Monthly Archives: May 2015

Big Meat: The indie butcher business grows up – Quartz

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Big Meat: The indie butcher business grows up – Quartz.

 

It turns out the challenge facing the meat business doesn’t come from the consumer side. Americans like meat. They didn’t need a primal food craze to convince them of that. But in places where the animals don’t come with a provenance, the butchery trade doesn’t attract new entrants because the labor economics just plain suck.

Meet Will Allen, The Urban Farmer Starting His Own Revolution

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Here’s another example of the changing landscape in food production, distribution and development.

When you think of farming towns, Milwaukee-proper might not be the first to come to mind. The large Wisconsin city is perhaps better known for its famed breweries and picturesque location along Lake Michigan, but one resident there has been on a mission to make farming more accessible even within the city limits.

Will Allen is a former professional athlete who played basketball throughout college at the University of Miami and post-college in Belgium. Though he has also held jobs in corporate America, Allen has spent the last 21 years in a completely different profession: urban farmer.

 

 

Why are Lobsters So Expensive?

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An in depth piece on the rise of the lobster in the US.

Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, lobsters were everywhere. They washed up along the New England coast like so much satanic jetsam, scuttling around and snapping their claws—and because no one bothered to kill and eat them in large numbers, most were huge. They weighed three to six pounds on average, which indicated that they were somewhere between fifteen and thirty years old.

In the mid-1800s, tinned lobster, served cold, became a kind of cheap salad-bar fixing across the country. This drove up demand, which drove the big lobsters to extinction, leaving lobstermen to harvest the smaller one- and two-pounders that are still the industry’s bread and butter today. Around the turn of the century, local restaurateurs in Maine started serving whole, boiled lobsters to rich summer vacationers as a marquee main dish. Thus the image of the modern lobster was born, a natural accompaniment to tuxedos, top hats, caviar, and Champagne: fancy, steaming, bright red on a silver platter. The advent of refrigerated shipping spread the trend to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

 

In other news, ever wonder why Lobsters turn red when you cook them?

Cooking lobster always feels a little magical: You drop a blue shellfish into a pot of boiling water, and a few minutes later, you take out a bright red shellfish.

Even scientists have long been at a loss to explain the chemistry underpinning this alchemy. One team of chemists from the University of Manchester in Englandbelieved they had an explanation way back in 2002, but later work indicated that their hypothesis only explained a third of the color change.