farmers.
Now, because of a growing global middle class as well as federal mandates to turn large amounts of corn into ethanol-based fuel, food prices are beginning to jump. Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand, a situation that is fraying old alliances, inspiring new ones and putting pressure on the Agriculture Department, which is being lobbied directly by all sides without managing to satisfy any of them.
Some Good News on Food Prices. (NY Times)
Michael Pollen, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, argued (among other things) that as a nation we do not pay enough for our food.
Along with some other critics of the American way of eating, he likes the idea that some kinds of food will cost more, and here’s one reason why: As the price of fossil fuels and commodities like grain climb, nutritionally questionable, high-profit ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup will, too. As a result, Cokes are likely to get smaller and cost more. Then, the argument goes, fewer people will drink them.
And if American staples like soda, fast-food hamburgers and frozen dinners don’t seem like such a bargain anymore, the American eating public might turn its attention to ingredients like local fruits and vegetables, and milk and meat from animals that eat grass. It turns out that those foods, already favorites of the critics of industrial food, have also dodged recent price increases.
Logic would dictate that arguing against cheap food would be the wrong move when the Consumer Price Index puts food costs at about 4.5 percent more this year than last. But for locavores, small growers, activist chefs and others, higher grocery bills might be just the thing to bring about the change they desire.
…
“It’s very hard to argue for higher food prices because you are ceding popular high ground to McDonald’s when you do that,” said Mr. Pollan, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” (Penguin Press). “But higher food prices level the playing field for sustainable food that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels.”
Interesting—if somewhat flawed—logic. Though, here’s a question (ignoring the actual tilling and harvesting machinery): how does the food get to the market? I haven’t seen any teams of pack mules on the 99W lately.
Food Stamp Use at Record Pace as Jobs Vanish. (NY Times)
Driven by a painful mix of layoffs and rising food and fuel prices, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year, the highest level since the aid program began in the 1960s.
The number of recipients, who must have near-poverty incomes to qualify for benefits averaging $100 a month per family member, has fluctuated over the years along with economic conditions, eligibility rules, enlistment drives and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, which led to a spike in the South.
But recent rises in many states appear to be resulting mainly from the economic slowdown, officials and experts say, as well as inflation in prices of basic goods that leave more families feeling pinched. Citing expected growth in unemployment, the Congressional Budget Office this month projected a continued increase in the monthly number of recipients in the next fiscal year, starting Oct. 1 — to 28 million, up from 27.8 million in 2008, and 26.5 million in 2007.
The percentage of Americans receiving food stamps was higher after a recession in the 1990s, but actual numbers are expected to be higher this year.
Federal benefit costs are projected to rise to $36 billion in the 2009 fiscal year from $34 billion this year.
High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest. (NY Times)
HANOI — Rising prices and a growing fear of scarcity have prompted some of the world’s largest rice producers to announce drastic limits on the amount of rice they export.
The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest.
Shortages and high prices for all kinds of food have caused tensions and even violence around the world in recent months. Since January, thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Protests have erupted in Indonesia over soybean shortages, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.
Food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. But the moves by rice-exporting nations over the last two days — meant to ensure scarce supplies will meet domestic needs — drove prices on the world market even higher this week.
Following up on the last post about the distribution of wealth vis-a-vis Starbucks tip jars, last Monday night I went to Berbati’s to see Jens Lekman. On a table inside the entrance, set up to collect ticket money and check off names from the will-call list, was a fucking tip jar.
After paying over $6 beyond the face value of a ticket for “convenience” fees, just to get my name on a list so that it can be crossed out…and you’re expecting a fucking tip? Go blow an alpaca, you entitled piece of shit.
Lean Cuisine. (Willamette Week)
Portland’s alt-weekly (the one with less female escort ads) explores the economic ennui that has seeped into our burg’s sprawling restaurant scene. Choice bits:
Just in the past few months, a number of what looked like solid dining hot spots have closed, including expense account-friendly Tondero, the eco-focused Terroir, downhome Lagniappe, chi-chi Hurley’s and the offal-obsessed Alberta Street Oyster House (which found a new owner and has since reopened).
…
“January was not a good month for the restaurant business in Portland,” says David Machado, the owner-chef of Southeast’s Vindalho and Lauro, WW Restaurant of the Year 2004. “If anyone says it was, they’re in la-la land.”
…
“I raised prices for the first time in a long time,” says Lisa Schroeder, owner-chef of Mother’s Bistro. “I basically give away my lox platter. At $14 I am not even covering my costs. The bagel alone is two bucks. But people in this town are only willing to pay so much for a dish. People in this town are too frugal.”
…
To give but one example of the importance of Portland’s dining scene, consider what Brian Ramsay, a broker for Realty Trust Group, has to say about the role great restaurants have in his business. “People who move to the Pearl District are focused on surrounding businesses, especially restaurants,” he says. “These people eat out every night and want quality food options to go with their condo.”
The short-term solution lies with us. If we want to keep up our town’s foodie rep, we have to step up to the plate, literally, and eat out.
You hear that? It’s your fault. You need to eat out more, you inconsiderate fuckers.
Iron Chef Boyardee. (Village Voice)
That, I figured, was an important consideration. I had been told that the Food Network threatened anyone who attended with a million-dollar fine if they revealed anything about the episode before it aired. But there are no worries now; the episode finally showed up on TV a couple of weeks ago, and it only confirmed what I’d realized as I sat in the audience last year:
Iron Chef America is more bogus than even I had imagined.
I knew the emperor had no clothes when I saw the chairman’s nephew in a B-movie action flick on cable.
Honey, will you marry… Oh. Never mind… (Reuters via Yahoo! News)
Hajji, of Hackney, east London, had concealed a $12,000 engagement ring inside a helium balloon. The idea was that she would pop the balloon as he popped the question.
But as he left the shop, a gust of wind pulled the balloon from his hand and he watched the ring — and quite possibly the affections of his girlfriend — sailing away over the rooftops.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he told The Sun newspaper.
“I just watched as it went further and further into the air.
“I felt like such a plonker. It cost a fortune and I knew my girlfriend would kill me.”
Hajji spent two hours in his car trying to chase and find the balloon, without success.
“I thought I would give Leanne a pin so I could literally pop the question,” he said.
Last night I bought a anniversary card for my wife, and left it at the checkstand. I feel your pain, dude.
Slashfood Talks: Mark Bittman responds with tinge of sarcasm. (Slashfood).
No. He is not.
What they didn’t tell you about recent meat recall. (Chicago Tribune via Seattle Times)
Those products include two versions of Nestlé’s Hot Pocket sandwiches, Heinz’s Boston Market lasagna with meat sauce, General Mills’ Progresso Italian Wedding Soup and a variety of meat products from ConAgra, ranging from Slim Jim snacks to Hunt’s Manwich Original Sloppy Joe Sauce.
The companies stressed that the use of Hallmark/Westland meat was limited, and that they notified retailers and told them to pull those products.
But none had taken the usual step of notifying consumers through news releases and warnings on Web sites.
Why the secrecy? In part because the recall is indirect; the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) urged Hallmark/Westland to contact food producers that use its meat and urge them to pull their products. But the USDA did not contact food producers.
The food manufacturers said they are under no obligation to notify consumers.
Queue up Jim Gaffigan singing voice: “Death Pocket!”
Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine officially cooked up for Wii, DS. (Joystiq)
Few details about the game are currently known, other than it will feature “a series of fast-paced and intense culinary challenges,” and that players will compete in Kitchen Stadium to become the next Iron Chef.
Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine will also include the likeness of show host Mark Dacascos, who replaced the original pepper-eating (not to mention snappily dressing) Takeshi Kaga. As much as we’d like to get behind the idea of waving our arms in the air in order to make squid ink ice creme or rabbit kidney stew, we’re disappointed that the game will be based on Iron Chef’s North American incarnation instead of the original, albeit more absurd Japanese original. Nevertheless — Allez Cuisine!
Here’s a hint: don’t choose Cat Cora, or you’re bound to lose.
Anybody watch the opening of SNL last night?
The last time I endured something so painfully unfunny, I was at a funeral.
Why Does Popcorn Cost So Much at the Movies? (Physorg.com)
New research from Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz suggests that there is a method to theaters’ madness–and one that in fact benefits the viewing public. By charging high prices on concessions, exhibition houses are able to keep ticket prices lower, which allows more people to enjoy the silver-screen experience.
The findings empirically answer the age-old question of whether it’s better to charge more for a primary product (in this case, the movie ticket) or a secondary product (the popcorn). Putting the premium on the “frill” items, it turns out, indeed opens up the possibility for price-sensitive people to see films. That means more customers coming to theaters in general, and a nice profit from those who are willing to fork it over for the Gummy Bears.
I’ll have to take their word for it. I’ve seen exactly one movie in the theaters in the last four years. The popcorn and hot dogs cost too much.
“Impossible” Chef Caught in Very Possible Lies (TMZ.com – h/t Joisey@PortlandFood.org)
The hard-ass British chef who stars in Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” is finding that spinning tall tales about one’s background is no cakewalk — and now the network says it’s investigating his alleged misrepresentations. Oh, deah.
Robert Irvine has claimed all over the place that he’d helped design Prince Charles and Princess Di’s wedding cake, among other things. But after an oddly thorough investigation by the St. Petersburg Times, Irvine admits he didn’t really bake it — or have anything to do with it … and that’s just the icing.
“It’s unfortunate if Robert embellished the extent of his culinary experiences,” said a Food Network rep. “We are investigating the matter and taking the necessary steps to ensure the accuracy of all representations of Robert on Food Network and foodnetwork.com.”
The Food Network also had an incident during the very last Search for the Next Food Network Douchebag™ where that guy (who was probably going to actually win the thing) was discovered to have lied about being an Iraq War vet.
You think a major league outfit like the Food Network would vet their talent a little more efficiently. They seem to have the pre-screening acumen displayed by the Bush Administration when it came time to staff FEMA.
What next? Might we find out that Guy Fieri’s hair color is—gasp—unnatural?
Michelin Gives Stars, but Tokyo Turns Up Nose. (NY Times)
Many prominent figures of the Tokyo food world, however, are saying to Michelin, in effect, thanks for all the attention (which we deserve), but you still do not know us or our cuisine.
Food critics, magazines and even the governor of Tokyo have questioned the guide’s choice of restaurants and ratings. A handful of chefs proudly proclaimed that they had turned down chances to be listed. One, Toshiya Kadowaki, said his nouveau Japonais dishes, including a French-inspired rice with truffles, did not need a Gallic seal of approval.
…
“Anybody who knows restaurants in Tokyo knows that these stars are ridiculous,” said Toru Kenjo, president of Gentosha publishing house, whose men’s fashion magazine, Goethe, published a lengthy critique of the Tokyo guide last month. “Michelin has debased its brand. It won’t sell as well here in the future.”
Up here in Oregon, the winters are bleak and stark, with weeks upon consecutive weeks of rain and grey. There’s a phenomenon called “Seasonal Affective Disorder” that can be used to explain the winter doldrums we experience in the Pacific Northwest (although we tend to call it by its less-pedantic moniker, “alcoholism”). While I wait for the return of the sun and the dissipation of the thick cloud cover, I can’t help but focus on how old I’ve become.
I turned 35 a half year ago, and for me it was a watershed milestone. I’m now officially middle-aged. (I base this assumption upon the fact that 67 is the retirement age that the Social Security Administration deems you’ve slaved long enough to collect full benefits. I then add over two years to this number for that realization to actually sink in).
At the time of my birthday, I had no time to reflect or dwell, as my wife was in the hospital undergoing the second of two major surgeries to remove cancerous tumors from her mid-section, and my best friend was in another hospital barely cheating death with a nasty bout of lymphoblastic leukemia. Also, it was Venezuelan Flag Day, which for socialist Hugo-philes like myself is equivalent of Christmas and Bastille Day rolled into one.
Now that things have slowed down a bit, I’m now awash in the morass of listlessness and depression that accompanies the gradual march towards death. Also, my Arizona Wildcats are in danger of missing the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for the first time in 24 years, and Mike Huckabee is no longer a viable candidate for the Republican presidential nominee, which means that we will not have a candidate this year that believed Man and Dinosaur both existed at the same time. Calgon, take me away.
You know you’re old if:
- You reach for salt in your kitchen and realize—in addition to kosher and iodized salt—you have 9 types of sea salt
- After your daughter knocks your beer chalice off the table and breaks the glass, spilling witbier all over the carpet and sofa, causing your wife to yell at you for playing ball in the house, you realize at this point in your life there’s pretty much nothing she can say or do to ever make you stop
- Dinner and a movie becomes just dinner or just a movie and then becomes sitting on the couch with a laptop and yelling at the Internet
- If in previous decades you used to look in the mirror and see promise and potential, you now remark to yourself, “Wow, time to tame those nose hairs”
- You remember when rap music didn’t suck
- You’re thinking about rehab because the first one didn’t “take”
- Your anger and resentment transgresses from players and the coach and shoots up the vitriol hierarchy to the actual baseball GMs themselves
- You have a food blog
- You stop and consider the full implications of amortization
- You get replacement earphones for your iPod because you feel self-conscious with white earbuds in public
- You are resentful that another one of your friends is getting married, not because you’re losing a friend to marriage or that it reminds you that everybody’s getting older, but because you’re compelled to go to Las Vegas and suffer through a punishing weekend
- You foment a fondness for a certain brand of toilet paper
- You take the bus downtown on New Year’s Eve and realize everybody on the bus is younger than you and has spent more money on their clothes
- Flipping through the channels, you come across Suze Orman and don’t immediately change the channel
- You call up your mobile phone provider and yell at them for the 3rd time to remove incoming text capabilities from your device
- You need a vacation to recover from your vacation
- You have a difficult time keeping track of which celebrities are dead or alive
- You reflexively spew invectives at anybody who tells you to visit their MySpace page
- While paging through the recorded episodes on your DVR, you realize that it’s 50% PBS shows—including Ruff Ruffman, Frontline, and Clifford the Big Red Dog
- You develop curmudgeonly insane rationalizations, such as “I’ll reduce my carbon footprint the moment somebody perfects microwave pizza”
- You’ve rearranged your garage for the third time in as many months
- One of your favorite bands is playing, and you say “I’ll just catch them next time they come to town on the back leg of the current tour” and the band either breaks up or dies before you can do so
- Your skepticism is no longer reserved for standard, questionable precepts such as Religion and Government, and instead trades in theories related to the systemic suppression of Monosodium Glutamate
Lawmaker: USDA shouldn’t cover food safety. (MSNBC)
A lawmaker called Tuesday for the U.S. Department of Agriculture to be stripped of its responsibility for food safety in the wake of the nation’s largest-ever meat recall.
The agency’s twin mandates of promoting the nation’s agriculture and monitoring it for safety have become blurred, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro said.
“Food safety ought to be of a high enough priority in this nation that we have a single agency that deals with it and not an agency that is responsible for promoting a product, selling a product and then as an afterthought dealing with how our food supply is safe,” said DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee responsible for the USDA’s funding.
Hard to say if a new bureaucratic arm of the federal government is the answer, but it’s clear the present system is broken. The market has decided: we don’t care if you die.
Cadbury thinks out of the box with ‘eco-egg’. (Guardian UK)
Cadbury Schweppes, which makes half of Britain’s Easter eggs, is trialling an unboxed “eco-egg” as part of its efforts to reduce 30% of its carbon emissions by 2020.
The foil-wrapped, hollowed out eggs are being sold under the Mini Eggs, Dairy Milk and Dairy Milk Caramel labels from moulded plastic casing preventing the eggs from rolling around on the shelf.
Cadbury said it was confident there was significant demand for such an offering despite the fact that many eggs are bought as gifts.
The global warming canard is so pervasive it now threatens how we enjoy Easter. I promise that for every Cadbury eco-terrorist chocolate confection sold, I will personally operate my lawn mower for 30 seconds.
We must alternately eat PEEPS® in order to save America, properly acknowledge the resurrection of Jesus, and heal the wounds of humanity.
Luckily, before then there’s St. Patrick’s Day and we can get totally trashed.
USDA Makes Nation’s Largest Beef Recall. (AP)
The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday recalled 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.
Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. No illnesses have been linked to the newly recalled meat, and officials said the health threat was likely small.
The recall will affect beef products dating to Feb. 1, 2006, that came from Chino-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., the federal agency said.
Hallmark Meat Co.?
Cocoa bean harvest puts kids at risk despite chocolate makers’ efforts. (Canadian Press via Topix)
Instead of rich and creamy sweetness, chocolate’s aftertaste may be stomach-turning bitterness once consumers learn that poor farmers are forced to use child labour to harvest cocoa beans.
Even as the chocolate industry is trying to curb unsavoury cocoa-farming practices in Ivory Coast and Ghana, Canadian aid workers, among others, are disappointed in the industry’s snail’s pace at dealing with the issue.
The Westminster Kennel Club gave a long-awaited Best in Show this year to a beagle.
As my own beagle would say, “It’s about fucking time, bitch.”
US store chain cuts sales of food from China. (Yahoo! News)
US grocery chain Trader Joe’s said Monday it would stop selling food imported from China due to customers’ concerns about the products’ safety.
“Our customers have voiced concerns about products from this region and we have listened,” Trader Joe’s spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki said in a statement.
“All single ingredient food items sourced from mainland China sre scheduled to be out of our stores by April 1,” she said.
“We will continue to source products from other regions until our customers feel as confident as we do about the quality and safety of Chinese products.”
The 20 Worst Foods in America. (Men’s Health).
What’s the worst?
Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing
- 2,900 calories
- 182 g fat
- 240 g carbs
Who would have thought fried potatoes covered in cheese and dipped in pure fat would be so bad for you? I may have to re-examine the bacon-gizzard protein shakes I usually have for breakfast.
The world’s rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan (Independent UK).
A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex”, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”
“We’re in so deep that it doesn’t seem like anything will help,” said Rebekah Ao, 33, a pregnant homemaker who lives in a new four-bedroom home in Avondale with her husband, Otto, a truck driver. The Aos, with $50,000 in income, owe a total of $607,000 on mortgages for two houses they bought since they moved to the Phoenix area about two years ago.
Christ almighty, there’s so many things wrong with the above quote.
Poison Dumplings Kill Japanese Merger (Business Week)
The overnight slump in U.S. stocks was the overwhelming reason for Japan’s Nikkei 225 index plunging 4.7% on Feb. 6. But for Nissin Food Products, the company that brought the world instant noodles, it was the continuing fallout from a scandal over contaminated dumplings that sent shares into free fall, tumbling 8.5%.
Nissin’s stock is the latest innocent victim of a batch of tainted, Chinese-made gyoza dumplings, imported by Japan Tobacco’s food arm, which led to more than 10 cases of food poisoning. News of the poisonings broke last week (BusinessWeek.com, 1/31/08) and triggered a slew of recalls of products produced by Tianyang Food, the Chinese producer of the dumplings. A huge news story in Japan, the scandal also renewed fears among consumers over the safety of Chinese products.
Food Politics, Half-Baked. (NY Times)
A call-to-arms to…put down your arms.
One need look no further than the battle over genetically modified crops starting in the 1990s to understand how this language undermines the qualified benefits of biotech innovation. Without a hint of doubt, pro-biotech forces insisted that genetically modified crops would end hunger and eliminate the need for pesticides. Genetic modification was supposedly a harmless panacea that would save the planet. Industry not only promoted this fiction, but it scoffed at the prospects of product labeling, insisting that it was the product, not the process, that mattered.
This arrogant attitude spurred the anti-biotech forces to promote their own distortions. “Frankenfoods” became the term of choice for genetically modified crops. Chemical companies engaged in “biopiracy”; they were killers of monarch butterflies, engineers of future “superweeds,” and according to Jeremy Rifkin, the prominent biotech opponent, monopolizers of an insidious technology that posed “as serious a threat to the existence of life on the planet as the bomb itself.”
Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler (Mark Bittman in the NY Times)
A SEA change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil.
It’s meat.
The two commodities share a great deal: Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.
High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi (NY Times)
Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.
Add cream cheese in a maki roll named after some erstwhile American municipality and all of a sudden eating sushi in America insults the diner on many levels.
CONGRESSIONAL FOOD FIGHT? (MSNBC)
The presidential race is not the only place where change is an issue.
Members of Congress returning to the Capitol this week are being confronted by transformational happenings that have shaken the building to its foundations: Democrats have hired a new company to run cafeteria services. Naturally, this has caused an outbreak of partisan skirmishing.“I like real food,” proclaimed Republican leader John Boehner when asked about the new menu by a producer for another cable news outfit. “Food that I can pronounce the name of.”
Boehner is now forced to wrap his lips around such phrases as “broccoli rabe and shaved persimmon,” “balsamic glazed butternut squash,” and “calico pinto beans”…all on this afternoon’s menu, along with the downright patriotic “American Regional Yankee Pot Roast,” which, even Boehner would have to admit, kind of rolls right off the tongue. On Fridays, there is a real sushi bar tended by a bona fide Japanese sushi chef. Gone are such grade-school cafeteria specialties as Salisbury steak and fried chicken, slathered in gravy and served with a side of chips. Debate rages among regulars about the merits of the new offerings. One consensus downside: the prices have gone upscale right along with the fare.
A drink a day for a longer life: study. (Yahoo! News)
Drinking is healthy, exercise is healthy, and doing a little of both is even healthier, Danish researchers reported on Wednesday.
People who neither drink nor exercise have a 30 to 49 percent higher risk of heart disease than people who do one or both of the activities, the researchers said in the European Heart Journal.
“The main finding is there seems to be an additional beneficial effect of drinking one to two drinks per day and doing at least moderate physical activity,” said Morten Gronbaek of the University of Southern Denmark, who led the study.
Stewart: Is this cynical by the Republican party? They use the evangelical bloc to kinda put them over the top… its almost like… do you watch the Simpsons?
Frum: I’m afraid to say, yes.
Stewart: Ned Flanders. Yeah thats great, you like having him around because he’ll do all the leg work, but when it comes down to it you want President Homer.
Frum: I don’t think we want President Homer.
Stewart: We have President Homer.
Why do all the people who have herpes seem really fucking hot?
Maybe I need to get herpes.
Who at Burger King thought it was a good idea to punk their most loyal customers?
And speaking of said customers, they really need to prioritize their affairs, reassess their lives, and perhaps explore their own happy place full of unicorns and kittens.
Here’s some Cameo for you serfs.
Here’s some wookies.
Some asshole from Men’s Health magazine is telling Ann Curry that shrimp cocktail is less fattening than crab cakes and that candy canes have less calories than chocolate and that ham is healthier than a well-marbled steak. Apparently, he has a book called “Eat This, Don’t Eat That.”
Next segment will feature a relationship expert advising you to avoid meth-addicted, self-fellatio enthusiasts who suffer from Munchausen Syndrome.
Issues with Portland’s own McCormick & Schmick’s
Shares of McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants Inc. sank to their lowest level in more than three years Friday after the company cut its fourth-quarter and full-year earnings guidance because of weak traffic.
The company is the latest restaurant operator to either slash its guidance or warn investors of weak earnings due to slow sales and traffic. Earlier this week, shares of Ruby Tuesday Inc., Ruth’s Chris Steak House Inc. and Darden Restaurants Inc. – which operates the Olive Garden and Red Lobster chains – hit new lows after telling investors upcoming earnings would not meet expectations.
UPDATE: Via Eschaton, does the Steakhouse Index portend a sluggish future for the overall economy?
A look at the six-month chart of the same stock and the S&P 500 shows how the steakhouses could function as economic indicators. Note the outperformance in the first quarter and the underperformance in the second quarter. Steakhouses thrive on expense accounts. Their sales are tied to the exuberance of (mostly) men in the corporate world, and their business is largely discretionary.
Tony Bourdain Would Pimp for Prada. (Chowhound)
What about a place like Mario’s with the Spotted Pig? Let’s say Fergus [Henderson] wanted to open a place?
Fergus? I’d do anything with Fergus. Anytime. Blind. I don’t care. We could kill 17-year-olds with regularity! I will personally serve 17-year-olds if I’m in business with Fergus!
Knife At Lunch Gets 10-Year-Old Girl Arrested At School
School officials say the 5th grader was brown-bagging it. She brought a piece of steak for her lunch, but she also brought a steak knife. That’s when deputies were called.
It happened in the cafeteria at Sunrise Elementary School. The 10-year-old used the knife to cut the meat.
“She did not use it inappropriately. She did not threaten anyone with it. She didn’t pull it out and brandish it. Nothing of that nature,” explained Marion County School Spokesman Kevin Christian.
But a couple of teachers took the utensil and called the sheriff. When deputies arrived, they were unable to get the child’s parents on the phone, so they arrested her and took her to the county’s juvenile assessment center.
It’s hard to be a carne-gangsta. Via BoJack, who is running a worthy charity drive on his blog today.
Senate Drops Measure to Greatly Reduce Sugar and Fat in Food at Schools (Washington Post)
Concerns on both sides of the aisle held up the vote, an aide to Harkin said. Some Democrats objected to federal preemption of stricter state standards, while Republicans had concerns about restrictions on snack foods, he said.
Harkin indicated that he is not giving up. “We’re coming back with that,” the senator said. “We have a lot of support for it.”
The amendment would have banned most candy, cakes and cookies, staples of today’s school snack bars. Sugary beverages, considered one of the main causes of teenage obesity, would also have been restricted. Serving sizes and calories for all drinks, with the exception of bottled water, were to be capped.
I remember in Junior High eating tons of pizza boats, chimichangas, and mystery burgers. Every kid deserves to suffer the same fate.
Emeril is out at the Food Network…sorta.
Emeril Live — the annoying dog-and-pony-show with a sycophantic crowd of rubes that cheers whenever the guy uses salt or garlic and smiles and nods to one another approvingly whenever Emeril repeats a trope concerning the superlative quality of fat rendered from a pig — is no longer.
But The Essence of… — the show where Emeril (not drunk on his own stardom) pulls together a cogent 30 minutes of cooking — lives on.
Meat, poultry, vegetables feel heat from global warming. (Yahoo! News)
From meat, poultry and milk to potatoes, onions and leafy greens, everything consumed on the world’s dining tables is feeling the heat from climate change, scientists say.
Researchers are trying to establish the extent to which global warming will affect livestock, plant life and staple crops such as rice to bolster their resistance to disease and breed stronger varieties.
The world’s billion poor, whether producers or consumers, will bear the brunt, warned scientists who ended a conference Saturday on agriculture and climate change in Hyderabad, southern India.
Many Americans Can’t Afford to Eat Right. (Yahoo! News)
THURSDAY, Nov. 22 (HealthDay News) — In this land and season of plenty, low-income and rural Americans continue to have difficulty finding healthy foods that are affordable, a new study finds.
One study shows that low-income Americans now would have to spend up to 70 percent of their food budget on fruits and vegetables to meet new national dietary guidelines for healthy eating.
And a second study found that in rural areas, convenience stores far outnumber supermarkets and grocery stores — even though the latter carry a much wider choice of affordable, healthy foods.
Food makers are pressured to cut sodium
Americans eat nearly two teaspoons of salt daily, more than double what they need for good health — and it’s not because of the table salt-shaker. Three-fourths of that sodium comes inside common processed foods like stuffing mix, gravy, and yes, pumpkin pie.
Even raw turkey, which is naturally low in sodium, sometimes is injected with salt water before it reaches the store, a lot more salt than a home cook might sprinkle on. You have to read the brand’s fine print to tell.
Now public health specialists are pressuring the Food and Drug Administration to require food makers to cut the sodium. In a hearing set for next week, they will call the government intervention crucial to fighting heart disease.
“There’s just a growing scientific consensus that current levels of salt in the diet are one of the biggest health threats to the public,” says Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that filed the FDA petition triggering the meeting.
Passed on without comment, as I am a person who has a drawer full of 9 different types of salt at this very moment.
It used to be Vinnie the “Microwave” Johnson, but now the honor goes to the inestimable Gilbert Arenas, or the player formerly known as “hibachi” (which itself was a crowd pleaser).
“We started off worse than we can imagine, started off slow,” said Arenas, who recently declared that his new nickname is Nacho. “Now we’re picking up some momentum. We’re just trying to get out of this November alive, because we know December and January is our time.”
Arenas is an alma matter of Arizona. Go Wildcats.
Amy @The Merc posts about a tamale sale from which proceeds go to families affected by the recent Del Monte immigration raid in North Portland.
Regardless of your views on immigration reform, it’s worth buying some delicious winter tamales just to encourage this guy to manufacture more spittle.
Small World ride revamped for bigger passengers. (CalorieLab)
The Small World ride now must accommodate adults who frequently weigh north of 200 pounds, which it often cannot do. Increasingly, overweighted boats get to certain points in the ride and bottom out, becoming stuck in the flume.
The ride monitors attempt to leave empty seats on many boats to compensate for the hefty, but this routinely antagonizes the hundreds of paying customers waiting in line. When a boat does bottom out, a long line of other boats backs up behind it, their passengers slowly going mad from listening to the ride’s theme song.
The ride monitors must then track down the stuck boat and attempt tactfully to help a rider or two to exit at one of the emergency platforms, which the riders in question do not always deal with graciously.
This is emblematic of America on so many levels.
Fast Food Items Highest In Trans Fat – The 88 least healthy foods. (A Calorie Counter)
Keeping in mind just how terrible trans fat is and all of the terrible things it can cause, I have given this the very catchy nickname of “The 88 Fast Food Items Most Likely To Kill You.” When you look over this list with the understanding that you should be eating 0 grams of trans fat per day, you’ll realize that my little nickname really isn’t that much of an overstatement.
Jack-in-the-box, Burger King, White Castle — the usual suspects.
Jim Gaffigan is a puffy, pasty comedian from Indiana that has been a mainstay in the comedy club and late night circuit for some time. You might recognize him from his commercial and acting work (he was a regular on That Seventies Show for a few seasons).
While other comedians might inject some aspect of food anecdote into their act — such as Eddie Murphy’s bit on McDonald’s in Raw — few “pepper” (get it?) their routine with the sheer number of sustained food references that Gaffigan “seasons”(!) his act with.
Perhaps it’s his modest, mid-western roots that positions Gaffigan well in this regard. He is the everyman, toiling in the mundane, and thus possesses a unique vantage point from which to wryly sink his teeth (ok, that’s it, I promise) into what you and I consider perfunctory and banal, such as the erstwhile Hot Pocket. This supermarket frozen aisle staple can form the crux of almost one fifth of his act, and it’s Gaffigan’s most famous bit. He’ll randomly interject the trademark commercial jingle (“Hot Pocket!”) and various, contextual permutations therein (“Diarrhea Pocket!”) throughout his astute observations on America’s popular microwaveable stuffed pastry (“There’s a vegetarian hot pocket for those who don’t eat meat but still would like diarrhea”).
Gaffigan reserves much of his derision for his stereotypical American brethren, including the lazy Fat American. He calls us out for the peculiar national holidays that revolve around gorging ourselves, such as Thanksgiving (“Let’s eat too much. But we do that everyday! Let’s do it with people who annoy us.”) and the Fourth of July (“I’m going to eat a burger AND a brat.”). Gaffigan effortlessly alternates between his on-stage persona and that of an incensed audience member having a running imaginary conversation with his/herself, a seeming prude so easily offended by the pasty bumpkin on stage and his incendiary ramblings that he/she would exclaim — with a tone that implies an incredulous case of the vapors — “But I like Hot Pockets, mister! They’re delicious.”
He has a keen ability to effortlessly expand upon the absurdity of the mundane (“Pie can’t compete with cake. Put candles in a cake, it’s a birthday cake; put candles in a pie…and someone’s drunk in the kitchen.”)
The subject of meat is given its just due (“Steak is like the tuxedo of meat…and bologna is the retarded cousin”) and Gaffigan pokes his fun at vegetarians (“I’m not a strict vegetarian, I eat beef and pork. And chicken. But not fish, that’s disgusting.”)
(Vegetarians will brag…)“I haven’t had meat in 5 years.” I haven’t had a banana in month – you don’t see me bragging. I love animals, I just like eating them more. Fun to pet, better to chew.
Jim Gaffigan will be at the Arlene Schnitzer Hall in Portland the evening of Friday, November 2. A second show has been added, so he will be performing twice in one night (7 and 10pm). Ticketmaster won’t allow me to purchase any tickets, so if anybody wants to give me a ticket, or if Mr. Gaffigan himself would like to put me on the guest list in exchange for effusive praise on this blog, I welcome the gesture.
The pleasure principle. (Times Online)
On language and food writing:
The problem and the skill is not actually in the food, or in having an eye for decor, an ear for the staff, or a nose for the wine list (which I rarely mention, because I don’t drink). It’s in the language.
English, which is so gloriously verbose about so much of life’s gay tapestry, is summarily tongue-tied when it comes to describing food and eating. The reasons are partially cultural. It has never been considered polite to talk about food, partly as there hasn’t ever been much food that you could be polite about. Food and talking about food was something the French did. It’s often pointed out that while the words for farm animals are Anglo-Saxon, their names when they’re cooked are Norman – pork for swine, beef for cattle, mutton for sheep – distinguishing who did the herding and who did the eating.
But then, many of the words that we do have are swaggered in a Pooterish bourgeois snobbery. I can’t write “moist” or “succulent” or “luxuriant” without shivering. Writing about food and the sensation of eating can be as nauseating to read as watching someone eat with their mouth open. So you have to pick your way through the verbiage with care and imagination.
On the nature of criticism:
Finally, people often say: “Seeing as you know so much, why don’t you open a restaurant?” And I think of Brendan Behan’s famous quote: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem – they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.” Like so much of Behan’s work, that’s smart, but not quite right. Critics may well be like eunuchs in a harem who know how it’s done – but having seen it done every day, they just don’t fancy having it done to them.
On the “organic” canard:
Can we just get the organic thing clear? Organic does not mean additive-free; it means some additives and not others. Organic does not mean your food hasn’t been washed with chemicals, frozen or kept fresh with gas, or that it has not been flown around the world. Organic does not necessarily mean it is healthier, or will make you live longer; nor does it mean tastier, fresher, or in some way improved. Organically farmed fish is not necessarily better than wild fish. Organically reared animals didn’t necessarily live a happier life than nonorganic ones – and their death is no less traumatic.
…
So what does organic actually mean? Buggered if I know. It usually means more expensive. Whatever the original good intentions of the organic movement, their good name has been hijacked by supermarkets, bijoux delicatessens and agri-processors as a value-added designer label. Organic comes with its own basket of aspiration, snobbery, vanity and fear that retailers on tight margins can exploit. And what I mind most about it is that it has reinvigorated the old class distinction in food. There is them that have chemical-rich, force-fed battery dinner and us that have decent, healthy, caring lunch. It is the belief that you can buy not only a clear conscience, but a colon that works like the log flume at Alton Towers.
On durian:
You can tell you’re in the presence of a durian from 20ft. They smell. No, they stink. They have the most exotically complex and psychologically confused life cycle of any vegetable, and rely on fooling carnivores to spread their seed. So they give off the odour of rotting flesh. It’s the scent of corruption, a whiff of the charnel house, a gag from a hot grave. If Stephen King books smelt, they’d smell of durian.
Inside, the flesh is marmoreally slimy, some say silky. Personally, I think it’s like lost babies who have been drowned in baths of whey. The flesh clings to the stones like putrefying muscle. You have to suck and nibble. Few westerners manage that twice.
I love this guy.
Eat your food, get your money back. (Reuters)
Norwegian food retailer Coop launched a new guarantee for its produce on Monday: “If you did not like the food, you will get your money back – no questions asked.”
Coop, a consumer-owned cooperative and second biggest food chain in Norway, said competition among retailers was so fierce that in order to win new clients it had to become more creative.
“We trust the customers, if they say they are not pleased with something, we do not ask any questions,” Coop spokesman Vidar Ullenroed told Reuters.
“We will refund the whole amount,” Ullenroed told top-selling tabloid VG, adding that there did not have to be anything wrong with the product to get cash back.
Pot candy factory owner surrenders. (Seattle PI)
The founder of an Oakland food factory that laces everything from cookies to barbecue sauce with marijuana surrendered Thursday to face a federal drug charge.
Michael Martin, 33, was freed on $300,000 bond on the charge of conspiring to manufacture and distribute marijuana.
This government hates capitalists.
Sometimes eating a large, carbo-centric meal — right when you get home — and then sitting on a couch with a laptop is not healthy.
For instance, I was too logy on a recent evening to take any decisive action when I suddenly found myself assaulted by a TV show. At one point it was simply piddling background noise to be safely ignored. I thought it was a commercial. Just a long commercial, and, after a while, one that had overstayed its welcome. It wasn’t until after five minutes I realized that this was actually a show.
The show in question is called “Cavemen”. It is part of ABC’s bold Fall lineup, and it exists as a potent reminder of what a horrible existence we humans lead on this earth.
If you’re at all familiar with what passes for popular culture in our society — and I consider myself somewhat versed in television, if only tangentially at times — you might be aware of the Geico advertistments which feature actual cavemen as the agents provocateur.
The general premise for the television show mirrors that in the commercial. It is all piled mercilessly upon the schtick that Neanderthals (or a similar biped from the more hunched, left end of the evolutionary diagram) have stopped evolving in any demonstrative fashion and have existed simultaneously (presumably) for hundreds of thousands of years alongside Cro-magnon man. And like us modern sapiens, these cavemen — despite their genetic predispositions for fashioning basalt spearheads and discovering fire — suffer from the prosaic angst we humans have consensually owned as our lifelong affliction.
In the commercial, these hombres erectus wax pathetic to unfeeling psychologists, explore frustratingly complex inter-personal relationships, and debate meta-physical reality in all its confusing glory. The 30-minute show provides this same launch platform for caveman ennui (sans a conventional laugh track).
It really is astonishing, the gall of ABC, to even consider showcasing this tripe. Do they expect the hoi polloi to swallow such a wildly unreasonable concept: a commercial that has shed its cocoon to emerge as a prime-time butterfly? Does ABC honestly believes this transaction is transparently on the up-and-up, that we are so gullible, so starved for self-referential Splendatainment that we’ll gladly line up to be force fed like a foi gras goose?
The idea is laughable at face value. Yet there it was, on television. In prime time, nonetheless. The synopsis of the debut episode is thus: one of the cavemen, I dunno, “Robert(?)”, who happens to be roommates with two other cavemen (let’s call them “Phil” and “Fred”1), is convinced that the hot, blonde, female sapien action he’s been getting is illusory.
Robert is wracked with the same self-doubt and confidence issues that is so endemic to us all. He is convinced his girlfriend is ashamed to admit to her friends that she is getting porked by some guy with as much hair on his knuckles as on his back (which is a lot, for the record). However, once he confronts her — while she is enjoying drinks with her friends — at some trendy watering trough, he ultimately finds his fears have been unjustified.
Prior to this singular, episode-changing event, the other roommates go on a shopping spree to soften the blow of impending romantic disaster, indulging in crass materialism as a panacea (just like us humans!). However, it is with such boarish levity that Cavemen lowers the discourse. And this exists as the core of show: cavemen, like minorities and teenage Goths, are misunderstood. They may look different, and technically be another species (as one caveman tells his roommate, “keep your penis in your genus”), but underneath that primordial hypodermis lies the same vulnerable, quivering core of uncertainty, a fleeting, shallow and crass individual preoccupied with Pinkberry and fair trade coffee.
The very real societal maladies of over-generalization and false stereotypes are simply swept aside in favor of a running gag. It is hard to imagine how this can be kept up for the average length of an SNL skit, much less an entire broadcast network season.
The Cavemen environs are quintessential L.A. in all its wondrous self-indulgence. The roommates — despite being underemployed — live somewhat luxuriously in a well-appointed apartment replete with the latest modular IKEA wall units and kitchen systems. They have gym memberships, where they twiddle away the desperate details of their painful lives while walking on treadmills. All the chicks are generically hot, vacuous model types. The writers of the show are letting you into their world. They constantly sift through the detritus and present polished nuggets of pop cultural aphorisms that simultaneously denigrate and exhalt modernity.
I imagine they are a sick breed, these writers, wickedly smart and capable of absorbing trivial knowledge like a sheet of Bounty (the “quicker picker-upper”), yet with a healthy predilection for the absurd. While you or I or any other aging doofus is pefectly satisfied with indulging our camp fetish by bowling on Rock’n'Bowl night and drinking domestic beer by the pitcher, this is the sort of freak whose idea of getting his ironic rocks off is getting blown by a transgender high-rent call girl while a repeat of Family Guy plays on the hotel television, all the while texting his girlfriend on his iPhone AND watching some midget fist a dog on RedTube.
Cavemen is a paean to our drive-through society, encapsulating everything it stands for but at the same time saying nothing at all. After we willingly suspend our disbelief that modern day humanoids actually do exist (and shop at Abercrombie & Fitch), the viewer is presented with additional logical fallacies that on the surface seem to spark intellectual curiosity, yet fail to deliver satisfactorily. For instance, the fact that Neanderthals do exist appears to validate the core tenets evolutionary theory, and that they are consumed with consumerism and suffer the trappings of modern human culture and discourse speaks somewhat to Social Darwinism.
However, the opposite argument can be made; Neanderthals and Cro-magnons exist together because that is exactly how the Intelligent Designer created them 6,000+ years ago. God in this case allowed Neanderthals, unlike the dinosaurs, to continue existing. Albeit, he put them in cashmere V-neck sweater vests. It’s all part of the plan.
This sort of maddening dichotomy acts as a governor, keeping the show from driving too fast. This parallels our existence here in America, where a President can veto a $5 billion bill that extends healthcare for children, dismissing it as impractically expensive, yet go before Congress and demand an additional $150 billion to fund some wayward nation-building wet dream half a world away. With a straight face.
Then it struck me. Cavemen is an intentionally evil work of madcap satire. It is a carefully crafted alternate universe, a Kafka-ish dream state, one whose narrative constructs a meta-reality so insanely ludicrious that it defies the imagination. It mines territory heretofore unexplored by previous entries to the genre (e.g. the movie Encino Man, which existed mostly to capitalize on the brief supernova-like existence that was the career of Pauly Shore). The bulldada absurdity is viscerally poignant, so real and material you can smell it. It’s akin to screening David Lynch’s The Elephant Man in a convalescent home for a bevy of unwitting octogenarians, after dosing them with peyote and Dulcolax.
Cavemen is essentially a 30-minute malapropism built around a loosely constructed plot. The plot doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to. It only exists as a greaser, a non-stick lube that allows a light, crispy, trans-fat-free breading to easily separate from the surface.
Cavemen reminds us of our shallow, empty and mindless pursuits of pomp and artifice2. And for this alone, it is eminently qualified as fantastically lurid agit-prop that happens to use the premise of two hairy knuckle draggers playing Nintendo Wii as its delivery vehicle.
Then the following sitcom came on with four guys3 who carpool to work together AND IT WAS THE SAME EXACT SHOW.
Cavemen
Tuesday nights, 8/7 Central
ABC
Footnotes
1These are not really the cavemen’s names, but they might as well be.
2 Also, it reminds us of how all men just want to get laid.
3 One of these guys was the fat kid from Stand by Me, who is the latest beneficiary of Rebecca Romjin’s incessant proclivity to marry down.
From a few nights ago, while re-configuring my Wii and scanning for wifi access points.
Maybe I should get out more often.
Turn your backyard barbecue green. (CNN.com)
Labor Day, Memorial Day and the Fourth of July are the most popular days to cook outside on the grill says the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Asssociation. Americans grill with a passion, the group notes, with eight out of 10 U.S. households owning a grill or smoker and half use it more than four times a month.
…
But if you’re one of the growing number of Americans who are also becoming passionate about the environment, you may be concerned that your backyard barbecue is adding to global warming and wondering what you can do to make burger flipping a bit more environmentally sound.
Shut the fuck up.
“We all know that by staying here it’ll be a good high this year
So what’s the use to staying there if you’ve got no use for time
The fitness coast is growing near
The shores they don’t stay blond all year
The continent moves with growing fears
Its all for expensive lawn”
— “Date with Ikea”, Pavement, off the 1997 album Brighten the Corners
The Ikea in Portland had been open for a little under two weeks when I dropped by on a Sunday evening. My wife was on an extended stay in the oncology wing at the Sunnyside Kaiser Permanente, and since we are moving to a new house soon and there was no internet access at the hospital, I figured I’d shoot up I-205 and score a printed catalog so she could fete her compulsive shopping behaviors from the safe confines of her hospital bed.
My first mistake was to go to Ikea.
I had somewhat fond memories of my last visit, when we braved the drive up I-5 to Renton a few years ago to hit the Seattle-area Ikea. We picked up a load of furniture in flat boxes, some things which over the years have been relegated to erstwhile and forgotten nooks and crannies throughout our house (and yard and garage), or items which have simply been thrown away. I do enjoy the kitchen items, though (best colander ever).
But I had visions of my hyper-efficient meatball plate I had procured in the sterile Ikea cafeteria. 15 perfectly round balls of meat, 126 grams of boiled red bliss potatoes, topped with 60mL of strangely creamy brown gravy, and accompanied on the side by 22mL grams of ligonberry sauce. An assembly that existed as a shining paragon of the Ikea philosophy: fleeting, throwaway uber-productivity that permeates every umlaut-bestowed line of build-it-yourself furniture. A cheap, quick crack cocaine hit, the equivalent of a power pop one-hit wonder, here today, gone tomorrow…the Harvey-Danger’s-Flagpole-Sitta of culinary experiences.
The route to the Portland Ikea is trepidatious. One wrong turn off the Airport Way access road and you’ll find yourself on the way to the Dalles or some random Comfort Inn or the Airport long-term parking lot. After nearly taking all of these wrong turns — and flipping several, extremely illegal U-turns — I made my way to Cascade Station, only to find the Ikea overrun with lecherous cretins collectively paying homage to the great cobalt Jesus.
The parking lot was full, and those late to the party (and this was nearly 7pm) were being diverted to one of many makeshift dirt parking lots that rimmed the periphery of the Ikea expanse. Flaggers wearing bright orange vests expedited the flow of traffic into these cattle yards. It had the feel of the county fairgrounds parking lot before a Monsters of Rock (or Ozzfest) mega-concert.
After walking nearly a half mile, I now found myself amongst the flocks of ebullient minions. These were pilgrims on a hajj to fulfill some perverse post-consumerism wet dream.
I was saluted by these colorful, flowing Ikea flags. This lent an air of diplomatic fanfare to the occasion, much like as if I was visiting the United Nations.
As you enter, you are presented with a couple options. Take the escalator to start the “tour”, or deposit your kid at the brat bank, where you’ll be given a pager in exchange for your first born. You’ll be able to wander aimlessly throughout the Ikea showroom knowing your child is accounted for. The pager is a nice touch — if little Johnny accidentally impales himself with the disassembled leg of a MAMMUT children’s polypropylene table, you’ll be the first to know.
On the top floor awaits the Ikea cafeteria. Presumably it’s situated at the mouth of the showroom so as to suggest that you’ll need the sustenance in order to brave the long, winding, Canterbury-ish journey on which you’re about to embark.
As you can see, the cafeteria was overflowing with hordes of angry consumo-bots eager to get their lingonberry on. It was seriously longer than the Space Mountain lines I used to encounter at Disneyland as a child. My meatball fetish would have to wait, as there was no way on earth I was going to return to my wife at the hospital 2 hours later just because I needed a round meat fix. Maybe, if she was still on her morphine drip, but ever since she stopped riding the snake her concept of place and time had regretfully returned.
I did manage to snap a couple shots of a section of the menu, and a placard on a table bragging about a 99 cent breakfast. Amazing.
I asked about the catalogs. They won’t get their shipment of catalogs for a few weeks. This amounted to a wasted trip.
The saving grace in this case is that Ikea also features a small snack shop at the exit (with much shorter lines).
I picked up a $0.99 chocolate bar, mostly for the packaging (and the awesome way the Swedish spell “milk chocolate”)…
a $.50 hot dog…
and 2 cups of meatballs for $1 each. A dollar!
Here’s a closeup of the snack bar menu.
Each one dollar cup of meatballs contained 5 meatballs in brown gravy, with a single toothpick speared into the very top ball o’ meat.
These were not good. The meatballs were incredibly overcooked, and the bottoms were flattened and nearly burnt from the sheetpan on which they undoubtedly sat too long. This gave the lower half of each meatball the mouth feel of particle board. The long past-prime gravy had a consistency not unlike custard. A custard that had been made from coffee brewed from mop water infused with a nondescript spice profile (cardamom?). Despite my firm and unwavering adherence to my usual “No Meatball Left Behind” policy, I didn’t finish them all.
As I made the ignoble walk of shame back to my car in the dirt overflow lot, I couldn’t help but notice how the Cascade station MAX tracks intersected the pedestrian walkway with an aura of nonchalance that belied the fact that tons of metal — capable of killing large mammals at low speeds — regularly shuttled past this very spot with punctual regularity. I fear for the poor shlub, freshly sated with a recent over-indulgent orgy of consumerism, and logy from a few dozen meatballs and a cinnamon bun, who might get flattened thin as the box for that BESTÅ modular entertainment unit he was carrying back to his car.
Via Je Mange la Ville, we get this totally awesome and mesmerizing clip of amateur gourmand Christopher Walken.
Let us also take this opportunity to pay homage to Walken’s ode to hotdogs.
See Sicko. American healthcare sucks. We suck. Big time.
Fuck you.
PETA blasts Michael Moore for eating meat. (MSNBC)
The animal-rights group is blasting the filmmaker as a hypocrite for criticizing the U.S. healthcare system in his new documentary, “Sicko,” because they say he’s in such poor health himself.
“There’s an elephant in the room, and it is you,” PETA president Ingrid Newkirk wrote in a letter to Moore.
God bless Michael Moore. Go see Sicko, and say simultaneous FUs to greedy corporate health care AND PETA.
Foie gras could be tasty way to get Alzheimer’s. (Times Online)
FOIE GRAS, enjoyed as a luxury since ancient Egyptian times, may be linked to the onset of diseases including Alzheimer’s, type 2 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, researchers have suggested.
The scientists who carried out the study say those with a family history of such illnesses should consider avoiding foie gras.
The possible risk comes from “amyloid” proteins found in the delicacy, which is made from the swollen livers of force-fed geese and ducks. The proteins have been linked to the onset of all these conditions.
In their study, the researchers found mice fed on foie gras started growing amyloid proteins in various organs. They observed a similar result when extract of foie gras was injected into the rodents’ bloodstream.
This latest bit of alarmism doesn’t affect me either way, but I am still creeped out by this.
French wine militants threaten jihad. (“Wine militants threaten action”, Guardian UK)
In a tape sent anonymously to French TV a month ago, the shadowy militant organisation known as CRAV (Comité Régional d’Action Viticole or regional winegrowers’ action committee) threatened violent action if new President Nicolas Sarkozy did not take measures to help economically desperate wine growers in the France’s vast Languedoc-Roussillon area.
Batali and Bourdain Argue Over Adam Platt, the Egg Thief, and Much More. (New York Magazine)
Batali: It’s amazing, these fucking Websites, these blogs. [Otto co-owner] Jason Denton hasn’t even thought about this pizza restaurant that isn’t even a pizza restaurant across the street from Otto, and he’s getting quoted. I call him and say, “Lips. What are you doing?” and he’s like “I want to tell you, I’m never planning on opening a pizza restaurant … I don’t know what happened on the blog this morning.” Whatever the blog heard is now fact.
Bourdain: I think it’s great. They’ve beaten down the wall, and everybody’s invited to write whatever shit they want about you. It’s democratic.
Batali: I’m not so much about these blogs by anonymous people saying nasty things about you. I think it’s getting pretty stupid. If there’s something interesting, and there’s somebody editing it and taking care of it, I’m down with it. But some of those people are just bit with vituperative anger and just want to rail on you.
Bourdain: It’s inevitable, it’s the tide, there’ s no fighting it. There’s a bunch of these guys that are like Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons, whipping out their fucking little cameras, and five minutes after one of them says it’s the greatest, the next will say that’s so last week. That’s inevitable. I go to all those sites and enjoy them, especially when they’re about people I don’t like.
Batali: Well, I don’t like them.
Speaking of Comic Book Guy…
Funny: Harry Reid on the 2008 GOP field.
Not Funny: Dennis Miller on Harry Reid.
The difference here is that Harry Reid is a senator. Dennis Miller is purportedly a comedian.
Bonus imaginary Dennis Miller schtick (cue smarmy voice) on his own career : I haven’t seen something go south this fast since Linda Lovelace after a blow bender. Topo Gigio! Cha cha!
I was constructing some pixels on the iErector Set this evening, and the History Channel fiddled in the background. It segued from a program on the history of cocaine to one concerning the meticulous nature of the ancient Mayan calendar and its systematic calculations (as decoded by the Dresden codex).
We are entering the tail end of this katun cycle.
And, if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s at the end of a processional cycle.
The Long Count is a large segment of time (1/5 of the 26,000-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes) with a definite starting and ending point. The period began on August 11, 3114 BC and it ends on December 21, 2012.
The 256-year cycle of thirteen katuns, the “short count,” was clearly a Mayan prophecy cycle. Each of the 13 katuns has a specific “fate” attached to it and the Maya believed that the occurrence, or arrival, of each katun brought with it this fate.
Some days it’s best to not get out of bed.
Basically, the Mayans have portended that on Dec. 21, 2012, the earth will reach the center point of the Milky Way. Planets will thus align and a cosmic event will occur.
No biggie? Well, it happens only every 26,000 years or so, and Mayan creation mythology targets this conspicuous calendar day as the date of annihilation.
Before you poo-poo, let me remind you that the Mayans knew their shit. They built entire, intricate fucking pyramids and shit that soared into the heavens, all without cranes or Caterpillar trucks or CAD software. 500 years before the Spanish came and fucked shit up old school, the Mayans excelled in astronomy and mathematics, and developed a written language independent of any outside influence. Their calendar system was amazingly complex, and the Mayans grasped the concept of zero that allowed them to formulate large ass numerical concepts. Oh yeah, they also discovered chocolate.
And the Mayans have been through this before. Their civilization strangely collapsed in the 10th century. Go ask Mel Gibson. What did it? Who knows? Maybe environmental ruin and wars amongst rival city-states over increasingly scant resources (sound familiar?) contributed to the mysterious Mayan diaspora and demise of a once great intellectual society.
The rise to prominence of NASCAR and the creation of MySpace notwithstanding, I’ve been trying lately to be a bit more optimistic about life and the future. It’s all I can do to put my mind at ease when I contribute to my 401k twice monthly on payday. And ever since we rode that nasty Y2K juju out, I’ve felt somewhat redeemed by my lingering (undeserved) faith in the ability of mankind to just deal.
However, this now throws everything into flux. This, fermented with the loquacious doomsday congener that is that fucker James Howard Kunstler, is enough to foment in any guy with a 30-year home mortgage simultaneous dread and exhilaration.
What will this Mayan End of Times bring? On the day of the Winter Solstice, a little over four years from now?
Societies will rise, flourish, and perish. A new order will arise. This will usher in the start of a new katun cycle. “For half there will be food, others misfortune.”
Tumultuous and drastic change, devastation, socio-political disruptions on a magnitude unseen in human history. A test for our species…but yet an opportunity for transformation and renewal? Will humanity come to terms with itself and face its future?
The vital question is how to we prepare for this coming transformation. Could humanity be wiped off the face of the earth come 2012? What steps are we taking to prevent this cataclysmic event horizon?
Then a commercial for the iPhone comes on, which demonstrates how easy it is to get calamari in San Francisco.
Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A ‘Gay Bomb’.
A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.
Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called “Gay Bomb.”
Our taxes are paying these people’s salaries?