Tag Archives: purchasing

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.)

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.

Another major player makes it’s way into the BKLYN food scene

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Wegmans to Open at Brooklyn Navy Yard

Not many grocery stores can claim cult followings, certainly not in Brooklyn, where the only options in some neighborhoods tend to be oversize bodegas carrying expired goods or overpriced green grocers full of kale, quinoa and craft beer.

Wegmans, the family-owned, Rochester-based chain of 85 stores concentrated in the Great Lakes region and the Washington Beltway, has that kind of following, inspiring fan websites, hashtags, T-shirts, even a high school musicalabout a couple who finds love in the aisles. The company is poised to open its first New York City store, and it has selected one of the most ripe locations: the derelict Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

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.

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.