Food News Feed

"I shop for wine like a woman." So says Mr. Asimov on his widely read wine blog for the NY Times. And as I momentarily put down my glass of Boxler Reisling, I somewhat sheepishly have to admit, "So do I."

Despite living smack dab in the middle of wine-breathing Northern California, I drink mostly European wines. Dry reislings, sancerres, chablis, buckets of rose, and lately, an awful lot of Querciabella chianti. I rarely pay more than $30 for a bottle, and generally follow the womanly shopping guidelines layed down by wine auctioneer Ursula Hermacinski, who Asimov quotes:

"The best values, she says, are $15 to $20 bottles from France and Germany (I would add Italy). She urges readers to try chenin blancs from the Loire, rieslings from Germany and chardonnays from Chablis. She recommends cru Beaujolais, and cabernet francs from the Loire. She also recommends shopping by importer, and lists some of my favorites: Louis/Dressner, Weygandt-Metzler, Jenny & François, Neal Rosenthal, Kermit Lynch, Becky Wasserman, Robert Chadderdon, Terry Theise and Martine’s Wines, among others. You go, girl!"

That's me to a T - excuse me while I curtsey. I usually take a quick glance at the back label to see who the importer is, and it's always reassuring to see Kermit Lynch's logo with Thomas Jefferson's quote: "Good wine is a necessity of life for me."

"I tend to avoid products with high fructose corn syrup. Not because high fructose corn syrup is inherently more evil than sugar (the science isn't in on that), but I don't want to support this corn economy and also, high fructose corn syrup is a marker for a highly processed food. I mean, what cook do you know that uses high fructose corn syrup?"

Twenty bucks says there's not a bottle of HFCS next to the grill when you are preparing hamburgers, yet the average fast food burger is practically glued together with it. HFCS is the All-American ingredient that's curiously absent from the All-American meal, the homemade hamburger.
More Pollan at the Beyond Organic website.

The only thing I remember from Home Economics class in the seventh grade is learning how to fry an egg. Come to think of it, we probably made cookies too, but Home Ec. classes have gone the way of Wood and Metal Shop. Teachers with credentials for instructing the classes are rare, and during a recent middle school tour, I saw a beautifully equipped wood shop being used for a math class (taught by the wood shop teacher who was retiring this year). Sigh.

The meatpacking industry, sensing a need that needs filling, has risen to the occasion with a new marketing campaign aimed at consumers who missed out on Home Ec. class and have grown up without the essential meat-cooking skills necessary to keep them in business. In other words, how are Cargill and Tyson going remain profitable if their customers don't know how to prepare their products?

According to a recent AP article,

"The agribusiness giant (Cargill) and one of its units are launching a marketing campaign that targets consumers — especially younger ones — who may be clueless about chuck roasts, round steaks, briskets and tri-tips...Cargill’s campaign features labels that help consumers figure out what to do with a particular piece of meat, online promotions and advice, and cuts that make sense for single people or smaller households...The campaign is based on the company’s own research, which found that eight of 10 shoppers were baffled by the meat case at their stores."

Cheap shot I know, but baffled, and most likely disgusted at the quality of their crummy "USDA choice grade" meats.

"In the razor-thin profit business of supermarkets,profitability depends on high sales per unit of shelf space. With a finite amount of shelf space and thousands of brands available, the chains favor the strongly consumer-wanted, high-volume selling products...it is more efficient to stock one or two mega-brands with their high sales velocity off the shelf than a number of lesser brands that are slow sellers. In this Darwinian process, mega-brands are the winners."