Food News Feed

Editor's note: I'd be awfully pissed/offended if I was a chef working in SF. Prince Charles and his wife Camilla are wined and dined at the new De Young Museum in San Francisco's GG Park, but instead of featuring a meal prepared by local chefs, they drag Alice Waters and the crew from Berkeley's Chez Panisse restaurant across the bridge to cook for the royal couple. No offense to the fine cooks at Chez Panisse, and yeah, I probably owe my job to Alice in some way or another, but I just don't get the idol worship. It's the tyranny of Chez Panisse rearing it's saintly head again...(scroll down to the Food News Feed from Nov. 6 for chef Daniel Patterson's NY Times piece on the Tyranny of Chez Panisse - Part 1).

The British Heart Foundation is featuring a series of ads depicting a hamburger bun filled with bones, gristle and gory connective tissue is the latest tool aimed at weaning youngsters in Britain of fast food. The Food4Thought campaign, targeted at the 11- and 12-year-old age group, comes after a BHF survey found that 36 percent of eight- to 14-year-olds did not know that potatoes were the main ingredient in French fries.
Click HERE for a look-see (WARNING: graphic grossness).

"I don't swear as much as Jamie because I haven't got as much to be angry about - yet," he says, with a smile. "Jamie's a great mate and it's very flattering to be compared to him, but we are in different leagues, and to be honest, any comparison sells the great man short. Besides, I can't ride a scooter."

"After oil, coffee is the second-largest traded commodity in the world," says Newman quietly. "Trading prices fluctuate all over the place, so farmers never know how much they'll be paid for their beans. When coffee prices fall below production costs, farmers are often forced off their land and they lose their homes, everything. With fair trade, farmers get a fair price for their harvest with a guaranteed minimum, so they can invest in their crops."

The Senate succumbed last week to food-industry pressure and approved a rider that would water down organic standards. If the Senate bill becomes law, the power to decide what synthetics can go into "organic" food would be shifted directly to the USDA -- that bastion of food-industry flackery. {Editor's note: It's only a matter of time until the word "organic" carries about as much weight as the words "all natural". We're betting that "sustainable" will be the next catch-phrase for the those looking to ditch their organic ideals.}

The 2004 apple harvest of just over 3 million tons was valued at close to one billion dollars, about $250 million of which comes from export sales. Enough of them are grown to supply large chains and big box stores across the country twelve months of the year - enough to make about 1-1/2 billion deep-dish apple pies.