Are wine-lovers pretentious, easily-manipulated fools who can't tell Two-Buck Chuck from a pricey Napa cabernet? Eric Asimov inquires.
Urban farmers: now selling at your local farmer's market.
The myths and realities of organics - Curious Cook Harold McGee looks for some real information and comes up kinda empty-handed. Seems everyone has their biases.
The Minimalist does crustless quiche, in cute little ramekins. OMG, the one with sauteed mushrooms sounds so good!
Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer accidentally breeds tobacco and tomatoes, calls the resulting hybrid a Tomacco and gets rich?
Unfortunately, the tomacco, albeit a cartoon invention, was the first thing that came to my mind upon hearing about the stramato.
A hybrid of - you guessed it - a tomato and a strawberry - its inventors are saying that their cocktail tomato" boasts a "beautiful strawberry shape, naturally sweet taste and a rich, deep red color."
Eh - I mean, it sounds good, but did the world really need another cocktail tomato? What was wrong with the old ones? Or just plain ol' cherry, for that matter?
"Milk In the Land: Ballad of an American Drink," a documentary about the ubiquitous white beverage, has shown at several film festivals across the U.S. and is now hitting Philly. Directors Ariana Gerstein and Monteith McCollum show us the ins and outs of the cow's milk industry, revealing its interesting past. But don't expect a thoughtful retrospective on the Great American Drink - this film unearths often grimace-inducing secrets about milk, questions its nutritional value, and spotlights the milk extraction process in farms run by agribusiness corporations.
The film features several theatrical elements, including testimonials by industry professionals and stop-motion animation, to explore the drink inside and out. It has been called "fascinating" by some critics, but one FilmCAN reviewer was pretty disappointed, saying the film lacked detail and that the interviewees provided stuttered, unconvincing arguments.
Despite the occasional bad review, Milk sounds pretty worthwhile - similar to the string of string of recent documentaries on the underbelly of the food industry, even if the film itself isn't the best, you'll undoubtedly walk out of the theater with some newfound food and business knowledge under your belt.
As mentioned in a recent post, maple syrup prices are soaring due to high fuel oil costs and a shorter season due to climate change.
But if you want to indulge your maple syrup-tooth right now, and happen to be in the Angelica, New York vicinity (about two hours from Buffalo), try Cartwright's Maple Tree Inn. The Cartwrights, a family of longtime maple syrup producers, began serving pancakes and syrup for a few weeks during the harvest season in 1963. They've been selling stacks of buckwheat pancakes ever since, to tourists from as far away as Germany and Japan. The restaurant is only open for two months - from February 12 through April 13 this year. How's that for local, seasonal eating?
The Cartwright's pancake recipe is a family secret, but here's a link to The Minimalist's Pancake Primer - his ricotta pancakes are killer (in case you can't make it to Angelica before April 12).
We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the Boston Globe.
Fuel prices - sugarmakers use fuel oil to boil the harvested sap into syrup - combined with already low syrup reserves from several poor harvest seasons are driving up retail prices. Warmer winters due to climate change have shortened the season, causing historically low output. Plus, there's an increased demand for maple syrup as consumers grow increasingly hip to its superiority over the faux corn syrup-based pancake syrups.
According to a trend piece in the Fashion & Styles section of today's New York Times, an increasing number of young people (the word "hipster" is not used, but certainly implied) are ditching Williamsburg for the farming life, raising free range chickens and organic spinach on rural farms.
"Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms," twenty- and thirty-something urbanites are getting some real dirt on their trendy Carhartts, the article says.
I guess this doesn't seem particularly new to me. Coming from the more rural environs of Chapel Hill, NC, hip young people working on organic farms is nothing new - my 22-year-old brother, for example, used to work part time in a nightclub and part time on a humane, hormone-free hog farm, and delighted in the fact that he sometimes got paid in pork shoulder. Plus, how many Baby Boomers don't have a story about working on an organic farm in the 1960s?
A viral campaign produced by website Sustainable Table, The Meatrix is a cartoon that reveals "the lie we tell ourselves about where our food comes from." It started up a few years ago, and has since been translated into 30 languages and boasts new features.
Not familiar? Though cleverly animated and peppered with humorous anecdotes, The Meatrix films are definitely not a joke, and probably not suitable for kids. There are three installments, the first being an introduction to what Sustainable Table calls "the dark side of the meat industry," and the second and third, The Meatrix II: The Revolting, and The Meatrix II 1/2, which explores new avenues into the dairy and meat-packing industries.
Our pig protagonist, Leo, chooses the red pill, and follows Mootheus, a trench coat-wearing cow, who reveals the grim reality about most of America's meat and dairy products. As they walk around the farm and Mootheus explains how animals are packed into tight-knit quarters and injected with RBGH and fed the carcasses of their relatives, the juxtaposition of the simplistic, brightly-colored cartoons against the shocking statistics helps to drive the point home.
America (at least the segment of the population that reads the New York Times Dining & Wine section) has already embraced artisanal raw milk cheeses, boutique breads, bacon from pigs hand-fed on nothing but acorns.
Now, according to the lead story in the Wednesday Dining & Wine section, small-batch milk, cream and butter are the next Big Thing in refined gourmandise. In the article, It-chef Thomas Keller of Napa's French Laundry raves about butter handmade at a small Vermont creamery. "It has a different flavor profile and nuances throughout the year," he rhapsodizes. Fresh local dairy products are great, certainly - I buy pints of thick, downy cream from a nearby farm, and love nothing more than a hunk of baguette slathered with good butter, paved with sliced radishes and sprinkled with sea salt.
But my favorite part of the story had less to do with food and more to do with seventh-grade giggles: a quote from Nancy Nipples, founder of the Pike Place Market Creamery in Seattle. Full legal name: Nancy Nipples the Milkmaid.
We're taught that in general, color is more desirable than white in food. This hasn't necessarily been the case for cauliflower, which belies its white color with a nutrition profile similar to its cruciferous siblings, broccoli and cabbage. Cauliflower is high in vitamin C and cancer-fighting antioxidants.
However, thanks to selective breeding (not genetic engineering), cauliflower in different colors are available. They taste the same as white cauliflower, but are just, well, more fun on the plate. Scientists are also claiming that they might be healthier for you than white cauliflower because of the benefits from the compounds that give the vegetables the color.
Healthier than white or not, if its being colorful makes you and your family eat it, that's all the better!
Maybe you've heard about "eating green," but aren't quite sure what it entails. Or you already try to eat organic, but sometimes wish there was more you could do for the earth. Or maybe you're already aware of eating green but could use a refresher.
Well, our friends at GreenDaily have done the research for you, and come up with a handy little guide to everything you should know about eating green. Each part of the guide features handy, straightforward information about topics like gardening, artificial growth hormones, and fair trade, complete with online resources and opportunities to learn more.
You'd think that with increased demand, you just have to increase supply. The increase in demand is one side of the problem. The other side is a very low and slow supply that is nowhere near keeping up with the demand, not only domestically, but in China as well.
Lots of companies are trying to manage this by simply switching their food products away from organic. It doesn't mean that their products are bad, it just means that they aren't certified.
Uh. Yeap, that definitely look like a heart-shaped peanut to us.
However, we highly doubt that the tiny heart-shaped peanut was grown specifically for Valentine's Day, as the farmer claims. It seems to us that, like finding Jesus, Mary, and Elvis on toast, the heart-shape is just a natural, one-time anomaly that can't be reproduced by the farmer. We'd be interested to see the heart-shaped peanut's siblings from the same plant.
With all the fancy schmancy genetic engineering they can do nowadays, scientists could probably design a plant that grows heart-shaped nuts, but not for this Valentine's Day.
Las Vegas is a town known for doing things in a big way. Well now they're giving sustainability the royal treatment. There's a proposal on the table to build the world's first vertical farm. Not just any vertical farm either, but 30 storys of it.
This $200 million project would be able to feed 72,000 people for a year and would grow everything from apples to winter squash. Of course, all of the products would be distributed directly to the casinos and hotels, who will be funding the project in the first place. The farm could potentially make up to $25 million a year, plus $15 million in potential tourist revenue. That means that it would eventually recoup the enormous start-up costs, especially with it's projected $6 million per year operating costs.
With our world population growing exponentially, and 60% of that population living in or near urban centers, vertical farms could be the wave of the future. If this experiment proves successful, every city in the world could one day be able to feed its citizens fresh, locally grown produce. Here's hoping that this Vegas happening won't stay there.
This last weekend I went shopping for a turkey (I know it's early, but I needed to do a little experimentation). I had some trouble finding a bird that wasn't frozen solid (I wanted to use it the next day) but finally found a fresh one that clocked in at around 12 pounds at Whole Foods. It was a serviceable little bird, but was fairly conventional and mass produced.
The next time I make a turkey, I'd like to get my hands on one of the heirloom birds that was featured recently in at article entitled Old Bird, New Feathers over at FastCompany.com. The article talks about Patrick Martins, a former head of Slow Food USA, in 2001 started a company called Heritage Foods USA in order to get more of these old fashioned turkeys back on American tables. The first year they sold 800 birds with the help of 17 farmers. Today there are 81 farmers raising these birds and Martins will ship more than 15,000 turkeys this holiday season. Not bad growth for six years.
Grist, that handy resource for environmental news and commentary, is spending the next two weeks focusing on food in a series called Sow What? They are diving into the heartland, talking to writers and researchers, taking a look at sustainable farming practices and generally trying to provide good information about the world of food that's out there these days.
Currently they have an article up about industrial agriculture in Iowa, a quiz in which you can test your own knowledge about food and farming, a look at Confined Animal Feeding Operations (pig farms) and a slide show of images from the sustainable food revolution. They'll continue to post information over the next two weeks, so make sure to check back and see what else they have to say.
As mentioned in a 
We're in the thick of the maple syrup harvest season right now, but high fuel costs will likely lead to price increases of around 30 percent, according to an article in the 
People dedicated to eating an organic lifestyle don't mind paying that dollar or two, or even ten, extra for organic foods. 
Las 
This last weekend I went shopping for a turkey (I know it's early, but I needed to do a little experimentation). I had some trouble finding a bird that wasn't frozen solid (I wanted to use it the next day) but finally found a fresh one that clocked in at around 12 pounds at Whole Foods. It was a serviceable little bird, but was fairly conventional and mass produced. 
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