Here’s a bunch of food-related links that aren’t necessarily inter-related, but I wanted to share them with you:
Former “America’s Next Top Supermodel” contestant Elyse Sewell went to South Korea lately and tried a dish that contained dog meat (a common ingredient in several Asian cuisines). Guess what? It tasted like dog. (via)
There is a growing realization that despite the sensible opposition to genetically-modified food, we may have no choice but to make use of it anyway to combat the problems with food productivity in developing countries because we’ve fucked up the ecosystem so badly. Monsanto, the corporation most involved in designing and marketing GM crops and the targeted pesticides and fertilizers that go along with them, clearly recognized the inevitability of this a long time ago, which is why they have no compunction about strong-arming American farmers.
A couple of weeks ago, Laura Shapiro wrote this piece for Slate taking celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay and his ilk to task for being out of touch with the reality of the situation faced by most home cooks in America: what he says should be a quick-fix dinner is a huge task for the home cook who gets home at 5:30 and needs to have dinner on the table at 6:00. Celebrity chef cookbooks, she complains, all expect you to have a traditional butcher on hand, ready access to expensive and hard-to-find ingredients, a full batterie de cuisine, and the skills of…well, Gordon Ramsay. She’s not wrong in a number of ways. Celebrity chef cookbooks in particular are the most guilty of engaging in food pornography and outsized expectations, and even Ramsay himself admits that he doesn’t cook for his family at home. She correctly observes that the genre of “quick meal” cookbooks (which the Ramsay book claims to be but surely is not) offer solutions that only work if you do such revolutionary things as plan ahead, shop in bulk, and learn how to fucking cook (Sorry, I’m channeling Gordon a bit myself). And that’s where I lose sympathy. Anyone who really thinks they can whip up a celeb-chef-quality meal in 30 minutes without any advance effort or expertise will also believe that they can lose weight without dieting and exercise, can make a fortune in real estate with only $10, or can have a penis bigger than the Eiffel Tower with just one little pill. 3QuarksDaily blogger Abbas Raza agrees with Shapiro, but takes his own tack: he’s all about taking the time to enjoy being in the kitchen when he cooks. Professionals need to learn how to be as efficient and multitasking as possible, amateurs do not. How can you enjoy eating the meal if you don’t enjoy making it?
If you haven’t read this New York Times article about how the increasing cost of fuel is being reflected in the price of food due to the sometimes bizarre transportation involved, please do. As I have said before, locavorianism might sound like just more fooodie snobbishness right now, but within a few years it’s going to become the way of life for most people, just as it was for centuries.
Harper’s Magazine has this great story about the foodie craze for raw milk and how some dairy farmers have created large and elaborate bootlegging operations to deliver the product to consumers while evading the efforts of the FBI. Some people claim that raw milk helps restore necessary bacteria in our intestines that fight off the increasing number of food allergies being diagnosed, helps reduce the number of unwanted hormones and steroids we ingest from milk produced by large commerical dairies, and that it’s just plain better tasting. This is an informative and well-researched article — don’t be surprised to see it pop up as a book down the road.
My friend Jo pointed me to this company’s webpage, which features beater blades with rubber scraper edges. They have one to fit just about every major model of stand mixer, and this definitely qualifies as a “Why didn’t they think of that before?” item.
Lastly, you probably read that Mars is buying Wrigley’s Gum. I would make a joke here about Uranus and the Hershey Highway, but I’ll let you figure out something on your own.
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