Where is the sustainable supply of higher-standard eggs, meat, and dairy going to come from?
Source: Fast-Food Chains Are Demanding Ethical Products. How Will Farmers Keep Up? – Eater
If you want to see the future of agriculture, look up.
Source: Is Vertical Farming the Future of Food? | Lucky Peach
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.
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
Itâs easy to forget that chocolate is a fruit. Itâs born on a tree and undergoes several steps that transform the bitter, astringent seed into the rich, flavorful bars that we know.
Letâs take a little time to ponder the botanical story of chocolate and retrace the journey from its tropical origin. The cacao tree (officially, Theobroma cacao; theobroma translates as âfood of the godsâ), was classified in 1753 by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus. The most recent genetic research points to the upper Amazon rainforests of South Americaânear present-day Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peruâas its origin. It grows only within a narrow latitudinal band, between 20ËN and 20ËS of the equator. From its origins in South and Central America, cacao cultivation now spans the circumference of the globe within its tropical range. West African countries, namely Ghana and the Ivory Coast, currently provide about 70 percent of the worldâs cocoa supply.
The cacao tree is fairly small, commercially bred to grow roughly 9 to 12 feet high. Like grape vines, cacao must often reach six to seven years maturity before producing a full yield of fruit. Its fruit, the cacao pod, develops from flowers that blossom directly from the trunk and thicker branches of the tree, reaching maturity in five to six months (thus sometimes allowing for two harvests per year). Each individual bean is comprised of an outer shell, the germ, and the nib. Conveniently, one podâs worth of beans produces a 100-gram bar of chocolate.
via How To Make Chocolate | Lucky Peach.
There are two ways of seeing herbs in error. In my gastronomic memory, the blunt and mostly bald symbol of the first way is the altruistic Signore Giocondo Cavaliere, of the village Amalfi, region Campania, population 5,428 (or so). On a blue May day, three other naĂŻve Americans and I invited him, along with Gennaro, the chauffeur; Giulio, who ran the fish market; Nino, who staked the peas; and an assortment of others to lunch in the white stucco villa we were borrowing.
Things went well through the crisp toasts with oiled acciughe, blistered friggitello peppers from the garden. But when handed a bowl of spaghetti with peas, pancetta, pecorino and mint, Signore Cavaliere allowed a look of mild distress to nest on his damp brow. He twirled a few polite noodles around his fork in silence until, after several minutes, the rattled man had to unburden himself.
ââI understand,ââ he whispered directly into my ear, in slow and serious Italian, ââthat in America you cook … experimentally.ââ He paused. Our eyes met for a critical moment.
ââBut hereââ â he waved to include the table, the loquat trees shadowing the high balcony, the citrus air, the deep sea â ââwe do not cook in such a modern way.ââ
I admitted to him in honesty that I didnât understand what he was talking about.
ââMint!ââ he almost shouted at me. ââMint! Canât be served with pasta!ââ I felt horrible for him, watching him redden. ââMint is for fish!ââ And his wet head fell into his hands.
Ilias Mathes has protection against bank closures, capital controls and the slashing of his pension: 10 goats, some hens and a vegetable patch.
If Greece’s financial crisis deepens, as many believe it must, he can feed his children and grandchildren with the bounty of the land in this proud village high in the mountains of the Arcadia Peloponnese.
“I have my lettuce, my onions, I have my hens, my birds, I will manage,” he said, even though he can no longer access his full pension payment because of government controls imposed six days ago. “We will manage for a period of time, I don’t know, two months, maybe three months, because I also want to give to our relatives. If they are suffering, I cannot leave them like this, isn’t that so?”
The production of food and milk gives villagers in many parts of Greece a small measure of confidence â and a valuable buffer. But that doesn’t mean the financial cut-off doesn’t cause headaches. Some in Karitaina have to pay 40 euros in taxi fares to get to and from the nearest banks just to withdraw 60 euros, the maximum daily amount for those with bank cards.
The bus to Megalopoli, the town with the bank, was shut down â a victim of austerity. Many of those who used to drive are now too unwell to do so. The majority who live here are retirees, shrouding the town in eerie quiet broken only by the constant birdsong and the sporadic shouting of people arguing about the financial crisis at a vine-shaded cafĂ© in the town square.
via Greek villagers’ secret weapon: Growing their own food – Business Insider.
From our friend across the “pond”
In Issue NÂș6 we are celebrating the ingredient EDIBLE FLOWERS. We meet the wonderful Jan Billington, an organic flower farmer in Devon who believes that edible flowers should not just as a pretty addition on the side of a plate. The lovely Johanna Paget, communications manager at the Soil Association will be popping by to explain the importance of good/organic/healthy soil. The talented Matthew Mason, Head Chef at The Jack in the Green, talks about his love for good local ingredients and shares a couple of incredibly tasty summer dishes. Plus, barbecue expert Marcus Bawdon will be showing us how to cook up some tasty wood-fired recipes. We take a look at the Kitchen Table Projects, a brilliant new London-based initiative that is passionate about helping artisan food producers get their product out there. All this on top of the usual good stuff youâve come to expect!
READ ISSUE NÂș6: groweatgather.co.uk/
Even for people who donât enjoy eating mushrooms, there is still intrigue in learning how they grow. Thereâs something mystical and magicalâI mean I do get a lot of people asking about âmagicâ mushrooms but I always comment that I think all mushrooms are magical.
I really like being able to watch a culture start from a little piece of tissue. From one tiny piece youâre able to grow thousands and thousands of pounds of food. We start our cultures in petri dishes. To create that culture you can take a piece of a mushroomâyou can take any mushroom out of a grocery store and put that into a petri dishâand it will grow an exact replica of the original mushroom.
Once I establish the culture on the petri dish, I put it into a test tube. The test tube is my master culture that I put into a refrigerator, and I can keep that for five to ten years. You want to keep track of each of your generations and how far youâve separated it from the initial spawn; mushrooms, unlike plants, break down and cause genetic mutations really quickly if you donât keep track. All of our bags are labeled.
We grow our mushrooms first in grain. I use barley or millet. We soak the grain in water then sterilize it in a pressure cooker for about four hours. After that it we cool it down and put it in front of hyperfilters that blow sterile air out at us so we can open up all the bags of grain without fear of things (i.e. competing fungi or bugs) flying into them. Then we take the myceliumâthe fungal network of the mushroom from the petri dishâand add them to the sterile grain. That goes out on the shelves to grow. How long depends on the species; oysters usually take about two weeks on grain. Then from there, we break the mycelium back up into grain and put it into our next substrate, which is a sawdust mixture. Thatâs what will eventually produce mushrooms.
We set up fifty-pound barrels with stacks of forty sawdust bags each, and then steam-pasteurize them. Weâre lucky to live in an area where thereâs lots of wood substrate, so itâs easy to get cheap sawdust. We take the sawdust and mix it together with barley and oat flour, and that gives it the carbohydrates and sugars to make the mycelium happy. If we just put it in sawdust, it wouldnât workâmaybe it would produce one or two mushrooms. We go through three or four yards of sawdust every other week, and to see that sawdust turned into food for people, thatâs really rewarding for us.
We have a regular greenhouse that weâve tarped so we can control the sunlight and the heat. A lot of people think mushrooms need to grow in complete darkness, but that really isnât true: they like a little bit of light. We just open up the bags in here and give them high humidity. They like 80 to 90 percent humidity. As long as they donât get too hot, usually we can grow year-round. When the mushrooms are grown, weâll do one long slice down the middle of the bagâthen after a while, when the bag ages to about a month or so, weâll do a second slice, just to try to get as much out of it as we can.
Every mushroom is different. Oysters usually take about four weeks from start to finish; shiitakes are about forty-five to sixty days. This is why the prices are different with mushrooms, generally; some take longer than others to grow. Maitake takes up to seventy days to get mushrooms, so thatâs why theyâre $18 a pound in the grocery store.
Ria Kaelin, Christianâs wife and partner in the business offers a concluding thought.
We so traditionally think of growing food as you put a seed in the dirt and nurture it and it will give you something. Whereas with this, you go, How does that even work? Almost like weâre not connected to that microbiological world. We are! But we donât sometimes stop to see it.
I was first clued in to the funny relationship some chefs have with celery a decade or so ago, when I worked for a summer at Chanterelle, the long-running and now-departed restaurant of David Waltuck. While there was certainly celery in the kitchen, Waltuck banished it from his stocks and braisesâit was an outcast, an unacceptable aromatic. In The French Laundry Cookbook, Thomas Keller notes that he doesnât use celery in stocks either, citing its bitterness. And Jacques Pepin has talked about being clonked over his jeune tete with a head of celery during his apprenticeship. (Or was that George Orwell while he was down and out in Paris and London?)
Either way, I think these guys may just have never met the right celeryâthat, of course, being the bleached celery of Lancaster County, PA. Unlike the stringent, vegetal stuff you find wilting in crisper drawers across America, Lancaster celery is feathery, delicate, and pale yellowâso sweet, so nutty, so tender that common celery pales in comparison. It is shorter and smaller than supermarket celery, and more or less string-free.
via Where to Find the Best Celery in the World | Lucky Peach.
The OpenLab is an open-source, digital platform designed to support teaching and learning at City Tech (New York City College of Technology), and to promote student and faculty engagement in the intellectual and social life of the college community.
