In the wake of the release of this year’s report on pesticide use in fruit and vegetable farming, The Atlantic’s food blog featured a list of the “dirtiest” and “cleanest” types of produce based on the amount of pesticides used on those crops. As usual, apples remain the most pesticide-laden item in the supermarket, while the least-pesticide-laden items include onions, sweet corn, watermelons, and cabbage.
You can bet this doesn’t get Alton Brown’s vote of approval: Plow & Hearth’s corn kerneler ($12.95) removes all the kernels from an ear of corn in one go. Me, I use my big-ass chef’s knife.
Back in 2009, I posted about a story in Gourmet Magazine abouth the plight of migrant farm workers indentured to the tomato farms in Immokalee, Florida and the efforts of a group called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to unionize the labor and improve the working conditions. Earlier this week, NY Times food columnist Mark Bittman posted an article about the ups and downs of that movement and about Barry Estabrook’s new book “Tomatoland”, which documents how industrialized agriculture has ruined tomatoes and created this modern slavery for farm workers.
Speaking of Gourmet Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine’s food blogger Lisa Bramen decided that she wanted to make a special birthday dinner for her husband using recipes from the year that he was born, 1978 (the year I turned 15, BTW). She searched through some of Gourmet’s recipes from that year and came up with a menu of Chicken Veronique, curried rice, a garden salad, and grasshopper pie. She sounds a little disappointed that the menu didn’t include family dinner fare like Sloppy Joes and tacos, but that’s why they called it “Gourmet”, chica. If she wanted to make the sort of crap we really ate in the 1970s, she should have gone through the back issues of Good Housekeeping. Still, it’s kind of a cute idea, even if it is a little too close to “Julie and Julia” territory. A back issue of Gourmet from August, 1963 is only $4.59 on Amazon.
You probably know that McDonald’s restaurants in countries other than the U.S. often developed special menu items to cater to the tastes and/or dietary restrictions of those countries. India has been a particular challenge, given that Mickey D’s speciality is beef burgers and Hindus don’t eat beef, but they have developed a whole menu for the India market. The paneer-based “McCurry Pan” you see in the image above is now being replaced with a sandwich made with a paneer patty (called the “McSpicy Paneer”, of course), which is being hailed as a triumph in development and production in the global marketplace according to this Business Today article.
