Food News

10.12.04

There, that's better!

According to Fortune Elkins over at BCCY, "With the recent discovery/creation of a coffee plant that naturally produces almost zero caffeine in the tree, the coffee landscape could shift in just a few years. Many coffee professionals have told me that their experience in the retail market leads them to believe that a good-tasting decaf coffee would fill a market void and significantly increase consumption." Read more about it here.

Evan Rail is a former Californian living in Prague writing about food and restaurants. It's a tough job, but someone's gotta do it.

A world-class chef, Henderson is sadly famous for something other than his signature dishes, such as roasted bone marrow or pea and pig’s ear soup. He’s labelled as "the top chef bravely battling Parkinson’s disease", a description he dismisses and which he dislikes intensely. Mopping his perspiring brow with a large red handkerchief, he apologises for sweating like, well, a pig, but he’s having a twitchy day, he says, for which he again apologises.

CLUELESS. "Are organic foods safer? No. While foods can be unsafe for any number of reasons, normal farming procedures are perfectly safe...Well how about taste? No again. Blind tests show no difference in taste between organic and inorganic foods. Given all this, how has the organic movement become so successful? Why have so many been taken in? We now have our answer: the placebo effect writ large."

I'll have the caesar salad, and can I get the pesticides on the side please.

Is this man really the best chef in the world?

The AFJ has announced the winners of the 2004 Awards Competition. The Best Newspaper Food section awards went to; Anchorage Daily News, Anchorage, Alaska; T. C. Mitchell, Food Editor (under 150,000), St. Petersburg Times, St. Petersburg, Florida; Janet K. Keeler, Food Editor (150,001 - 350,000), and Star Tribune, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Lee Svitak Dean, Food Editor (over 350,001). Congratulations!

Stunning photo in the November issue of Vanity Fair. In the article titled "Order the Fish" by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), there is a picture of the ConAgra feedlots in Greeley, Colorado. Taken from the air, it shows miles, and miles, and miles of nothing but cattle. Pause for effect.

Then there's this quote: "One of the U.S.D.A.'s first actions after Bush took office was to halt the salmonella testing of ground beef purchased for the national school lunch program.

(Although testing has resumed on the meat headed for school lunches, the USDA has ruled that ground beef contaminated with salmonella may be sold legally.)

Now doesn't that just piss you off?

The Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction and Enforcement Act of 2003, also known as Kevin's law. Kevin Kowalcyk died after eating contaminated hamburger meat, he was 2 1/2 years old.

Well, the gist of Schlosser's article is not that Mad Cow is back, it's that it never left.

Frontline interview with Schlosser.
From Alternet 05.03.04 - Cowed Media Disease.
From UPI 05.04.04 - USDA vet: Texas mad cow breach not unique.
From the SF Chronicle 05.04.04 - Don't read this over a burger.
From the AgriBusiness Examiner 01.05.03 - California health officials denied information by ConAgra on location of tainted meat.
From the Sierra Club - 19 million pounds of ConAgra beef from the Greeley, Colorado plant were recalled in 2002.
A very short list of where to get beef that that you might actually want to eat:
American Grassfed
Buffalo Groves
Western Grasslands
Back to Nature Beef
Alder Spring
Dairy Sheep Farm
Arrowwood Family Farm
Bennett Ranch
Grassfed Beef
Cameron Ranch
Cola Beef
Cawcaw Creek Pork
Cedar Summit
Iowa Natural Meats
Cimarron Ranch
Coleman Natural
Creswick Farms
Crownhill Farm
Find a complete list of grass fed beef producers at Eat Wild .