Should You Be Buying Your Groceries Online?

Janice | May 16, 2012 - 12:10 pm


Clicks or Bricks: which is cheaper, easier, greener?

Who wouldn’t want to cut out all those trips to the supermarket?
Hopefully you’ve already cut way back, with a larger portion of your food coming from farmers markets and other local sources, but you just can’t get everything. There will always be a need for the cans and bottle, cleaning supplies and paper goods that large chain stores offer cheaper and with better selection. We are still left with that most detestable of all household errands—the trip to the supermarket.

It’s misery from start to finish: the parking space in the next county, the shopping cart with a cranky wheel, the checkout line that inches along, and finally the multiple trips from car to kitchen hauling all those grocery bags. What if you could eliminate that dreaded chore AND reduce your environmental impact?

A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Green Design Institute concluded that online purchases with home delivery can result in 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions than traditional shopping. Approximately 65 percent of total emissions generated by the traditional retail model comes from driving your own car to and from the store. Even though a huge, fuel-burning truck will be bringing the groceries to you, the incremental energy consumption and emissions created by one more shopping order and one more delivery stop added to the truck’s route is less significant than if you make the drive yourself.

There are also logistical differences in the supply chain that can lessen the environmental impact of online shopping. Traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers generally have items shipped from manufacturers to distributors to regional warehouses, where they are then redistributed to individual store locations. Online sellers can streamline the process. They usually eliminate at least one tier of regional warehousing, and some can even skip a few steps by relying on distribution partners to ship directly shipping to customer homes. This cuts back not just on the transportation of products, but also the bundled packaging and packing materials needed along the way.

Try it; you’ll like it.
Online grocery purchases are still at a miniscule 2% of overall sales, thriving in just a few urban niche markets. But those users are hooked. Among shoppers who tried out online shopping over the past year, 43% have become regular, weekly online customers and 12% are now monthly shoppers.

Here come the game-changers.
We’ve grown comfortable with online shopping, the modems are a lot faster, and gas prices are hovering around $4.00  a gallon. Walmart, already the nation’s biggest grocer, is experimenting with a new online service called Walmart To Go, while Amazon, the king of online retailers, has big plans for a national roll-out of its own service, AmazonFresh. There are plenty of alternatives for the Walmart averse— SOS eMarketing lists 50 online grocers including ethnic, regional, and specialty retailers, and we now have the nation’s first USDA-certified organic online grocer.

For the little things on your list…
We all know about the wasteful gas-guzzling miles spent on last minute trips for a few items. For that desperately needed quart of milk or bag of Milanos, we can look to an Italian crowd-sourcing experiment called Milk, Please!. The app lets a user send a shopping request to Milk, Please!, which is accessible online, via smartphones, and at supermarket kiosks. Someone who is planning a shopping trip or is already at the store can view the request and add the items to their own shopping list. They then drop the item off on their way home, and Milk, Please! handles the payment and reimbursement. Massachusetts-based Neighbor Favor is trying a similar tip-based service harnessing the abundant idle time and energy of college students.

Posted in home delivery, shopping, sustainability | Leave a comment

Intermarriage and the Price of Skirt Steak

Janice | May 15, 2012 - 2:42 pm

image via Meat Sections

 

One in seven marriages in the United States is between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another.
That was the big news earlier this year when the Pew Research Center released its Social and Demographic Trends Report, a giant, once-a-decade, number-crunching project based on data from the 2010 U.S. Census. Of course anyone who’s shopped for skirt steak already knew this.

All those multicultural households means that more than a third of Americans can claim a family member, by marriage, of a different ethnicity or race. More and more Americans are sharing the cultures, customs, and especially the cuisines of a variety of racial and ethnic traditions. According to the Mintel marketing group, in a given month 63% of American households will have cooked Mexican food, 46% have cooked Chinese, and another 29% are fusion cooks. And a lot of those households seem to be cooking skirt steak.

For years, skirt steak lived in relative obscurity, ignored by America’s traditional home cooks. It’s a humble and homely cut that’s positioned on a cow between the flank and the brisket, and it basically acts like a girdle holding in those other belly parts. It’s coarsely-grained and chewy, but long marinating, quick cooking, and thin slicing reveals its distinctly juicy, decidedly tasty charms.

Until the 1980′s, skirt steak was priced below ground beef, and still butchers couldn’t give it away. Too tough and tendon-y to grind up for hamburger, most skirt steak ended up as dog food.

Then fajitas happened.
And Chinese stir-fries, Japanese negimaki, Korean bulgogi, and Brazilian churrasco. This flavorful, marbled steak proved to be the ideal cut for a multitude of robust, ethnic preparations. Its popularity skyrocketed,  fueled by the surging multiculturalism. Today the skirt steak is the second most expensive cut of beef at the wholesale level, with only the tenderloin costing more. It’s worth every penny.

Learn the ins and outs of shopping, prepping, cooking, and serving this (now) all-American cut:
Serious Eats has a skirt steak how-to guide (sponsored by the Texas Beef Council), and you’ll find more recipes and tips at The Art of Manliness.

 

Posted in cooking, food trends, home | Leave a comment

Shameless Act of Product Placement: James Bond Will Drink Heineken

Janice | May 14, 2012 - 1:31 pm

Everyone’s got their price. Apparently James Bond’s is $45 million.
That’s the rumored value of the marketing deal with Heineken that turns Daniel Craig’s James Bond into a beer guy.

Vodka martinis have always been James Bond’s signature drink. Ian Fleming assigned very specific traits and idiosyncrasies to Bond that are emblematic of the style and sophistication of the character he created. Along with 007′s choice of martinis, famously served “shaken, but not stirred,” there’s his gambling (baccarat), guns (Beretta 418 or Walther PPK), attire (dinner jackets and Saville Row suits), and car (Aston Martin). In Skyfall, the next big-screen installment, the suave, lady-killing British spy will swap his cocktail shaker for a can opener.

There’s nothing new about food and beverage product placement in movies and television shows. The origins of the practice go back to 1935′s Curly Top; that’s right, Shirley Temple was shilling for Nabisco when she sang ‘Animal Crackers in my Soup.’

Product placement is inescapable in contemporary entertainment. Every scene is a potential merchandising opportunity. A sitcom family’s got to eat, so why not have them eat a sponsored product? A marketer will pay a fee for its cereal box or soda to show up on the kitchen counter; more if it’s in the foreground; less if it’s only seen in profile. If you see “products provided by…” or “promotional consideration given to…” in the closing credits, you can bet that money changed hands.

Technology has even given rise to the virtual product placement. A different sponsor can be tapped when a movie hits the rental market or a television show is seen in syndication. The Friends gang never ate Oreos in its broadcast seasons, but you’ll find them on Monica’s kitchen table in reruns, and a 2006 episode of  How I Met Your Mother now shows the lead characters walking past a movie poster for the 2011 film Bad Teacher.

At its best, product placement feels like a natural extension of the character and plot line. At its worst, you get Agent 007 chugging a brewski.

Product placement is everywhere. Educate yourself at Product Placement News.

 

Posted in Entertainment, food business | Leave a comment

Obama, Clooney & You: Menu Revealed

Janice | May 11, 2012 - 10:17 am

The event was officially known as Obama, Clooney & You. It was alternatively dubbed Starmageddon.
I don’t know about you, but this is what Obama and Clooney had for dinner:

artichoke salad
roasted duckling ‘Peking style’ with tiny steamed buns.
lamb and beef cheek duo, potatoes and brussels sprouts
sweet corn tortelloni

The setting was a party tent set on the basketball court at George’s Hollywood Hills house. Los Angeles-based celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck did the cooking.
The guest list included actors and entertainers (Tobey Maguire, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Salma Hayek, Barbra Streisand); studio executives and other Hollywood heavyweights; Southern California’s wealthiest presidential supporters ($40,000 a plate); plus a few small potatoes supporters (a New Jersey science teacher and a Florida utility company worker) chosen sweepstakes-style from a list of $3 and up contributors.

There’s still time to enter the next sweepstakes for your own dinner with the President.

Posted in diversions, Entertainment | Leave a comment

The Cone is Always King but Ice Cream Sandwiches are the Trendier Choice

Janice | May 10, 2012 - 12:33 pm

still life with ice cream sandwich by Oriana Kacicek

 

It’s shaping up as the summer of the ice cream sandwich.
We’ve seen it before with cupcakes, whoopie pies, and donuts. Now ice cream sandwiches are the latest humble, familiar snack to get the upscale treatment.

The classic slab of vanilla between chocolate cookies is merely a jumping off point. How about lemon cookies filled with honey-lavender ice cream,  strawberry-rose petal ice cream between two almond French-style macaroons, or brown butter-candied bacon ice cream within butterscotch cookies? Flavor combinations are limited by nothing more than the creator’s imagination and the eater’s willingness (Pekin duck sandwiched between oatmeal cookies, anyone?). Any baked good, sweet or savory, is fair game. We’ve seen red velvet cake, Rice Krispie Treats, delicate tuille cookies, toasted brioche, and waffles.

No conversation about contemporary ice cream sandwiches is complete without a shout-out to CoolHaus.
Founded in 2009 as a Barbie-pink tricked-out postal truck, it roves the streets of Los Angeles dispensing made-to-order ice cream sandwiches, using twitter instead of a jangly tune to announce the truck’s arrival. The CoolHaus name is a doubled, double entendre that reflects the founders’ training as architects: a nod to Bauhaus, the early 20th century modernist design movement; an homage to the influential architect Rem Koolhaas; and a little wordplay for the ice cream-selling ‘cool house.’ Today the ever-expanding CoolHaus universe includes  trucks in LA, New York, Miami, Austin, and Dallas; its first bricks-and-mortar scoop shop; and a retail line of packaged ice cream treats. Its freshly-baked cookies, organic, small-batch ice cream, and daring flavor combinations launched the trend we see today in food trucks, upscale restaurants, and grocery cases.

Bon Appetit visited city streets, restaurants, and grocer freezer cases from coast to coast to locate 8 Ice Cream Sandwiches to Try Now.

 

Posted in food safety | 2 Comments

1 in 10 Americans is Employed by a Restaurant

Janice | May 9, 2012 - 1:57 pm

 

Forget about manufacturing, healthcare, and technology; the real jobs are in food.
According to the National Restaurant Association, restaurants have added more than 560,000 jobs in the past year, with 200,000 of those positions created in the last six months. Restaurant employment now stands at 180,000 jobs above the pre-recession peak.

This year we’ll spend $1.7 billion per day on restaurant meals.
That’s 48% of all our food spending. Consumer spending and employment growth in the restaurant industry have outpaced the rest of the economy for 13 straight years, and they’re expected to keep growing with 1.4 million new positions added in the next decade.

Jobs for everyone
Half of all adults—60 million Americans—have worked in restaurants at some point in their lives. One in three workers got their first job experience in a restaurant, and for one in five of us, it was a McDonald’s.

Restaurants are a vital part of our lifestyle and our economy. Do your part for America—eat out more often.

 

Posted in food business, restaurants | Leave a comment

Behold the Round Saltine

Janice | May 8, 2012 - 1:24 pm

Round Saltines have been showing up on supermarket shelves throughout New England.
After a century of quadrilaterality, Nabisco is test-marketing the new geometry. If it’s well received in the region, there could be a national roll out by the end of the year. This is no mere addition to the Saltine product line—the round crackers will replace the original squares.

Nabisco company spokesman Basil T. Maglaris calls the round crackers “relevant and contemporary.”
He seems to be missing the point.

Saltines are innocuous, familiar, and bland, which is precisely why we eat them. They’re the stuff of home remedies and kindergarten snacks. At restaurants we’ll crumble a cellophane two-pack into soups and stews, and at home we’ll eat them with peanut butter while we stand over the sink. Saltines are prescribed by doctors to ease nausea and settle an upset stomach, and they’re often the only food tolerated by pregnant women and anyone who wakes up with a hangover.

Cutting corners, both literal and figurative
On a pragmatic note, there’s the matter of the missing corners. The round crackers have a lot less area than the square ones, but there are no more of them in the box. The old 16 ounce package has been replaced by one that weighs a mere 10.5 ounces, but the retail price has stayed the same.

Nabisco has been strangely silent on the subject of the re-engineered crackers. There’s no advertising campaign or marketing promotion and the company didn’t issue the typical press releases. Not a twitter has been sent, and there is no round Saltine Facebook page for you to ‘like.’ Even the company website shows no trace of round Saltines.

By this time next year, the iconic, four-sided, salt-dimpled cracker might be history.

Nabisco’s Mr. Maglaris did say that concerned customers could contact the company’s hotline at 1-800-NABISCO.

Posted in food business | 2 Comments

Cool New Cooling Gadgets

Janice | May 7, 2012 - 3:27 pm

How do you cool the drinks when it’s hot outside?
Mankind has wrestled with this one from the beginning of time. From fire and ice, radiation and resistance, to exothermic and endothermic reactions, we’ve tried it all. We’ve put a man on the moon, so why does it still take hours to chill a can of PBR or a bottle of Pinot Grigio?

Here are the latest gadgets to cool down your summer beverages.

 

Cool on the go with the Koolatron mobile wine chiller. It plugs into a car outlet with a 12V plug and 5-foot power cord, and chills a standard sized wine or champagne bottle down to 40 degrees F in about half an hour.

Japan’s Kirin Brewery has created the world’s first frozen beer foam. It dispenses from a tap like soft serve ice cream. It tops draft beer with an ice cold frothy head and creates an insulating lid that keeps a pint cold for up to 30 minutes. The foam is made by aerating and freezing regular beer to 23 degrees, so there’s no dilution as it melts.

The Instant Wine Chiller cools the wine instead of the bottle. Pull the gadget out of your freezer and attach the pourer to the neck of a bottle. Best for reds, as the wine passes through its internal coil system it’s cooled by 15 degrees— taking wine from room temperature to cellar temperature instantaneously. The chiller is made from the same stainless steel used for fermentation tanks, promising to maintain the wine’s taste and characteristics.

The Corkcicle also targets the wine, not the bottle, and does it a bottle at a time. You pre-freeze the Corkcicle, a BPA-free plastic icicle filled with non-toxic freeze gel and attached to a cork. Open a bottle and replace the cork with the apparatus.

The Beer 90 Chiller promises a cold one in 90 seconds. Fill the chiller with ice and drop in a can. Crank the handle to spin the canister. It creates a whirlpool effect inside the can that accelerates cooling by exposing all the beer to the now-chilled surface of the can. By the time you work up a thirst, the beer is icy cold. Alternatively, you can go with the Tinchilla; it operates on the same principle of thermal conduction, but a pair of AA batteries will do the work for you.

 

With Wine Chill Drops you can have a glass while you wait for the rest of the bottle to chill. Their manufacturer claims they cool a single glass in one-twentieth the time it takes to chill a whole bottle in the refrigerator. Place one pre-frozen drop in a glass of wine and remove it when the wine reaches the desired temperature.

 

The beverage industry has long considered the self-cooling can to be the holy grail of chilling technology.
Pepsi Cola thought it had cracked the code in 1998 with the Chill Can, but cancelled its plans when the can was challenged by environmentalists over its use of a greenhouse gas-contributing refrigerant coolant. Then in 2006, Miller Brewing launched its I.C. (Instant Cool) can. After much celebrating and fanfare, it was also scuttled due to environment and design concerns.
They’re at it again.

The Chill Can will be re-introduced this spring. West Coast Chill will be shipping its all-natural energy drink in a new and improved version in which the harmful refrigerant has been replaced with an environmentally innocuous process involving activated carbon derived from organic renewable vegetable materials, and carbon dioxide reclaimed from the atmosphere. Press a tab on the can and the temperature of the liquid inside will decrease by 30ºF within three minutes.

West Coast Chill has not publicly released details of its patented technology, but the website has an explanation of the science behind heat exchange units. The company is promising to provide special recycle bins wherever the drink is sold since traditional recycling can’t be utilized.

 

Posted in appliances + gadgets, beer + wine + spirits | 1 Comment

Weekends are Bad for our Eating Health

Janice | May 4, 2012 - 1:48 pm

There’s something about the weekend.
It can be 2½ days of downtime or jam-packed with activities. Either way, it beckons us to throw caution to the wind.

7.68 million food ratings describing nutritional content were collected through the iPhone app The Eatery; the numbers were crunched and distinct eating patterns were revealed.

There are some people who use the weekend to get a jump on their diet and exercise plans with two day juice fasts marathon runs, but most of us fall into a decidedly more indulgent camp. If we get to the gym a few times and followed a healthy eating plan all week we feel like we earned our weekend splurge.

Our weekly downhill slide starts with lunch on Friday, easily the least healthy of the weekday lunches, and continues straight through to Sunday night. It actually picks up steam so that each hour of the weekend is just a little less healthy than the one that preceded. Friday dinner is a well-deserved treat after a tough week, but Saturday’s is typically the least healthy meal of the week. We sleep late on Sunday but still manage to pack our most immoderate day into fewer hours. We dine a bit  less indulgently on Sunday night, with an eye toward restarting the weekday regimen.

An extra 350 calories spread out over the weekend—just one bagel, or a few glasses of wine or beer, or an ice cream cone—and over the course of a year it adds up to 18,000 added calories; enough to pack on an extra 5 pounds.

 

infographics courtesy of Massive Health/The Eatery

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Child Foodies: Even more obnoxious than the grown-ups

Janice | May 2, 2012 - 12:29 pm

 

image via Supermarket Guru

 

It seems that kids don’t want to eat like kids; or at least a certain sort of parent doesn’t want them to.

The Prepubescent Epicure as Ultimate Foodie Accessory
It goes beyond the desire of parents to raise an adventurous eater or to share a love of food with their children. It’s a badge of honor for the urban sophisticate; instead of comparing notes on traditional childhood milestones like first steps and shoe-tying, parents claim bragging rights to the child that can handle an escargot fork or requests duck confit in their lunch box. A new tooth is cause for celebration because now the little one can finally have his own artichoke.

Into and Out of the Mouths of Babes
Here are select outtakes from the haute world of kid cuisine:

  • The Brooklyn Paper explores the coffee culture of the borough’s youngest cafe habitués, ‘tots ditching their bottles and juice boxes in favor of “babyccinos” — mini decaf cappuccinos.
  • ‘Down from heaven came the crab. It was enclosed in the zucchini flower, doused with black truffle sauce, topped with shaved truffles…’
    –from the blog of 12 year-old David Fishman, aka the Middle School Food Critic, whose reviews have appeared in GQ Magazine.
  • Birthday Cake Two Ways in which a food blogger tells of serving a wheel of truffle-infused aged goat cheese ‘with three white candles plunged into its earthy skin‘ in lieu of a cake to celebrate her daughter’s 3rd birthday
  • C is for Chanterelle, K is for Kobe Beef in My Foodie ABC, a bestselling alphabet primer
  • A New York Times roundup of kid-friendly meals includes a $32 child-sized serving of spaghetti with butter at the Michelin-starred L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon

Of course there’s nothing wrong with teaching kids about good food. Their young immune systems can’t handle certain raw foods; otherwise, let them experiment. But the notion of tiny, discriminating epicures is a figment of the narcissistic parent’s imagination.

‘Oliver Stern, 3, who lives on the Upper East Side and attends a private nursery school there, won’t eat Chinese unless it’s the $33 crispy beef from Mr. Chow‘
–from Twee-sine, the New York Posts’ look at the twee cuisine phenomenon, as proudly reported by his mother

According to the Monell Chemical Senses Center children have childish tastes that serve an evolutionary function by helping them get appropriate nutrition. They prefer sweet to savory, need higher levels of salt, react powerfully to strong odors, and are more drawn to textures than taste.

A child’s tastebuds are immature. Their palates are just plain unrefined, physically incapable of truly rarefied discernment. There have always been picky eaters and kids who throw temper tantrums over Happy Meals. Thanks to indulgent parenting, now they’re stamping their little feet over a $32 plate of Mr. Chow’s crispy beef.

Posted in kids, trends | Leave a comment

Lesbians Get Fat, Gay Men Stay Skinny, and New Wives Pack on the Pounds

Janice | April 30, 2012 - 10:29 am

image via Kimball Stock

 

It’s true. Women really do ‘let themselves go’ when they’re in a relationship.
I hate myself for saying it. I feel like a mean-spirited sexist, a traitor to my gender, a perpetuator of hateful stereotypes. But it’s undeniable, supported by mountains of data.

Women in committed relationships are far more likely to become obese as those who are merely dating.
The greater the commitment the greater the likelihood: it doubles with cohabitation and triples with marriage. Less so for men whose weight is relatively unaffected by living together and whose gain tends to taper off after a few pounds early in marriage.

Of course you’re getting fat.
Lean Cuisine and yogurt have become a thing of the single gal past. Now you’re part of a couple, cozying up on the couch with Netflix and a pizza, sharing a dessert when you go out for dinner, and spending indulgently lazy Sundays with bagels and the newspaper.

Gay or straight, fat or skinny, men prefer thinner partners.
Even beyond preference, The International Journal of Obesity reported that 73% of men claim discomfort or intolerance for dating the overweight. People who seek relationships with men—gay men and straight women—feel the most pressure to conform to the norms of attractiveness. And this plays out in the weight divide among couples. Put two judgmental men together in a gay couple, and you find the lowest obesity rates (14%). Take men out of the equation and you find the highest obesity rates (26%) for lesbian couples. Heterosexual couples tend to fall somewhere in the middle.

Chubbily ever after
You can look in the mirror all you want, but when you’re in a relationship, it’s all about the reflected gaze of your partner—who loves you.
Failing that, most overweight women lose about 15 pounds following a break-up.
Posted in diet | 2 Comments

Bottled Water Comes Out Swinging

Janice | April 26, 2012 - 11:57 am

You have to buy bottled water because you can never find a decent, working drinking fountain.
Drinking fountains are disappearing from public spaces because everyone buys bottled water.
WeTap wants to break the cycle.

WeTap is a new, free smartphone app that uses Google Maps to locate public drinking fountains, nearby or along your route.
Water fountain data is currently available for just a few U.S. cities, but it’s already the largest database of its kind, with information on location, working condition, water quality, plus a photo of each fountain.

From the expense to the environment impact, there is just so much wrong with bottled water; but you already know that. While in the U.S. we’re still going through 85 million bottles every single day, we are catching on. More than 100 cities and towns and an equal number of college campuses have banned sales or restricted the use of bottled water, as have many national parks including Zion National, the Grand Canyon, and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

The bottled water industry is not taking this lying down. With 20 billion dollars in annual domestic sales at stake, the International Bottled Water Association has launched a marketing campaign to defend itself against what its press release calls “well-known anti-bottled water groups [that] are recruiting college students to spread misinformation.” The IBWA has launched an online campaign urging the public to protect this threat to its “freedom of choice,” and has launched a video titled Student Activism: 101 reminding students that past generations have used college campuses to protest against war, racism, and other social injustices like Darfur and sweatshop labor.
Uh huh, just like bottled water.
That’s some serious chutzpah.

Alternatively, concerned citizens can channel their activist energies toward reducing the 50 million or so barrels of oil used to produce and transport a year’s worth of water bottles, and eliminating the 38 billion water bottles that end up in our landfills each year. You can help reinvigorate our public water systems— some of the cleanest, safest, and most abundant waters in the world. The WeTap app encourages crowdsourced contributions. Install the application and you can contribute to your area’s map and ratings through the add a fountain function.

See what restaurants are doing to break the bottled water habit. One small change has already saved 9 million gallons.

Posted in phone applications, sustainability | 1 Comment

Foodiness– It’s Like Truthiness for Food

Janice | April 24, 2012 - 1:34 pm

Apologies to Stephen Colbert.
 He is of course the originator of the phrase with which we are taking liberties. He struck upon truthiness as a satirical way to explain intentional approximations of truth; a sort of wishful thinking unburdened by facts. And there’s plenty of ersatz truth to our food.

Appearances can be deceiving.
 It’s a lesson we’ve learned all too well in 2012. First, we were repulsed by the ‘pink slime’ flap, when we learned that the federal government regularly purchases millions of pounds of a slimy bacteria-prone mash of slaughterhouse trimmings masquerading as hamburger meat to serve to the nation’s schoolchildren through the National School Lunch Program. We recoiled again when Starbucks revealed that the rosy-pink coloring agent added to its Strawberry Frappuccinos is derived from the ground up bodies of beetles.

Fool me once, shame on you.
 Let’s not let it happen again. Don’t wait for the next scandalous revelation.
 Here are some of the other egregious bait-and-switches of processed food.

Wyngz, not Wings: a distinct chicken entity recognized by the USDA
 The USDA website has an official definition of a chicken wing laid out in Title 9, Section 381.170(b)(7) of the Code of Federal Regulations, but the section goes on to ask this question: “Under what conditions can ‘wyngz’ be used as a fanciful term on poultry product labeling?”
It was news to us that ‘fanciful terms’ fall under the USDA’s purview, but even more curious were the required conditions. The term ‘wyngz’ can only be used to “denote a product that does not contain any wing meat or is not derived only from wing meat.” Wing shape is optional; spelling (or misspelling, to use the official USDA terminology) is not: “no other misspellings are permitted.”
There’s something’s fishy about that low-fat ice cream.
Low fat ice cream used to be thin and grainy, a little icy with none of the voluptuous mouth-feel of its full fat relatives. These days it can be as rich and creamy as butter yet still as virtuous as broccoli. That’s because many of the top-selling brands add a protein cloned from the blood of the ocean pout, an eel-like Arctic Ocean fish. Food scientists discovered that in the lean fish the protein works like anti-freeze to keep it from freezing in even the coldest of waters. Lucky us, it works just as well in our ice cream in the coldest of supermarket freezer cases.

There are no blueberries in many packaged blueberry muffin mixes.
You won’t find any in Blueberry Pop-Tarts or Special K Blueberry Fruit Crisps either, and Total Pomegranate Blueberry Cereal is totally missing the blueberries and the pomegranate. Instead of real blueberries, some manufacturers create little berry-shaped clumps of various sugars, starches, gums, and oils, and coat them with (often petroleum-based) blue food dye. They’re usually labeled as blueberry-flavored bits or particles. For its Blueberry Muffin Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal, Kellogg’s concocted an entirely new food classification, identified in the ingredient list as crunchlets.
Blueberries aren’t the only ones. The only cherries, oranges, or pineapple you’ll find in Gerber Graduates Juice Treats are pictured on the box. Not a trace of strawberry bursts out of Betty Crocker’s Strawberry Splash Fruit Gushers. You will find broccoli in Knorr’s chicken broccoli fettuccine noodles, but the dish actually contains more salt than green vegetable.

Here’s a euphemism for you: Natural Flavor.
We go to the FDA website for this one. Natural flavor or natural flavoring is defined as virtually anything (oil, extract, essence, distillate…) from anything that could have existed in nature at one time. It can come from any part or byproduct of any animal, vegetable, or mineral—wood, fur, rock, soil, feather, even secretions, discharges, and excrement—it’s all fair game. And once it falls under that umbrella, the substance doesn’t have to be identified, but simply listed in the ingredients as natural flavor. One of the most common natural food flavorings is castoreum. It’s a substance that’s only found in the anal glands of beavers; the beavers like to spray some out and mix it with their urine to mark their territory. It’s found in nearly every kind of candy, tea, gum, soda, juice, cereal, ice cream, yogurt, or bakery item with raspberry or berry flavor.

Perhaps these are food facts we could have done without.
It’s said that there are two things you don’t want to see being made—sausage and legislation.
Try to hang on to your appetite; you’re going to need the strength. The presidential election is just around the corner.

Is it food or foodiness?
Learn how to spot the difference and why it matters from Chef Erica Wides, who coined the phrase. She explores issues of food, foodiness, and more as the host and creator of Let’s Get Real on the Heritage Radio Network.

Posted in food knowledge, food policy | Leave a comment

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Janice | April 23, 2012 - 11:29 am

currency cover art from 'Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money'

 

The Wall Street Journal said: ‘Forget conventional 401(k)s; think goat cheese and fennel.’
Business Week called it one of the ‘big ideas that will change small business and entrepreneurship,’ and Time Magazine explored its potential to ‘remake America’s food industry.’
They’re all talking about the nascent Slow Money movement bringing seed capital to local food systems.

This is an idea whose time has come.
Local foods are in the spotlight, focusing our attention on the need to strengthen and promote sustainable regional food systems and move away from corporate agribusiness. And our food interests happen to coincide with an opening for new investment models. The last financial market meltdown convinced us that we need to understand our investments. Forget about credit default swaps and subprime-backed derivatives—let’s put our money in investments we can sink our teeth into. Literally.

Kickstarter (and the similarly structured Indiegogo) has had great success applying its crowdsourced funding platform to food-related projects.
It began as the go-to place for filmmakers, designers, and other creative media types, but food entrepreneurs quickly staked out their own small but vibrant corner. Last year more than 30,000 Kickstarter investors pooled their funds- in increments as small as $5.00- to fund 241 food and beverage projects like a community gristmill, a magazine for high school foodies, an urban apiary, a doggie cupcake bakery, and lots and lots of food trucks (plus one tricycle vendor).

This is not a loan or an investment; Kickstarter participants are patrons, and their patronage is usually rewarded in the form of project mementos or perks— a $10 pledge might entitle you to a snack bag from an organic nut roaster, or $200 to a pickle maker could get you a weekend brining workshop.

Not all your eggs in one basket
Credibles nudges the model closer to an investment.
If an individual were to make a direct investment in, say, an egg farm or a jam maker, payment in-kind would bring them more eggs and marmalade than they would know what to do with. Intead, Credibles creates a single fund from the contributions of multiple investors. The loans it makes to small and artisanal producers are repaid in-kind—a farm returns crops, a restaurant returns meals, a small-batch ice cream maker returns pints of rocky road—but since an investor is buying into the shared pool, repayment comes from the collective pool of businesses in the form of edible credits, ‘credibles,’ that can be redeemed for a wide assortment of products.

Slow Money for Slow Food
These new investment models are part of the larger concept of Slow Money. Equal parts movement and investment strategy, it takes more than just its name from the global grassroots Slow Food organization. In the same way that Slow Food is a response to fast food and the globalized, industrialized state of our food supply, Slow Money offers an alternative to the fast money of our global financial markets. It asserts that our current paths, both agricultural and fiduciary, are irresponsible, unhealthy, and ultimately unsustainable.

Slow Money redefines investment returns to measure not just profits, which will come more slowly, but to also consider the value of social responsibility in return-on-investment calculations. Land preservation, crop diversity, food safety, and strong local economies all pay their own dividends.

Crowdfunding just got a lot easier.
Earlier this year, a bi-partisan group of senators introduced a piece of securities legislation called the Crowdfund Act. While it adds to the compliance burden of funding portals like Kickstarter, it’s a boon to both individual investors and entrepreneurs, lifting many of the regulations that restricted the crowdfunding of small businesses. Approved resoundingly by the Senate, this month President Barack Obama signed it into law as part of the JOBS Act.

You can read the full text of the Crowdfund Act (Senate Bill 2190) at the Library of Congress website.

Posted in food business, local foods, sustainability | Leave a comment

Arousal by Food Smells

Janice | April 20, 2012 - 12:04 pm

image via Sensing Architecture

 

Food might be the way to a man’s heart, but the smell of food aims a little lower.

Research performed at the Smell and Taste Research Foundation in Chicago discovered that certain food smells are like olfactory Viagra, significantly increasing blood flow to the penis for men and to the vagina for women.

Thanksgiving—the sexiest holiday?
Men are easy, pretty much turned on by all food smells, but pumpkin pie is special. In combination with other foods, the smell of pumpkin pie increases penile blood flow by 40%.

Top scents for men:
pumpkin pie combined with lavender
black licorice with doughnuts
pumpkin pie with doughnuts
Pizza, buttered popcorn, and cinnamon buns round out the list of top turn-ons. Cranberry and chocolate were the least favored, with response rates as low as 2%.

Wouldn’t you know it?
The female sexual response is not so simple. While pretty much any food scent is arousing to men, women are more discriminating, turned on by some and turned off by others.
Top scents for women:
Good & Plenty candy combined with cucumber
Good & Plenty candy with banana bread
Pumpkin pie, coffee, vanilla, and grilled meats also do the trick for women.

Mood killers
While men have little to no response to less-favored fragrances, women actually have negative responses, exhibiting a reduced flow of blood to the genitals. Turn-offs for women include cherries and barbecue, except for the ladies of Atlanta and Houston who are inexplicably stimulated by these scents.
Love is in the air. You just need to sniff it out.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Power Couples of Food

Janice | April 19, 2012 - 11:12 am

happy food pair image via Man/Beer Love

 

It’s not that you are what you eat so much as you are what you digest.
There’s synergy in the foods we eat. The more we learn about that synergy, the more we understand that the sum of what we eat is not just the total of our individual food choices. One plus one does not equal two when it comes to health, well-being, and nutrition.

Food Pairing is the name of this game.
Guacamole with salsa, tomatoes cooked in olive oil, tea with lemon; some foods taste better when they’re eaten together. In the same way, certain foods eaten in combination can make the sum of the meal healthier than the individual ingredients.

Taste can even unwittingly be a factor. It seems that nature has arranged things so that many of our favorite complementary flavors are also the most powerful food pairings. Guacamole’s fatty acids make you absorb five times more of the healthy beta-carotene and lycopene found in salsa; olive oil helps the body absorb key carotenoids from the tomato skins; and the vitamin C in lemons increases the absorption of tea’s natural antioxidants.

Ceasar salad is another naturally synergistic combination. Olive oil and a bit of cheese boost the body’s ability to absorb the nutrients found in romaine lettuce—and it has to be a full fat dressing to work. When’s the last time a nutritionist has shared that bit of good news? Other natural affinities that happen to be good-for-you pairings include sushi, where the vinegar in the rice neutralizes 35% of the glycemic impact of the carbs in the rice, so you’ll feel fuller longer without the spike and plummet of your blood sugar levels; and hot dogs with sauerkraut. Fermented vegetables, like the cabbage in sauerkraut, improve the absorption of animal proteins and bolster digestion-friendly probiotics in your body that help build up your immune system.

Here are some other high-impact food pairings:

  • Rosemary + Steak: The acids in rosemary prevent the formation of carcinogens on grilled meats.
  • Eggs + Cheese: The vitamin D in eggs optimizes the absorption of calcium from the cheese.
  • Beer + Nuts: A beer or two plus a handful of nuts can reduce your risk of heart attack.
  • Spinach + Lemon: You’ll absorb six times as much iron from the spinach.
  • Garbanzos + Beet Greens: The vitamins in the beans maximize magnesium absorption from the greens, and we could all use a little extra magnesium; the mineral is responsible for modulating anxiety levels, and nearly three-quarters of us are depleted.
  • Orange Juice + Oatmeal: The real breakfast of champions, the combination doubles the artery-cleansing powers of either on its own.

Get more mileage out your food. Elaine McGee, author of Food Synergy, teaches power food strategies in Web MD’s Top 10 Food Synergy Super Foods.

Posted in health + diet | Leave a comment

Rolling Out the Tax Day Freebies

Janice | April 16, 2012 - 10:56 am

Is there any better flavor than the taste of free?

Everyone loves a bargain, but free is a whole other animal. Zero is not just another price. It’s an emotional hot button— push it, and we are irrationally, deliriously happy.

In what’s become an annual but odd rite of spring, Tax Day has become synonymous with free and discounted food. So many national chains are hosting tax relief specials that you can practically eat all day without ever cracking open your wallet.

Here’s this year’s list:

Just remember, if you manage to collect more than $600 in free food, it can be taxed as income.

Posted in holidays, restaurants | Leave a comment

Google and Facebook: The Best Company Cafeterias in America

Janice | April 13, 2012 - 11:24 am

The stereotypical computer geek works obsessively and eats crap, coding into the wee hours fueled by a diet of caffeine and junk food. If they think at all about food it’s to use a little multivariate calculus to optimize the pan dimensions for a box of brownie mix.

We got it half right. They do work long and strange hours, never saying no to a good all-night hackathon, but it’s not all instant ramen and Jolt cola. Not by a long shot.

Silicon Valley has a long tradition of feeding its employees. It dates back to the 1950′s when Hewlett-Packard was the place to work with its free snacks and company picnics. In the dot-com boom years of the 1980′s youthful entrepreneurs created a giddy post-college world of soda-stocked mini fridges and Friday beer blasts. These days it’s more cruise ship than dorm room, with midnight buffets of grilled-to-order kobe beef burgers and 3 AM French crêperie carts, and nobody does it bigger or better than the Valley titans Facebook and Google.

Google set the new standard when it hired the former chef to the Grateful Dead to oversee two dozen cafés and dining rooms scattered throughout its Mountain View campus. There’s tabletop hotpots and dim sum at the Asian-themed Jia, Basque-style tapas at Café Pintxo, and roasted black bass with parsley pesto and bread crumbs at the haute cuisine Café Seven, rumored to be the best of the Googleplex. There’s a classic American diner, a Mexican taqueria, a massive salad bar with count ‘em three different roasted beet salads, and eateries dedicated to vegans and raw foodists. The grounds are planted with pick-your-own organic produce, and you can always pop out for a wheatgrass shot or roasted soybean snack mix from the numerous and strategically-located juice bars and kitchenettes. Free to all who work there, it’s estimated that Google spends an annual $7,500 to feed each employee.

Online, Facebook’s ‘like’ button is duking it out with Google+. In employment, the two compete fiercely for talent. And on their nearby campuses, Facebook is challenging Google’s long-standing claim to food service supremacy.

Facebook hired away one of Google’s top chefs to overhaul its previously humdrum cuisine. The kitchens have moved toward mostly organic ingredients from sustainable producers, and frequently turn mealtimes into themed extravaganzas like a recent Spanish lunch of braised rabbit with muscatel, cinnamon, and fresh cherries, Homer-pleasing deep-fried pork chops for a dinner based on The Simpsons TV show, and an all-chocolate menu with chile-ricotta-cocoa ravioli and asparagus with chocolate vinaigrette. There are ‘microkitchens’ scattered throughout the Facebook campus stocked like the 7-Eleven of a computer programmer’s dreams with Coke and Red Bull, Clif bars and fruit roll-ups, string cheese, Kit Kat bars, Reeses Cups, five different brands of yogurt, chocolate chip cookies, and Froot Loops. Serious Facebook foodies can explore the culinary world by interning in a company kitchen.

Part employee perk, part self-serving productivity booster
On-site gyms, dry cleaners, massages, car washes, haircuts—free and copious food is just one on a long list of fringe benefits. They all fit into the companies’ strategies to strip away anything that might get in the way of the overlong workday that’s part of the tech industry culture.

Don’t you want to know how you can eat there?

Make a friend.
Both Google and Facebook employees can bring guests.

Send a resumé.
Job interviews are nearly always scheduled around lunchtime so that the companies can flaunt this particular employee benefit.

Become a shareholder.
It just takes one share of Google stock (currently trading at about $650) to score an invite to their annual shareholder meeting. It’s held at the Googleplex, and shareholders are invited for that day to dine on campus.
Facebook’s stock is expected to begin trading in May. The  company has yet to disclose the specifics of its shareholder benefits.

 

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Food Named for Celebrities/Celebrity Babies Named for Food

Janice | April 10, 2012 - 2:27 pm

We’ve always named foods for celebrities.
I’m not talking about foods named after their creators, like the Earl of Sandwich or Sylvester Graham of graham cracker fame, but foods that are named in tribute, like the Shirley Temple or Baby Ruth.
Really, could there be any higher honor?

New York’s Carnegie Deli is famous for immortalizing its showbiz regulars with sandwiches.
There’s Henny’s Heaven (cream cheese, lox, lettuce, tomato, onion, and capers on a toasted bagel) named for the classic comic Henny Youngman, and the overstuffed corned beef of the Woody Allen. We know that Tim Tebow has truly arrived now that the newest Jet has his own Carnegie Deli sandwich. We also know that he’s not yet a real New Yorker: the corned beef, pastrami, roast beef, American cheese, lettuce and tomato of the Jetbow are packed between slices of white bread and slathered with mayonnaise, both firsts for the deli, which is more of a spicy mustard and rye bread kind of place.

Ben & Jerry’s favors rock stars for its ice cream flavor honors.
There’s been the Queen-inspired Bohemian Raspberry, an homage to their favorite jam band with Phish Food, Dave Matthews Band Magic Brownies, and the butter brickle salute to Elton John, Goodbye Yellow Brickle Road. Cherry Garcia was the company’s (the world’s?) original rock star ice cream, and is still its all-time best selling flavor.

Food on the celebrity brain.
Could it be wishful thinking on the part of those who have yet to achieve sandwich-like star stature? Maybe it’s all the deprivation required for the photo-op-ready body. Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: the stars are naming their offspring for food, and not the Basils or Honeys of yesteryear.

Jason Bateman’s daughter, born just this winter, is Maple Sylvie. Isla Fisher and Sascha Baron Cohen have daughter Olive, and both Ethan Hawke and Claudia Schiffer named their daughters Clementine. Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon chose a spice for his daughter Saffron, while Grey’s Anatomy’s Isaiah Washington went with the herb Thyme for his son, and there’s a glut of little Hollywood Coco’s (David Arquette and Courtney Cox; TV actress Diane Farr; Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore; No Doubt’s Tony Kanal). The Man vs. Wild star, himself saddled with the monicker Bear Grylls, named his son Huckleberry, while Chef Jamie Oliver can almost be forgiven for daughter Poppy Honey.

Most credit Gwynyth Paltrow and Chris Martin with kicking off the trend when they named their baby girl Apple, but early rockers Frank Zappa and Bob Geldof both bested the couple—by a few decades and a ton more audacity—with their now-grown daughters Diva Thin Muffin and Peaches Honeyblossom. For the record, Ms. Zappa has dropped her middle names and Ms. Geldof has appealed to celebrities to stop the naming madness, claiming to be haunted by hers all her life.

In Unfortunate Baby Names, Uncas Slattery (yup, Uncas) identifies what he believes are the most unfortunate food-related names of all time:

  • Apple Pie – born Virginia, c. 1830
  • Candy Barr – born South Carolina, c. 1848
  • Cherry Tart – born Mississippi, c. 1859
  • Eggy Bacon – born Georgia, c. 1851
  • Ham Burger – born Michigan, c. 1847
  • Liver Bacon – born Missouri, c. 1891
  • Muffin Hill – born Texas, c. 1876
  • Treacle Tart – baptized Durham, 1746
  • Gooseberry Berry – born Texas, 1920

See, Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof? You could have done a lot worse.

 

Posted in Entertainment, kids | 2 Comments

Is Williams-Sonoma’s Agrarian Brand the Real Portlandia?

Janice | April 9, 2012 - 2:09 pm

American Hipster by Kyle Mahan

 

Who needs Portlandia when we have Williams-Sonoma Agriarian?
The urban DIY sustainability movement comes painfully close to self-parody with Williams-Sonoma’s new Agrarian line of tools and supplies.

Launched last week, Agrarian brings us shiny tin bronze garden trowels hand-forged by Austrian coppersmiths ($58.95 not including optional monogramming on the linseed oil-rubbed turned beech handle), the cedar shake-roofed Alexandria Chicken Coop and Run ($1,389.90 in your choose of colors with “White Glove delivery; we’ll assemble the coop and place it for you“), and a $14.95 ball of twine “handcrafted in Scotland by a company known for its high-quality garden twine since 1922.” The merchandise line also includes a $299.95 metal tub that can be repurposed as an herb planter (described as an “authentic found object, circa 1920s–1940s”) and the Kumbucha Brooklyn Kit complete with “organic, fair-trade cane sugar from Brazil” and a “pristinely propagated symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast;” everything you need to brew your own ancient tea-based beverage just like they do by the Belt Parkway.

It’s the self-conscious virtuousness of urban homesteaders.
Agrarian will give a big déjà vu feeling to fans of the Portlandia television series. The sketch comedy loves to skewer the precious concerns of the studiously trendy, and foodies are a favored target. Portlandia has brought us the lactose- and wheat-free Allergy Pride Parade, the overzealous briners of We Can Pickle That!, and the unforgettable Colin, a menu item presented to restaurant patrons with a pedigree and photograph identifying him as a local, free-range, heritage-breed, woodland-raised chicken that was fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a conversation about our broken food system. I have nothing but respect for the ethos of sustainability and self-reliance. I admire the artfulness, passion, and ingenuity of those who reclaim fallow land for food production. But the high-end, sanitized homesteading represented by Agrarian smacks of elistist puttering by hipster backyardatarians and status beekeeping by weekend getaway home-owners.

It’s an easy target for Portlandia-style parody; like hitting the broad side of a barn painted a perfect Martha Stewart Living™ Barn Door Red.

I think you’ll like Brokelandia. A love letter to Portlandia, it’s a Brooklyn-based spoof of a spoof covering everything from beer-flavored salted caramels to deep-fried sardine skeletons.

Posted in Entertainment, sustainability | Leave a comment
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