Today, Center for Food Safety (CFS) released a new report exposing the well-funded organizations and highly-sophisticated public relations tactics propelling an increasingly defensive food industry.
Onions are absolutely fundamental to cooking. I may love garlic more, but I need onions. When I’m in the kitchen, I know my onions like Adam knew Eve. I don’t just use them, I make love to them. (via Know Thine Onions | Flash in the Pan)
I’d like to see much more crop diversity promoted by policy, especially in a world with a changing climate. Industrial agriculture is very efficient and has its role to play, but depends upon affordable energy inputs. Many of the hectares mentioned in the statistics above are coming from soybean, corn, and cotton, in that order. Yet, we must understand that a major challenge of poor, small shareholder farmers worldwide is having reliable, productive seeds, and another major challenge that they have is dealing with pests and diseases. Most farmers have free choice and like the labor savings and reliability offered by using these seeds and methods.
I’m just home from a visit to New York City, where I attended a conference on Food and Immigrant Life: The Role of Food in Forced Migration, Migrant Labor, and Re-creating Home. Hosted by the New School, the conference examined the relationships between food and migration and framed immigration and food service employment as cultural as well as social justice issues. After a day of listening to smart, engaging talks, I ate a great dinner at the Brooklyn restaurant Nightingale 9. There, Arkansas expat Rob Newton constructs dishes like shrimp and pork boudin, served on a bed of Vietnamese greens, topped with toasted rice powder. During my short visit to New York, I learned lots, picked up a few programming tips we plan to apply to SFA events, and began conversations with the New School that I hope will lead to future collaborations. Here are five takeaway moments, in no particular order:
[I]sn’t abundance better than scarcity? … If this is the food movement, it appears to be in reverse gear.
According to Laborde, although both proposals stop short of providing direct production incentives, they help US and EU farmers out-produce (and, hence, out-compete) their counterparts throughout the world.
NYTimes: A Ban On Many Pork Products Will Be Relaxed
Lovers of cured-meats rejoice, the end of bad salami is near!
The United States Department of Agriculture will relax a decades-long ban on the importation of many cured-pork products from some regions of Italy starting May 28, greatly increasing the number and variety of salumi in markets and restaurants here.
While many importers and producers celebrated the changes, others were unable to judge the impact of the ruling because the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services did not specify what standards would not have to be met by Italian producers, nor the expense of meeting them. Many are also worried about the threat of swine vesicular disease and whether or not producers will be able to meet the USDA guidelines for listeria, salmonella and E. coli. There is certainly a concern for quality.
If artisanal salami is approved for importation it would open up a new world of Italian cured-pork products in the United States:
Presently, only about half of Italy’s wide variety of cold cuts are approved for import into the United States, according to Italy’s Association of Meat and Cold Cuts Producers. “Up until now, we could only export seasoned ham, for example, like Parma and San Daniele, and cooked ham or mortadella,” said Davide Calderone, the association’s director. “We will soon be able to export pancetta, salami, coppa — potentially all the Italian cold cuts with no exception,” he added, estimating that this could mean an increase of $9 million to $13 million a year in Italian cold cuts exported to the United States, now put at $90 million.
Good news, I reckon. And if you would like to know more about air-cured sausages, I did a podcast on them a little while ago.
Rich bought several flats of the berries and pickled them using a simple brine of champagne vinegar, sugar and salt. Now he’s serving them with yogurt atop a scallop chip (the result of a process wherein the inventive chef purees, flattens, dehydrates and fries a local scallop).
Ya huh.
This is relevant to my cooking interests. Indeed.
Just the jump start I need to get back to a vegetarian kitchen here at home.
Jilly Cooper, I think, once said that “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom”. Or maybe it was Shirley Conran. Either way, that goes in spades for brussels sprouts.
(Source: graceinfood)
ActionAid: Food Used to Fuel Cars in G8 Nations Would Feed 441 Million | Big Picture Agriculture
Just that.
