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
That’s nothing compared to 2013’s record price of $1.76 million, however.
Source: Japanese Restaurateur Pays Princely Sum of $118K for a Single Bluefin Tuna – Eater
In addition to a fine, there are new requirements placed on the pricey grocer, which disagrees with the DCA’s findings.
Source: Here’s Whole Foods’ Punishment For Mislabeling Bust: Gothamist
Fair trade? Direct trade? Shade grown? Here’s what it all means, and which of it is nonsense. (Spoiler: a lot of it is nonsense.)
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.
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.
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.
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
In âLucky Peach #13: Holiday,â Peter Meehan wrote about his annual Christmas partyâwhere, among many other things, he makes the lobster rolls from Jasper Whiteâs book Lobster at Home. The front matter of the book, about how to shop for and kill lobsters, is succinct, spot-on, and very useful! Weâve published his rules for purchasing live lobsters below. (And after finishing that, you can check out his recipe for lobster rolls here.)
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.
