Food News Feed

"The Naked Chef has been renamed "silencer of the lambs" after slitting the animal's throat while it was conscious. Graphic scenes aired on British television this week show Oliver grimacing as he pushed a knife through the sheep's neck." {Editor's note: There is nothing more primal than killing your dinner. Reminds me of chef Thomas Keller's soliloquy on butchering rabbits from the French Laundry Cookbook. "One day, I asked my rabbit purveyor to show me how to kill, skin, and eviscerate a rabbit. I had never done this, and I figured if I was going to cook rabbit, I should know it from its live state through the slaughtering, skinning, and butchering, and then the cooking." (pg. 205-206)}

"The world of the professional kitchen is endlessly fascinating to me. There's an honesty to it that I find almost nowhere else. It’s a lot like the operating room, only people don’t die in the kitchen, which is quite nice, and an asset to the work as far as I'm concerned. You can't lie in a kitchen -- that’s what I like most about it. You're either ready or you're not, you're either clean or you’re a mess. You're either good or you're bad." (Michael Ruhlman is the author of Bouchon, A Return to Cooking, The Soul of a Chef, The French Laundry Cookbook, and most recently, Charcuterie - with Brian Polcyn).

"It resembles a bottle of watered-down antifreeze, but antifreeze probably tastes better. If the stench of this beverage doesn't make you gag, the flavor most certainly will. Several tasters were sick for days afterward, one describing the soda as "the most disgusting consumer product ever invented."

"A new website allows you to pick your pig, get to know it, learn all about its happy, free-range life - then have it delivered to your door chopped up and ready to eat."

"Wineries continue to take stock of what was lost a month ago after a $100 million arson fire at a warehouse filled with vintage wine, and investigators continue to search for clues. Richard Arrowood of Arrowood Vineyards and Winery in Glen Ellen said he's recently gotten word that all of his Grand Archer label wine stored at the warehouse was undrinkable. "Everything was just cooked," he said."

Standards enacted by New Jersey’s Department of Agriculture designed to protect farm animals actually allow inhumane practices such as cutting tails off dairy cows to facilitate milking, according to a lawsuit by animal welfare organizations. The department took common practices used by farms that raise animals for meat, eggs and milk — practices that were sometimes inhumane — and simply wrote them into the standards, said Gene Bauston, president of the Watkins Glen, N.Y.-based organization, Farm Sanctuary.

Chambers says he bought a bag of cocktail ice and a disposable camera, and, on his boss's order, created a foul-weather tableau. "The way we did it, we was down taking pictures, out this row (of tomatoes), and then we just stood behind it and throwed the ice over the top. To me, it looked like a hailstorm," says Chambers.