food museum blog

Spring, Really?, Invades Summit Springs Farm, Maine

The greenhouse-from-Hell is up, fully up and running, and actually occupied by young seedlings as well as baby chicks.  What's not to like! For those of you who live near the Poland, Maine farm, there are still a few openings in the CSA program. ( Contact Sonya, summitspringsfarm@fairpoint.net)

Perhaps more importantly, the garlic ( above) is poking through its bed of seaweed, having finally tossed off the last (?) of the snow.  Don't know about you, but I prefer homegrown garlic, rather than the symmetrical, fully white, perfectly formed heads in wide distribution from our pals in China.

Real Issues, Please, Not Faux

While the candidates fool around with non issues such as answering old-fashioned 1950's red phones,  who has experience and what kind, and my commander-in-chief mojo is fiercer than yours,-- ( I even heard 46 year-old Barack Obama described as a "callow youth." Please!)--- violence continues and even escalates in many parts of the world, oil prices reach appalling heights, oh--and the world is slowly getting hungry as wheat and other staple grains become  scarce commodities. Amazing.

According to this report from Scotland's Sunday Herald, "More than 73 million people in 78 countries that depend on food handouts from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) are facing reduced rations this year. The increasing scarcity of food is the biggest crisis looming for the world'', according to WFP officials.

At the same time, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned that rising prices have triggered a food crisis in 36 countries, all of which will need extra help. The threat of malnutrition is the world's forgotten problem'', says the World Bank as it demands urgent action."

Price rises are due to a surge in demand, worsening droughts, and increasingly, the growing of foods for bio-fuels, instead of for feeding people and animals. The report continues:

"High (wheat) prices have already prompted a string of food protests around the world, with tortilla riots in Mexico, disputes over food rationing in West Bengal and protests over grain prices in Senegal, Mauritania and other parts of Africa. In Yemen, children have marched to highlight their hunger, while in London last week hundreds of pig farmers protested outside Downing Street."

"The US currently grows one-sixth of its grain harvest for cars, which is madness," ( Robin Maynard of the UK Soil Association,) told the Sunday Herald."

Crawfish, Gators, Armadillo and All That

We had a crawfish festival here in St Pete recently, complete with Cajun bands---and we had a hankering to go eat mounds of the little freshwater mini lobsters but the cost was $12 to enter a park here lined with the usual kind of vendors selling earrings and funnel cake and assorted tacky items, so we passed. After all, the music was so "enhanced" we could hear it for free from blocks away, and my local fish store has crawfish, along with cooked $5 apiece lobsters, and great local clams, and oysters, ditto, though not as superb as Dutch oysters, and a slew of local fish with wild nicknames, as well as flounder and arctic char and , and.....
I ate gator once a few years back, unmemorably--the fish store has frozen gator--but a few days ago a friend visiting from the frozen tundra of Vermont joined me on a walk in a park smack dab in the center of St Pete where we spotted three 12 inch-long baby gators, all sweetly small and stripy, slowly swimming along with their cute schnozzes up out of the water.

ps Just a day before we had seen an armadillo snuffling about in yet another naturey place within St Pete.
Haven't eaten that.....But here's a recipe--oh goody--how does one remove the armor plate, though?

( Thanks to http://www.nuawlins.com/crawfish.htm for crawfish pic.)

Slaughtering News From All Over, Plus, A Teapot Scandal?

Grateful that I do not have 150 feet of intestines tucked inside, as do manatees, I see that the current crop of free healthy product magazines are recommending a huge roster of "cleansing" items this winter, none of which would be needed if the magazines' audience were eating as advised in the first place, right?

But I digress---a slaughterhouse video from Hallmark Meat Packing in Chino, CA, has prompted Los Angeles schools to withhold meat products from a company called Westland that buys meat from Hallmark, on the grounds that the "downer" cattle unable to walk towards their deaths were being dragged or pushed in, and thus might be suffering from diseases that could render their meat iffy for human consumption. Westland provides ground beef to the USDA's National School Lunch Program.  Many school systems around the US have chosen to reject meat from Westland, including some in Oregon and Florida.

( Meanwhile, rival groups in Kenya have been killing one another not only machetes, but also with bows and arrows. )

Japanese whalers, despite concentrated efforts to stop them, continue to slaughter whales with impunity, though Australian authorities now claim the video evidence they have will bolster their case against the spurious legal claim of the Japanese that they are taking whales for "research purposes."

Apparently The Teapot Museum of Sparta, NC, was the recipient of a $500,000 grant from the Federal Transportation office back in 2006, a fact now revealed to all and sundry with great derision. This report from 2007 says the planned new museum idea has been scrapped. Now as one who applauds any museum effort directed however tangentially at the subject of food, the stuff that sustains us, rather than at yet another monument to war and destruction, I must say that chunk of change would have been a fine first step towards the creation of the National Museum of Food & Farm on the Mall in Washington, DC. Read more about The FOOD Museum's proposal here.

Lettuce-Loving Sirens

O the sirens of Florida, the graceful behemoths that lie like gray logs just under the surface of the water. We recently examined manatees up close at the Tampa Zoo, where those under repair and rest after injury from boat propellers and other human hazards, chomp down barrels-full of lettuces. They and their gizzard-possessing fish friends, the local leaping mullet, are vegetarians of reknown.

From manatees.net--"Manatees eat over 60 different species of aquatic and semi-aquatic plants. Their diet includes manatee grass, turtle grass, various species of algae, mangrove leaves, and water hyacinths. They may consume 10% of their body weight daily in vegetation. Their digestive system allows the bacterial breakdown of cellulose in the hind-gut. To accommodate the great volume of high-fiber food they eat, manatatees have intestines up to 150 feet long."

Choosing Eggs

In the olden days of my childhood, people simply bought eggs, choosing whatever was the best bargain. Others, of course, plucked fresh warm eggs from steamy nests recently exited by obliging hens, as we did many years later living outside of Brussels in rural Belgium.  And thus it had been for eons ranging back to when the first hens leapt down from the trees in Indochina and began crossing available roads, or ox paths, more like.
In any event, recently I was hunkered down in the egg department of a supermarket. Eggs fed vegetarian diets!  Eggs with enhanced Omega 3’s!  Bad eggs laid by chained up slave hens. Good eggs deposited by happy hens who scratched in the dirt on a daily basis. 
I read the following: “ 4 Grain Cage Free Eggs are produced by hens who perch, scratch and nest in an all-natural environment and are fed only the purest all-natural grain feed.” There were 2 web addresses stamped on the 100% reclaimed paper carton. One was for 4 Grain, the other  something called the United Egg Producers’ Animal Husbandry Guidelines.
Yes-- but notice the hens are not described as being outdoors...

Maybe that's an archaic and unrealistic notion when contemplating hens raised for real commercial gain. I think I read in one of Michael Pollan's books that birds given access to the outside-- a small open door--rarely if ever go through it, as they have been together in a mass since chickhood and only an aberrant Truman-type would break loose from the crowd.

The New New Thing in Birds--Plus--Tasty Lunch in Indian Country

Apparently I missed noting that heirloom chicken is de rigeur for the trendy and food aware these days. Catching up on my New Yorker reading, in an article about the director of the Metropolitan Opera I noticed that a special dinner thrown for the Met featured "heirloom chicken. " This immediately conjured up images of antiquarian birds with feathery toes and festooned "ears," as painted by a lesser English artist of the 18th century.

I am at ease with heirloom tomatoes and heirloom beans and whatnot, of course. But with chickens, the average mortal is still trying to consistently find " natural "birds, let alone organic hens.  The foodily correct societal goal of tracking down ancient and venerable strains of hen for the pot or the roasting pan seems wearying.

Regular readers here know that I rarely eat birds, having started on the veggie-fishy route 30 years ago after befriending a hen named Harold. But for those of you who do, I hope you have a culinary road map as to the whereabouts of these rare birds.  ( NY Metro folks can go to Heritage Foods--it has at least one, an English breed, and also sells heritage turkeys.)

Meanwhile, and speaking of heirloom, if you are ever at Acoma Pueblo, one of the most unusual of all the pueblos of New Mexico, take the tour and then plan for an informal, inexpensive lunch  at the Yaak'a Cafe in the visitor center. On a recent visit we savored traditional lamb stew, green chile and pork stew, and pinto beans with chicos ( dried corn,) with a side of red chile. Plus Indian bread. Three of us split the enormous pinon nut-topped brownie, too.

( Thanks to http://www.heritagefoodsusa.com/what_we_sell/index.html for the portrait of the Dark Cornish hen.)

Musings On Food for Dogs And Dogs As Food

Yesterday I treked through Costo with a membership-holding friend, the first time I had been there in over a year.  In the olden days before Trader Joe's arrived in town, I might have picked up maple syrup, smoked salmon, Cabot cheddar cheese in big blocks, giant bags of salad, maybe some red snapper, but this time, I walked out with kitchen trash bags and a large box of organic chicken doggie treats-"No wheat, no corn, no by-products!"--from Castor & Pollux, Lincoln, Nebraska.  ( The dawg approved.)

Later that night I read an excerpt in The Week from a piece by Steven Rinella in Outside magazine about his quest to eat dog, in Hanoi.  He eats grilled strips of sesame crusted dog, dog feet ( I blogged once about the dog feet platter that whipped past those of us at the vegetarian table at a banquet in China), even plain old boiled dog leg. And he is not happy, though he knows much of the world does eat dog. ( Apparently native people of the Americas once were hound chow hounds, if you will.  )

On his final day of eating dog---you can read the entire story here---he reports:

"I'm trying to will myself into a nonchalant attitude—just a guy in a restaurant eating his meal. I can't do it. I'm forcing it down, and it is not enjoyable. At this point, I've answered for myself the question I wanted answered: If your culture and your culinary curiosities go head to head, culture's going to win. It'll win even if you're rooting against it."

So---Even extreme eaters like Rinella cannot easily block memories of furry family pets while trying to reconsider them as food. 

And then there are feathered pets---I first gave up eating chicken when our zany, alert pet hen, Harold, wandered into my kitchen in Belgium one evening. Chicken breasts about to go in the oven for dinner were on the table. I picked her up for a cuddle, in the manner she liked, and realized ( duh!) that her scrawny little chest was an unsettling reminder of the breasts I had just dredged in flour.

Since that time over 30 years ago, I have indeed eaten some occasional chicken--the rosemary-infused organic roast chicken perfected by my pal on the Hudson River, for example--and the inadvertent hen that I try to skirt in one dish at my local Thai buffet, and, of course, I feed chicken to my pet.

If you get to know most any animal at all well--a dog, a pig, a lamb, a hen--then it's so...

"I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens."  Issac Bashevis Singer

( Dog pictured was the recipient of the organic chicken cookies, not a meal.)

Doritos-Stealing Seagull Charms Aberdeen

Thanks to alert blogger and commenter Kathy F for this gem.

Depressing Food News From All Over

LifeScience informs us that mussels are declining in North American waters. " ...mussels now are one of the most endangered groups of animals on the continent, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Humans are primarily responsible for the disappearance of mussels through water pollution and changes to their physical habitat wrought by the construction of dams, dredging and the introduction of exotic species."

So eating mussels locally will start to be challenging--we will all be making moules frites with Dutch bivalves, or worse, those huge greenies from New Zealand.

Meanwhile, good old beleaguered China now has a killer pig virus problem, apparently. According to the Washington Post,  "Moving rapidly from one farm to the next, the virus has been devastating pig communities throughout China for more than a year, wiping out entire herds, driving pork prices up nearly 87 percent in a year and helping push the country's inflation rate to its highest levels since 1996. "   International authorities are concerned that the virus may easily spread beyond Asia--it's already in Vietnam and Burma--to affect people worldwide.

The Dole bagged salad people are doing a voluntary recall of their Heart Delight salad mix after one bag in Canada tested positive for the E. coli bacteria.

And then, in Michigan, former president Gerald Ford's bulgy-eyed likeness--the poor guy is even wearing a striped tie!-- has been carved from a corn field at Gull Meadow Farms.

( Thanks to pbs.org for the mussels shot and a nifty-seeming recipe at the webiste link  for "Mussels steamed on the grill with chourico sausage in a white wine butter sauce, served with Texas toast .")