Archives for February 2010
Cities Demand Suds on the Sabbath
The mayors of the three largest cities in Connecticut who want to revoke the state-wide ban on Sunday alcohol sales are facing opposition — but not from moralizing politicians or teetotalers:
The group that would sell most of that alcohol, the Connecticut Package Stores Association, has blocked Sunday sales multiple times during the past five years in one of the most heavily lobbied issues at the Capitol. The association says the extra day would not mean any extra money for the state or the stores because it would simply spread existing sales over seven days instead of six — while adding an extra day of operating costs.
Geographically, all three cities — Bridgeport, Hartford, and New Haven — are located far from the border. The mayors hope repeal will stop Sunday six-pack runs across state lines, with the resulting tax revenue trickling back to them. Failing that, the mayors say they’ll seek exceptions for their cities. I have to wonder if that isn’t their true goal: the cities would become wet islands, attracting folks from satellite towns. The mayors could then enact local taxes on the sales without having to wait for the money to first filter through the capital.
Is Salt the Devil Incarnate?
John Tierney of the NY Times has a great article today about the salt debate. The question at issue is whether the salt debate has merit or is another government inititiative that has unintended consequences, such as the food industry’s work on creating artificial salt. The debate is is being waged most fiercely in NYC, as Bloomberg and that city’s Orwellian named Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is taking on salt.
The harder the experts try to save Americans, the fatter we get. We followed their admirable advice to quit smoking, and by some estimates we gained 15 pounds apiece afterward. The extra weight was certainly a worthwhile trade-off for longer life and better health, but with success came a new challenge.
Officials responded by advising Americans to shun fat, which became the official villain of the national dietary guidelines during the 1980s and 1990s. The anti-fat campaign definitely made an impact on the marketing of food, but as we gobbled up all the new low-fat products, we kept getting fatter. Eventually, in 2000, the experts revised the dietary guidelines and conceded that their anti-fat advice may have contributed to diabetes and obesity by unintentionally encouraging Americans to eat more calories.
That fiasco hasn’t dampened the reformers’ enthusiasm, to judge from the growing campaign to impose salt restrictions. Pointing to evidence that a salt-restricted diet causes some people’s blood pressure to drop, the reformers extrapolate that tens of thousands of lives would be saved if there were less salt in everybody’s food.
Cut Your Dogs in Half and Your Grapes in Quarters
The American Academy of Pediatrics is calling for the labeling of foods that kids might choke on. CNN phones in a perfect uncritical, generic scare-story-plus-call-for-regulation:
It’s a silent, often overlooked danger that kills dozens of children every year, and it’s easily preventable: choking to death on food.
Now the largest pediatrician group in the United States is calling for warning labels on foods that pose the highest risk for choking.
The American Academy of Pediatrics estimates at least one child in the United States dies every five days from choking on food. The academy rates choking as the leading cause of death among children 14 and younger.
The group is issuing a new policy statement calling on the government and manufacturers to implement a food labeling system warning parents of these risks.
“This is a call to action,” said Dr. Gary Smith, a pediatrician and immediate past chairman of the Committee on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Also, the nation’s largest pediatric care group announces that it would like to see someone invent a choke-proof hot dog. (Reason.com and Reason.tv editor Nick Gillespie asks: “Isn’t that just baloney?”)
Until the regulatory state can grind into action, however, the pediatricians have some tips:
• Cut hot dogs lengthwise and grapes in quarters. This changes the dangerous shape of the food, which can block throats of young children and even teenagers.
• Avoid giving toddlers other high-risk foods such as hard candy, nuts, seeds and raw carrots.
Oh yeah, America’s teens are going to love it when their moms start cutting their grapes into quarters at restaurants.
Fat Kids, Skinny Kids
Meet Lucy. She’s five years old. And at 3′ 9″ and 51 lbs., she’s the new face of obesity in England.
Maybe poor Lucy should go on the Kelly Osborne sleepytime apple diet. (Since “an apple… has no carbs and no sugar in it”.)
Quick Bites
Four people die during Jamie Oliver’s TED Award acceptance speech (honest!). Was it the fact that he paced around the stage like a frenetic Frankenstein, or that his cadence often devolved into something you might see at an especially bad poetry slam? [TED Blog]
The Cal State Fullerton Daily Titan editorial board writes like they’ve been eating too much seitan. There’s “no possible way” they’d write something this dumb about the Olympics and food sponsors if they were eating better food. Like McDonald’s. [Daily Titan]
A public school teacher is braving a school year of cafeteria food and blogging it. [Fed Up with School Lunch, via Mark Bittman's Twitter feed]
The excellent HumaneWatch, keeping an eye on the very non-excellent Humane Society of the United States, debuted yesterday. [HumaneWatch]
Nice profile of D’Artagnan head Ariane Daguin. [NJ.com]
Restaurant freeloaders eat up. Then they screw the restaurant. [The Big Money, via The Food Economy Twitter feed.]
Chefs to Host Terrible Television Program, Great Radio Segment
If you’re like me, you love learning about diners, drive-ins, and dives, but hate having to listen to Guy Fieri for thirty minutes. Well now he’s hosting another show, although this time, about something significantly less interesting than food. Fieri will be hosting an NBC game show called Minute to Win It, where people perform stupid and mindless tasks in under a minute in an attempt to win $100,000. See below.
In other chef-turned-host news, famed chefs Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert will be doing a five-week long segment on Martha Stewart’s XM radio show:
Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert: Turn & Burn will launch on Thursday, February 18 and will air from 7:00-8:00 pm ET every Thursday through March 18, on Martha Stewart Living Radio, SIRIUS channel 112, and XM channel 157, as part of “The Best of SIRIUS package.”
During the show, Bourdain and Ripert will stir up discussions on everything from food ethics to food in the media, celebrity chefs, at-home cooks, vegetarianism, and sustainability. The two will also welcome special guests, including acclaimed chef/restaurateur Mario Batali, who will be live in studio on February 18 at 7:00 pm ET for Turn & Burn’s premiere.
Now THERE are two chefs I wouldn’t mind listening to every week.
An Expose on Just How Awful the US School Lunch Program Is
The US government pays massive dollars to schools to help them provide meals to children in public schools. Federal payments — including $2.68 for each fully reimbursable lunch — total around $12 billion annually and feed roughly 30 million children every day, according to the USDA. That covers about half the cost of food service. Local governments pick up the rest.
Michelle Obama is making fighting obesity her FLOTUS statement and Mary Cheh of the DC Council shepherded in legislation that ostensibly brought healthy foods to the DC Schools menu.
But Ed Bruske of the Wa Post spent a week in a DC school cafeteria and shows that government involvement in school food is nothing but harmful.
When she took office in 2007, the District’s schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, opted to privatize food operations. “The mayor and I want to introduce students to a variety of foods to help train their palates to choose healthier foods for the rest of their lives,” Rhee said. The “fresh cooked” initiative was included in the city’s contract with Chartwells.
But from what I observed during my week in the kitchen at H.D. Cooke, “fresh cooked” does not mean “from scratch” or even “fresh ingredients.” Most meals are made from processed foods that have been precooked and frozen. They’re simply heated in the steamer or in a convection oven, since one of the things missing in the school’s tricked-out kitchen is a stove. Meal components have been designed to require minimal time and skill to prepare. It’s all part of an effort to squeeze school meals into tight local food budgets that hinge on federal subsidies.
Freshness and flavor are the first casualties. Fat is replaced with sugar as a go-to calorie booster. One of the most startling images from lunchtime at H.D. Cooke was the mad rush around the cooler where chocolate- and strawberry-flavored milk is stored. Sodas have not been served in D.C. public schools since 2006, but the dairy products served rival soft drinks for sugar content.
I am going to go out on a limb here and aver that the non-subsidized Catholic school lunch program that I experienced as a child was far superior to having kids eat processed macaroni with meat bits for lunch. Our lunch program served only sandwiches and half-pints of skim milk. That looks incredibly healthy compared to what the DCPS is offering. But it would not meet the standards of the US, which mandates “hot meals” for lunch. Ergo the awful and unhealthy lunches that are served. Let’s go back to simple sandwiches.
Fussin’ Over Hugo Chavez and His Plans to Starve His People
Venezuelan tyrant Hugo Chavez, after having shuttered and expropriated a private grocer, last week launched a socialist grocery chain in its stead. From the pro-Chavez voices at Venezuela Analysis:
Over the weekend Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez inaugurated some of the new government run hypermarkets which are taking the place of the recently nationalised Exito hypermarket chain, announced the possibility of buying 80% of another, related, supermarket chain, ordered Venezuelan food company Polar to move its storage buildings out of Caracas, and announced a new commerce minister.
On Saturday president Chavez inaugurated one “Bicentenary” hypermarket, or large supermarket, as it opened its doors in Barquisimeto, Lara state. The new hypermarket is one of six new ones around the country…
In mid January this year the government expropriated the Exito hypermarket chain, due to selling out of date goods and their speculation and price changes following the devaluation of the bolivar. The government then incorporated the stores into the Corporation of Socialist Markets (COMERSO), a publicly owned network of subsidised supermarkets and food stores.
At the inauguration, Chavez said that products previously obtained by the old Exito hypermarket, “when speculation reigned in that shop”, could now be sold for up to five times less, for “fair prices”….
“The oligarchy tried to create a scandal over the expropriation of this hypermarket…but the real outrage is what they were committing against their workers and the people. Further, they tried to create a fuss at the world level, that didn’t come to anything,” Chavez said.
More here.
OK. Um, Hugo. Fuss. Fuss right here. Lots of fuss. Fuss!!!!
The new chain is merely part of Chavez’s larger nationalization scheme, one that has seen him steal private businesses from private owners and then drive them into the ground with his especially inept brand of central planning. This isn’t the only grocer that will fall, either. Chavez is currently planning to expropriate a French chain, though he notes that “expropriation will be a friendly agreement.” (Perhaps Chavez will order the French to eat cheese and smile while he takes their shop, for which Chavez will naturally set the purchase price.)
While the oil-rich nation is beset with a crippling energy crisis–largely due to Chavez’s nationalization of the energy sector–that has sapped the country of electricity, Chavez sticks his tongue out at the populace by playing beisbol under the lights while regular Venezuelans sit in the dark under rolling blackouts, and hires a Cuban “expert” to fix the energy crisis (which is about as sensible as hiring an egg to guard the henhouse).
As with most of what Chavez does, this situation would be funny were it not so tragironic. I still remember seeing the limited choices and almost-bare shelves of Moscow’s grocers in 1987. Sure, they had good prices. But socialism didn’t produce food, so the low price of a loaf of bread–while important–was more than countered by the fact that said loaf of bread didn’t actually exist. What this said to me was more than anything any critic of socialism or communism could ever put into words, and has stuck with me since.
The only solace I take is that Chavez’s grip on power seems more tenuous than it has been since he was ousted several years ago in a short-lived coup. And then there’s this theory: Fuck with people’s livelihood and chances are you’ll eventually get burnt. Fuck with people’s food and chances are you’re not long for this world.
More from Crispy on Chavez’s food follies here.
Quick Bites
New Mexico residents protest state senate’s “tortilla tax.” [KRQE]
LA held its “‘first annual’ LA Street Food Fest” on Saturday. [LAT]
Michelle Obama vows to take on obesity. Billions in unsuccessful programs and increase in obesity rate inevitably to follow. [Telegraph]
The loathsome Jamie Oliver wins a TED prize and hopes it will unlock the back door to the White House, so that he can help Michelle Obama draw up said programs. [Hello]
Romania mulls a tax on so-called junk foods. [AFP]
Mark Bittman mulls a tax on soda. [NYT]
Man wins lottery, celebrates with bacon. [Daily Mail]
Mr. Spriggs BBQ So Smooth It Will Impregnate You
This Week in Bacon
Apparently Canadians are just as passionate about bacon as Argentinians (see fellow Crispy blogger Jessica’s post below). Here are some of the results from a survey of 1,006 Canadians, commissioned by Maple Leaf Foods (which, shockingly, packages and sells bacon):
Nearly one in four respondents (23 per cent) from Manitoba and Saskatchewan have wondered if “my partner loves bacon more than me;”
Asked to rank aromas (vanilla, spice, floral, musk) by preference, 23 per cent of men rated bacon No. 1;
Four out of five respondents (82 per cent) who said they love bacon also said they’re good lovers.
And perhaps most shockingly, 43% of Canadians say they “love bacon more than sex.” So this Valentine’s Day, forget the chocolate, candy, flowers, J. Crew Sweaters, and jewelry. Get your significant other something s/he will really appreciate – BACON. And here’s a suggestion for that extra special present for your extra special loved one: The Wine and Cheese Place’s Bacon Basket (includes “Bakon Vodka, Bacon Chocolate Bars, Bacon Bandages, Bacon Soap, Bacon Gummy Strips, Bacon Air Freshner and of course BACON”).
Fresh! Local! Sustainable! Risible!
Daily Mail columnist John Carvel goes gaga over Hampshire, an English countryside village he claims is
well on the way to becoming the first in England to defy the power of the supermarkets by achieving communal self-sufficiency in food.
[...]
Nick Snelgar, who earns a living from growing herbs and shrubs near his home in Martin… organised a meeting in the village social club in 2003, and from it came the nucleus of enthusiasts who have organised the producer co-operative that is now feeding most of Martin’s residents.
What does the village’s self-sufficiency look like? Funny but it’s not a very self-sufficient self-sufficiency.
First, only “60% of the households in Martin use the co-op to supply at least some of their food.” (emphasis mine) 60% of people occasionally buying some items at a particular place is more a norm than a revolution.
Second, 126 of the village’s 164 households have paid five quid to join the co-op. That’s a pretty high percentage (76%), true, but it shows that even by a conservative estimate, 40% of the village’s households, and 21% of the co-op’s own members, don’t even shop there at all.
Third, and to Sneglar’s credit, even the co-op auteur doesn’t see the sense in getting rid of supermarkets.
I don’t want to kill off supermarkets. They should continue to do what they do best: provide toilet rolls and manufactured products that do not deteriorate when transported.
Like canned foods. And Triscuits. And frozen fish. You know, foods the supermarket carries.
Argentinian President: Pork Rises to the Occasion more than Viagra Does
To build on fellow poster Kim’s claim that pork is the meat of Kings, The President of Argentina has chimed in to agree.
Actually, Ms. Fernandez de Kirchner went further, arguing that pork assists in other ways.
According to CBSNews she said that she hadn’t known pork improved sexual activity, but she had a very good time after having pork with her husband, former President Nestor Krichner. “It is much more gratifying to eat some grilled pork than take Viagra,” she said.
Pork: It’s the Meat of Kings!
Here’s a little gem that was forwarded to me by a friend and fellow bacon-lover. It’s a nice little video (and catchy too) to start off your morning — be careful, it plays on loop, so you will probably need to shut it off after 30 or 40 seconds so you don’t annoy your co-workers . . . or yourself.
Prepare yourself for a GREAT day: Swine Tastes Fine (sorry, can’t embed the video).
Quick Bites
Groundhog makes a fine bologna. “There was a guy in St. Thomas who would go out and make bologna out of different animals. He made groundhog bologna, beaver bologna, crow bologna, everything.” [Chambersburg Public Opinion]
Russian fans throw bagels at adultshamble Pete Doherty. [Celebuzz]
Thai taxi driver suspected of launching bags of poo “and putrid fermented fish into the compound of Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s residence.” The poo I get, but according to the article “fermented fish [is]… a northeastern food speciality.” [Thai News Agency]
Checkout clerk at British supermarket giant Tesco demands ID from woman buying cheese-and-onion quiche. [Daily Mail]
What do you get when you cross bingo, a Vodka Stinger, and a c**t? Cops come a’calling. [Village Voice]
National Pancake Day returns February 23. [IHOP]
