Food « Tikkunista!

7. Food

Jan-20-2012 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: I stumbled on Yotam Ottolenghi while watching videos on Nowness’ website, and went to look at his Guardian recipe column. Wow! Exciting vegetarian recipes unlike any we’ve seen before: if you enjoy cooking and big flavours, don’t miss the link to those recipies. Slate questions why pepper is on all tables, and offers some alternatives for that non-salt shaker. And David Foster Wallace explores (in detail, with many footnotes) the morality of eating lobsters. The article, from Gourmet in 2004, might be better classified under “literature” than “food”, but hey….

* Ottolenghi: Love is the Right Word NOWNESS

Chef, restaurateur and best-selling cookbook scribe Yotam Ottolenghi touchingly shares his family-oriented outlook in photographer and filmmaker Ben Ingham’s intimate short. “We wanted to create a portrait of the way I live, the way I work; to give a picture of my life,” says the Israeli-born gastronome, who turned his back on a career in journalism to study at Le Cordon Bleu London at the age of thirty. Since opening in 2002, the chef’s eponymous eatery has gone from an upscale take-out joint in Notting Hill to a four-outpost culinary sensation, while his latest London spot, NOPI, has had gourmets lining up for its masterful viennoisierie and signature salads. Following the success of his recent vegetarian cookbook Plenty and a weekly column in The Guardian newspaper, Ottolenghi is now working on a new book focusing on the food of Jerusalem co-authored by Ottolenghi’s Palestinian head chef, Sami Tamimi. “We are trying to capture what’s going on there, both old and new, to translate the flavors of the place,” says Yotam

* Good set of Ottolenghi’s recipes here

* Against Pepper Slate

I’ve started to wonder why pepper gets such Cadillac placement on the American table, sitting beside the salt shaker at every coffee shop and kitchen counter in the country. Why, too, do so many recipes invite us to season “with salt and freshly ground black pepper” upon completion? Why isn’t it salt and cumin, or salt and coriander, with every dish in the Western canon? What’s so special about pepper anyway? Perhaps it’s time to rethink the spice.

Salt, of course, is a seasoning beyond question. When it’s well-used, salt manages to make food taste not salty, but more like itself. Almost everything we eat has some sodium in it, and we have receptors on our tongues devoted to the taste. The human need for salt is so innate that it’s only natural to adjust our dosage at the table.

But pepper? It can be terrific: It’s a great beef spice—a rib eye calls out for a rough crack of black pepper; Caesar salad needs a little of its musky prickle, to be sure; I like a spicy ginger cookie with a bit of the black stuff. But pepper isn’t particularly aromatic, and it can bulldoze over other flavors with its scene-stealing pungency. Even the pricy Telicherry kind, served from a footlong Peugeot grinder, is strong, invigorating, but also a little obtuse. Why should this brawny spice be kept on the countertop at all? Why not stash it in the rack with the fennel seed, the mustard seed, and the cinnamon—all the wonderful spices that add life to our food but are by no means all-purpose? I think we’d appreciate pepper’s qualities all the more if we used it just for specific dishes, not universally.

* Consider the Lobster David Foster Wallace Gourmet Magazine

Several irreproducible segues down the road from the PETA anecdotes, Dick—whose son-in-law happens to be a professional lobsterman and one of the Main Eating Tent’s regular suppliers—articulates what he and his family feel is the crucial mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue: “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.”

Besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about 11 different ways, the main reason Dick’s statement is interesting is that its thesis is more or less echoed by the Festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain, which is part of a Test Your Lobster IQ quiz that appears in the 2003 MLF program courtesy of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council: “The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.”

Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy…The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.

* New Timmies Sizes Montreal Gazette (photo)

6. Brave New Problems

Nov-11-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: The most recent report on CO2 is out, and it’s very bad, worse than scientists had dared to predict. Al Jazeera gives us the numbers, and Juan Cole gives us the implications. A UK company admits that fracking causes earthquakes, and it turns out that Genetically Modified food isn’t more efficient, unless you’re a Monsanto stockholder, of course.

* Global Carbon Dioxide Output Soaring Al Jazeera (Thanks Gabe)

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the US department of energy has calculated, in a sign of how weak the world’s efforts have been at slowing man-made global warming. The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
…The world pumped about 564 million more tonnes of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009, an increase of six per cent.

That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries – China, the US and India, the world’s top producers of greenhouse gases. It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.

*Godzilla Carbon Emissions in 2010 Unprecedented Juan Cole Informed Comment

The spike in carbon emissions in 2010, a 6% increase over 2009, was so humongous that the scientists measuring it initially thought that there must have been a mistake somewhere in the measurements. Tom Boden, head of the Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis …: “It’s big… Our data go back to 1751, even before the Industrial Revolution. Never before have we seen a 500-million-metric-ton carbon increase in a single year.” 512 million metric tons, to be precise. Well, if it hasn’t been done since 1751, it has never been done by human beings. The last time this happened was 55 to 40 million years ago, in the Eocene. When India went plowing into Asia and threw up the Himalayas, the impact heated up the crust and released massive amounts of carbon dioxide. That happened, likely, over a long period of time, but the effect was an increase in the average surface temperature of the earth of 4-5 degrees Celsius. Antarctica became a tropical jungle.

While the increase is disheartening, it isn’t surprising.

* Fracking Firm Admits It Caused Earthquakes in England Treehugger

When two small earthquakes struck near Blackpool, England in April and May, suspicious eyes turned toward the hydraulic fracturing operation in the area. In a move few expected, Cuadrilla Resources, admitted that its shale fracking operations were indeed responsible.

In a press release issued today, Cuadrilla explained the findings of an investigation of the tremors:

It is highly probable that the hydraulic fracturing of Cuadrilla’s Preese Hall-1 well did trigger a number of minor seismic events.

The seismic events were due to an unusual combination of geology at the well site coupled with the pressure exerted by water injection as part of operations.

…Cuadrilla insists that the event was extremely rare and unlikely to do any damage if it ever recurred. But whether or not it’s right, the fact that humans are causing earthquakes as well as global warming is likely to make the idea of fracking much less palatable. Despite Cuadrilla’s insistence that this is an isolated incident, a US Geological Survey report links 50 earthquakes to fracking operations throughout the United States.

* GM Crops Have Not Lived Up To Their Promises, Say NGOs The Hindu

Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of “superweeds,” according to a report by 20 Indian, southeast Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups representing millions of people.

The so-called miracle crops, which were first sold in the U.S. about 20 years ago and which are now grown in 29 countries on about 1.5bn hectares of land, have been billed as potential solutions to food crises, climate change and soil erosion, but the assessment finds that they have not lived up to their promises.

The report claims that hunger has reached “epic proportions” since the technology was developed. Besides this, only two GM “traits” have been developed on any significant scale, despite investments of tens of billions of dollars, and benefits such as drought resistance and salt tolerance have yet to materialise on any scale. used to control pests despite biotech companies’ justification that GM-engineered crops would reduce insecticide use.

8. Dangerously Close

Oct-14-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: How close is too close? We start with photos of situations in which you don’t want to be too close. Then there’s the Kerning Game! Try to drag letters in a word until they’re perfectly kerned, without too much or too little space between any of them. Hours of fun for the graphic designer in your life! Some countries don’t want you to get too close to certain foods, which is why they ban ketchup, marmite, and Kinder eggs. And should you get too close, we have an article about how virginity can be restored, at least enough to fool whoever was so concerned. And they don’t like that….

* The Charge of the MuskoxenEyewitness

* Bad Time To Go On The Trampoline

* Kern Type, The Kerning Game

* 10 Unusual Banned Foods Stylist Magazine

* Human Nature : The Beauty of Artificial VirginitySlate

Pause for a moment to consider what these men are asking God to protect them from: a cheap, mass-produced insert that releases fake blood. It’s the technical equivalent of a Halloween gag. But to them, this is no gag. It’s an offense against God. In this way, the artificial hymen serves as a useful test of religious idiocy. If a $30 item that leaks fake blood violates your faith so profoundly that you must ban it, then what you have isn’t really a faith. It’s a fetish.

9. Useful Comparisons

Oct-14-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Simple binary comparisons can be very revealing. Here are four memorable examples.

* The U.S. Now Uses More Corn for Fuel Than Food

Only about 20% of all the corn grown in the U.S. now goes to feed humans directly, and more than half of what remains is now being turned into ethanol fuel while the other half goes to feed livestock. The problem is that life-cycle studies show that corn ethanol ranges from barely better than fossil-fuel gasoline to significantly worse, especially if you take into account land use issues and the impact of higher food prices on the poor. Many would agree that corn ethanol is a net loss for society, yet this industry keeps growing.

* Twice as many Americans view Occupy Wall Street favorably than view Tea Party favorably Washington Post

Time released a new poll this morning finding that 54 percent view the Wall Street protests favorably, versus only 23 percent who think the opposite. Interestingly, only 23 percent say they don’t have an opinion, suggesting the protests have succeeded in punching through to the mainstream. Also: The most populist positions espoused by Occupy Wall Street — that the gap between rich and poor has grown too large; that taxes should be raised on the rich; that execs responsible for the meltdown should be prosecuted — all have strong support.

* Obese Now Outnumber Hungry Red Cross

Obese people now outnumber the hungry globally, but hardship for the undernourished is increasing amid a growing food crisis, the International Federation of the Red Cross warned Thursday….In statistics used to underline the unequal access to food, the IFRC stressed there were 1.5 billion people suffering obesity worldwide last year, while 925 million were undernourished.

* Consumers Now Owe More On Their Student Loans Than Their Credit Cards.

7. Food Titbits

Sep-23-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Cracked has some impressively good facts buried in its special mix of clever vitriol and banal numbered points. The Oatmeal is chewy-good as it reveals things you’ve never known about coffee (it all started with dancing goats, for one). And “best” meals means most memorable… so have some guesses. A starting hint: Charlie Chaplin, Gold Rush, shoe.

* The 6 Most Horrifying Lies The Food Industry is Feeding You Cracked.com

Everything is better with blueberries — that’s why they put them in so many foods. Now that we think of it, there sure seems to be a lot of blueberries in a lot of products. You’d think we’d see more blueberry fields around … not that it would do any good, as the number of blueberries you’ve eaten within the last year that have actually come from such a field is likely pretty close to zero.

Studies of products that supposedly contain blueberries indicate that many of them didn’t originate in nature. All those dangly and chewy and juicy bits of berry are completely artificial, made with different combinations of corn syrup and a little chemist’s set worth of food colorings and other chemicals with a whole bunch of numbers and letters in their names.

* 15 Things Worth Knowing About Coffee – The Oatmeal

* The 10 Best Meals In The Movies The Observer

9. Weird Net Stuff

Jun-10-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Sometimes while trawling the net, we find things that are too strange not to pass on, but that don’t fit into any category. And that’s what these all have in common. Go figure.

* The Denny’s Bacon Cam

* The Customer Is Not Always Right

(A guest picks up the house phone in the hallway. The call goes directly to the front desk.)

Me: “Front desk, how may I help you?”

Guest: *confused and disappointed* “Oh. The sign said ‘house phone’. I thought it would…um…call my house.”

Me: *seriously dumbfounded*

Guest: “I guess not.” *click*

* Captain Jack Sparrow was Muslim Reddit

* How Does Tikkunista Find All These Things?

4. Food Shortages

Feb-11-2011 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: We look at the famine in Pakistan that follows the floods. But while it’s a critical situation, there are massive food shortages all over the world as a result of extreme weather, and we look at what might be causing that. And we wind up with a clear and concise graphic story about the sad fate of Olive, the other reindeer. Just might be an allegory….

* Pakistan flood crisis as bad as African famines, UN says The Guardian

A “humanitarian crisis of epic proportions” is unfolding in flood-hit areas of southern Pakistan where malnutrition rates rival those of African countries affected by famine, according to the United Nations.

In Sindh province, where some villages are still under water six months after the floods, almost one quarter of children under five are malnourished while 6% are severely underfed, a Floods Assessment Needs survey has found.

* Droughts, Floods and Food New York Times (Thanks, Dave!)

We’re in the midst of a global food crisis — the second in three years. World food prices hit a record in January, driven by huge increases in the prices of wheat, corn, sugar and oils….Consider the case of wheat, whose price has almost doubled since the summer. The immediate cause of the wheat price spike is obvious: world production is down sharply. The bulk of that production decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, reflects a sharp plunge in the former Soviet Union. And we know what that’s about: a record heat wave and drought, which pushed Moscow temperatures above 100 degrees for the first time ever.

The Russian heat wave was only one of many recent extreme weather events, from dry weather in Brazil to biblical-proportion flooding in Australia, that have damaged world food production.The question then becomes, what’s behind all this extreme weather?

* St Matthew’s Island (Click to enbigify)

9. The Past is a Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There

Nov-05-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: L.P. Hartley wrote this section’s title, and he’s right. Trip back to early typewriters, to early exercise machines, and to the food ads of the 1950s… who knew you could do so much with Spam, besides deleting it from your inbox?

* Hansen’s Writing Ball & Other Unusual Typewriters Dark Roasted Blend

* Vintage Exercise Machines

* Vintage (Mostly Food) Ads

6. Hits and Myths

Oct-29-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Senator Patrick Moynihan used to say “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts.” Three articles that all attempt to dispel myths, ranging from serious to light.

* Top Ten Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Myth #1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region.

Although Arabs were a majority in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel, there had always been a Jewish population, as well. For the most part, Jewish Palestinians got along with their Arab neighbors. This began to change with the onset of the Zionist movement, because the Zionists rejected the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and wanted Palestine for their own, to create a “Jewish State” in a region where Arabs were the majority and owned most of the land.

* Nine Myths about Socialism in the US Bill Quigley | ZSpace

Myth #1. The US government is involved in class warfare attacking the rich to lift up the poor.

There is a class war going on all right. But it is the rich against the rest of us and the rich are winning. The gap between the rich and everyone else is wider in the US than any of the 30 other countries surveyed. In fact, the top 10% in the US have a higher annual income than any other country. And the poorest 10% in the US are below the average of the other OECD countries. The rich in the U.S. have been rapidly leaving the middle class and poor behind since the 1980s.

Myth #2. The US already has the greatest health care system in the world.

Infant mortality in the US is 4th worst among OECD countries – better only than Mexico, Turkey and the Slovak Republic.* The Food Lab’s Top 6 Food Myths Serious Eats

5. Pasta Must Be Cooked in Massive Amounts of Boiling Water

With dried pasta, as long as the pasta is completely covered in water, it’ll cook just fine. People cite the fact that a large pot of water will lose less heat than a small pot of water when you add pasta to it, but this is in fact not true. There is a difference between heat (energy) and temperature (a value based on how much energy a given amount of a given substance holds).

9. Harmonious Movements

Oct-15-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: Three glorious short videos showing people moving together: a youtube montage fades dancers from 40 classic film and video sequences into one another; two hand-dancers perform We No Speak Americano; and two kitchen workers in India make parathas. Mind = blown.

* Dancing at the Movies Youtube

* We No Speak Americano Youtube

* Perfect Catch The Presurfer

7. All the Food that’s Fit to Swallow

Oct-01-2010 | Comments (0)

Bird’s Eye: If the politics of food were listed on the stock market, it would be a good buy. As global warming diminishes food stocks, the arguments about morality of what we eat get closer to the bone, or the stalk, depending on your taste. This week George Monbiot eats crow and recants on veganism, Bill Clinton switches to plants for protein, and a lunatic provocative article suggests the only moral solution is to kill all the carnivores. But Super-Salmon is coming, whether he’ll save the day or not. Read on, for a further helping of what Leonard Cohen called, “the homicidal bitchin’ / that goes down in every kitchen / to determine who will serve and who will eat. ”

* Monbiot Eats Crow The Guardian

This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case.

In the Guardian in 2002 I discussed the sharp rise in the number of the world’s livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition. After reviewing the figures, I concluded that veganism “is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue”. I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque. So does the book I’m about to discuss. I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.

* I Went On Essentially A Plant-Based Diet. Bill Clinton

I went on essentially a plant-based diet. I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit. I drink a protein supplement every morning—no dairy—I drink almond milk mixed in with fruit and a protein powder so I get the protein for the day when I start the day up. And it changed my whole metabolism and I lost 24 pounds and I got back to basically what I weighed in high school.

* Should We Kill Off the Carnivores? The Atlantic Wire

Even hard-core vegans might balk at McMahan’s argument that not only should humans stop eating animals, but we should do what we can to keep carnivorous animals from eating animals. Even, he says, if that means “arrang[ing] the gradual extinction of carnivorous species, replacing them with new herbivorous ones.”

* GM Food Battle Moves To Fish As Super-Salmon Nears US Approval The Observer

So what is to be done to satisfy the world’s seemingly insatiable appetite for fish? An appetite that will see the consumption of farmed fish outpace global beef consumption by nearly 10% within five years, according to the UN? AquaBounty, whose shares are sold on London’s Alternative Investment Market, thinks it has the answer. And if, as looks increasingly likely, the US government agrees, the implications for global food production will be enormous. Welcome to the new world heralded by the “GM salmon”. The company’s dream of selling genetically modified salmon eggs that allow the fish to grow to maturity in half the normal time received a giant fillip last week when it announced that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was close to granting approval.

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