Author Archives: Alejandro Cantagallo

About Alejandro Cantagallo

Growing up in Queens, the son of immigrants, Alejandro had an early start in the food world helping his father out in the family's butcher's shop. Throughout his twenties he worked his way through the front of the house at a number of north shore country clubs and later shifted gears and started culinary school at CUNY CityTech. In 2010 Alejandro opened Floresta and despite acclaim closed a year later. Currently, he is a senior college lab technician in the purchasing and operations arm of the Hospitality Management Department at CUNY New York City College of Technology and is also an adjunct professor in the same department. Alejandro's current instructional workload includes Culinary 1 and Introduction to Food and Beverage Management.

Local Gold?

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As the market has shown saffron at times has toppled gold with its price per gram and in ancient times was used as currency. Here’s a nice piece about very local “saffron” from LuckyPeach.com

I was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, visiting my mom recently, when I spied a long-forgotten fixture of the local supermarket checkout aisle: a display of Mosemann’s saffron packages, each one carefully stapled to a card background, just beyond customers’ reach. We bought one, and as I examined the familiar Pennsylvania Dutch-styled packaging, I noticed that Mosemann’s saffron comes from Spain, which struck me as odd. I’d always believed it was locally grown in central Pennsylvania. It made me wonder: was “Pennsylvanian saffron” just a local legend?

 

White House Meeting Elicits Pledges to Reduce Antibiotic Use

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The Obama administration convened representatives of hospitals, food producers, professional medical societies and restaurant chains on Tuesday and extracted pledges to reduce the use of lifesaving antibiotics, whose effectiveness is waning because of overuse.

The meeting at the White House highlighted the problem of antibioticresistance, a public health crisis that every year kills at least 23,000 of the more than two million Americans who fall ill from infections that are impervious to the drugs.

The event was part of a series of efforts that began in the fall whenPresident Obama’s science advisers announced a national strategy to curb the overuse of antibiotics. It was the first time a presidential administration had taken on the problem, but consumer advocates said the strategy so far has fallen short of getting tough on antibiotic use in agriculture.

The FDA Bans Trans-Fats in Restaurants

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The Food and Drug Administration is expected to issue restrictions this month to snuff out the artery-clogging fats that ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg banned in New York City eateries nearly a decade ago, sources say.

It was Bloomberg who led the charge to ban trans-fats, which have been outlawed in NYC restaurants since 2006.

They Will Squash You

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Kevin’s marrow is as heavy as a baby hippo (it’s arriving on the back of a tractor), and Ian’s pumpkin makes a nice chair (six humans are hoisting it onto a scale). Meanwhile, a prize-winning cabbage takes up most of a park bench, freaking out a toddler.

The U.S. produces impressively swollen pumpkins, there is a world-record marrow in the Netherlands, and strong competition from Germany, Switzerland, and Canada. But the culture of growing giant vegetables to show off is decidedly British. In the Wallace and Gromit movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a village’s annual giant-veg competition comes under threat from the titular beast, and the citizens take it very seriously. In towns up and down the UK, during September and October, you can find giant-vegetable competitions wherever cell phone service gets spotty. The prizes are never as good as Gromit’s golden carrot (spoiler!), yet the competition is fierce, the anticipation high, and the parsnips twisted as all hell. (The thing to know about giant vegetables is that they are not just big; they are unrecognizable. There is the mangled hell of a giant parsnip, writhing and twisting on itself, and there is the shapely magnificence of a giant onion, shrouded in layer upon layer of golden skin.)

Urban Gardening on the Third Floor

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Kerry Trueman and Matt Rosenberg began by growing tomatoes on the roof of their third-floor walk-up in the West Village more than 20 years ago.

“We didn’t know anything — we used Miracle-Gro,” said Ms. Trueman, 54, who blogs about the politics of food for Civil Eats and writes about climate change for Moms Clean Air Force. “But it changed the way I viewed things in cities. Whenever I was on a high floor, looking down, I would see all this roof space and say: ‘Wow, you could grow so much. There are no woodchucks or deer, no Japanese beetles. And so many things grow so well in containers.’ ”

They used a ladder to climb through the roof hatch then. They built large planters for strawberries and 20 different kinds of roses. They grew blueberries and corn and hops. They had to dismantle the roof garden in 1998 during a legal battle to keep their building rent-stabilized. But by then, they were hooked. “Tomatoes are the gateway drug,” Ms. Trueman said.

The Piscivore’s Dilemma

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The oceans are in serious trouble, creating a tough question for consumers: Should I eat wild fish, farmed fish, or no fish at all? The author, a longtime student of marine environments, dove into an amazing new world of ethical harvesters, renegade farmers, and problem-solving scientists. The result: your guide to sustainably enjoying nature’s finest source of protein.

 

So much food is wasted because it’s ugly

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Food is simply too good to waste. Even the most sustainably farmed food does us no good if the food is never eaten. Getting food to our tables eats up 10 percent 12 of the total U.S.energy budget, uses 50 percent of U.S.land, and swallows 80 percent of freshwater consumed in the United States.3 Yet, 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten.4 That is more than 20 pounds of food per person every month.5 Not only does this mean that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year,6 but also 25 percent of all freshwater7 and huge amounts of unnecessary chemicals, energy, and land. Moreover, almost all of that uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills where organic matter accounts for 16 percent of U.S. methane emissions.

You Can’t Always Trust a Title – The Good News About E. Coli Food Poisoning

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Fewer Americans are getting sick from a nasty germ sometimes found in undercooked hamburgers, the government reported Thursday.

The latest report card on food poisoning shows illnesses from a dangerous form of E. coli bacteria have fallen 20 percent in the last few years