When our local market becomes news

Berkeley's a small town. When one of the grocery stores management gets shaken up, especially if that grocery store has its own foodie fan base, word gets around. I had heard that people were gathering at Monterey Market to say farewell to the couple that ran it. I didn't know the back story. Today, locavore blog The Ethicurean gave it to me: Fujimotos’ departure from Monterey Market a tough blow to local food chain

In other local news: the new Berkeley Bowl in West Berkeley has opened, and Black Oak Books in North Berkeley has closed its doors.

All of these stories, though hyperlocal, are getting more Twitter buzz than Shahrukh Khan in San Francisco. Apparently the intersection of those who Twitter in San Francisco and those who obsess over the Badishah of Bollywood have a very tiny insection. (Sigh)

NYTimes: Sugar is back. As a health food.

Grocery store. Bread aisle. Several competing brands. Given two comparable varieties, say, Brand X multigrain, and Brand Y multigrain, which one do I choose?

I used to distinguish on price.

Now, I'll scan the ingredient labels. If I see High Fructose Corn Syrup, I won't buy it. If the competing brand lists Sugar in its place, I'll buy that one. Hell, I'll even pay a premium. I believe I've paid up to a dollar more for a loaf of bread to avoid HFCS.

I'll pay extra for the perception that I'm getting a more "natural" product.

The New York Times covers sugar's second act as a "healthy" food.

Good for sugar, I think. But then the article doesn't just cover this marketing trend-- adjustments by processed food and beverage manufacturers responding to consumer preference: it goes on to quote several scientists who point out that nutritionally-- there's no difference between HFCS and Sugar. An empty calorie is an empty calorie.

So much for my health.

Still, Coke tasted better in India. Like Mexico, they make their cola with sugar, not corn.

And I still get to feel righteous for sticking it to the tyranny of the corn states.

Michael Pollan's letter to the President-Elect

Back in early October, Michael Pollan wrote a piece in the NYT Sunday magazine in the form of a letter to the incoming president, calling for an overhaul of the nation's food system.

[W]ith a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Of course, these "open letters" are merely literary devices that allow a writer to use prescriptive (as opposed to descriptive) language. They are designed to provoke discussion among a publication's readers, and there is never an expectation that the intended (or imagined) recipient actually reads these things.

Except, of course, when he actually does.

From Joe Klein's sit-down interview with Obama:

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs.

I don't know what's more awesome; that we have a president-elect that has at least been introduced to Pollan's reimaginings of food or that we have a president-elect that actually reads.

As to whether Pollan's prescriptions will make an impact: we'll know if we see Michelle and the girls planting a Victory Garden in the South Lawn.

(Via Kottke.)

Ethicurean: Eating Local isn't about Greenhouse Gases

Ethicurean, the group blog dedicated to the notion of food mindfulness, or, as they so artfully put it, "Chew the Right Thing", responds to Dubner's post in the New York Times Freaknomics blog.

Well, not directly. They respond to the same peer reviewed study that Dubner cites in his blog, namely "Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States," by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews.

The paper does note that the last miles to the table are not the major source of greenhouse gas emissions... agricultural inputs are. So you make more of a "green" impact by reducing consumption of red meat (since you're using a lot less agricultural inputs (fertilizer) to grow soy and corn which is fed to methane-producing cattle) than by buying local.

Ethicurean doesn't disagree. But their analysis of the paper doesn't lead them to the conclusion that local isn't better. There are other quality of life reasons for eating locally (which Dubner doesn't address... since he sticks to simple economics).

Ethicurean also stands up to Salon's recent attack on localvores here:
http://www.ethicurean.com/2008/06/28/salon-locavore/

A dissenting commenter on this latter post dismisses the food miles issue and notes: "I buy food at farmers markets. Mostly for the reason you mention: it's picked later and thus tastes better."

Freakonomics: Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores?

On the NYT Freakonomics blog, Stephen J. Dubner tackles the question of whether the inefficiencies of growing our own food wouldn't actually be more resource-intensive than relying on the food grown by professionals. As his launching off point he recounts his family's experiment with making their own orange sherbet.

We spent about $12 on heavy cream, half-and-half, orange juice, and food coloring — the only ingredient we already had was sugar — to make a quart of ice cream.... In the end, we wound up throwing away about three-quarters of what we made. Which means we spent $12, not counting labor or electricity or capital costs (somebody bought the machine, even if we didn’t) for roughly three scoops of lousy ice cream.

Link

A Locavore's Meat of the Month Club

Over at The Ethicurean, Bonnie Powell announces the start of a new Community Supported Agriculture program that features sustainably grown meat.

The backstory is amazing, which bring to light many of the logistical difficulties of attempting a "cow share," or any kind of subscription program that involves large meat animals (as well as remind the average grocery store buyer that they really don't know where meat comes from). Where do you find a slaughterhouse? How do you divide up beef ribs into 40 subscriptions? (Here's her 2006 post on what to do with an order of 660 pounds of beef and lamb.) Who gets the hog skin? But... it's fascinating to see that the 75 member Bay Area Meat CSA not only has a waiting list, but an email subscriber base of more than 500 people!

New CSA starting in Tomales, based at Clark Summit Farm. You can sign up now, but hurry, they have to cap these subscriptions. Details at Bonnie's post, plus links to other local Meat CSAs.

New Rule: People recommending that a particular cereal tastes like Buc-Wheats cereal need to have actually eaten Buc-Wheats at some point in their lives.

Man. Two recent commenters to my original post lamenting the absence of Buc-Wheats cereal from the marketplace proposed some current alternatives.

It seems clear that neither of these writers had experience with actual Buc-Wheats.

Upon cracking our first box of Kelloggs' Frosted Flakes GOLD this morning the look and taste were immediately quite evocative of our late, lamented Buc-Wheats. It's been too many years to say for sure but to me the similarities are more than casual.

If by "more than casual" you mean "not at all", then yes, of course, I agree with you.

I went and bought a box of Frosted Flakes GOLD, even though I could read on the box that Frosted Flakes GOLD is corn-based. It is honey-flavored with horrific marshmallow overtones. (Like Honey Nut Corn Flakes, but sweeter.)

Not two weeks later, we hear from this individual:

There is a cereal out there that is almost exactly like Buc Wheats. It's called Maple Buckwheat Flakes Cereal by Arrowhead Mills.

Wow, I thought. Maple. Buckwheat. We could be on to something.

Here, again, we have a problem with language, in which one needs to remove the word "exactly" and replace it with "nothing".

So now I've got these two boxes of cereal (Frosted Flakes GOLD and Maple Buckwheat Flakes) in my cupboard and I have no intention of eating any more of them.

For those of you who never ate Buc-Wheats, or who have smoked too much of the locoweed to remember, permit me to attempt an evocation of this discontinued cereal.

It was a wheat-based flake. The closest in texture I know of is Total. But less sweet, a little more whole-grain in flavor. The maple sweetening syrup was drizzled into the cereal, so that most of the flakes were unsweetened, some had just a bit of sweetness, and a few were fused together in a tasty clump of sweet maple-y goodness.

One could compare this in the savory realm to homemade Chex Mix, in which one stumbles across an intense shot of worcestershire sauce-soaked Chex in a handful of mildly seasoned Chex.

This irregular texture and sporadic sweetness was a huge part of the cereal's awesomeness.

In fact, my recollection is that at some point the recipe/manufacturing processes changed. Some rumors suggest that the actual buckwheat was removed--I don't recall noting that, but I do recall that after the change the flavor of the flakes had a bit less depth.

Also after the change there were no longer any maple-encrusted clumps of flakes. The application of the maple flavoring was far more evenly applied.

I still loved Buc-Wheats during this era, although not quite as much, and when I want a cereal that evokes this latter-day Buc-Wheats I turn to Kellogg's Healthy Heart Maple Brown Sugar Smart Start.

It's too sweet and crunchy by far (wish that I could extract the oat clusters), but the maple flavoring combined with the whole grain (in this case oat bran) flakes is the closest thing I've got.

Commenters are welcome to offer their own suggestions, so long as they follow the rule (above). And I'll say right now that unless you write 250+ extremely convincing words describing what about a particular cereal is like Buc-Wheats, I'm not going to run out and try it.

Fool me twice, won't get fooled again.

Technorati Tags:
buc-wheats

Downergate Funnies

Cartoonist Mark Fiore's "Doreen the Downer" shows us where hamburger comes from.

Holiday Guide 2007: Entertaining - Cookies (washingtonpost.com)

I was looking for an Washington Post article covering a White House press briefing which announced that the country's drug interdiction policy for the past 7 years has been a success. I couldn't find it from the front page. But then this caught my eye, and you know me, given a chance to click on something equally interesting, I'll lose all memory of the first thing I was trying to look up.

So. Twenty six different cookies for the holidays. Twenty six more ideas to propose.

Not that I have high hopes.

L wants to make more sugar cookies with sprinkles. R agrees. We suggest other favorites from our childhood (peanut butter cookies with hershey's kisses, green corn flake wreaths), but they're not interested.

A cookie made with crushed candy canes appeals to them.

Whatever. I need to find out really soon if carmel covered chocolate chip dulce de leche oatmeal cookies are all that-- or too much-- and if the vegan Rumnog Pecan Cookies will come out if I sub in real milk and butter, and --only because I live in Berkeley (this cookie sounds a little too snobbish and not all that tasty-- John Scharffenberger's Chocolate shortbread with Cacao Nibs

Hey. Who put the Quinoa Cheese Cracker in the mix? That's clearly an oversized cracker.

Also, on the same page: edible gingerbread Christmas ornaments.


(Note: I had to allow popups to get the recipes to appear)

West Berkeley Bowl, still in progress

West Berkeley Bowl, progress as of 10/17/2007
Originally uploaded by Michael L

A proposed larger-sized Berkeley Bowl in West Berkeley raised the ire of the locally-owned Berkeley Daily Planet... but once the zoning variances were approved, the paper dropped all coverage of how the project was going. For a while, we couldn't tell if was moving forward or not.

Now, thanks to Flickr, an enthusiastic photographer, and his kite-flying prowess, I know. Thanks Michael L!

Magic toffee

This is one of those recipes that must be tried to be believed.
Thanks to Kathy Molinaro for introducing it to me.
The day she brought this into the office I drove straight home to make it.

Super easy. ASTONISHINGly good.

Ingredients:
Saltines
1/2 lb (2 sticks) butter
1/2 cup sugar
12 oz bag semi-sweet Nestle (or other) morsels

Preheat oven to 350°
Line a jellyroll pan with foil, including sides.
Line pan with saltines.
Melt butter on stove, pour in sugar.
Bring to a (rolling) boil and remove from heat.
Drizzle over saltines.
Place pan into 350° oven for 15 minutes,
remove from oven and sprinkle chocolate morsels over saltines.
Return to oven for a few minutes more, until morsels melt.
Remove and spread chocolate across top with knife.
(I used a metal pie server)
Leave in refrigerator overnight.
Break up like peanut brittle.
Freaking enjoy.

Tips:
1. Best served right out of the refrigerator.
2. Do not leave yourself alone in the house with it.

Loard's, Loard's, Loard's

Last summer I couldn't find anything online about Loard's, our local ice cream shoppe.

Now it's been blogged, featured in the East Bay Express, and loards.com has gotten a slightly more modern makeover.

From the Express:

...Loard's makes relatively small batches of ice creams with relatively high fat content (about 16 percent), and what's known as "low overrun" — a minimal amount of pumped-in air, the notorious filler in big-factory ice cream.

I prefer it to the Fenton's, I gotta say.

This fall we're gonna host an ice cream social and have a Loard's/Fenton's faceoff, so that others will come to understand.

The fatness formula | Economist.com

(via The Ethicurean)
The Economist takes aim at high fructose corn syrup, which suggests that fructose, and not fat, is a major contributor to obesity.

It's an op-ed piece, so there's a lack of citations, but if it's true that there are good sugars (glucose) and bad sugars (fructose), there's even more reason for me to spend ten minutes in the bread aisle at Andronico's reading ingredients trying to find a loaf of bread under $4 that doesn't use HFCS.

Just reading about the hormonal effects of HFCS makes my innards hurt.

And in the last paragraph, I like the backhanded swipe at America's plan to produce biofuels from corn. "Misguided government policy" they call it. I'll have to do some more reading, because I'm not sure if they are calling it misguided because this country's agri-corn future will starve more Mexican campesinos, or because it will make corn even more dominant in our economy, or because it's a losing cause next to switchgrass as a biofuel, or because the Economist just assumes that since the US can't find its way out of a paper bag/land war in Asia, that it couldn't possibly execute a sensible energy policy.

The Farm Bill: Eaters Come Last

Michael Pollan's lucid explanation of The Farm Bill. As Pollan describes it, it's not the farm bill, it's The Food Bill. You should care because it's only up for reauthorization every five years.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system.

[This is actually being posted by Deirdre, but since Tim's already signed in, I'm not going to bother with my own i.d.]

The Best Mac and Cheese Ever? Really?

Tom has been blogging for, what, five days?, and already he is presenting what he says is the best mac and cheese recipe ever.

Dried mustard? Hot pepper sauce? Eggs?!?

If he'd gone all nutmeg on me I would have telephoned the Brooklyn Police to have him hauled away, but as it is I'm left thinking there's something funny in that Hudson River water they drink out there.

Because I am that kind of friend I will inform Tom that the best mac and cheese ever can be found in Issue 3 of Martha Stewart's Everyday Food magazine (May/June 2003).

Ingredients:
- 1 pound shredded white cheddar cheese
- 8 ounces cream cheese
- 1 1/4 cups whole milk
- 1 tablespoon melted butter (plus more for greasing baking dishes)
- 1/2 pound elbow macaroni
- 1/4 cup storebought or 3/4 cup homemade bread crumbs
- salt and pepper

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Butter four 14-ounce ovenproof dishes. In a small bowl, toss 1 tablespoon of melted butter with breadcrumbs and 1/4 cup cheddar.
2. Cook macaroni; drain.
3. In a large saucepan over medium heat, bring milk to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low; add cream cheese, cut into cubes. Stir until melted, 2 minutes. Gradually stir in the remaining cheddar until melted, 5 minutes. Add the cooked pasta, salt and pepper. Toss to combine.
4. Divide the mixture among prepared dishes. Bake until bubbling, 10 minutes. Remove from the oven; sprinkle with the breadcrumb mixture. Bake until golden, 10 minutes more.

Ok, so the recipes do share the preposterous level of cheese (3/4 pound against 1/2 pound macaroni). And here the whole milk and cream cheese take the place of Tom's evaporated milk and extra butter.

I still don't get what's with the eggs. Just make carbonara for crying out loud.

Ethicurean: Chew the Right Thing

New favorite blog, which documents the growing enlightenment of foodies toward food consciousness.

Inspired by Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Bonnie Azab Powell rounded up some friends also interested in thinking about food, and created a collaborative blog on sustainable, local, organic, and/or ethical food choices.

I like the multiple perspectives from different foodsheds (Berkeley, Austin, Seattle, plus reports from readers) on restaurants, farmer's markets, and farmers. I also like the recipes and the essays grappling with how to make meals more local, or more in line with sustainable agriculture.

But what I really like is the News roundup: several times a week the team posts links to headlines in the media about our food supply chain. You'd think that might be hard to sustain. But these folks comb the news for health stories (trans-fat; E. Coli outbreaks), trade policy (Genetically modified crops, the impact of NAFTA on corn, Japanese bans on American beef), consumer issues (package labelling), agriculture (the Farm bill, the citrus freeze), and intersection of all these issues with big business, Wal Mart, Archer Daniels Midland, and global warming... why some weeks there's more food news than foodie essays.

And on top of that, their tag line cracks me up.

organic free-range chicken broth

From Dooce, a parenting blog worth the occasional visit:

I made all these points to my mother who continued to insist that organic free range chicken broth is a noble and valid product, and that is when I told her that I was going to write about this and emphasize the fact that she was taking up for the hippies.

And if you’ve ever wondered how it might be possible to melt the face off an Avon World Sales Leader, you might want to start by telling her that she’s taking sides with a group of people who don’t wear make-up.

Male model being ogled by fish eyeball

Well, we're back for another season. Just when our marriage was beginning to suffer a few awkward silences, along comes TAR to help us remember why we're so perfect for each other. It's so easy to scoff at the triathelete with the artificial limb about why she can't scale the wall faster, or to smirk as the Korean-American graduate student brothers can't quickly recreate a mosaic brick pattern. And I could definitely do that bok-choy-tai-chi way way faster than the cheerleaders. So we need to know Tom Carpenter's TAR link right away to share our vastly undeserved feelings of superiority. (PS: I think this is going to be a good season. I really want the coal miners to stay in it.)

Horsemen of the Esophagus

What's better than a week at a rented house near the beach?

A rented house near the beach chock full of magazines.
The grownups passed around back issues of Harper's and The Sunday New York Times Magazine. Liam and Ronan were fascinated by the 3-D cover of the 1000th issue of Rolling Stone. A single copy of InStyle magazine was there to help us "cleanse the palate," and keep us up to date on Jennifer Anniston's New Year's Resolutions.

But the best article I found was in the May 2006 of The Atlantic Monthly. It's a glorious article on the world's top competitors in the International Federation of Competitive Eating, excerpted from Jason Fagone's book, Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream.

The offbeat subject drew me in. The writing hooked me. Fagone knows how to tell a story, and it helps that the IFOCE promoters are great showmen. The final page of the article online captures the amazing drama of the 2001 Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest.

Michael Pollan writes, Whole Foods writes back

Partly in response to Michael Pollan's latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Whole Foods is rejiggering its regional supplier chain to incorporate more locally grown foods.

This is a pretty lengthy SF Gate/Chronicle story, with references to blog entries by the CEO of Whole Foods and Pollan himself.

Separate from the content issues themselves (which do make for interesting reading), what I find most remarkable is that a company the size of Whole Foods would so publicly respond to the work of a single author, and that it would do it using the CEO as the primary communicator, and the internet as the primary zone of communication--rather than hiding behind a corporate press release sent to media outlets, or even a one-way interview by the CEO.

Granted, Pollan was reaching readers within Whole Foods' target demographic--both with his bestselling book and his columns for NYT TimesSelect. So these challenges to Whole Foods' values were having a real impact on the company's image.

What's interesting at a meta- level is how this exchange points towards future shifts in the ways businesses communicate, as articulated in part by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in their book Naked Conversations.

Pollan remarks in the article that using this public arena to create a dialogue was a shrewd decision by Whole Foods, and builds credibility among those who care about these issues.

Scoble would argue that the companies who are open and honest will be the shrewdest, and the most successful at building lasting relationships with their customers. Those, on the other hand, who use "openness" as a PR device will fail, because that is still about attempting to control the conversation.

Pollan will still continue to study and write about Whole Foods, so he'll be there to help keep them honest.

Or, maybe Whole Foods knows a guy who knows a guy who can, you know, take care of it.