Linkapalooza – Food

And lo! On the Sixth Day there were links to post! And Jeebus looked down and said [this is good].

We begin with “A Mystery Solved”: For several years now, the valiant citizenry of New York have been driven to distraction by the occasional but powerful aroma of maple syrup wafting through Manhattan’s concrete canyons. The times being what they are, the initial reaction of many Gothamites was to lose their freaking shit that it might be a bioterrorist attack cleverly concealed by a delectable aroma. That’s what you get for living in a city that smells like a sewer — the immediate assumption that anything that smells good MUST be evil. (One can only imagine the level of shit-freaking that would happen in Boston, which smells like a sewer AND low tide, AND went ballistic over those LED signs a couple of years ago). But this very morning, sayeth the Gray Lady, the source of the smell of mapley jihad has been identified: a processing plant that makes additives for food and fragrance products, which has been processing fenugreek seeds for the perfume industry. Fenugreek is well known to anyone who cooks Indian cuisine, and is apparently a significant ingredient in artificial maple syrup flavorings (who knew?). It also has a variety of beneficial health effects, and is recommended to breastfeeding mothers to increase milk supply. Expect Michale Bloomberg to take credit for improving the health of New Yorkers in 3…2…1…

Next, we ask the musical question “Coffee, Is There Anything It Can’t Do?”: If you’re like me (and if you’re not, you really should be), every morning you have to dump the previous morning’s used coffee grounds prior to making your daily pot of America’s Favorite Drug. Wouldn’t it be great, you think (okay, you probably don’t, but play along with me), if there were some planet-friendly thing you could do with coffee grounds other than make compost. Via Slashfood comes a link to this product concept that was submitted to a conference on “greener gadgets” being held later this month in New York City (presumably WITHOUT the death-wielding maple aroma). You put your coffee grounds into a little cartridge doo-dad that connects to the top of the printer, then wiggle the doo-dad back and forth as the paper feeds through the device, and the day-old coffee is magically transformed into “ink”. Anyone who has ever dumped their morning joe on their shirt can speak to the near-indelibility of coffee stains, so it’s a perfect medium for quick, cheap, environmentally-conscious printing. Plus, your documents will have the rich, luxurious aroma of freshly-brewed coffee…although this may mean that they will be classified as Weapons of Mass Destruction in New York City.

Speaking of the Devil’s Brew, the United States Army takes its coffee pretty damn seriously, maggot! American military action in the 20th Century was fueled on nothing but strong black coffee and unfiltered cigarettes, because that’s how fucking tough we were back then. Hitler didn’t stand a chance against the G.I.s and their cuppa joe. The blog Entropic Memes recently offered this excellent post about the Army’s 1951 in-depth analysis of the essential facts about coffee: it’s preparation, it’s storage, the type of beans to purchase, anything and everything about it. Illustrated with many of the tables and graphs from the report, the post tells us that the Army bought 8.5 million pounds of coffee per month back then, and that’s a lotta beans to count.

Our next subject is one last “fuck you” to France from George W. Bush: Among the assorted last-minute bits of fuckwittery enacted by the outgoing Bushies was the imposition of punitive tariffs on a variety of imported food products as retribution for the banning of American beef, particularly in the EU. The most outrageous imposition was increasing the tariff on Roquefort cheese to 300%, essentially destroying the market for Roquefort in the United States. Luckily for the makers of Roquefort, exports to the U.S. only account for about 450 tons out of an annual export market of about 3,700 tons, but still represents more than 10% of the total exports. I am a total fanatic for blue cheeses in general, and I adore Roquefort, though on a daily basis I am much more likely to buy the locally-produced Great Hill blue, but I do love me some Roquefort. Thanks again, George.

Finally, in Tuesday’s Food & Wine section of the New York Times there was this article which almost reads like a bulletin from the Department of Duh: Americans don’t know how to cook for themselves, which contributes to the national epidemic of obesity. Nowhere is this more evident, says Julia Moskin, the article’s author, than on the NBS series “The Biggest Loser”, where obese people compete to see who can lose the most weight, but have to be shown from the ground up not only how to incorporate exercise into their lives, but how to prepare basic, nutritionally sound meals. Not surprisingly, they also need to be taught WHAT to eat. Oh, and, quel suprise!, many of the participants on the show balloon right back up just as soon as they don’t have someone forcing the broccoli down their throats.

Of course, you can’t generalize too far. Speaking as someone who loves to cook but also loves to eat and as such passes a pretty good resemblance to the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, I can attest to the counter-argument that knowing how to cook doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not going to overeat. Indeed, knowing how to cook is a pretty good way to insure that you WILL overeat. Nevertheless, the trend away from regular meal preparation to more and more consumption of restaurant food (primarily fast food, but not entirely) and the lack of awareness of basic nutrition go hand-in-hand with the excessive weight gain that is so prevalent in this country and in the U.K.