It’s not for nothing that political candidates call the endless parade of banquets and luncheons the “Rubber Chicken Circuit”. This article at The Economist’s “Intelligent Life” magazine looks at the disconnect between what people want from banquet food and what a hotel or restaurant can realistically manage to do for a large group and how some chefs are trying to up their game by getting away from rubber chicken a la king and trying cooking methods and cuisines that are better suited to the vagaries of serving several hundred people simultaneously.
Speaking of chicken…it should not be a surprise to anyone that Americans have an overwhelming preference for “white” meat (in other words, chicken breast), spurred partially by the machinations of the poultry producers and partially by our infantilized palates. But until they perfect the process for growing meat without growing the chicken, every bird has two legs as well as a breast. That’s a lot of meat left over, too much to even consider just throwing away, and so the poultry producers export all those chicken legs to other countries where people LOVE them. This Slate article says that the biggest importer of American chicken legs for years has been Russia, but the Russians are trying to boost their domestic poultry production and so are buying less and less from us. Given the state of the economy and the ecological disasters waiting for us on the horizon, Americans need to wise up, stop being fussy, and start eating dark meat. It tastes better anyway.
The USDA has an online interactive “Food Environment Atlas” that you can use to explore county-by-county census data as it relates to a variety of food and health concerns. A website called “Daily Yonder” used the atlas to generate this map of the U.S. showing the number of fast-food restaurants per capita and then some additional infographics for several related vectors: obesity, exercise, amounts of types of food eaten (soft drinks, vegetables, meat), and amount of per-person spending on fast food. There’s no sort of master index that pulls all of this together in that post, but taken as a group the maps do point out trends.
We occasionally enjoy watching the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern. I have to say that probably a good 75% of the stuff he eats actually looks just fine to me; not to harp on a point too much, but Americans as a group are appallingly infantile about their food preferences, and a lot of the things he samples are not so much gross as they are merely culturally unappealing because they’re unfamiliar. Once in a while you can tell that even Zimmern has to man up to eat a few things that clearly don’t taste good, but he never shirks from something just because it’s weird. Well, almost never. I think I’d pass on that, too.
In The Atlantic, local chef Chris Parsons writes about the 2011 Bocuse d’Or competition that was recently held in Lyon, France. You may recall that I blogged about his Bocuse d’Or posts last year, too. Parsons himself was a competitor in 2009.
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