Category Archives: Food

Alice Waters: Eat Local

This is really not that hard a decision to make…

Think about it…

Is there really any point in eating grocery store tomatoes in January?  They taste like styrofoam…

It’s worth the wait for the real thing in June….

Or canning and freezing local produce in the summer.  I do…

 

There are certainly challenges to eating locally, such as the decrease in the variety of food that is available in the winter months. At Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA, we are lucky because we can find local produce all year long. However, we are always thinking about food in a sustainable way. In the winter, we focus on the winter squashes, root vegetables, and we use canned tomatoes and huckleberry syrup that we’ve made in the summer. I think eating locally is so much about being creative with your choices.

I am hopeful, as I believe we’re waking up to the fact that for the past 30 years we haven’t been eating food that’s really good for us, and we’re not taking care of the land or the farmers in our country. I’m seeing that this is changing as evidenced by the drastic increase in the number of farmers markets in the country in recent years, the fact that there are now vegetables growing on the White House lawn, and the incredible number of school gardens popping up across the country.

 

via Alice Waters: Eat local | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

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Think tainted Chinese pork is scary? Check out the nearest supermarket meat case | Grist

It’s becoming more and more obvious to me that we need to eat locally produced food and organic food.  It’s important to know where your food comes from- and hopefully the local farmer who produces it.

God knows what the big box and grocery store meats have in them….

Let’s not even think about McDonald’s and the fast food industry…

Over in China, the nation’s burgeoning pork industry has been been busted for churning out meat tainted with an illegal and quite dodgy growth-enhancing chemical, The Washington Post reports. The banned chemical, clenbuterol, is said to “reduce a pig’s body fat to a very thin layer and makes butchered skin pinker, giving the appearance of fresher meat for a longer time.” When people ingest it from eating the resulting pork, they suffer “symptoms such as a quickened heartbeat and headaches … and, in rare cases, die.”

Something similar could never happen here, right?  Well, the poultry industry quite legally laces its feed with arsenic — for similar reasons. Traces of arsenic do end up in chicken meat, in the poisonous “inorganic” form. And the pork industry regularly doses pigs with ractopamine, a growth enhancer that the USDA allows even though its own research shows that it stresses pigs out. The European Union and, yes, China ban ractopamine, worrying that it harms people when ingested.

Then there’s “non-therapeutic” use of antibiotics so popular among the four or five companies that dominate our meat industry.  Eighty percent of antibiotics consumed in the United States go to factory animal farms, the FDA recently revealed. One of the main functions of this pharmaceutical barrage is to promote growth. The problem with routine antibiotic use on farms, of course, is that it gives rise to all manner of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which then can break out of farms and infect the human population (i.e., us).

There’s a growing consensus among U.S. food-regulatory and public-health agencies that industrial meat’s addiction to antibiotics endangers the public. The latest: the USDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have collected data showing that antibiotic overuse in meat factories “could be exposing Americans to bacteria like Escherichia coli and Campylobacter that have become resistant to antibiotics,” The Wall Street Journal reports.

Hat tip to DailyKos where I orignially saw this…

MORE:   Think tainted Chinese pork is scary? Check out the nearest supermarket meat case | Grist.

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My Thoughts: I Hate Sears

This is going to be a bit of a rant…

I hate Sears….

And I can’t even begin to count the ways, but I’ll try.

I always said there were three things you could count on in life:  Death, Taxes and that I would never buy clothes at Sears.

So, they  bought Lands End, who I use to love, and I had to mark them off my shopping list.  Now I was limited to Brooks Brothers, J Crew, Polo/Ralph Lauren and LL Bean….

That only reinforced that appliances were the only reason to go to Sears.

I was raised that if you needed to purchase an appliance- any appliance- you just went to Sears.  That’s what we did.  It was a non-debatable given.  Everyone thought Kenmore appliances were the best and they used to last for years.  My Mother had her Harvest Gold Refrigerator in the kitchen for a good 30 years.  Long after we all wished it would die…

No more.

When we bought and renovated our house about 5 years ago, I bought all the new appliances for our new kitchen at Sears.

I wanted to get the best, so they would last.  Foolish, foolish me….

Within a month, the new refrigerator stopped working and we lost all our food.  When I called for service, I had to speak to someone in Georgia to schedule service in North Carolina.  It was a week to 10 days before they could get to us…When I complained about all the food we lost, they said I should have bought the extended warranty to cover the food.  It was my fault we lost our food.

When the repairman finally came, he said it was a “known problem” and the part that failed on our refrigerator was failing on all the refrigerators of that model.  Of course, they didn’t tell you that when you bought it or pro-actively contact you to replace it.  This also meant they were out of stock for the part and had to order it.  This meant a few more days before they could finally fix it.  We went almost two weeks without a refrigerator.

This was a very expensive 2 door refrigerator with the pull out drawer for the freezer.  I had loved it when we got it, but I can never truly trust it again.

Now, five years later, our top-of-the-line Kenmore Elite dishwasher is dead.

We, of course, only use non-Sears repairmen now.  They do not have any vested interest in us buying new appliances.  We spent about $175 them to fix the dishwasher door last month.   It just started falling to the floor when you opened it.

A couple of days after they fixed that, the dishwasher started making a strange sound.  When the repairman came back today, he said “junk it”.  The stainless steal tub was leaking, the pump was shot and the motor was “sparking.”  He said it would cost almost as much to fix it as to buy a new one.  It wasn’t even safe to use it until we got a new one.

I broke the pattern.  I did not go back to Sears.  I’ll never go there again.  Our relationship is over…

Instead, now I’m waiting two weeks for Lowes to deliver our new Bosch dishwasher.  We have to wait for a special order because I am so picky and had to have a particular model that both had all the features I wanted/needed and was top rated by owners and major consumer magazines.

But I’m not sure I’ll make it.  I’m a Dishwasher addict and can’t imagine washing dishes by hand.

I’ve already told my partner, Steve, this means no one can eat or drink anything in the house, for the next two weeks, unless it is in a disposable container with plastic utensils we can throw away.

The hell with the environment until I get my new dishwasher….

Now that Sears appliances and service are worthless, there is simply no longer any reason for Sears to exist.

It’s time to euthanize them.

Someone please put Sears out of their misery before they kill an appliance again.

Another American Institution has bit the dust and needs to be swept away….

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Why Don’t Farm Animals Get the Respect Pets Do? – NYTimes.com

This opinion piece from Mark Bittman in the New York Times makes a very good point…

Animals on Corporate farms and mass produced poultry, beef and pork come from animals raised in conditions that are almost unimaginable.

I gave up veal years ago…

I try to buy local and free-range as much as possible because I know the animals are treated humanely.

I can’t go vegan, but I do try to find meat that at least seems to come from farms that treat their animals humanely.

If all we pet lovers put pressure on the system to improve the lot of farm animals, think how much we could accomplish…

It would be better not only for the animals, but for us….

But thanks to Common Farming Exemptions, as long as I “raise” animals for food and it’s done by my fellow “farmers” (in this case, manufacturers might be a better word), I can put around 200 million male chicks a year through grinders (graphic video here), castrate — mostly without anesthetic — 65 million calves and piglets a year, breed sick animals (don’t forget: more than half a billion eggs were recalled last summer, from just two Iowa farms) who in turn breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria, allow those sick animals to die without individual veterinary care, imprison animals in cages so small they cannot turn around, skin live animals, or kill animals en masse to stem disease outbreaks.

All of this is legal, because we will eat them.

via Why Don’t Farm Animals Get the Respect Pets Do? – NYTimes.com.

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The U.S. Wastes 40 Percent of All Food Produced Per Year

This is shocking to me…

I knew there was a lot of waste, but not this much…

I also suspect this is due to the distribution system and corporate run farms…

Here are some great, common sense tips from Jonathan Bloom on how to reduce food waste in your household:

But, as Bloom points out, there are incredibly simple things we all can do to break the cycle of throwing out an average of 15 to 25 percent of our food annually per household (and the $1300 to $2200 we spend on it).

1. Shop smarter. Make a list to reduce your purchase of unnecessary items, plan meals, bring less food into your house. Since 25 percent is wasted, commit to buying 25 percent less food.

2. Focus on sensible portions. Portion sizes have increased as have the diameter of dinner plates. Pay attention to what’s on your plate and think about equating value less with quantity than quality.

3. Ignore expiration dates. OK, so don’t ignore them but approach with a fair amount of skepticism. If something is spoiled, you’ll know it by the way it looks or smells not by the date on its packaging.

4. Love your leftovers. Don’t just save them, eat them.

5. Befriend your freezer. It’s a waste delayer.

via The U.S. Wastes 40 Percent of All Food Produced Per Year. How About We Stop Doing That? – Food – GOOD.

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Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture | | AlterNet

More evidence in support of Local Food and Organic crops….

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course — and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live,” says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call “organic agriculture,” although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.

A new report, presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with its recommendation of agroecology. For example, it says, “We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations.” Instead, it says the solution lies with smallholder farmers.

via Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World’s Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture | | AlterNet.

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The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?

Scary stuff…

But then, I’m not a fan of Whole Foods…

They are Republicans in Green Clothing…

I’m just hoping Deep Roots does get their new store here in Greensboro and offers more local food options…

And there is still the Farmer’s Market….

And Earth Fare…

I really don’t trust Whole Foods or the Big Business Organic companies anymore…

In the wake of a 12-year battle to keep Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered (GE) crops from contaminating the nation’s 25,000 organic farms and ranches, America’s organic consumers and producers are facing betrayal. A self-appointed cabal of the Organic Elite, spearheaded by Whole Foods Market, Organic Valley, and Stonyfield Farm, has decided it’s time to surrender to Monsanto. Top executives from these companies have publicly admitted that they no longer oppose the mass commercialization of GE crops, such as Monsanto’s controversial Roundup Ready alfalfa, and are prepared to sit down and cut a deal for “coexistence” with Monsanto and USDA biotech cheerleader Tom Vilsack.

In a cleverly worded, but profoundly misleading email sent to its customers last week, Whole Foods Market, while proclaiming their support for organics and “seed purity,” gave the green light to USDA bureaucrats to approve the “conditional deregulation” of Monsanto’s genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant alfalfa.  Beyond the regulatory euphemism of “conditional deregulation,” this means that WFM and their colleagues are willing to go along with the massive planting of a chemical and energy-intensive GE perennial crop, alfalfa; guaranteed to spread its mutant genes and seeds across the nation; guaranteed to contaminate the alfalfa fed to organic animals; guaranteed to lead to massive poisoning of farm workers and destruction of the essential soil food web by the toxic herbicide, Roundup; and guaranteed to produce Roundup-resistant superweeds that will require even more deadly herbicides such as 2,4 D to be sprayed on millions of acres of alfalfa across the U.S.

via The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?.

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Baby Gaga: Breast Milk Ice Cream Sold by London Restaurant Icecreamists

I’m sorry, but this thoroughly grosses me out….

But I had to share it as it’s all over the web….

Hat tip to Americablog.com where I first saw it…

When a well-stocked ice cream parlour says they sell every flavour, there are usually limits.

But one restaurant in London is selling breast milk ice cream which is being served to customers in a cocktail glass.

Icecreamists, based in Covent Garden, have named the £14 dish Baby Gaga.

Victoria Hiley, 35, from Leeds provided the first 30 fluid ounces of milk which was enough to make the first 50 servings.

But the company are looking for more women to provide breast milk – and are providing £15 for every ten ounces extracted using breast pumps.

The recipe blends breast milk with Madagascan vanilla pods and lemon zest, which is then freshly churned into ice cream.

A costumed Baby Gaga waitress serves the ice cream in a martini glass filled with the breast milk ice cream mix. Liquid nitrogen is then poured into the glass through a syringe and it is served with a rusk.

It can be served with whisky or another cocktail on request.

Mother-of-one Victoria said: ‘I saw the advert offering to pay women to donate breast milk on a forum and it made me laugh.

‘There were so many comments and people were having a debate on whether it could be genuine. So I thought I’d find out.’

Another 13 women have volunteered to donate their breast milk.

via Baby Gaga: Breast milk ice cream sold by London restaurant Icecreamists | Mail Online.

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Is Food Too Cheap?

Great article with lot’s of perspective from Michelle Madden at the Huffington Post:

There is something unsettling when enormous quantities of food are sold at bargain prices — when food is so abundant that a restaurant can offer a double sized portion of your meal for $1 extra, or a store can sell a pound of Twizzlers for 50 cents or eight chicken breasts for $4.

Basha’s left me wondering…Is food too cheap? Do we eat too much (in particular low nutrient-density food — the cheapest of all), and waste too much, because we pay so little and therefore don’t value it? In other words, we over-buy because it’s cheap and over-eat because we’ve bought it. And what we don’t eat, we toss, because we know we can buy it again. In the early 1900s we spent 25% of our income on food, today we spend less than 10%, and it’s dropping. Over the past 25 years, the price of a McDonald’s hamburger has gone down 30%. Is it any surprise our waist lines are expanding, and our illnesses worsening, with every dollar we save?

When did quantity trump quality? Why do we balk at paying $6 for a pound of grass-fed, small-farm, nutrient rich beef, but keep coming back to the $6 all-you-can-eat, pasta buffet. America has always been the land of plenty, but we have plenty of plenty. And that’s the problem.

We have driven costs so far out of the food system that in so doing we have not only driven down nutritional value, but driven out the notion of food being a precious resource. And when we do encounter its preciousness, in the form of whole, “clean”, fresh food, at a farmers market or if we’re lucky, our local store, we pay exorbitantly for it. So is it any wonder most of us choose the lowest priced products (refined carbs and factory raised animals), eating more than we need, and getting fewer of the nutrients our bodies crave.

It makes the two-for-one special, start to look a lot less special.

via The Sweet Beet: Is Food Too Cheap?.

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Bert’s Seafood Grille to close March 12 : News-Record.com

Bad news from the local restaurant scene…

Bert’s is/was one of the local standouts. I took innumerable out of town business guests there and everyone always loved it.

Bert’s was also always one of our personal favorites, but it just seemed out of the way once they moved to West Market Street.  Amalfi Harbor closed and the Brazilian place-who’s name escapes me-moved.  That area just seems to be bad news for restaurants…

Location. Location. Location.

If Bert’s were still here in the ‘hood, I somehow think they would have made it…

GREENSBORO — Bert’s Seafood Grille, an upscale seafood restaurant, will close March 12.

Owner Mary Lacklen cites a grim economy, among other things, for her decision to close the 23-year-old business, which is also at the end of its lease.

The West Market Street restaurant is a multiple winner of Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence and the Triad’s Readers Choice Award for Best Seafood restaurant.

via Bert’s Seafood Grille to close March 12 : News-Record.com : Greensboro & the Triad’s most trusted source for local news and analysis.

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