Tag Archives: sourcing

Local Gold?

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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 Piscivore’s Dilemma

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Big Meat: The indie butcher business grows up – Quartz

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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?

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Ever Wonder how dates are grown?

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s a quick walk through from our friends at the Huffington Post:

Of all the dried fruit options at the grocery store, dates rank amongst the least popular of the bunch. They don’t have the cute California Raisin character to make them likable, nor do they have a catchy name like Craisins. What they do have is a mildly bad reputation for being just as common — and unwelcome — as fruit cake at Christmas time. It’s too bad because dates are responsible for making some truly delicious recipes most of them desserts.

On our quest to bring dates back into the public’s favor, we got to thinking about where dates come from. For those of you who have never given any thought to this fruit’s origin, the answer may surprise you. But even more remarkable is the amount of work — and the serious need to overcome one’s fear of heights — required for the harvest of dates. These palms grow tall, and they take their fruit with them.

For those who are naive about the date, we’re going to break it down — with photos to boot