You decide:

I have to say kudos to SNL for keeping a play on the infamous Swetty Balls skit in the vault, until they had fodder of comparable hilariousness.  And this is hilarious.

Also, I should have mentioned this earlier, but I’m hanging up the blogging stirrups while I try to get a new project off the ground.  You can check it out at The Food Action Network.

While I believe this is more of a elite problem (oh noes! that $80 jar of caviar was really fish eggs from Mississippi!) than a general public health problem, there is the issue of allergies, which could come into play, as well as general mistrust of the system.

A little known provision nestled in the momentous healthcare bill passed this week means a big change for all those who eat out.  Over the next year, the FDA is mandated to write rules that will require calorie counts on menus of all restaurant chains with 20+ locations.

It turns out that reinforcing calorie counts with the 2000 calories a day recommendation is most effective.  Let’s hope the FDA takes note.

Studies are still being done on the effectiveness of this approach, with early ones showing no change to a 6% reduction in purchased calories.  Either way, giving consumers more information can only be a good thing.

Calorie count laws have already passed in New York City, Seattle, and California. This legislation is a great example of popular local initiatives bubbling up to the national level.

Update: And I suspect this is why the Restaurant Association was lobbying against the healthcare bill.

While I don’t necessarily believe that Big Food really wants to make their food healthier, we all have to acknowledge that in our culture, healthy food has become synonymous with bad tasting food.

Yes, that’s sometimes true.  But it is becoming less and less true.  And often we like the things we like, aka high fat and salt content, because we’re used it, and probably wouldn’t miss it once we’ve become acclimated to less.

Nor are they sheep or goats.  I realize some people may resemble farm animals on occasion, but I can assure you there are some important differences.  And those differences are what makes this so not OK.

Chef Daniel Angerer is letting diners at Klee Brasserie munch on cheese made from his wife’s breast milk.

“It tastes like cow’s-milk cheese, kind of sweet,” he told The Post.

The flavor depends on what the cheese is served with — Angerer recommends a Riesling — and “what the mother eats,” said Angerer, who once bested Bobby Flay on TV’s “Iron Chef.”

Breast milk doesn’t curdle well due to its low protein content, so a little moo juice has to be added to round out the texture, Angerer said.

After blogging about his efforts with the human cheese, customers started demanding a sample, he said.

“The phone was ringing off the hook,” the chef said. “So I prepared a little canapé of breast-milk cheese with figs and Hungarian pepper.”

We don’t allow fellow citizens to sell organs, and we don’t allow them to sell their body for sex.  There’s a very good reason for this - financial incentives for selling or renting your body can induce desperate people to take very dangerous risks with their body.  Imagine if breast milk became a commercial enterprise - women could be coerced into taking hormones or antibiotics or supplements to increase the quantity or quality of milk they produce with potentially negative side effects.

Yes we do allow people to sell blood.  However donations are heavily regulated and the product is used for life saving measures, not as fancy appetizers.

Congrats to Angerer, who obviously is very skilled in garnering PR for himself.  Now let’s hope this doesn’t become a trend.

Pictures really do equal a thousand words.

Yep, that would be beer, butter, and soda that have enjoyed the major declines.  And fresh fruits and vegetable that have seen the steepest increases.  Ben over at consumerist asks the obvious question - hey washington what’s up with subsidizing corn syrup and soy, but nothing for broccoli?  we live in a topsy turvy world when a six pack of Coke is cheaper than some bell peppers.

I just found Howdini.com and I am absolutely addicted.  Lots of great food tips from how to make garlic paste to baking a fire engine cake. Howdini also has lots of non-food tips as well, such as how to deal with a crier at the office and ways to spice up you love life.

I am definitely trying this tip on how to make your own pie crust. He makes it look SO easy.  I’m not so fancy as to have marble counter tops, but I am willing to bet that if I throw my pizza stone or even a cookie sheet into the freezer beforehand, that would work just as well.

How to make a pie crust

Ms Piggy and the Owners (photo credit: the.piggery)

Those are some of the names of the sows that will be chopped up and delivered to homes in the NYC area this year. The Piggery is offering the first meat-only CSA in the Big Apple, and it is sure to get bacon lovers all hot and bothered.  Here’s the deal:

At the Piggery, animals are raised among the squeaking and squealing until they weigh about 250 pounds. Then they’re shipped to a USDA-certified slaughterhouse. The meat is returned to the farm, where Sanford and Marshall butcher, cure, cook and package it for customers in Ithaca and New York City.

Their top menu items include thick pork chops, bacon, creamy patés, sausages, salami, pulled pork and chorizo.

Customers can choose between a “whole hog” order which will cost $1200 per season, a half-hog at $600, and a quarterhog at presumably $300, although the website does not explicitly state its price.  A customer that goes half-hog can expect to get at least the following through the 24 week season:

I personally am dying to know what a Boston Butt is.

Now a key trait of CSAs is that the food is supposed to be local.  The Trumansburg-NYC trip is a stretch, clocking in at over 3 hours.  However, its a lot closer than the factory -farm meat that travels to the east coast via I-80 from the western skies. So for CSA lovers, it definitely is a judgement call.  And for the health conscious there is the matter of whether one should incorporate so much bacon fat into a diet.

The Naked Chef makes his debut at TED Talk. Now I love TED Talk, and I love Jamie Oliver, but I have to admit that Mr. Oliver comes off as a little strident, and just skims by shrill.  However, the chart in the beginning is one to know by heart, and some outtakes from his new show teaching folks how to eat are rather poignant.  Check it out:

Ads that make you go hmmmm

Tom Philpott gives an inside look at what makes the American food system a massive contributor to global warming and pollution.  And no, its not due to cow farts.

I still remember a few years back when there was a huge piece on heirloom garlic in California, where upscale grocers were stocking a dozen different varieties of garlic with “chocolate undertones” and “whiffs of rose”.

Well the mad scientists on the farms have a new designer product - chicken.  I’m all for naturally grown, well fed and well cared for chickens, even though I personally do not indulge in the bird these days.  But isn’t chicken supposed to taste like, well, chicken?

We can breathe safely now.

Yes, they’re coming, and life as we know it will never be the same.  Imagine all the innocent organic veggie sandwiches with avocado and roasted red peppers and NO ALFALFA.  The horrors.

As mentioned earlier, GM corn has now taken over 90% of the market - more than Internet Explorer’s market dominance in its heyday.  And its impossible to stop - GM corn seed can be carried by the wind to land and cross pollinate with organic - no corn is safe in America.

And now it is the poor alfaalfa sprouts’ turn. Harmless, unoffensive, never hurt anyone.  And about to be extinctified. But it’s not just veggie sandwiches that will suffer - organic alfalfa is a major feed source for organic cows.  So goodbye organic alfalfa could mean goodbye (or really, really, REALLY expensive) organic meat and dairy.

The USDA is accepting comments on its impending decision for the next two weeks.  The folks behind the fabulous documentary FRESH has a petition you can sign in solidarity with the Alfalfa.

Sadly, its not food pills you pop in the microwave and out comes a Thanksgiving feast.  Luckily, it doesn’t require GMOs.  All that’s required is some coding and a well populated database:

“Food miles, food safety, animal well-being and exceptional quality are important issues that guide my purchasing practices,” said Joe McGarry, an executive chef with Bon Appetit Management Company. “FoodHub allows me to use these factors to sort through the database and find the best suppliers.”

Sophisticated search capabilities allow buyers, both large and small, to instantly discover ready suppliers with a few clicks of their computer keyboard. Conversely, sellers can use FoodHub search features to identify new buyer leads and build targeted customer databases. All registered users can complete an online profile that includes a detailed description of their operation and preferred methods for doing business. FoodHub supports both direct market relationships and leverages existing distribution channels to encourage growth in regional food sales.

Meet FoodHub.  Membership for buyers is a cheap $100 a year.  Another reason why Portland is probably the most kick ass American city.

Biologists decided it was high time to test out those new fangled GM corn varieties that Monsanto has been pumping out and now account for more than 90% of corn grown in the US.  Sure, there has been industry tests, but the more analytically minded among us have a hard time swallowing results that were bought and paid for.

The initial findings are not promising:

We present for the first time a comparative analysis of blood and organ system data from trials with rats fed three main commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize (NK 603, MON 810, MON 863), which are present in food and feed in the world. NK 603 has been modified to be tolerant to the broad spectrum herbicide Roundup and thus contains residues of this formulation. MON 810 and MON 863 are engineered to synthesize two different Bt toxins used as insecticides. Approximately 60 different biochemical parameters were classified per organ and measured in serum and urine after 5 and 14 weeks of feeding. GM maize-fed rats were compared first to their respective isogenic or parental non-GM equivalent control groups. This was followed by comparison to six reference groups, which had consumed various other non-GM maize varieties. We applied nonparametric methods, including multiple pairwise comparisons with a

False Discovery Rate approach. Principal Component Analysis allowed the investigation of scattering of different factors (sex, weeks of feeding, diet, dose and group). Our analysis clearly reveals for the 3 GMOs new side effects linked with GM maize consumption, which were sex- and often dose-dependent. Effects were mostly associated with the kidney and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, although different between the 3 GMOs. Other effects were also noticed in the heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system. We conclude that these data highlight signs of hepatorenal toxicity, possibly due to the new pesticides specific to each GM corn. In addition, unintended direct or indirect metabolic consequences of the genetic modification cannot be excluded.

Yeah I had a hard time wrapping my head around the jargon also.  The short of it is, GMO corn poisons the liver and kidneys.

This is scary, scary stuff.  Corn syrup is pretty much in everything we eat.  Westerners have massively high intake of corn, and in the US, the vast majority of that corn is GMO. Ten years down the road, will we be seeing liver and kidney failure of epic proportions?