food
lborkowski | April 13, 2012Yesterday, the FDA announced a new program that has the potential to slash the routine use of antibiotics by livestock producers. The routine administration of antibiotics to livestock with no signs of sickness helps animals grow more quickly, but it's also a significant contributor to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. An estimated 70% of the antibiotics sold in the US are given to non-human animals, and most of them are the same drugs that humans rely on to treat our illnesses.
Gardiner Harris's New York Times article about FDA's announcement bears the exciting (to me, anyway)…
drorzel | March 30, 2012One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it's a real effort not to run in and overdo it.
I occasionally try to cook stuff in this general category at home, with fairly mixed results. One thing that I've often tried to do at home is fried rice, with fairly mixed results, mostly because I don't generally have the right kind of rice on had (we mostly use medium grain rice from the "Hispanic" section of the supermarket, for no really well…
lborkowski | March 22, 2012Today is World Water Day, and this year's theme is "Water and Food Security." UN Water explains why we should care:
Each of us needs to drink 2 to 4 litres of water every day. But it takes 2 000 to 5 000 litres of water to produce one person's daily food.
Today, there are over 7 billion people to feed on the planet and this number is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050.
To be able to feed everybody, we first need to secure water, in sufficient quantity and adequate quality.
We will also need to produce more food using less water, reduce food wastage and losses, and move towards more…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2012
Adipocere / corpse wax:
a wax-like organic substance formed by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue, such as body fat in corpses. ... a crumbly, waxy, water-insoluble material consisting mostly of saturated fatty acids. Depending on whether it was formed from white or brown body fat, adipocere is grayish white or tan in color. ... The transformation of fats into adipocere occurs best in the absence of oxygen in a cold and humid environment, such as in wet ground or mud at the bottom of a lake or a sealed casket ...
Wikipedia
Salami:
Salami are cured in warm, humid conditions…
sastyk | March 15, 2012This was an important discussion back when I wrote it in 2007, and somehow, I've never re-run it (although it does appear in Aaron and my book _A Nation of Farmers_). It is definitely time to talk more about this model, and I'm hoping to enlist many of you in doing an evaluation of the real productivity of our home gardens and farms - using this as a model. So time to run it again, as a starting point for seeing how much progress the local food movement has really made in the years since it began!
The 100-mile diet has gotten trendy - but there's a problem with this model. The idea that…
sastyk | February 29, 2012Michael Ableman has written a lovely manifesto from the 2% - the tiny percentage of Americans who actually farm:
There are far more people in prison than growing our food, more stockbrokers and lawyers than those of us who feed our neighbors. We are the 2 percent we call farmers.
There is nothing more central to our lives than how we secure our food. Yet the responsibility for this has been almost entirely handed over to someone somewhere else, to an industrial system where farms have become factories and food has become a faceless commodity. The results have been disastrous; epidemic levels…
cmonforton | January 17, 2012Republican Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich likes to pump himself up by picking on other people. Several weeks back his target was "children in the poorest neighborhoods." Now it's people who receive food assistance.
Others have checked his claims about President Obama being the "food stamp President," but Gingrich also suggested that if you are on food stamps, you aren't earning a paycheck. According to data assembled by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, however, a hefty portion of households receiving benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are…
sastyk | January 17, 2012I've always read cookbooks the way one reads novels, not only for recipes but for plots, stories and bits of detail, and one of the details I always look for are acknowledgements of particular tastes in my cookbook authors. The reason I look for this is that cookbooks are usually a uniquely authoritative genre - one that purports to tell you THIS IS GOOD. And yet, of course, one's tastes are particular - most cookbooks that don't originate in restaurants are fundamentally about a particular person's sense of what tastes good and is appealing. Some acknowledge this, most don't, but it is…
sastyk | January 4, 2012In college I lived in a house where I was the only female resident among a largish group of guys. Along with assorted boyfriends, girlfriends and hangers on, our house became a hang-out for a lot of people, and we regularly sat down with 15-20 people for dinner. Our food budgets, however, were not of the sort that made this easy - but we managed mostly by feeding everyone soup, more or less all the time. The household was vegetarian and kosher, and we were young and experimental, and almost nothing seemed weird. As one of the chief cooks in the household, I made soup out of nearly…
drorzel | December 31, 2011A while back, a reader from Bulgaria sent me a photo of a highly topical bottle of local spirits:
You can either know where you are, or how much you've drunk, but not both...
Having spent my last day of 2011 taking SteelyKid to the mall for bouncy-bounce and midway games, and then having her help me bake apple pie (which she demanded to do out of nowhere, and wouldn't stop talking about), I could really use a shot of quantum liquor. Or even some classical beer.
Sadly, I'm fighting a wretched cold, so booze is out of the question. But if you're in a partying state, have a drink for me. And…
cmonforton | December 1, 2011The worker-led organization Restaurant Opportunities Center United released this month a new type of diners' guide, one that focuses on working conditions for the employees at 180 restaurants nationwide. The US restaurant industry employs 10 million individuals and is the fastest growing sector in the economy. More than half of restaurant workers, however, earn less than the federal poverty line and very, very few (an estimated 10%) are offered paid sick leave. [Achoo!! from the waitress. Sniffle, sniffle, cough, cough from the cook.]
The 30-page Consumer Guide on the Working Conditions of…
pronald | November 3, 2011Finally our paper is in press!
in the coming issue of PNAS, we describe a genome-scale model for predicting the functions of genes and gene networks in rice, an important staple food. Called RiceNet, this systems-level model of rice gene interactions allows us to effectively predict gene function. This information can be used to help boost the production and improve the quality of one of the world's most important food staples.
This graphic is a full-size view of a RiceNet layout, color-coded to indicate the likelihood of network links; red for higher and blue for lower likelihood scores…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2011
I am making fårikål, a dish whose name has a kind of brutal literality, meaning "sheep in cabbage". It doesn't ring quite so harshly in Swedish, as we have no separate word for mutton, using the same word for the animal as for its meat. I'm making fårikål because I had it in Oslo a few weeks back when I happened to visit that city on the day following the great Sheep In Cabbage Day, which has been celebrated on the last Thursday of September since 1997. (Here's a basic recipe. Opinions differ as to whether you should use black pepper or allspice, and possibly add bay leaves and thyme.)
lborkowski | October 21, 2011The Institute of Medicine has released a report recommending that the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture consider "a fundamental shift in strategy" when it comes to nutrition labeling." While the recommendation for a "front-of-package" (FOP) labeling system is not new, the IOM authors don't just want the usual nutrition facts to be moved from the back of the package to the front; rather, new labels should specifically encourage shoppers to choose healthier products.
The authors cite EPA's Energy Star program as a successful government labeling system, because it…
lborkowski | October 17, 2011The kidnapping of two aid workers from the Dadaab refugee camp on the Kenya-Somalia border is a grim reminder of the crisis situation in the region, especially Somalia. Al-Jazeera's Peter Greste has some numbers:
[I]n Somalia alone, four million people are still starving nationwide; three million of those live in the South. Of these, 750,000 people risk death in the next four months if they do not get aid immediately.
According to the United Nations agency responsible for monitoring food supplies in Somalia, almost half a million children are suffering from "severe acute malnutrition". About…
lborkowski | October 11, 2011Last Friday, CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report included a report on the listeriosis outbreak associated with Jensen Farms cantaloupe (the grower is recalling the melons; look for "Rocky Ford" on the label). So far, 84 cases have been confirmed in 19 states, and 15 of these victims have died.
The number of cases may continue to rise, because even though the contaminated cantaloupes are at or near the end of their shelf life, the illness has a long incubation period (usually 1-3 weeks, but as much as 70 days). People who ingested the bacteria in late September might still experience…
lborkowski | October 5, 2011The Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News has put together an excellent - and alarming - story on salmonella in chicken. Jeffrey Benzing, Esther French and Judah Ari Gross outline the problem this way:
Salmonella is found in a range of food products, including meat, produce and eggs. Chicken is the single biggest source of infection among cases where a food has been identified, causing about 220,000 illnesses, 4,000 hospital stays and at least 80 deaths annually in the U.S., according to an analysis of CDC data by the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida.
But gaps in…
sastyk | October 5, 2011
From the UN FAO, we can see that world food prices remain extremely high. We also, I think, when we conjoin this with oil prices can see that there is at least a significant correlation.
So much of what has been done in agriculture over the last 75 years has served to tie oil and food prices more tightly together, but it is increasingly clear that the world's poor cannot afford to have their access to food controlled by the price of energy on world markets. That kills people, to put it as bluntly as possible.
This is one of the reasons I'm least convinced that improving agricultural…
sastyk | October 4, 2011My friend Alice hosted an urban permaculture class at her house a few years ago. She lives in an brownstone in a downtown neighborhood of Albany with her husband and two young kids, and the occasional housemate. Two permaculture design teachers and a host of enthusiastic students came together to create several designs for how she might optimize resource use and productivity at her home. She and her family chose one of the plans, and set to work on a number of inside and outside projects, including transforming her small, sunny backyard into an urban garden, full of food producing plants.…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2011Dear Reader, please try saying "ENSKTBLEH". Yes, six consonants in a row. ENSKTBLEH. OK? Now sing it, loudly and happily. Go!
I've spent three happy days at the first ever Picture Stone Symposium in Visby, listening to papers, moderating some bits and giving a presentation of my own that went down pretty well. And one evening I was reminded of a) that I'm a weird singer, b) that one of C.M. Bellman's least felicitous phrases occurs in one of his best-beloved song lyrics.
During a reception Thursday night in the Picture Stone Hall of the Gotland County Museum, a UK colleague asked me and a…