Aroma Cucina

Learn to love Ugly Fruit

Let’s say you have 3 kids. One is very tall, one is short and fat and one is absolutely medium in every way. Would you throw out the tall and short ones and just keep the medium one? Probably not. Besides there are laws about throwing your children into the trash just because they aren’t standard size.

Now, let’s say you have 3 ripe tomatoes, but they don't look alike.  In many countries, if you are a vegetable seller, you are required to throw out the odd shaped tomato and only keep the standard tomato. Because after all, when it comes to fresh fruits and vegetables, conformity matters more than waste or taste.  

Sound silly or sinful? Sound outrageous? It is just this sense of outrage that prompted Isabel Soares to start “Fruta Feia” (Ugly Fruit) in Lisbon, Portugal.  Soares came to the MAD chef symposium in Copenhagen to tell us her story.

  While European rules on food conformity are partly to blame, so are supermarkets that insist on standardized sizes and shapes. Shippers have their say as they insist on uniformity to make it easier to pack and ship the fresh produce. In turn, the consumer has been trained to expect to see ‘perfect’ fruits and vegetables, so anything sub-standard is rejected.

The goal of Ugly Fruit is to rescue locally grown non-standardized fruits and vegetables and distribute them to it’s members, much like how a food cooperative or CSA operates. Ugly Fruit is also dedicated to broadening the consumer’s mind about what is acceptable and normal. Soares’s project got its initial startup money as one of three winners of the  Ideias de Origem Portuguesa entrepreneurship prize. This recognition was crucial in raising the additional funds through PPL, a crowd sourcing website.

While the idea of rescuing perfectly good food sounds uplifting and romantic, the reality is a lot of hard work and heavy lifting. Early in Ugly Fruit’s history, they had a supremely bad morning when their produce pick-up van caught fire and literally burned to ashes. A friend rescued them on the side of the road with another vehicle and they were able to pick up their daily round of food from the growers, but they were very behind schedule. Normally it would take 3 hours to break down the food and set up the individual crates for their clients. News of the van’s demise spread throughout the Ugly Fruit community and by the time they returned to their warehouse, there was a crew of willing volunteers to help break down the food in 45 minutes. As Soares told the story, it was at this moment, with everyone pitching in, that she knew this project would succeed.

  The estimates vary on exactly how much food is wasted, but the general consensus is about 50% of food is wasted at some point in the growth-to-table-to-trash cycle.

An additional obstacle the group faced was opposition, or call it suspicion on the part of the growers. As Soares explains, the farmers thought she might have been an under cover agent for the sanitary department. But, if you’re throwing away 25% of your crop because it doesn’t conform, eventually you are going to welcome the arrival of the Ugly Fruit van. It’s not just the waste at the consumer level, but think about the water and soil resources that are also being wasted.

 From startup in November 2013, to just a few months later in late spring of 2014, Ugly Fruit had sold 21 tons of fruit and now has a waiting list of over 1,000 people. That’s a lot of food in a short amount of time. It looks like people have no problem with mis-shapen lemons after all.  Soares has plans to expand to other cities outside of Lisbon, and if goes all as planned, maybe her idea will spread to other countries as well. 

Isabel Soares, thank you for sharing your story at #MAD4.

What is cooking in a mad, mad, mad, mad world?

What happens when Rene Redzepi and his merry band of pranksters bring together a gaggle of chefs and culinary people to talk about “What Is Cooking”? It becomes a MAD affair!

MAD is a  community of thoughtful people who care about food and the impact the restaurant community can have on how we eat. Every summer they erect a giant red circus tent and hold an annual conference in Copenhagen. This year, I got to go and it was inspiring, whimsical, heart wrenching and good fun.

I also have to confess; I have a complete crush on Rene Redzepi. He’s completely human, humble and approachable. I imagine he’s quite intense in the Noma kitchen, but this is as it should be when you have the number one restaurant in the world. On the second morning, he greeted every single attendee with a good morning kiss and a hug and that gets my vote for keeping it real.

Picture this opening moment: lots of people riding high on the excellent coffee that was served in the breakfast tent. It's a cacophony of conversations, photos, greetings and meetings all going on at top volume. And then we’re told to head to the main tent.

You shuffle into one of the entrances and now you try to find a seat on the bleachers but it’s really dark and your brain is being blasted by LOUD heart thumping rock music. It’s the kind of music that tattoos your brain for the rest of the day.  On your seat is a tote bag that has the program of the day’s speakers, but it’s too dark to read it, so you’re still wondering what’s going on. (Note: To keep us all speculating, the list of speakers was kept top secret.)

And then the music stops. The crowd settles in and grows quiet.

A man and a woman in a kimono walk onto the stage.

Without saying a word, the man pours flour into a shallow red bowl. He adds water. He begins to knead the dough with the familiarity of someone who knows how to listen with his hands.

In absolute silence. 

Within moments, he’s got a viable ball of dough and he moves to a table-top where he rolls out the dough.

In absolute silence.

He picks up a knife and lovingly slices the noodles. (And here there is a collective gasp of knife-envy from the audience because it’s the most beautiful noodle knife cutter we’ve ever seen.) The noodles are dropped into boiling water, then tossed in cool water, drained and finally arranged on a plate that rests on a serving tray. 

In absolute silence.

The beautiful woman in the kimono glides forward into the audience and offers an audience member the tray to taste the noodles. She returns to the stage, retrieves the other tray and again offers the noodles.

In absolute silence.

 It was a moment of pure, peaceful, prayerful zen. A moment that encapsulated all that is cooking: the prep, the saving of every scrap of left over flour, the attention to detail and finally the offering of food. This was a chef’s way of saying grace. Thank you Chef Rai. (Restaurant Sobatei Rakuici in Niseko, Hokkaido, Japan).

 Then our leader, Chef Redzepi, steps out into the spotlight and the tent goes MAD. [Update: Link to MADfeed's video of soba master Tatsuru Rai.]

 

I’ve always cared about cooking; it’s who I am, but I struggle to find the words. The people who spoke at this festival found their words and told their stories.

It’s my honor to share with you some of their tales over the next few weeks. Today I’ll leave you with this nugget of wisdom  given to us by Chef Jeremiah Tower.  Here's what Elizabeth Taylor told him,  “When the going gets rough, put on your lipstick, pour a cocktail and get on with it.”

 Amen, sister. #MAD4

 

You call this sustainable?

 
If I search the word ‘sustainable’, Google will give me 207,000,000 responses in .36 seconds.  And I have a really slow internet connection here in Umbria.

Sustainable is the new organic. It’s the buzzword-du-jour.  It’s soft marketing. Tack the word sustainable onto just about anything and the politically correct consumer goes weak-kneed with delight as they think their purchases are contributing to a food solution.

For now, let’s just talk about small farms and sustainable agriculture, ok? We can get to sustainable bio-dynamic gin and tonics another day. Not that I'm the least bit cynical about marketing techniques.

A recent spate of blog posts and articles are all talking about the future of small farming. From the wonderful Rachel Laudan, who ponders “Who is Going to Farm?”, to a thoughtful editorial in the New York Times, “Don’t Let Your Children Grow up to be Farmers”, there is soul searching going on.

The crux of the problem is money. I know, you’re surprised.

According to a USDA brief published in 2006, income not earned on a farm “provided 85-95 per-cent of household income over 1999-2003, up from around 50 percent in 1960.”  What?? 85-95% of household income doesn’t come from farm labor? Well, that pretty much sucks if you are thinking about earning a living supplying restaurants with high end neo-natal carrots.

Bren Smith, who wrote the NY Times editorial, isn’t just telling anecdotes. The government backs up his story. A small farmer can’t earn a living just working a farm. No matter how romantic it sounds, you need another source (or two or three) of income.

Enter “Slow Money”.  This alliance is connecting investors with farmers.  According to their website, “Through Slow Money national gatherings, regional events and local activities, more than $35 million has been invested in over 300 small food enterprises around the United States since mid-2010.”

The site also explains its international outreach: a solar dairy farm in Switzerland and chapters sprouting up in France, Japan, Canada and Australia.

Let me get this straight.

Having money to get the farm up and running is better than no money, right? Nice tractors are way better than a hand held hoe.

So, a hedge fund manager, or a board director who most likely does not support raising the minimum wage of migrant farm workers can now donate some of their profits to small farmers.  Am I detecting a  whiff of smug wafting from this approach?

According to another NY Times article: “The future is local,” said Narendra Varma, 43, a former manager at Microsoft who invested $2 million of his own money last year in a 58-acre project of small plots and new-farmer training near Portland, Ore.

 That’s a lot of seed money for a start up farmer, even for a cooperative farm concept that Mr. Varma is developing.

What about subsidies?

Farm subsidies are an economic tool used worldwide as a way to keep food prices more stable. A year of bad weather, or blight can wipe out an entire year’s worth of work, and in theory, subsidies attempt to stabilize that.

Let’s follow the subsidy money. According to that 2006 USDA report, 32% of all US farms receive subsidies. Over 50% of that amount goes to large farms; small farms receive the lowest share of assistance (12%).  As your production level increases, so does your subsidy amount, so payment amounts go primarily to the high income-high wealth farmers.  I know, I surprised you again.

Are any of these approaches sustainable?

If ‘sustainable’ still means a system that can perpetuate itself, I’m not so sure.

The farmer's market and a CSA are not going to keep a small farmer’s lights on and the computer running.

If you need a money-bags investor to make your farm more resilient to annual income fluctuations, that means the priorities shift to paying back the investor.

As an average consumer, I want to eat fresh, local and affordable vegetables. A boutique priced tomato isn’t going to make it into my daily diet.  What about the people who use food stamps, even if the farmer’s market will double the value of their food stamps?  (A subsidized farmer subsidizes a lower income family. Yeah, that sounds sustainable.)

These are tough issues and deserve to be talked about.

Yo! Are you guys at MAD listening? Its time to have a non-romantic, nuanced, public conversation about these issues.

2014 Food & Beverage Trends & Predictions

The New Year is a time for reflection, resolution, and endless lists of the best or worst whatevers of the past year. Best Special Meal Requests by Vegan Customers, Worst Italian-American-Jewish Restaurants Ever, Most Underrated Vegetables You’ll Never Find at Whole Foods, and of course, Most Popular Food Allergy. (Gluten free still tops the list 5 years running, while peanut allergies have mysteriously plummeted to 8^th place, once again allowing airlines to toss us bags containing 5 peanuts or less.)

Here are our Aroma Cucina “2014 Trends & Predictions”.

Predictions:

Chef Tattoos: In a timesaving move, many restaurants will have on-sight tattooing stations for line cooks.

Sustainability becomes a hot button topic as two chef contenders in the reality show “Last One Standing” shoot each other over the final remaining morel in the state of Oregon.

 

Food Mashups will continue to evolve. After the doughnut married the croissant to begat the cronut, what's next?

• Dogburger: Ground hot dogs shaped into round hamburger patties and deep-fried.

• Pizzacorn: Cryogenically frozen nuggets of Sicilian style pizza are blasted to look like popcorn.

• Meatghetti: Using special meat glue, pork is force fed through a pasta machine creating nearly-almost 100% meat noodles. The Gluten Frees are thrilled with this non-wheat noodle until they find out the technical name for meat glue is transglutaminase and that must be a problem, really, for some reason….

Food Matters:

Inner Lives of Carrots Revealed. Vegetables have feelings too. Exhaustive research that began with understanding how chickens count more accurately than toddlers has lead to even more tiring research about the inner emotions of vegetables.

The Farm to Table movement is alive and well. New legislature requires the name and history of each person who helped raise the vegetable be printed on a sticker that must firmly adhere to the vegetable. This gives rise to the “Sticker Shock” mini-cottage industry of greenmarket workers who will remove the stickers without damaging the fruit.

Kiwi Free & Proud. Intra-state shipping of produce is banned in the U.S. This leads to widespread rioting in New York when residents learn that tomatoes cannot grow in the snow. “Who knew?”, asks Shirleene Madison, sandwich shop employee at the popular Organic Brooklyn Eatery.

Status Symbols of the Foodistas:

Frack-Free Water Bottles: These water bottles are made from 100% pure Himalayan stone and do not contain any petroleum products. The stone is hand-harvested by children attending the free Frack-Free Day Care Facility in Nepal. Although the bottles are quite heavy, they can also be purchased with an optional Sherpa who will schlep and refill the bottles as needed. (See craft water below for further info.)

Virtual Kitchens: An expanding trend originating with the skinny hipster crowd who don’t eat anyway. These virtual kitchens utilize the latest 3-D projection technology so it actually looks like you have a kitchen instead of a bulletin board crammed with take-out menus.

Trends:

Extreme Ethnic Foods: Remote island destinations are seeing a surge in chef tourism as chefs are forced to find rare and unusual plants, animals and protein-rich insects.  We are all still in shock over the untimely death of Chef Rad Forager who did not know that raw water hemlock has some nasty side effects.

 

Craft beer and distilleries have led to the craft water movement. Hand-held sparking tools are used to smash home grown hydrogen with filtered high altitude oxygen to create custom craft waters. Roaring Bull Energy Drink has been banned in most EU countries, but their marketing campaign for “Hindenburg Death Rain” Craft Water has been highly effective as it features the extreme danger of sparking hydrogen to create water.

The Anti-Foodista movement has had resurgence in street cred as they embrace the previously derogatory label of “Foodie”. Foodies remain the number one readers of food-centric blogs and purchase more VitaMix blenders than any other demographic.

And that, Dear Readers, is our year-opening roundup of what we have to look forward to in 2014!

Happy New Year from our crazy family of cooks to yours!

 

Related articles

2014 Food Trend Predictions from the Supermarket Guru

Plate2Page Magic in Toscana

Is it alchemy or magic when a spell is cast and you are transported to another place? When words transport and images bring a place to life?
Food bloggers are stuck in that nether world between art and craft, hobby and vocation, respect and silliness.
Perhaps we belong to the old tradition of serial story telling?
Not unlike Pinocchio and the Pickwick Papers that told their stories in regular releases in the newspaper, we tell stories and share recipes in little daily bites. Our loyal readers are in on the jokes, know the characters, know of my fondness for roasting quail.

It was in that spirit, of wanting to walk in Dickens or Collodi’s shoes,  that I went to the Plate2Page food writer & photography workshop in Tuscany.

OK...I confess Dickens was not exactly what I was thinking about on the long, foggy drive from Montone to Pistoia. But, I was looking for inspiration, and permission, to play with my words and my photos.

Writing is solitary and there is certainly an appeal to being able to share fears and frustrations with other who tell tales through words and pictures. How much of my personal life should I reveal, must everything be 100% truthful and hot off the fire, how often must I blog, and how the hell do I adjust the white balance on my camera? 

Blogging is a new frontier for sharing and those of us who truly care about what we write push ourselves to do it better with every post.


There were 16 of us: 4 organizers/teachers and 12 participants. We came from:Germany via India, France via Florida, South Africa via England, Italy via Sweden, Malta, Brazil,Canada, California, Denver, Belgium, Toronto, Poland, Amsterdam, England. In other places and other situations, this might make for long uncomfortable silences, but when food is your love, the barriers melt, the Belgium chocolates are passed around and the noise level rises.

There was a late night photography class, and multiples of writing and photography assignments throughout the weekend. And while I picked up technical knowledge, what I truly gained was a respect for our craft and the comfort of comraderie with my fellow serial writers.

Many thanks to our creative organizers: Meeta of  What’s for Lunch, Honey; Jean of Cooksister;  Jamie of Life’s a Feast, and Ilva of Lucullian Delights. Each of you brought something unique and wonderful to the experience.

And more thanks to the generous sponsors of this Plate2Page workshop: Bisol Prosecco, Sunchowder’s fabulous jams, Zwilling J.A. Henckel’s knives, tasteofhome's yummy baking book, Smaromi’s gorgeous salts, OXO, South African’s Peppadew peppers, Cavi-Art’s beautiful faux caviar, Gallo rice, Nielsen-Massey Vanilla, Gourmelli’s pink Himalayan salt slab, Matcha Factory’s green tea powder and travel size bottles of Tabasco.

Food Speak: NYC Style

Do you think we could view the world of food as a many faceted, sparkling crystal? Shiny in spots and grubby in others?  Do you think New Yorkers are a tribe unto their own? How does everyone afford to go out night after night? Why didn’t I didn’t know I could go to a different food event every day and night? 

I’ve been a part of some amazing and unique conversations while I’ve been in The City the past few weeks. As is par for the course with me, one question leads to another.

There is no question that food is HOT. The media, the buzz, the attitudes, the events remind me of the crazy days in the fashion world when money flowed and the world revolved around Kate Moss.  Linda Evangelista infamously declared she didn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000.  Now, I believe it s Giada De Laurentiis who is the reigning diva of the moment.

Celebrity chefs have usurped the Super Models. My, how the world has changed.  Or, my, how it really hasn’t changed at all; it is still just as silly as it ever was.
But, there is something else going on; there is an air of urgency, an awareness that we need to know more about what we are eating.


Our complacency with the way we eat is slowly being shrugged off, like a sleeping giant shaking its head and trying to make sense of what happened while he was napping.  Shake, shake: junk food isn’t really cheap if you factor in the cost of making people sick. Shake, shake: food tastes better when you eat it in season. Shake, shake: people forgot how to cook, but they’re waking up to it’s pleasures once again. Shake, shake: we’ve got a lot of people to feed on this planet, how we gonna do it?

On Tueday night, I listened to Kat Flinn, Pam Anderson and Lauren Shockey talk about their new books and their personal journeys that led them back to the home kitchen. The crowd roared when someone said, “Bring back Home-Ec classes!”


As part of the Culinary HIstorians series,I listened to one of our national treasures, Paula Wolfert, talk about the joys of Moroccan cooking, and how happy she is to bring Berber cooking the attention it deserves.  It was a sold out event and the audience was rapt, respectful and informed.

By Friday, I needed to round up food people for our #IACPNYC photo shoot.  The word went out and within 24 hours I had a skate boarding butcher, mustached mixologist, gorgeous coffee roaster, courageous author, vegan activist, home charcuterie maker, two adorable boys who wanted to play air guitar with a bunch of celery, and an urban farmer all lined up to have their photo taken for the cause. My sincere thanks to Holley Atkinson of  Slow Food NYC and Karin Endy of The Culinary Trust for helping me to gather the clan.


There was a kind of magic in the room as everyone shared their stories with us. These passionate people are doing amazing things and changing the way we think about food and drink.  I have the utmost respect and admiration for our photographer, Jason Blake, who conceived of this project and who let his curiosity and enthusiasm bring out the best in everyone.

One last shout out of the week to Jane Lerner of Smorgasburg/The Brooklyn Flea frame. What a great time and great food to be had in Brooklyn!  Thanks for getting me over there and opening my eyes and tastebuds.

There’s a phrase that keeps simmering in my brain as I work on the IACP conference and meet all these committed people: “May you live in interesting times.”  Well, I do believe I’ve hit the jackpot.

Thank You Mom, Or Why I Love Being in the Kitchen

A little break from artichokes to wish all the mother’s a Happy Day!
All week long I’ve been thinking of my Mom and chuckling about how she can never remember the Italian word for artichoke: carciofi.  I suspect she remembers very well, but enjoys hearing everyone laugh.
One of my mother’s greatest gifts to me (and there are many!) is my love of cooking. She’s a good cook, but the fact that growing up, we always had dinner together is where the love part comes in. I had to be home by dinnertime..or else. That was a time to share the day, talk about nonsense, or revel in the fresh corn that was picked moments before it went into the pot. Of course the time I picked the cow corn by mistake and brought it home also meant it was time to teach me the basics of corn identification. It’s how I learned all the capitals of the 50 states...drilling at the dinner table.
No matter what kind of day you were having, dinnertime was a little oasis where everything else stopped and you connected with the family. Whether you wanted to or not. Hell, I was a miserable teen ager like every other teen ager, but you still had to come to the table.

Then there were the parties. Growing up it seemed as if there was always a party going on, either at our house or at somebody’s house. One time I walked into our kitchen, and there were 5 or 6 women, chopping onions,  all with saran wrap tied around their eyes to keep from crying.  They were laughing too hard to notice they were crying anyway.  Over the years, we all learned to hang spoons from our noses. No dinner was complete without a spoon hanging session. Poor Jeff, he married into a family of spoon hangers. Not that his family isn’t just as nutty! 

Even bad times meant people gathering, people bringing food. When my father passed away, after the funeral everyone came back to our house. The house was literally bursting with people and eventually sadness turned to laughter with everyone telling stories and eating casseroles.  I remember thinking how much my Dad would have loved that party.

And that’s why I love to cook. Because putting food on the table is a sure way to gather family and anyone else who is around and have some laughs. If you have dinner together often enough, those dinners build an unbreakable bond.

So, Mom, when you say, “I don’t know where she got it from.” Yes, you do...I got it from you. 

Here's a wonderful musical video, from Louie Lopez who has eaten at our table so many times he is definetely family!

 

 

 

Simple Food v. Modernist Cuisine?

There is much ado over Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine and if I had a spare room and a lot of extra cash...well, I still don’t think I’d buy it.
In case you missed the coming of this encyclopedic behemoth, it’s 5 volumes, at around 500 bucks and it’s on back order. I respect and admire the Boyz with Toyz crowd, but in general, I’m a simpler, comfort seeking cook. Let me be clear, there’s a time and place for modernist cuisine, and a time and place for comfort food. There is room to enjoy both; there is no line in the sand and both schools learn from each other.

Recently I’ve come across fooderati prose that gushes in wonderment at the miracles that can be performed with just three ingredients! As if there was some prize for discovering joy in simplicity. Well...duh. Good quality ingredients, prepared respectfully have been in vogue since women discovered how to cook meat over a fire.

Umbria is probably one of the better examples of making good food from humble ingredients. Note, I did not say Michelin 5 star fine dining, I said good food. Everyday food.

Pancetta is a staple meat in Italy; not the cured, bacon-like pancetta, but raw slices of pork belly. It’s always the first thing to get gobbled up at BBQ’s. A traditional stove top way to make pancetta is to fry it in the pan, throw bits of  fresh sage in at the last moment, and then finish the dish with a good size hit of red wine vinegar. It’s pork belly perfect.

My big experiment today was seeing how potatoes would pair with the super peppery arugula that wintered over in our orto.  It worked beautifully with boiled potatoes moistened with some of our olive oil, a little bit of mustard and a pinch of salt. Take note: no self respecting Umbrian would ever add mustard to anything, it’s just not in their DNA.

The tomato salad was a salad of necessity. The tomatoes are coming up from Sicily and they’re just so-so, but I wanted a salad. The sweet peas are in season and I’ve been throwing them in everything, just because I can.

So, the moral of the story is don’t apologize for simple food, don’t elevate simple food to a state of godliness and save your pennies because this new oven that Shola is testing at Studio Kitchen looks to be just about everything I’ve ever dreamed of. It peels grapes for god’s sake.

Happy Weekend!

PS Next week we’re hosting an Artichoke Festival here at Aroma Cucina. How to clean them and a week’s worth of recipes. Should be some tasty fun.

When To Be or Not to Be a Locavore

I will never be a committed locavore. I won’t give up:
mangoes
coffee
olive oil
tangerines
shrimp
wine

I could go on and on,  but you get the point. Doesn’t it make more sense to be an efficient-vore?  Certain things grow better in certain places. What am I going to do for high altitude coffee beans? Grow them on top of my kitchen cabinets because that’s the highest point around?

Things taste better when they grow in their proper environment. This is called terroir, and wine people will debate endlessly about whether or not you can taste the shale that covers the root of a particular grapevine. French and Italians will come to fisticuffs over whose truffles taste better. I KNOW our orto produces the best tomatoes in the whole world. And that’s because tomatoes taste best in season, sun ripened, plucked and eaten still warm. 

We need to know when to ship and when to stay  local. No one hands out medals for trying to force grow lettuce in a freezing cold upstate NY greenhouse in winter. It’s simply not efficient.

Shipping has become incredibly efficient. The reason civilization spread was an indirect result of wanting what someone else had. People wanted salt, and eventually they built a city near the salt collecting area and called it Rome. Spices traveled and so did culture. We traded...I make this, you grow that, we trade.

Sarah Murray’s book, The Moveable Feast is an absolute eyeopener as she explains the pure efficiency of shipping food. It’s full of stories about things that we now take for granted and weird moments in history. Like the Clipper ship races, where the ships would leave India and race to England, arriving within moments of each other. Or the fact that UPS truck routes are  set up so they have no left turns to save on fuel.

Read the book. Make informed decisions. I’m all for eating local, when it makes sense. But, when those mangoes are flooding Chinatown, and they taste this good, you know I’m going to be eating them!

How do you eat?

If organic celery costs $4.95 and regular celery costs .99 which would you buy?

• organic because I'm worth it
• how bad could it be?
• regular so I can save $4.00 and buy a bottle of organic water

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I know. I’m trivializing important food issues, but what goes on in the world of food media and marketing is really frustrating and demoralizing. Are we content to be treated as mindless children? walking wallets? elitist foodies devouring endangered species?
Or worse: have we lost our sense of humor?? 

Alice Waters included sharks fin in her wish list for a final meal and was soundly berated for being insensitive. Hell, I want some of those Ortolan little birdies that Mitterrand ate for his last meal. I want them...but I’m not getting them. People, could we please just get a grip?

Slow Food sent around a petition regarding Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD. It’s not about the collapse of the American colonies ...it’s about bees. Here’s the quote:  “The Environmental Protection Agency has the power to investigate and ban the pesticides thought to be responsible but, despite their own scientists' advice and under pressure from pesticides companies, they're dragging their feet.” [emphasis by Slow Food]

This is scare mongering. Slow Food is laying a blanket denunciation on all pesticides. If you go onto their various websites, there is now a more moderate tone suggesting there may be multiple reasons for CCD. But, that won’t get names on a petition, will it?

Whole Foods issued a cheery 5 step rating system for animal slaughter, only it’s more about making the consumer feel good,  than it is about being able to comply.
The reality is that it's a very bad idea to have bulls around that aren’t castrated. They get really feisty and will injure each other if a pretty Bessie happens to stroll by.
There are also the legal problems associated with on farm slaughter. Most states don’t allow it, or allow it only for at home consumption, or there are significant limits on the number of animals to be slaughtered. It is a state by state ruling. So, is Whole Foods only going to source from one state? One farm? Not likely.

And what is up with pigs and bowling balls?? Apparently it’s a wonderful thing to throw bowling balls in with the pigs so they have something to do. This is natural? Italian pig famers would laugh themselves silly. Then again, bowling isn't very popular in Italy. Maybe the farmers could start a trend.

People, we need to face some facts. There are lots of hungry mouths in the world, more on the way and we all need to eat. While slow, local and organic is wonderful, and the way I like to eat, it is a choice. I buy organic when I feel it’s worth it. 
So could we scale down the rhetoric and start coming up with some truly viable solutions?
And to the guys at Whole Foods and Slow Foods....don’t treat us like children. Talk to us about the problems, the challenges, the realities, and we’ll like you a whole lot better in the morning.