Tag Archives: food

November 4, 2011 · 11:57 am

The McRib Wars or the Fuss About Fast, Cruelly Created Frankenfood

Do people really eat these things?

There is so much wrong on so many levels here:

  1. Animal Cruelty allegations
  2. Frankenfood
  3. McDonalds
  4. Food additives
  5. It just sounds plain nasty….

This should really blow a hole in the “new” upscale, Starbucks type image McDonalds is promoting to fool people into eating this crap….

Of course, this being America, most won’t listen and will probably eat it anyway.  On the way to the polls to vote Republican.  While wondering why they are gaining weight and not feeling well….

From the Huffington Post, emphasis mine:

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) announced this week that it had filed an SEC complaint against Smithfield Farms, the large pig producer that supplies pork for McDonald’s divisive, limited-edition McRib sandwich. The complaint, which is posted in its entirety online, alleges that the pigs’ living conditions are cruel and unusual, citing reports of pigs covered in blood andsows being confined to tiny gestational grates, which are illegal in some states.

This isn’t the first time animal rights’ groups — or even the HSUS — has targeted Smithfield for its record on animal welfare. In December 2010, the HSUS got ahold of gruesome footage of a Smithfield Farms facility, leading respected figures like Mark Bittman to call for a boycott of meat from the company.

Indeed, this most recent complaint seems more like the latest salvo in an ongoing dispute than like a breaking development specifically occasioned by the McRib. An unsympathetic analysis of the HSUS action would probably lead to the conclusion that the group is tying its complaint to the McRib in order to drum up public attention for the cause. The sandwich, after all, has long been a lightning rod for press coverage.

That’s not to say that the McRib is some kind of pristine product of nature, of course. Before the HSUS complaint surfaced, several media outlets had conducted investigations into the myriad of bizarre ingredients that go into the boneless “rib” patty at the center of the sandwich.

The pork bits that make up the meat include “tripe, heart and scalded stomach,” which is bad enough. But the chemical additives that go into the sandwich are even worse. Allegedly, when the additives aren’t binding lung and liver bits together, they’re used for keeping yoga mats springy and shoe soles white.

via McRib Lawsuit Pits Humane Society Against Smithfield Farms, McDonald’s Over Animal Welfare.

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July 24, 2011 · 1:55 pm

Organic Food: When Does It Matter?

I always try to buy locally grown, in-season organic food.  Organically grown food is much better tasting and so much better for us.  If you buy it at the Farmer’s Market, you are also supporting local farmers instead of the giant corporate agri-businesses that supply the chain grocery stores with their tasteless, plastic produce.

It’s always better to know your food source and support local food.  But it can be expensive and sometimes time dictates a run to the dreaded Harris-Teeter.  Then you have to make choices- do I buy conventional or organic?  Conventional is so much cheaper, is it really important to buy the organic version of this food?  What to do?  How do I find balance in my food choices and budget?

If you can’t buy all local, in season, organically grown food, here is some great information from EWG, The Environmental Working Group, to help you make your choices.  Keep it on your iPhone or Droid next time you go food shopping:

 

Eat your fruits and vegetables! The health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure. Use EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides to reduce your exposures as much as possible, but eating conventionally-grown produce is far better than not eating fruits and vegetables at all. The Shopper’s Guide to Pesticide in Produce will help you determine which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticide residues and are the most important to buy organic. You can lower your pesticide intake substantially by avoiding the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated produce.

Commodity crop corn used for animal feed and biofuels is almost all produced with genetically modified (GMO) seeds, as is some sweet corn sold for human consumption. Since GMO sweet corn is not labeled as such in US stores, EWG advises those who have concerns about GMOs to buy organic sweet corn.

EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce

Dirty Dozen:  Buy these Organically Grown:

  1. Apples
  2. Celery
  3. Strawberries
  4. Peaches
  5. Spinach
  6. Nectarines – imported
  7. Grapes – imported
  8. Sweet bell peppers
  9. Potatoes
  10. Blueberries– domestic
  11. Lettuce
  12. Kale/collard greens

Clean 15– Lowest in Pesticide Contamination:

  1. Onions
  2. Sweet Corn
  3. Pineapples
  4. Avocado
  5. Asparagus
  6. Sweet peas
  7. Mangoes
  8. Eggplant
  9. Cantaloupe-domestic
  10. Kiwi
  11. Cabbage
  12. Watermelon
  13. Sweet potatoes
  14. Grapefruit
  15. Mushrooms

 

via EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides | Environmental Working Group | EWG.org.

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July 17, 2011 · 10:35 am

Mediterraneans Abandon Their Famous Diet : NPR

Big Agri-Business and Marketing strike again…

From NPR:

 

It’s not news that Americans are getting fatter and fatter, and the same is happening in many countries around the world. What may come as a bit of a surprise is that it’s even happening in Mediterranean countries, especially among young people.

Pioppi, a little seaside Italian town south of Naples, is home of the Mediterranean Diet. In fact, there’s a museum here dedicated to Ancel Keys, a Minnesota physiologist who traveled to Europe during the 1940s and 1950s to study the diet of people living near the Mediterranean Sea.

Keys, who liked to eat Mediterranean-style meals, lived to be 101 years old. The problem is, in Italy generally, even here in Pioppi, the diet is being ignored.

“The Mediterranean diet is absolutely something that we are trying to pursue every day,” said Dr. Angelo Pietrobelli, associate professor of pediatrics and nutrition at the University of Verona. “Unfortunately, in particular among adolescents, they try to avoid Mediterranean diet because they try to ‘imitate’ the U.S. diet.”

Some people, of course, don’t think hamburgers and sodas are a U.S. diet — they call it the “industrial global diet.” Either way, the results are the same.

When Keys first came to Italy with the U.S. Army during World War II — his name is the K in the Army’s emergency K-rations — he was struck by the low rate of heart disease he saw among poor people in Italy, compared to well-fed northern Europe and America. The traditional Mediterranean diet is more than just tasty — it’s actually good for you.

But the Italians who gave Keys his insights into the Mediterranean diet have vanished. Italy now tips the scales as the fat man of Europe; maybe 36 percent of 12- to 16-year-olds are overweight or obese, according to Pietrobelli.

Nor is the problem confined to Italy. Spain and Greece are also abandoning the traditional Mediterranean diet and lifestyle and seeing much heavier young people.

Of course, it isn’t just fast food and sodas.

“I can tell you that approximately 20 percent of subjects between 6 to 12 years of age are staying in front of the TV approximately four hours per day,” Pietrobelli said.

For the first time in history, today’s children are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents. And the Italian Ministry of Health is worried. Health officials say the obesity is reaching epidemic proportions, and the TV campaigns “make it easier to make healthy choices.”

The rise in Italian obesity rates is remarkable: After all, the overweight kids in, say, Pioppi, are the great-grandchildren of the original Mediterranean diet subjects. That’s a massive change in only three generations.

While nutritionists like Pietrobelli continue to work on fixing the problem, others are trying to understand the changes.

via Mediterraneans Abandon Their Famous Diet : NPR.

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July 10, 2011 · 10:10 pm

Major Grocer Getting Rid of Self-Checkout Lanes

Well, this is a step in the right direction.

I hate these self-checkout lanes.  They are impersonal, don’t work right half the time and take jobs away from people.

Hell, we are supposed to be a service-based society now that we don’t manufacture anything anymore.  This was just another way to destroy service and service jobs…

Good riddance!

Hat tip to AmericaBlog where I first saw this link to MSNBC:

One of the nation’s major grocery store chains is eliminating self-checkout lanes in an effort to encourage more human contact with its customers.

Albertsons LLC, which operates 217 stores in seven Western and Southern states, will eliminate all self-checkout lanes in the 100 stores that have them and will replace them with standard or express lanes, a spokeswoman said.

“We just want the opportunity to talk to customers more,” Albertsons spokeswoman Christine Wilcox said. “That’s the driving motivation.”

Privately held Albertsons LLC operates stores in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. To find a store, click here.

The move does not affect stores operated by grocery giant Supervalu, which operates more than 450 Albertsons stores in 16 states including Nevada, southern California and the Pacific Northwest.

Wilcox said the replacement of automated checkout lanes with human-operated lanes likely would mean more hours available for employees to work.

The move marks a surprising step back from a trend that began about a decade ago, when supermarkets began installing self-checkout lanes, touting them as a solution to long lines. Now some grocery chains are questioning whether they are really good for business.

Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the U.S. (with some 2,500 outlets), is experimenting with removing all self-checkouts in at least one Texas store, reports StorefrontBacktalk, an industry publication. Publix, another major chain, is “on the fence” about self-checkout, according to a report quoted in the story.

Self-checkout industry leader NCR Corp., which counts Albertsons among its clients, does not see the grocery chain’s move as a threat to its business, said company spokesman Cameron Smith.

He said more than 150 retailers in 22 countries use the company’s self-checkout lanes, and not just for groceries. The market is projected to grow by about 15 percent annually, he said.

“Ultimately, customers appreciate the choice of self-checkout,” he said.

via Major grocer getting rid of self-checkout lanes – Business – Consumer news – Retail – msnbc.com.

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June 23, 2011 · 9:03 pm

Cooking with the Chippendales?

How did I miss this back in the 1980’s?

Jaye P Morgan, singer and Match Game regular, apparently hosted this “cooking” show….

More like a campfest…

More than one person in the comments at the original site has referred to this as “Cooking with Blanche Devereux”….

Hat tip to Dlisted where I first saw this:

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June 22, 2011 · 9:05 pm

Georgia’s Harsh Immigration Law Costs Millions in Unharvested Crops

God forbid, a White Person pick a crop in Georgia!  That’s unheard of!  What were the Republicans in the Georgia Legislature thinking?

Oh, I should know by now not to use the words “thinking” and “Republican” in the same sentence…

Still, It’s really scary to see the results when the GOP actually gets to put their plans in action…

People really should realize by now that “Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican.”

That is, if they want a job and a home tomorrow and don’t want to eat cat food in their old age…

Or now, if they want food in the Grocery Store….

From Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

Jay Bookman provides some unsurprising news about Georgia’s illegal immigration crackdown: there are unintended, negative consequences.

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia…

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry….

The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

The economics here aren’t particularly complicated, and I’m sure they won’t be new to the sophisticated readers of the Atlantic, but they are useful to look at and consider explicitly when thinking about issues like this.

It goes like this. If you’re not going to let illegal immigrants do the jobs they are currently being hired to do, then farmers will have to raise wages to replace them. Since farmers are taking a risk in hiring immigrant workers, you can bet they were getting a significant deal on wage costs relative to “market wages”. I put market wages here in quotations, because it’s quite possible that the wages required to get workers to do the job are so high that it’s no longer profitable for farmers to plant the crops in the first place.

via Georgia’s Harsh Immigration Law Costs Millions in Unharvested Crops – Megan McArdle – Business – The Atlantic.

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June 14, 2011 · 4:02 pm

Tomatoland

Fascinating article about grocery store tomatoes from Barry Estabrook’s blog and new book “Tomatoland.”  I just ordered a copy of the book.

I very rarely buy out of season tomatoes.  Now, I don’t think I’ll ever do it again…

Besides, the grocery store tomatoes have no taste.  They are just a waste of time and money.

I always look forward to June when the first fresh tomatoes come in at the Farmer’s Market and I can buy them there.  They are so much better…

Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award–winning article, “The Price of Tomatoes,” investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with  more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but produces fruits with a fraction of the calcium, Vitamin A, and Vitamin C, and fourteen tiimes as much sodium as the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point?

Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation’s top restaurants.

Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a Who’s Who cast of characters in the tomato industry: The avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the United States attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents’ medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years.

Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit and an exposé of today’s agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

via Tomatoland.

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May 22, 2011 · 12:17 pm

The Man, The Can: Recipes Of The Real Chef Boyardee : NPR

I don’t think I could choke this stuff down today if I had to…

But growing up with a Mother who couldn’t- or wouldn’t- cook anything edible, we would have starved without Chef Boyardee!

Unlike the friendly but fictional food faces of Betty Crocker, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, Chef Boyardee — that jovial, mustachioed Italian chef — is real. Ettore “Hector” Boiardi (that’s how the family really spells it) founded the company with his brothers in 1928, after the family immigrated to America from Italy.

Though America came to know him as Chef Boyardee — in the apron and trademark tall hat — Anna Boiardi knew him simply as Uncle Hector. Anna carried on her family’s culinary tradition; her new book, Delicious Memories, is part cookbook, part family history and part homage to her ancestors — immigrants who made their way in a new country.

via The Man, The Can: Recipes Of The Real Chef Boyardee : NPR.

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May 12, 2011 · 2:40 pm

McDonald’s Revamps Stores to Look Like Starbucks

I’m glad they are so focused on the aesthetics, but what about the food?

Remember that Happy Meal Test?

They are still serving those hamburgers that never decompose when left outside for months….

McDonald’s is looking less like McDonald’s and more like Starbucks.

By Brian Blanco, for USA TODAY

At a time when most of McDonald’s competitors are still shell-shocked from the recent recession, the fast-food giant is undertaking its biggest store-by-store makeover in the chain’s 56-year history: The 500-pound clown of fast food is trying to look more like a grown-up.

It’s a $1 billion-plus undertaking that McDonald’s and its franchisees hope, by 2015, will have the vast majority of America’s 14,000 McDonald’s looking comfortable enough to hang out in long after you’ve gobbled down your burger, fries — and smoothie.

For the next generation of McDonald’s customers, the notion of what a McDonald’s restaurant looks like inside and out could be turned on its head. Goodbye, fiberglass tables and industrial steel chairs. Adios, neon-yellow, bright-red interiors. Hello, wooden tables, comfortable faux leather chairs and interiors newly painted in muted oranges, yellows and even subtle greens.

Take away all the McDonald’s signage — and the familiar front counter area — and customers who were to drive by or step inside wouldn’t likely know they were face-to-face with a McDonald’s. Even from the street, many of the changes are immediately apparent. No more clown-red roofs. No more confusion about what door to use. And that all-too-familiar white facade has been replaced with more inviting earth tones and glass.

More:  McDonald’s revamps stores to look more upscale – USATODAY.com.

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May 10, 2011 · 9:56 pm

7 Restaurant Tricks – Ways for You to Spend More

Interesting article from Dr Mercola and Yahoo Finance…

Menu engineering is used by restaurants to steer you to order high-profit items. Yahoo finance has collected a list of some common menu ploys:

  1. First in show. You are more likely to order the first item on a list in a given section of the menu (such as the “chicken” or “beef” section.) That’s where many restaurants place the most profitable dish of that type.
  2. Menu Siberia. Unprofitable dishes, on the other hand, tend to get banished to a corner that’s less noticeable.
  3. Visual aids. Many menus box off something they want to promote, because if you draw a line around it, people will order it. Photos also sell dishes.
  4. Package deals. Even if only a small percentage of the McDonald’s customers spend some extra dollars on a meal package, that translates to millions in additional revenue.
  5. Dollar-sign avoidance. Some menus avoid dollar signs and decimals — keeping money abstract makes spending less threatening.
  6. The small plate-large plate conundrum. A restaurant may offer two sizes of the same dish; that price differential is almost pure profit.
  7. Ingredient embroidery. If the menu makes each ingredient sound ultra-special, it will sell better; it may be the same dish you would get anywhere else, but you’ll start to think you can only get it there.

via 7 Restaurant Tricks – Ways for You to Spend More.

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