The Impending Doom of the Ketchup Industry Has Been Narrowly Averted
February 5th, 2010 at 5:13 pm by Ali SWe can breathe safely now.
Attack of the Mutant Alfalfa
February 4th, 2010 at 11:26 am by Ali SYes, 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.
Food Systems of the Future!
February 3rd, 2010 at 9:33 am by Ali SSadly, 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.
The True Test of GMO Corn
February 2nd, 2010 at 11:48 am by Ali SBiologists 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?
Irrational Chicken Hate
February 1st, 2010 at 2:49 pm by Ali SI’ve encountered this before, but its really quite amazing how irrational people can be about farming and livestock:
That won’t fly with folks like D.C. resident Greg Stewart, who’s resisting the aspiring chicken farmers. “Their neighbors have no desire for any type of country or rural feel to where they live,” said Stewart, a 44-year-old real estate agent.
That is a pretty broad stroke of the pen to decree “Their neighbors have no desire for any type of country or rural feel”, but I can’t say its the first time I’ve heard someone object on those grounds. Apparently there are many who stereotype farms and rural living as poor and unsanitary and backwards. In particular, I hear this from older folks who they or their family escaped poverty by moving off the farms and into the city a half century ago. Times have changed, but people are always slower.
Just so we’re clear the zoning law provides for control over sanitary concerns and noise complaints. No roosters and no noxious smells allowed.
Travel Arrangements
January 27th, 2010 at 11:23 am by Ali SEven if you can afford the seeds, the inputs. Even if drought and bugs don’t wipe out your crop. Even if you can harvest a bumper crop, it don’t mean squat unless you can deliver it to market.
Tale of Two Lunch Kitchens
January 25th, 2010 at 1:03 pm by Ali SWith two employed parents the norm in most American families, the majority of school age children are eating more and more meals at school. At a point in their lives where they are developing habits that will last a life time, these kids seem to be learning all the wrong lessons.
Even when school districts try to move away from “airline” food of unidentifiable saran wrapped servings, they still have trouble offering up what most of us would consider edible:
She opened the door to the walk-in freezer and grabbed several 5-pound bags of something called “beef crumbles,” then pulled a 10-pound box of curly egg noddles and two 6-pound cans of tomato sauce off a shelf in dry storage. The pre-cooked “beef crumbles” would be heated in a steamer; the egg noodles as well. Then Whittington would slather the beef with the canned tomato sauce, spice it up with a little garlic powder, and finally stir in the noodles and some pre-shredded cheese.
Voila: “Baked ziti!” Whittington declared.
This is just one observation of Ed Bruske, who spent a week with his daughter’s lunch ladies in a Washington, DC elementary school. Turns out its fairly hard to create a healthy well balanced meal when school lunchrooms are supplied with steamers instead of stove tops, and the cooks are incentivized to produce the fastest, cheapest meals possible.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. It may have taken 5 years to figure out, but Revolution Foods, based in Berekley, CA seem to have a winning solution:
So Revolution Foods adopted higher standards than the government requires for school meal programs. The meals are prepared fresh daily and feature foods free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors and sweeteners. Every lunch includes fresh fruit and vegetables.
The breakfasts and lunches contain no high-fructose corn syrup or trans fats, the milk is hormone-free and the meats are from cattle that have not been given antibiotics or hormones. Whenever possible, the food is organic and uses locally grown ingredients. Nothing is fried.
Both programs are paid for through the federal child nutrition program, so it’s not that the Californians are out spending their DC counterparts. Rather, it is a more fully evolved program that grew out of an atmosphere where parents, teachers, and students were educated on what healthy meals really look like. And we’ve got a long way to go before that happens in DC.
Savory Bread Pudding
January 20th, 2010 at 9:28 am by Ali SAcknowledging that I am not a master chef (yet!), I rarely stray from a recipe, knowing that my untrained deviances will lead to probable disaster. However, I was inspired by a bread pudding a friend made for Christmas, and decided to try and turn it around into a suitable New Years Day brunch item.
The original bread pudding recipe is fantastic because 1) it is incredibly hard, pretty much impossible, to screw up, 2) it is very light and with a hint of sweetness - an excellent base for experimentation. Trust me on the hard to screw up part. I scorched half a loaf of bread, tooled around with the cooking time, then drowned the poor thing in a pond of butter, and was still able to resuscitate it. The very simple recipe can be found on the BBC website, and yielded the following:
It’s super simple:
Ingredients
3 free-range eggs
3 tbsp caster sugar
2 cups milk and cream mixed together, half and half
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 loaf white bread, croissants, brioche or panettone
50g/20z butter
large handful raisins, soaked in a liqueur of your choice (or Marsala is good)
double cream or custard, to serve
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4.
2. Mix the eggs, sugar, milk and vanilla extract together in a large bowl.
3. Slice the bread of your choice, toast and butter it and arrange in overlapping slices in the bottom of an ovenproof dish, leaving some edges sticking out at the top so that they crisp up. Scatter the soaked raisins over the top and then pour in the egg mixture.
4. Bake for 30 minutes in the preheated oven and serve warm with cream or custard.
I added way too much butter that wasn’t cooking off, so I had to take it out of the oven, pour out the extra butter, and toss it back it. I also found that it needed at least an extra 10 minutes more to cook than what the recipe called for. I skipped over the raisins and cream, opting to go with the simple brilliance of the pudding itself.
After the improbable success of my first try with the recipe, I was riding fairly high on my horse, and knew I couldn’t wait to get back in the saddle. Having a pot luck brunch to attend, the wheels of the cooking brain started churning. What if I made bread pudding a brunch item?
So here was my thinking: remove most of the sugar, and all of the vanilla, and essentially you have an omelet and toast baked together. And there’s lots of things that go well in an omelet. I settled on onions, peppers, spinach, cheddar, and rosemary. However, I am positive that anything that works in an omelet will work here.
The key is to saute the extra items first, especially if you are using meat, as the bread pudding cooks at a fairly low temperature. So I softened up the onions and peppers for a few minutes in a skillet, added the spinach for the last minute just to wilt it. I wisked up the egg mixture sans vanilla with 1 tablespoon of sugar instead of three. In the pan, I did a layer of bread, a layer of veggies and cheese, another layer of bread, then the egg mixture over the top. And then into the oven it went!
I cannot describe in words how yummy this is. So yummy I shocked myself. If you took french toast and an omelet and baked them together, you might get something halfway as tasty as this. Sweet, savory, filling, and delish-a-rama.
Q: What’s in Your Bottle? A: BPA
January 19th, 2010 at 12:44 pm by Ali SThere is new hope that the FDA is finally ready to get serious about BPA.
The agency said Friday that it had “some concern about the potential effects of BPA on the brain, behavior and prostate gland of fetuses, infants and children,” and would join other federal health agencies in studying the chemical in both animals and humans.
BPA is a chemical that is technically not in food, instead it can be found in hard plastic bottles (look for recycling number 7) and the lining of aluminum cans. However, the chemical doesn’t always stay there, and has been found to leach into the food it holds, often at toxic levels.
The first major concern was the high levels of BPA found in baby bottles and sippy cups. While manufacturers have been moving to remove BPA from those items, people are starting to ask about BPA affects on the rest of us.
Naglene and Camelbak have stopped using BPA in their products, however if you have an older item, you may want to look into an upgrade. Sadly, most canned goods manufacturers have resisted a BPA-free diet. Requiring product labeling, coupled with a good education program, amy be an easier and almost effective strategy than attempting an outright ban.
What do Salsa, Peanut Butter, Bagel Spread and Various Cheeses Have in Common?
January 14th, 2010 at 4:50 pm by Ali SA: If they are sold under the label “Parkers”, Listeria!
Yummm, recall fun. Good luck with that one Big Food.
Lies! The Secret Ingredient was Lies!
January 14th, 2010 at 12:06 pm by Ali SOK, now I feel doubly lied to. Not only did the Food Network insinuate that the First Lady would play a key role in their White House Iron Chef, but now it turns out that the produce used in the cooking segment was not the same produce picked in the White House garden by the famous chefs.
At the beginning of the two-hour special, the chefs were shown picking sweet potatoes, broccoli, fennel and tomatillos from the White House garden. Then the chefs were seen walking into Kitchen Stadium, produce in hand. One problem: The show is filmed in New York City.
“Due to the production delay between the shoot at the White House and the shoot at Food Network, the produce used in Kitchen Stadium during the ‘Super Chef Battle’ was not actually from the White House garden,” said Food Network spokeswoman Lisa Krueger in a statement to The Talk.
Instead, the chefs used replacement produce, though only the same types of fruits and vegetables picked from the White House garden.
Replacement produce! You can’t replace the Secret Ingredient on Iron Chef. When you specifically name the ingredient to be produce from the White House garden, you can’t substitute fare from your local Whole Foods. It’s like replacing Beluga with your local sushi takeout roe. They may both be fish eggs, but no one is going to spend $5K for a kilo of sushi roe. Now I just want to slap Jane Seymour for each time remarked on how unbelievably “fresh” the produce tasted.
Additionally, this was just dumb. It’s a 3 hour trip from DC to NYC, there is no reason why they couldn’t use the same produce if it was planned properly. Or they could have filmed in DC. Either way, this was a pointless lie, and an obnoxious one at that. The Food Network may have been served extra helpings of viewers for its White House special, but how many viewers are now left with a sour taste in their mouth?
The Real Dangers of Fast Food
January 13th, 2010 at 4:30 pm by Ali SFathers, best be locking your daughters up, lest they end up dating a fast food mascot:
RAD OMEN - “Rad Anthem” from Nicholaus Goossen on Vimeo.
Haven’t decided if the mountains of coke or the stripper wearing a chicken mask giving a lap dance to Colonel Sanders was more disturbing.
Dedication: Freezing Yer Buns Off While Food Shopping
January 13th, 2010 at 11:10 am by Ali S
image courtesy of flickr user immolation scene
Sadly, my local Farmers’ Market over in Mount Pleasant shut down for the season about a month and a half ago. Only 4 blocks away, it was incredibly convenient way to find fresh and often organic fresh fruits and vegetables. Since then, I have attempting to scour my local grocery (Giant) for my local and organic fare.
I hasn’t been easy. Over the past year, all sorts of organic produce has been appearing on the shelves, mostly under the brand “Nature’s Promise”. Better than conventional, and of course more expensive, it’s still industrial farmed organic, so I have trust issues with it. Plus, there’s still plenty of items Giant doesn’t carry organic - sweet potatoes, pears, green beans. Very frustrating.
So this weekend I have resolved to brave the cold and head over to one of the take-no-prisoners-open-all-year Farmers’ Markets and find out what the true believers are selling. My suspicion is that there will be lots of root vegetables and baked goods. The former is better than buying at Giant, the latter ridiculously over priced. Will let you know what I harvest.
The Too Good to be True Noodles
January 11th, 2010 at 3:57 pm by Ali SRocco debuted his must try foods of 2010 on Rachel Ray, and the one that caught my eye was the Shiritaki Noodle:
These noodles have NO CARBS and NO CALORIES. They’re made of plant fibers, so they’re healthy and make you feel full. The best part? They’re already cooked! Just rinse and eat.
And yes, they are sold over the interwebs. However, no one really addresses how they taste…
Chamber Pot vs Soda Fountain
January 7th, 2010 at 1:56 pm by Ali SYep, they found fecal matter in soda machines. According to Virginia food scientists, 48% of the liquids they tested were positive for Coliform bacteria, which is an indicator of feces. Drink up!
The “Special Guest” That Wasn’t
January 6th, 2010 at 1:43 pm by Ali S
I, like many foodies across the nation, was super pumped for the special White House Iron Chef that was broadcast this past Sunday night. Sadly, I left the table wanting something more. For anyone that has been following the exploits of the Michelle Obama’s vegetable garden, there wasn’t much new information. Yes, Bobby Flay informed us that sweet potatoes are Mrs. Obama’s faves, but how many times are they going to gush about the pounds and pounds of produce the garden has dished up? How many times are we going to get the same tour of the White House acreage? Foodie bloggers across the country have already beaten this story to death.
No, I tuned in, because I was curious to see FLOTUS at the tasting table, rubbing shoulders with the other judges, smacking her lips at the amazing creations, and dashing the hopes of world famous chefs when she dismisses a dish as being under seasoned. At least that’s what I thought we were getting with the advertising “…and a special guest of national importance…”.
No such luck. Instead we got Nigella Lawson, Jane Seymour, and Natalie Coughlin. Really? They couldn’t even get Bo Obama to lick some crumbs up off the floor? Insanely dull and disappointing considering all that hype.
The show did pull in some mega numbers, the show’s biggest in its 8 seasons, but how many patrons left with a bad taste in their mouth?