Gigabiting

     image courtesy of Culinary Cory
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Budget travel. Eco-tourism. Agri-tourism.

If you’re looking for the kind of relaxation that comes from sitting on a beach, this is not for you. If you take your rusticity in small, controlled doses then I suggest you look elsewhere.

If you would like to make a genuine connection with the food you eat, gain some practical skills, and immerse yourself in the culture of the sustainable food movement, this is your opportunity.

There are networks of small, mostly family-run farms throughout the U.S. and Europe that host volunteers in exchange for meals and accommodations. The expectation is typically 4 hours a day of farm work. The experiences are as varied as the farms. You can spend a week at a cheese cooperative in the south of France or the summer helping with a medicinal herb garden on a small resort island in Washington state. Accommodations range from rustic to sublime: you could be bunking in a hayloft or a hotel suite, with most arrangements falling somewhere in the middle on the comfort scale.

A number of agricultural associations and volunteer networks make it easy to find opportunities online.

The largest and most established of these is Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms known as WWOOF. In its 30th year, WWOOF has member chapters on every continent so that WWOOFers can string together volunteer opportunities that take them across regions and countries.

The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service and the New England Small Farm Institute are large clearinghouses for small farms throughout North America.

Help Exchange is strongest in Australia and New Zealand. It lists host organic and non-organic farms, plus work exchange opportunities for ranches, lodges, and ships.

GrowFood’s mission is the most explicitly educational. Many of the participating farms welcome children and offer weekend work exchange experiences. Currently GrowFood lists nearly 2,000 opportunities across the U.S.

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2009 was a very good year for food on film. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced the nominations for the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress for Julie & Julia, and Food, Inc. was among the nominees for Best Documentary Feature. Both are landmark developments: Julie & Julia because of the brilliant convergence of two iconic women, Meryl Streep and Julia Child; and Food, Inc. for bringing food consciousness to a new level in the U.S.

The nominations are bringing viewers and attention to these two worthy films, but there are many more recent food-related films that should not be overlooked.

The kitchen is small and cramped. Food prices are high. There are tons of ethnic dining options. The International Space Station sounds a lot like a New York City apartment.

It costs $40,000 a day to feed an astronaut.

It’s all about the delivery costs: more than $10,000 to blast a pound of food into outer space, with each astronaut allotted 3.8 pounds of food a day. And while it’s come a long way from the days of freeze-dried ice cream and squeeze tubes of baby food-like purees, there are some serious limitations to cooking in space. The refrigerator is tiny, food packets are heated in suitcase-like food warmers, and meals have to be velcroed onto trays so they won’t float away. Read entire article.

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There is an unsteady alliance when salt and sugar commingle.

It happens when the tastes are unblended and distinct; balanced in a dizzy dance on your tongue. Some of these couplings are legendary, like melon with prosciutto; some are classic, like french fries with ketchup; and some are questionable, like ‘Hawaiian’ pizza with pineapple and ham. Read entire article.

                         image courtesy of Serious Eats

The nation’s strictest menu labeling laws went into effect today in my hometown of Philadelphia.

It’s a small but significant victory. In all other cities where we have seen labeling laws, the restaurants have been able to limit the mandates to calorie labeling. Philadelphia’s law includes carbohydrates, sodium, saturated and trans fats. Read entire article.

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Today’s post was was going to be about chicken soup.

I had it all planned. I was going to show you a graph from the Centers for Disease Control illustrating the way the flu season peaks in the month of February. I had collected entertaining anecdotes about Jewish penicillin and a charming photograph of someone’s grandmother ladling it up from a steaming soup kettle. I had the results from a University of Nebraska Medical Center study documenting chicken soup’s ability to reduce neutrophils cells, which trigger the inflammatory responses that make cold sufferers feel so rotten.

Then  J.D. Salinger died. Read entire article.

image courtesy of Consumer Eroski
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In the world of geeky niches, Food Geeks are a little more socially-acceptable than Gamers and Gadget Nerds but not as cool as Music or Movie Geeks. At least according to Gizmodo’s Socially-Acceptable Geek Subgenre Scale Gallery. Food Geeks have a middling rank between top-of-the-heap Finance Geeks (Math Nerds turned cool… who’s getting a wedgie after calculus class now,  jocks?) and the bottom-dwelling human/animal fantasy-hybridists known as Furries.

Food Geeks should not be confused with Foodies

Foodies talk about past and future meals while eating the current one. They know the pedigree of the eggs they eat and Read entire article.

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The world’s most expensive ham went on sale last week.

The upscale UK department store Selfridges is offering the ham for sale in the food hall of their flagship London store. The leg of jamón ibérico de bellota weighs a bit over 15 pounds and is selling for $2,940.

What could possibly justify a price tag of nearly $200 per pound for a ham? Read entire article.

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This post is for anyone who has ever dreamed of owning an olive grove on a sun-drenched Tuscan hillside or a vineyard in the Loire Valley.

And this post goes out to all of you who prefer not to be up with the chickens, who hate dirt under your fingernails, and get queasy from the smells of tractor diesel and manure.

Why buy the farm when you can rent?

Growers and producers with a wide range of offerings will lease you a portion of their operation— for one growing cycle you can lay claim to your own beehive, apple tree, oyster bed, or row of grape vines, and then reap the benefits of the harvest. Read entire article.

Gadget Love

Do you get a little weak in the knees in a cookware store?                                                 If you’re like most of us, your love for kitchen gadgets knows no bounds. Cherry pitters and fondue pots, rice steamers and egg separators,  presses for garlic and sandwiches, grinders for coffee and spices— no gizmo is too esoteric or uni-tasking to lust after. Read entire article.

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“It is a matter of physics, a scientific fact that the human body reacts in very similar ways when anticipating food and sex. Capillaries swell, lips and membranes become engorged, saliva thickens and the pulse rises. It’s no accident that the two pleasures have become… confused.”

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Anthony Bourdain,  No Reservations

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What’s Your Food Porn Preference?

Fat or skinny. Exotic or plain. Enhanced or au naturel.

Food Porn and the x-rated variety make use of the same visual language and techniques, full of provocative camera angles, exaggerated features, and saturated colors. The subject matters differ, but they push our primal buttons in the same way. Read entire article.

Type ‘cooking’ into the YouTube search engine and you get 510,000 videos results. Granted, the number is dwarfed by the search results for ’sex’ or ‘Xbox’ or even ‘cats,’ but it’s still impressive. While there are plenty of quirky, niche, and gratuitously not-ready-for-prime-time submissions, the bulk of the YouTube cooking videos are charmingly entertaining and solidly instructive. Relax the production standards, take away the preening celebrity chefs, and you could be watching the Food Network. Read entire article.

      image courtesy of Pammy Shep

In a candy land of sugary, fruity, creamy, chocolatey, there’s black licorice: herbal, salty, medicinal, and barely sweetened.

Defiantly unapologetic, licorice has become a confectionary whipping boy. Read entire article.

Where do you look for culinary inspiration?

Online recipe collections are giving traditional cookbooks a run for the money. More and more of us are bypassing the cookbooks in our own collections and turning to cooking blogs and websites. The web has the advantage of immediacy, with an infinite number of recipes at your fingertips. And the web wins out in searchability; no back-of-the-cookbook index can rival the encyclopedic search terms of an online recipe database. Read entire article.

image courtesy of flickr

Remember 2007?

Unemployment was low and the Dow was high. We were mainlining energy drinks— $7 billion worth— just to keep up. If the party wasn’t stopping then neither were we.

These days, we’re all frazzled nerves. We’re looking to be soothed. We need something to bring us down from the ledge of our own anxiety. Read entire article.