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
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
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.
When it rains it pours:
Whole Foods is in trouble again.
The supermarket chain, still reeling from the revelation that it had systematically overcharged customers for packaged foods for years, is now facing a federal class-action lawsuit for using the term “evaporated cane juice” as a euphemism for sugar.
The plaintiffs allege that Whole Foods called sugar “evaporated cane juice” on the label of its Gluten Free All Natural Nutmeal Raisin Cookies in an attempt to make consumers believe that the cookies “do not contain as much sugar as they in fact contain.” Their suit was originally filed in a Missouri state court but is now before the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri.
For a while, it seemed liked every food manufacturer interested in appealing to health-minded customers was citing “evaporated cane juice” on its ingredient label. It sounds healthier, and certainly more “natural,” than plain old “sugar” — even though there’s no actual difference between the two.
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.
IN THE FIELD
Itâs a spring afternoon in the middle of asparagus season, and Iâm crouching in a field with Jim Durst, an organic farmer in Californiaâs Yolo County, northwest of Sacramento. Here and there green spears poke upward through the dirt. These asparagus will be picked tomorrow; they can grow whole inches overnight. âIt looks totally different in the morning,â Jim tells me. âIt looks like a little forest of trees, sticking up. And after they harvest, it looks like somebody logged it.â
Asparagus is a member of the lily family, so it has very extensive root systems. It grows mostly along waterways. The roots can go down about anywhere from twelve to twenty feet.
The warmer soil temperature stimulates growth, so as soon as it warms up in the spring, the spears start to emerge. We harvest every day, because the spears can grow two to three inches a day. The spear is actually a branch trying to get up and get going. Once you cut a spear off, the plant sends up another shoot. So harvesting stimulates productionâit keeps it going. During the harvest time, we are cutting the field every day. We harvest particularly spears of a certain height, âcause thatâs what we put in our box. The market determines that to be nine and a half inches.
via Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Asparagus* | Lucky Peach.
Second only to maybe kale, quinoa is the health food star of our time. The Food and Agriculture Organization named 2013 the International Year of Quinoa, after all. This tiny grain-like food is full of good-for-you nutrition and tastes great in just about anything: salads, omelettes and even cakes.
We’re willing to bet you’ve eaten a good deal of the stuff, but do you know what it really is? It’s okay if you don’t, because not many of us do. Today’s the day we change that with a few fun facts and photos that tell us about where quinoa comes from.
Here are 8 important things everyone should know about quinoa:
via What Is Quinoa? A Breakdown For Those Of Us Who Eat It But Don’t Truly Understand It.
Itâs a sunny day at Windfall Farms in upstate New York, and Morse Pitts, the owner, is trying to explain to me one of the many reasons his microgreens cost so damn much: anywhere from sixteen to sixty-four dollars for a quarter pound, which barely enough to fill a bowl. But he tells me thatâs still far from breaking even.
First off: every shoot sold comes from a single seed. A sunflower shoot takes up to three weeks to mature. New seeds are planted twice a week for the duration of winterâwhich, this past year, lasted four and a half months. To keep their stand at the Union Square Greenmarket sticked they had to plant over 750 pounds of sunflower seeds (at $185 per 50-pound bag)âand thatâs one of the dozen-plus microgreens they sell. They also grow micro mesclun, mustard, pea greens, sunflower shoots, amaranth, buckwheat, Hong Vit radish, arugula, and an assortment of edible flowers. The flavor of these greens is intense (also, theyâre cute), and theyâre considered the gold standard by many New York chefs. But the real reason Pitts grows them is so that his dozen or so workers have something to do in the slow months.
via The Jolly (Micro) Green Giant | Lucky Peach.
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