food museum blog

Goats and Pirogues

Southern Louisiana truly is the America Different, a jewel of mixed cultures like nowhere else in the country except perhaps New Mexico.  Foodie recently saw a photo of a goat wearing a red life jacket, sitting in a shrimp boat, riding out the floods of Hurricane Rita. Then she read a quote from someone in New Iberia, LA saying that things would be okay since thay had their "pirogue."

Pirogue is French, the Spanish is piragua, originally describing a flat bottom boat created from a hollowed out tree. Today pirogues are built from a wide range of materials and many come with two masts and sails. The flat bottom design made the pirogue perfect for the marshy areas and bayous of southern Louisiana, used  for both fishing and hunting. And today it is seen as a rescue vessel as well.

German-Born Pontiff Puts His Own Mark on Mass

( Don't get your knickers in a twist, folks, this is a JOKE! Thank you.)

UN's World Food Program to Stop Food Delivery to North Korea

Less than three months ago Time Magazine reported that the North Korean government had tightened up its borders so the hungry could not as easily enter China,  increased rationing, and urged more people to buy rice on the "open," market, an option the poorest citizens could not afford.
Now the UN has agreed to stop food shipments in January at the request of the North Korean government. For the past ten years the UN's World Food Program has fed about 6.5 million people per year. ( The population is roughly 22 million.)
North Korea claims it has adequate food delivery from other sources, including China, and that its harvest will be plentiful. But the UN will not be allowed to monitor that harvest and manyWestern experts fear another famine will hit the country. 
According to an AP article ( Sept 18, 2005) by Burt Herman, Richard Ragan, head of the WFP effort in North Korea, said recently that North Korean government officials told him "they didn't want to create a culture of dependency."

MRE's? Provisioning in These Troubled Times

Remember all the flurry around preparing for Y2K? What a crock ! But today? Foodie has oiled her rusty bike chains, fixed saddlebags to the rear wheels and a big basket up front, and is now pondering her choices of long-lived foodstuffs. MRE's of course come to mind first.

These are the Meals Ready to Eat so beloved of troops in the field. Vacuum-packed stews, apple sauce and all manner of more, some even coming with a bizarre little heater. ( Add water, and watch chemicals begin to circle the wagons, creating heat. Or something.) The web is full of foreboding-sounding sites that supply these, such as militarysurplussurvival.com, theepicenter.com, areyouprepared.com,survivalinstinct.com.

One site had sold out of its MRE’s but had a "rare" supply of LRP ( Long Range Patrol) rations, freeze-dried, shelf life of 5 years, for those lengthy recon sessions in the neighborhood.

What’s a foodie to do?

In an undisclosed location Foodie is stashing the following: nutrition bars, water, dried fruit, nuts and chocolate. Oh-- and rice and beans.Canned sardines. Olive oil. ( That camp stove is around somewhere!) Maybe some spuds......We read that during World War II some folks on the run ( Jews) liquified all their potatoes and moved out of harm’s way for two weeks, swigging on spud juice from bottles hidden in their coats.

Fortunately, Foodie is between pets so no need to haul bags of food, bowls, even more water. ( Those doggie saddlebags always slid right off my canine, so no way.) It is time to find water purification tablets, maybe even a portable water filter?

No!—it is time to make a fine cup of coffee and relax. Enjoy the now. Eat well and be well.

Same to you all.

Windows on the World

Seventy nine people working at Windows on the World, the 107th floor restaurant of The World Trade Center, lost their lives on 9/11/01. 

Agriculture is Soooooooo...Boring

This morning Foodie read a front page piece in the NYTimes on-line by Alexei Barrionuevo and Jeff Bailey headlined: Alarm Growing on Storm's Cost for Agriculture.  This afternoon when Foodie went to Blog the piece it had vanished. She found it again on the International Herald Trib for tomorrow's edition, then found it in the NYT Business Section--it was not even a headline under Business on the NYTimes homepage, yet "Sears Holdings Replaces Chief Executive" was. Foodie was puzzled, attempting to keep her suspicions at bay.

Okay--several points. One, no one wants to read about agriculture--the very word "agriculture" puts most people to sleep, right? It's like reading about, say, the fine points of levee engineering when the sun is shining and it's April and the beignets at Cafe du Monde are especially tasty. Until those same levees fail and your B&B  is up to its roofbeams in filthy water. Or until somebody has no food, or sees on tv thousands of people with nothing to eat for days.  Or drink. Maybe then the subject takes on some legs.

Oh and if stocks fall.  And if prices rise in the supermarket, at restaurants..... That too, could make a dent. ( Incidentally the bankruptcy law recently passed by Congress may cause incredible trouble for new or rebuilding small businesses like burger joints, high end restaurants, cafes, bakeries, any place that serves or sells food in New Orleans or along the Coast.)

Here's a key paragraph from the NYT article:

"In all, the hurricane will cause an estimated $2 billion in damage to farmers nationwide, according to an early analysis by the American Farm Bureau Federation. The estimate includes $1 billion in direct losses, as well as $500 million in higher fuel and energy prices." This news comes at a time when the US was attempting to lower subsidies paid to farmers, in response to calls from abroad to" open more export markets to American farmers and to comply with international free trade agreements."

Meanwhile the US Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns tried to assure international customers that "ships were moving again" carrying grain and soybeans. Yet others pointed out that the ports, including the Port of New Orleans, have unsafe working conditions and very few returned workers.

( Photo: Mississippi River grain barges---image from www.painetworks.com.)

Food Post-Katrina--The Mind Boggles, The Stomach Turns

Learning of bodies rotting in food lockers, and decaying chickens and soured milk products being bulldozed into giant waste heaps,  Foodie's thoughts about what had been New Orleans' vibrant regional food scene are like wispy, trivial dreams. Life is all about change and movement, yes, but a one week upheaval is simply way too speedy. Even our multi-tasking, hyper-electronically driven brains cannot process adequately what has occurred.
The  Houston Food Bank is already strained to the limit as it attempts to feed so many more people.  Free food sites in Houston, many of them at local churches, are listed on The Houston Chronicle website.  Vegetarian food is available from BAPS Care International, a non profit with 55,000 volunteers worldwide that began its work in 1907, and Kosher meals are free at the Chabad Lubavich Center. 

Second Harvester's Food Bank of Greater New Orleans' website remains down but we expect when this group re-surfaces it will need all the help it can get.

Gulfport's Grover Gives Back--Okra, Butter Beans and more

Foodie wanted to share this blurb from an AP story Sept 3 by Emily Pettus:

   

In poverty-stricken north Gulfport, MI,  Grover Chapman expressed disgust that his neighborhood has received no aid from government agencies or from private groups such as the Red Cross.

"Something should've been on this corner three days ago," Chapman, 60, said Saturday as he fed his neighbors.

He used wood from his demolished All Seasons produce stand to cook fish, rabbit, okra, and butter beans he'd been keeping in his freezer. The neighborhood is about five miles inland from the beach. Though many houses are still standing, they're severely damaged and corrugated tin roofs lie on the ground.

"I'm just doing what I can do," Chapman said. "These people support me with my produce stand every day. Now it's time to pay them back."

Spuds to the Rescue: Visit The Potato Museum On-Line

If potatoes are not being fed to the weakest 0f the  Gulf  Coast's  rescued, they should be. It has long been known that severely malnourished people do well on simple mashed potatoes, a bit at a time.  The pure potato' s virtues are many and varied.

That's a Foodie segue to alert FOOD Museum Blog readers to the presence of our other rejuvenated website, that belonging to The Potato Museum,  and to its Potato Blog.
We started out with the potato back in 1975 in Brussels, Belgium, and were pioneers in creating a museum about food.

The Potato Museum grew from three classrooms to the world's largest collection about the history and social influence of the potato,  a vegetable considered the most important globally. TPM was a key contributor, simultaneously, to the Smithsonian's Quincentenary exhibition, Seeds of Change,  and to Canada's  The Amazing Potato, a 6000 square foot exhibition in Ottawa at the National Museum of Science & Technology. 

Take a look around TPM, now on-line,  the seed entity that led to The FOOD Museum.

New Orleans: Food Distribution Disaster

Now we all know that New Orleans and nearby Gulf ports  are critical hubs for international food distribution....grain for the world, coffee and bananas for Americans;  seafood, sugar processing etc.  Not to mention that New Orleans is an irreplaceable global food heritage city.

From Food USA Navigator.com reports:

The Mississippi River, the cheapest route for the shipping of many crops and other commodities destined for overseas and domestic markets, has become inaccessible in parts. Up to 300 barges containing grains and other products have been left stranded.

Grain processors including Cargill are concerned that with the grain harvest season less than a month away, shipping will remain constrained during the busiest and most important time of the year.

Damage caused by the hurricane is also likely to have a significant impact on the nation's coffee supply. Over a quarter of all coffee stored in the United States is in New Orleans, the second largest stock of coffee behind New York.

The fear now is that floodwater has damaged large quantities of this stock, rendering it useless. This is likely to have a significant knock-on effect on major manufacturers of coffee-based food and beverages.

Such uncertainty has already created bullish prices, with New York commodity markets seeing coffee prices rise the most in six months, a picture reflected on the London-based futures market Liffe.

In addition, vital infrastructure has simply been swept away. Chiquita, one of many businesses to have been caught up in the terrible aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is shifting its port operations from Gulfport Mississippi, along the coast from New Orleans, to Freeport and Port Everglades after Gulfport was destroyed.

"The city of Gulfport sustained tremendous wind and water damage, and many port facilities, including ours, have been severely affected” said Bob Kistinger, president and chief operating officer of Chiquita Fresh.

“While we are still assessing the situation, it is clear that we will need to relocate our services from Gulfport for the foreseeable future.”

In 2004, Gulfport handled approximately one-quarter of the company's banana imports to the United States with weekly shipments from Central America. In the near term, the company plans to utilize Freeport, Texas, Port Everglades, Florida, and possibly other ports to handle shipments that were previously scheduled to Gulfport.

Louisiana's shrimp and oyster industry has also been demolished by the storm and is expected to be out of action for the foreseeable future.

Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board executive director Ewell Smith said the impact of the hurricane on Louisiana's $2.6 billion seafood industry "will be severe." The region produces 10 percent of the shrimp consumed in the United States and 40 percent of the oysters, putting oyster supplies - and prices - at particular risk.

Imperial Sugar is another company with important facilities in the region. Production at the group's cane sugar refinery at Gramercy, located approximately 20 miles northwest of New Orleans, was suspended on Saturday morning and a thorough damage assessment at the refinery is presently underway.

Image: Mississippi river barge load of grain from http://www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/resourcesandtourism/components/6685-33.html