When food is made with love, you can taste it. So it goes with Benton’s Country Ham, a North Madisonville, Tennessee-based business that produces what many call the best bacon in the country.
via A Day In The Life Of Alan Benton, America’s Unofficial King Of Bacon.
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It will be made with 10,000 new varieties of grapes.
Winemaker Randall Grahm â the founder of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, Calif. â has launched an Indiegogo campaign to create the first New World Grand Cru. A Grand Cru is a regional classification of wine that denotes “the highest-quality vineyard areas.” Grahm hopes to transform the “unique terroirs” of his Popelouchum Estates in San Juan Bautista, Calif. into a vineyard that achieves the designation.
“If anyone could do it Randal Graham could.”
To do this, he plans to breed 10,000 grape varieties that have not existed before and blend them into a new wine. The campaign explains: “The intention of the breeding program is to incorporate
via Ambitious Winemaker Aims to Create First New World Grand Cru – Eater.
Who knew ice cream could be so complicated?
At the apex of summer, just when we need ice cream most, we’re reminded that an imposter lurks in the frozen case of the grocery store — a lighter, fluffier concoction called “frozen dairy dessert.”
via That Ice Cream You’re Buying Might Not Be Ice Cream At All.
The Food and Drug Administration is banning imports of some fresh cilantro from Puebla, Mexico, after a government investigation found human feces and toilet paper in growing fields there.
The FDA announced the partial ban Monday after cilantro imported from the state of Puebla was linked to 2013 and 2014 outbreaks of stomach illnesses in the United States. The FDA said health authorities in Texas and Wisconsin also suspect cilantro from the region is responsible for more illnesses this year.
Following up on the outbreaks, U.S. and Mexican health authorities investigated 11 farms and packing houses in Puebla over the last three years. The FDA said it discovered “objectionable conditions” at eight of those firms, including five that were linked to the U.S. outbreaks. The FDA said the officials discovered the feces and toilet paper in fields and found that some of the farms had no running water or toilet facilities.
via FDA Bans Some Mexican Cilantro After Human Feces Found In Fields.
Food companies would not have to disclose whether their products include genetically modified ingredients under legislation passed by the House Thursday.
The House bill is backed by the food industry, which has fought mandatory labeling efforts in several states around the country. The legislation, which passed 275-150, would prevent states from requiring package labels to indicate the presence of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
via Government Says Food Companies Don’t Have To Disclose GMOs.
The American craft brewing industry is undoubtedly booming, but the beer sector is still overwhelmingly dominated by just a handful of giants: 11 brewers produce 90 percent of all beer sold in the U.S, says MarketWatch.
The report points out that “[w]hen you look at the beer aisle and your local taproomâs beer list, it looks like a broad array of choices” â but giant corporations “are actually narrowing those choices through acquisitions and diversification.” Think, for example, of Anheuser-Busch InBev buying out craft brewers such as Chicago’s Goose Island and Seattle’s Elysian Brewing in recent years.
And while the latest stats on craft beer certainly look favorable â “Weâre told that craft beerâs share of the market rose 17.6% last year, accounting for 11% of beer volume and $19.6 billion of the beer industryâs $101.5 billion in sales,” says MarketWatch â the reality is that still, “one of every five beers sold is a Bud Light.”
On the other hand, American craft beer exports are on a major upswing: 2014 saw a 35 percent increase in other countries’ thirst for U.S.-born craft brews, resulting in $99.7 million worth being exported last year (the leading consumer is Canada).
via 90 Percent of American Beers Are Made by Just 11 Different Brewers – Eater.
E. coli O157:H7 did not burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, as many in the big food business like to think. It slowly crept into our food supply, spreading in the enormous feedlots that began to dot the U.S. landscape during the last century. The bacteria is now endemic and can be found in cows, sheep, and wild animals such as boar, elk, and deer. As few as fifty E. coli O157:H7 bacteria are enough to cause human illnessâand as many as 100,000 can fit on the head of a pin.
Once this strain of E. coli makes it into our small intestine, it can damage the intestinal wall, causing severe cramping and bloody diarrhea. In some instances, the toxin that the bacteria releases gets into the bloodstream, damaging red blood cells and causing severe complications like kidney failure, stroke, brain damage, and death.
The fate of South Koreaâs kimchi industry rests on whether China considers it pickled or not.
When China reclassified the fermented cabbage dish several years ago, Korean exports of kimchi evaporated. As a pickled product, it did not meet Chinaâs strict import hygiene standards.
Now, China has pledged to reconsider the designation, a concession that could pave the way for a new boom in exports since the two countries sealed a broad trade deal.
The episode over kimchi, a source of deep culinary and cultural pride in South Korea, reflects the sometimes complicated relationship that China has with its neighbors. As China looks to deepen its regional trade ties, such pockets of tension could flare up, creating challenges for its ambitions.
Watch the Reakted Video –Â http://nyti.ms/1JS2mVy
BOARD THE BOB BARKER, in the South Atlantic â As the Thunder, a trawler considered the worldâs most notorious fish poacher, began sliding under the sea a couple of hundred miles south of Nigeria, three men scrambled aboard to gather evidence of its crimes.
In bumpy footage from their helmet cameras, they can be seen grabbing everything they can over the next 37 minutes â the captainâs logbooks, a laptop computer, charts and a slippery 200-pound fish. The video shows the fishing hold about a quarter full with catch and the Thunderâs engine room almost submerged in murky water. âThere is no way to stop it sinking,â the men radioed back to the Bob Barker, which was waiting nearby. Soon after they climbed off, the Thunder vanished below.
It was an unexpected end to an extraordinary chase. For 110 days and more than 10,000 nautical miles across two seas and three oceans, the Bob Barker and a companion ship, both operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd, had trailed the trawler, with the three captains close enough to watch one anotherâs cigarette breaks and on-deck workout routines. In an epic game of cat-and-mouse, the ships maneuvered through an obstacle course of giant ice floes, endured a cyclone-like storm, faced clashes between opposing crews and nearly collided in what became the longest pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel in history.
via A Renegade Trawler, Hunted for 10,000 Miles by Vigilantes – The New York Times.
For as long as I can remember, I have had an unfathomably strong affection for pickles and potted meats and jellies and jams. I was thrown into the preserving pond early. I sat as a toddler, I am told, several summers running, in the cool shade of a tidy old trailer in Canaan, Me., playing with snails as the mobile homeâs fleshy mistress, Louise, taught my mother to select cucumbers and beets and pole beans from a dense trailer-Âside garden â packing them into heavy glass jars and then gently heating them in a worn tin pot.
I donât think I ever tasted any of Louiseâs many preserves. (ââOh, they were terrible!ââ my mother tells me. ââHorribly sweet.ââ) The omission might help account for my obdurately romantic view of what the British writer Hugh Fearnley-ÂWhittingstall refers to as the ââextended family we call by the rather austere name preserves.ââ All preserves strike me as good. They reach me at such childish, religious depths that I have wondered if, even before Louiseâs trailer and my rapturous secondhand consumption of jarred delicacies in books, some supernatural pickle pot or jelly didnât offer me a miraculous taste of itself in a dream.
If cultivating soil was what let humans settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures that let us unmoor.
I have felt lucky, as a grown person, to discover that this thing I loved in innocent abstraction had real importance. Salting and drying meat and fish helped human beings to last through long winters, sea voyages and treacherous overland trails. If cultivating soil was what let us settle, it was harnessing bacterial cultures and sugar, salt, acid, fat, sun and wind to paralyze microorganisms and save food from decay that let us unmoor, discovering all the world that was not visible from our cabbage patches. Basque cider allowed seamen to cross oceans. Dutch pickled herring fueled the exploration of the New World. Vikings spread cod in the riggings of their ships to dry and stiffen in the cold wind, then traded on it as they battled through Scandinavia, the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Cheese was first a way of preserving milk; wine, of grape juice; sauerkraut, of cabbage; prosciutto, of pork. In this sense, all preserved things are additionally miraculous, in that they all are also ways of storing other things: part vessel, part content
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