Archives for July 2009
Blue Food Grows a Backbone
As a kid, I was a fan of trivia books. In one, I came across the factoid that the only true blue food in the Irish bilberry. Now, this was a factoid in the most literal sense—that is, a fact-like object that may very well be a non-fact. But I steadfastly argued with all who dare to say things like, “But aren’t blueberries blue?” Fools!, I cried. Your trivia knowledge is pathetic! And you will all wind up like that girl in Willy Wonka! And then you’ll be sorry!
Meanwhile, the blue raspberry craze passed me by, and I gave away a lot of blue M&Ms and jelly beans. But now, blue food dye is redeemed:
Tests in rats showed the dye, called brilliant blue G, a close relative of the common food dye Blue no. 1, crossed into the spinal fluid and helped block inflammation, Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center and colleagues reported.
Holy food science, Batman! That’s pretty impressive.
“We have no effective treatment now for patients who have an acute spinal cord injury,” Dr. Steven Goldman, who worked on the study, said in a statement.
“Our hope is that this work will lead to a practical, safe agent that can be given to patients shortly after injury, for the purpose of decreasing the secondary damage that we have to otherwise expect.”
On second thought: A close relative of blue dye can just casually ooze into people’s spinal fluid? Maybe my blue abstinence was the right call after all.
Blood for Barter
Usually when I donate a pint I’m given coupons to crap places I never patronize (Applebee’s) but this time out I received something truly useful: a coupon for a free gallon of Friendly’s ice cream. Yes, it’s Friendly’s, but it’s ice cream. For blood. Which, if you know me, is the closing of some kind of cosmic circuit.
The deal is being offered throughout New England during July and August.
I’ve been racking my brain to think of what other bodily fluids a healthy, libidinous white male could exchange for frozen treats… Wait a minute! Does anybody know how to milk your own pancreas?
“Illegal Eggs Taste Amazing”
“Famously succulent” homemade summer sausage can only be had under the table in Toronto, reports Maclean’s, in a great quick article about locavore black markets in Canada:
The sausage is verboten because it’s made on the farm, and any kind of meat product must be prepared in a kitchen that adheres to provincial safety regulations, even if it uses meat slaughtered in a government-inspected facility.
The microbial risks taken by raw milk nuts are nothing compared to the legal risks faced by their suppliers.
The farmers who provide foodies with their fix are taking a risk. Last year, a man in eastern Ontario was fined $3,000 for selling un-graded eggs to restaurants. And the Saturday-morning farmer’s cows aren’t even part of the quota system. In Canada, dairy farmers must sell their milk through provincial marketing boards, not on the free market. If caught, she could face serious penalties.
A recent study found that $10 wine tastes better if the drinker thinks it’s $90 wine (”with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure”). The same phenomenon is probably at least partically responsible for raptures over illegal duck eggs and summer sausage. The price is only part of the cost, and an egg custard that might land you in the pokey is bound to be more delicious than a legit dessert make from supermarket eggs.
Still, I tried (legal) duck eggs last summer on Long Island, and (controlling as well as I can for my own neurological quirks) I think they they were legitimately above average in their sapidity. It’s shame Canadian farmers have to slip their best customers sausage on the sly.
Via Overlawyered
Screwed Leonard’s
Stew Leonard’s, a Connecticut-based grocery chain, is selling a parcel of property they bought with the intent to develop into a store — 13 years ago:
“I just put it on the market,” [Stew Leonard, Jr.] said Wednesday. “Why not see what happens? We want to leave all our options open. We’re not looking at opening anything in Connecticut.”
Instead, Leonard said, his focus is on opening new stores in New York and New Jersey, where the real estate market is booming.
Since 1996, the town of Orange, CT has been fighting Stew’s from opening the store, complaining it will bring increased crime, traffic, and infrastructure stress to the suburb. This despite the parcel being a cornfield adjacent to I-95, where customers could zoom off and on the highway without looting or flushing too many toilets while visiting, and despite Orange being full of such mom-and-pop stores like Lowe’s, Target, and Home Depot (I love Home Depot. They have everything — except the item you’re looking for). And also despite Stew Leonard’s being one of Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For eight years in a row or simply a great place to buy milk from local farms or coffee roasted right in the store.
So congratulations, town of Orange, CT. Your short-sightedness and buggering of local businesses and farms during an economic downturn is an inspiration to government everywhere. Hey! Want to be in charge of my health care?
Sweet ice cream o’ mine
Everyone has an ice cream of his or her youth: that one brand, that one store, that one local chain that defined ice cream for you. Sure , you probably ate what ever came out of the freezer case as well–and perhaps for you whatever came out of the freezer case is your totemic ice cream and that works too. In fact it probably works even better for you because you can have your frozen madeleine moment for a long, long time, whereas those of us who clove to local brands, or worse the single shop, could well never experience the like again.
The people of Oklahoma brandish the Braum’s. Philadelphians genuflect before Bassett’s. And the villagers of Valparaiso validate the Velvet. These are three stellar products, but even the Bassett’s blue and white container does not make my heart leap up as much as the leaping calf of Richman’s.
I’m not going to tell you Richman’s was the best ice cream ever. ( A friend of my brother’s once tasted the rum raisin and then politely inquired, “Is this county dry?” ) But it was pretty sensational. In the day, the ice cream was made behind the factory at the main store, sold at a couple of branches scattered throughout the near area, and in local stores. I remember once having a pitched debate with the Sibling over which was better homemade ice cream or Richman’s. I said homemade. He looked at me wide eyed and said earnestly. “Have you ever seen the upstairs at Richman’s?”
Richman’s is still sort of with us. The satellite stores closed, but the original store still operates though the factory behind it is apparently closed. The logo and brand seem to be owned by the Philadelphia Water Ice Company. I haven’t tasted it in years, but am reliably informed that the chocolate banana is still “pretty damn good.”
So what’s your totemic ice cream?
Better Booze in Virginia, At Last?
Liquor stores in Virginia are terrible (so bad they probably caused fellow Crispy blogger Jacob to flee the area!). They’re owned and operated by the commonwealth’s Department Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC), and if you’re looking for anything snootier or more unusual than Maker’s Mark, you’re probably SOL. The lighting is bleak. The clerks have all the enthusiasm for their product of middling DMV employees. (Come to think of it, DMV employees may actually be more enthusiastic about the work+hooch combo than ABC staff.) And the hours are inconvenient.
But serious Old Dominion boozehounds see a ray of hope in their tequila sunrises: Former state attorney general and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell proposed privatizing the whole mess in a press conference yesterday, conducted (seriously!) in a parking garage.
The idea is win-win. End 75 years of incompetent state alcohol sales management and the state gets a bunch of cash for transportation spending when it sells off the rights to run a private liquor store.
In case you’re waffling on whether this is a good idea, go spend 5 minutes on Virginia’s weirdly self-congratulatory booze biz website. Historic photos celebrate milestones. Like 1970, when the first lady clerk, Betty Wilson, was hired. Thank goodness government was running that rum, how would we have achieved gender equality otherwise? (Note: I think the guy in my local liquor store in nearby Alexandria is still wearing her coat.) Lady boozemongers were an innovation that appeared just a couple of years after Virginia started licensing sales of “liquor by the drink” in bars.
In its early history, Virginia ABC agents were also enforcers of anti-bootlegging and moonshining laws, allowing the government run stores to deal very effectively with private competition.
Warning: Lawsuits Give You Cancer
In honor of National Hot Dog month, the good people of the “Cancer Project” have launched a suit in Essex County New Jersey to get warning labels slapped on your Oscar Meyer wiener. I admire the group’s chutzpah as much as I deplore everything else about them. NJ courts are an excellent venue for this sort of absurd lawsuit because NJ courts are absurd, but there’s a certain flair in launching such a suit in what may be the natural habitat of the hot dog.
To the Moon and Beyond
Just in time to commemorate the moon landing,
Coca-Cola announces a better-than-expected second quarter profit. Forward, C.R. MacNamara!
Okay, so you guys may be the first to shoot a man to the moon, but if he wants a Coke on the way, you’ll have to come to us.
“If you can read, you can cook.”
My grandmother died this morning. If they looked at her medical statistics and what she ate, sanctimonious government types would pronounce themselves unsurprised and indeed would not-so-secretly be thinking with officious disapproval, “She asked for it.”
She was highly hypertensive (I once took her blood pressure. When I told her it was 170/125, she responded enthusiastically, “Oh, that’s GOOD! Isn’t it!) and her cholesterol was above 300. Her favorite four foods were salt, mayonnaise, cheese, and bacon. Whenever she ordered chicken salad, she asked for a side of mayonnaise because restaurants never used enough for her taste. Her spaghetti gravy is unreproducible because no one in the younger generations can bring themselves to use as much fat and salt as she did. I remember watching her taste it and say “That’s not quite right.” She went to the refrigerator, got out the bacon fat jar, and added a generous serving spoon of fat to the already quite fatted gravy–then it was up to spec.
She had no interest in the modern hydration fad and no truck with water. She drank a few cups of tea a day and the occasional libation.
No, sanctimonious health types would not be surprised by her death. I’m not surprised by her death either but for another reason: she was 107 and 3/4 years old.
Married the day after the Crash, Nana took up housekeeping during the Depression. “I didn’t know how to cook, ” she said. “I lived at home until I was married, and Mama did all of the cooking. The only thing I ever made was candy because I liked to eat it. But after I married, I had to learn to cook. It wasn’t hard: if you can read, you can cook.”
She was a very good reader. Her birthday cakes would embarrass many a wedding cake. Her teas were legendary. Her cannelloni remains unequaled. And her advice remains sound, “If you can read, you can cook.” And when something doesn’t taste quite right . . . it probably just needs some fat.
A Fossil Fuel We Can All Support
Beer made from 45 million year old yeast has a “complex and well-developed taste profile.” One would hope so!
The No Deer Hunter
Panic on the streets of Fairfield!
After a particularly contentious deer management meeting on Tuesday night at which animal rights activist Nancy Rice berated Commissioner Landon Storrs saying, “You’re evil, you’re a killer!” Storrs has decided to resign from the sub-committee saying, “I’m afraid of these people.”
Storrs told the Minuteman she filed a non-actionable complaint with the Town of Fairfield Police Department against Rice who she said threatened Storrs and another committee member, Joan Neiley, as they walked to their cars yelling, “You’ll be sorry for this!”
And your little dog too! Fairfield is experiencing problems with too many deer, having an estimated 75 per square mile where 10 to 15 will do. The subcommittee is considering a cull like that in nearby Greenwich a few years ago, which “took out 80 deer at a cost of $47,000 with the carcasses donated to a New York soup kitchen that processed the meat for free.”
Later there was a protest by the anti-hunting group Friends of Animals, led by the aforementioned Rice:
The protesters’ initial press release said they would march from Sherman Green to Old Town Hall, however, all but one protester got into their cars and drove the quarter-mile.
Take it from me: they were in SUVs.
Friday Food Song(s): Songs for Ice Cream Trucks
I grew up in the hinterlands. For very sound economic reasons, the hinterlands do not have ice cream trucks. I have never bought an ice cream from an ice cream truck. But even I know that the ice cream truck is an iconic part of American Society to which many people have a Pavlovian reaction. Upon hearing a tinny, chiming rendition of “Turkey in the Straw”, they leap drooling to attention and start fishing for change. This album is for them.
What inspired the composer? Find out here.
The Pause That Refreshes–A Links Roundup
Health care and financial markets are not enough. The Obamas are now going to lead us on the path of righteous eating, for the children of course.
A self-described libertarian anarchist hates Coke. Interesting. The ones I know enjoy capitalism. Is it because he’s English?
Speaking of capitalism and marketing, here’s an example of it modern style courtesy of Chipolte, providing you hefty calories with INTEGRITY.
Whether it’s from calories with integrity or those without, we’re fat. The world is getting fat. So let the modern hand wringing begin: Write a book!
People are too fat, but food still costs too much in the developing world. It’s not particularly cheap either in these cities.
An economist walks into a bar…
Time Magazine Calls NYC Nanny-State Laws the #2 Food Trend
While it is not a positive that NYC has instituted Nanny-State food rules, it IS a positive that Time Magazine calls them that.
After months of legal disputes, New York City in May began enforcing a law aimed at curbing obesity by requiring certain restaurants to post the calorie content of each menu item. It was a transparently snobby law: only chain outlets were affected. Philadelphia followed suit in November. But the Los Angeles City Council went several steps further in the war on fat. It banned any new fast-food restaurant from opening in certain L.A. neighborhoods for a full year. The council apparently felt that residents of those neighborhoods — residents who are disproportionately African-American and Latino — cannot decide for themselves what to consume.
This Week in Bacon
The latest bacon craze concoction is brought to you by bacon lovers Christian Williams and Melissa Tillman of San Mateo, California. The winners of the BaconCamp contest in San Francisco created Bacone, a breakfast treat that’s delicious – and easy – to eat. The Bacone consists of:
three strips of bacon deep fried to make a cone shape, filled with a mixture of scrambled eggs, hash browns and cheese, and topped with biscuits and country gravy.
The breakfast-food concoction not only won the judges’ choice award, but also landed Williams an appearance on the Food Network and Gourmet magazine featured him in a story about what it called the Gross Food Movement.
For complete instructions on how to make the Bacone, click here.
What a perfect messy breakfast for your morning commute! While there have been mixed reviews on the Bacone, the sweet and savory sounds pretty scrumptious to me.
