Food News 10-27

10/27.04

Update - 10-29 - They eat horses too don't they?

"Cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep and turkeys are living creatures humans kill and eat. So are horses. There is nothing peculiar about eating horse meat that morally distinguishes eating horse meat from eating beef, pork, sheep, lamb, chicken or fish that would morally require prohibiting horse slaughter for meat." Texas horse slaughterhouses are a little too close to the racetracks...

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The Gourmet Institute. "What am I going to do with an apron signed by all these chefs?" asked one man waiting for a seminar by authors Jane and Michael Stern. "EBay, baby," someone offered...And poor Rocco DiSpirito...Someone should have warned the embattled chef that Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and executive chef at Les Halles, and Batali, of Food Network and multiple restaurant fame, were going to trash him during their aptly named talk, "Bad Boys in the Kitchen."

Nina Planck - on going toe to toe with the big boys (she oughta know) and making farmers markets a one-stop shop for all your food needs - in New Farm.org. "One rival for farmers’ market shoppers is the chain Whole Foods, which opened its first health-food store in 1980, the year the first farmers’ market in Washington, D.C., opened. With $3 billion in sales, the supermarket with ‘whole foods’ values already has sales three times bigger than all U.S. farmers’ markets combined. Whole Foods meets demand for ecological foods with all the intelligence and seductive marketing tricks professional retailers can muster."

30 days and counting until you've got to stick it in the oven. May as well make it a Heritage Turkey. (sign in: sautewednesday@yahoo.com/password: 1turkey). NoCal guide to H.T.s. SoCal guide to H.T.s. Search a state for where to buy Heritage Turkeys. Heritage Foods U.S.A.

Oh yeah, Heritage Pork ain't too shabby either. "Typically raised on small farms, heritage hogs like the Berkshire or Gloucestershire Old Spot come from breeds prized for hundreds of years. They're reared without hormones or antibiotics on small farms for fat and flavor, not for lean meat, says Jennifer Small, of Flying Pig Farm in upstate Shushan. Small, who started the farm with her husband four years ago, has seen sales boom - via greenmarkets and the Internet and to restaurants like SoHo's Savoy. She says many other heritage farmers are enjoying similar success stories." Making better bacon. Doug Metzger raises Berkshire Pigs in Seneca, Kansas.

Macaroni and cheese, still considered a vegetable throughout much of the South, is one of those universal beloved foods. More from the Southern Foodways Symposium held Oct 7-10 in Oxford, Mississippi. Coverage on the event from: News and Observer, The Tennessean, and the Denver Post.

The 75th year of the Mallard Creek BBQ. "Hogs were slaughtered in the fall, after the first frost. Elections are held in the fall. People with their mouths full of barbecue are likely to sit still long enough to hear a pitch. Put them all together and you have the political barbecue. Politics and barbecue have gone together all the way back to George Washington, who entertained with barbecues at Mount Vernon."