Eclectic reporting on all things food--- exploring news; food history; growing; marketing, cooking; book reviews; issues such as food safety, school lunch reform, GMO foods; diet/nutrition and wacky food fun. Visit The FOOD Museum, a 501c3, at www.foodmuseum.com.
The self-described "food politics" website Civil Eats has posted this by Naomi Starkman:
"Consumer Reports’ latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice,
tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand
foods tested contain measurable levels of Bisphenol A (BPA). The
results are reported in the December 2009 issue and also available online.
BPA, which has been used for years in clear plastic bottles and
food-can liners, has been restricted in Canada and some U.S. states and
municipalities because it has been linked to a wide array of health
effects including reproductive abnormalities, heightened risk of breast
and prostate cancers, diabetes, and heart disease. I’ve reported on BPA
here, here, and here."
My pantry, which I just checked, contains a few cans--tomatoes, white beans, black beans, and pumpkin. I stared hard at them just now. A can of green beans never has entered my larder but, yes, tuna has, sardines have, along with the odd cans of beans. As a spontaneous, non recipe-based cook, those beans are vital and always ready to go. Soaking dry beans overnight-- of course I have done that, but usually when I know that I am preparing a massive portion of black bean soup the next day.
I am sure many of you soak and cook beans ahead, and then freeze them in handy sized amounts, right? But in what? Plastic bins! Baggies? Chemical-laden somethings?
Help!
( Tks to http://www.thehungrymouse.com/home/2008/10/24/white-beans-two-ways-garlicky-dip-creamy-soup/ for can pix. It's a site that looks lively and informative, BTW.)
If you delight in letters--remember them?-- as well as food, American history, and familial fondness, read this book. It's called Slick as a Mitten, by Dennis M. Larsen, it's published by Washington State University Press , and it's about a character named Ezra Meeker.
The book, rich with old photos, is based on Meeker's letters, mostly to his wife, Eliza Jane. She and Ezra came west on the Oregon Trail in 1852 and settled in Puyallup, Washington. Meeker, along with his father, became a wealthy hop grower and broker, but at the close of the 19th century, he went bust. The hops were infested with bugs, controlled only through exceedingly expensive methods. Ezra was also on the board of a bank, though not involved until it began to decline, all the other officers having abandoned it. He personally covered the bank's losses, all its customers, by spending most of his own money.
Unimaginable in this era of Bank of America et al? The mid to late 1890's were a time of bank closings and financial downturn in the US.
Once gold was discovered in the Klondike area in 1897, the race was on. But, unsurprisingly, so many masses of people arriving in an inhospitable area did not find enough to eat. People suggested that there was more money to be made in supplying miners than in engaging in mining itself. "There are no fresh vegetables of any kind here," said one.
Meeker took note of this and decided to supply both fresh and dried veg, as well as reconstitutable eggs to the populations springing up in Yukon tent cities. He specialized in granulated and sliced potatoes, dried cabbage, squash, sweet potatoes, turnips, pop corn, and fresh oysters from the east, hauling everything first by steamer, then along icy trails with "teamsters," and floating produce down the Yukon River.
Even lemons.
He was 67 when he started. In three years he had made possible the movement of almost 100 tons of food. And throughout those years, he wrote regularly to Wife, back home in Washington, signing himself Husband. It was Eliza Jane who supervised the dehydration of the eggs, and the preparation and packing of the veggies.
As for the phrase slick as a mitten, Ezra lost his assets that way, he said, swiftly. I picture a thick leather mitten, coated with ice.
ps Meeker planned the town of Puyallup, and named it. The name honored the native people there, known as the "generous people," but whether their generosity extended to the deeding of their lands to white settlers for hop growing I do not know. ..
In a small local store here that specializes in healthy meats, and assorted groceries, I spent way too much time this morning reading a few marinade labels. I was waiting for the three pounds of chicken wings I had ordered for my dog. ( Yes, she eats them raw. No, not quite every day.)
First, I checked the sodium content. I love salty things, but sometimes these products, along with salad dressings, just taste like salt, period. Next, I pondered xanthan gum. It's in many products of this sort, but...
Now, back home, if the Wiki contributor is correct I know that xanthan gum is created when a bacterium ferments sucrose or glucose. How the happy little bacterium does this, I do not know, and why the result helps stabilize sauces and dressings......well.
The marinades contained actual ingredients, too---like garlic, lemon, chiles, sesame oil, ginger, and such. I put them all back. Not so much because of the "gum," but because I realized how silly it was to buy a product containing it, when I can zip together a marinade myself. Of course. I do it. Yes, we can.
And I have bought this kind of thing in the past and hated it on the first taste, thus wasting $5. In these troubled economic times, who needs that?
Annoyingly, however, I discover have no fresh ginger on hand. My marinading as well as my marinating will have to wait a day or two.
You may have seen the headline--McD's is thinking of putting one of their joints in the "food court" that serves the Louvre in Paris. I can barely believe I am juxtaposing the words "food court" and Louvre. I haven't been there in a while but hitting a little bistro around the corner would have been my choice, after a morning spent tromping through the galleries. But I need to enter the 21st c., don't I? Apparently the Champs Elysees McD's is the most successful in the entire McD universe.
Gourmet Magazine, on the other hand, must not be shining brightly enough for Conde-Nast. It is ceasing publication of the ancient ( est. 1941) food journal by the end of this week, astonishingly. The company's Bon Appetit--less grand, less precious, more accessible? will carry on, for the moment.
My mother subscribed to Gourmet for several years in the 1970's, but the real Conde Nast star in our house was always The New Yorker. I've been reading it since I could read, and love it still.
After a two week utterly informal comparison test, I have decisively concluded that organic bananas do indeed taste better than the usual, much better. 29 cents each vs 19 cents at Trader Joe's. I focused in on the organic bananas because their texture was firm, their flavor not icky and cloying, and one had the sense that these were fruits that had not traveled thousands of miles in refrigerated ships and trucks, though of course, they must have.
It's well known that commercially grown bananas experience their share of herbicides and pesticides, as do the people who work with them in the fields and pack them in the sheds. That alone makes the move to organic--only a dime more per banana!--the appropriate choice.
Clever entrepreneurial farmer Gao Xianzhang in Hexia, northern China, is making a bundle selling 10,000 pears molded into baby form--selling them for 5 pounds UK each, according to this report in the Daily Mail. ( Take a look at the mold at the link above.)
Eavesdropping on an informal gaggle of what appeared to be Trader Joe's' top bananas chatting hard against the coffee wall, I heard that they had just come from a meeting with "corporate." ( A second Albuquerque TJ's is opening any minute.)
So I stepped up and said, "Excuse me, but what about Florida?"
A big guy in a Hawaiian shirt replied--"Funny you should ask. FL was top of the list, but now it's a no go. That state has the most foreclosures, the first decline in population in decades, and high unemployment."
"But wouldn't that make space less expensive? And more people looking for the well-priced? offerings TJ specializes in? "
"That's what I thought," he said. "But corporate doesn't think it's a good bet."
(Damn.)
Meanwhile, the WaPost reports that supermarkets in the DC Metro area are cutting prices, or rather as the writers hyperbolically put it more than once, prices are "plunging." On things like Folger's coffee and detergent. Stores who had upgraded with sushi and exotic cheeses to entice higher end consumers now are cutting the heck out of t. paper prices.
I, for one, am more likely to eschew sushi than t. paper in these troubled economic times.
In today's NYTimes, Michael Pollan writes that no discussion of health care reform, costs, and so on should overlook "...a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet."
Bravo!
It's obvious, it has been said and written before, but there it lies, maybe less like an elephant and more like what an elephant leaves behind after digesting a good meal.
When Foodie Spouse and I applied for a slightly different health insurance policy several years back, we were asked if we smoked--no, never--and if we "used alcohol." Nothing was asked about our diet, nor about our level of physical activity. I asked the asker why her company was not interested in knowing any of that.
Silence.
You can get better auto insurance rates if you show evidence of being a safe, skilled driver. My health care provider apparently could care less that we might be a better risk for them than an inert couple hooked on fast food and soft drinks.
But, as Pollan points out, once the pre-existing condition loophole is removed with the passage of a proposed health care bill, "... health insurance companies will
promptly discover they have a powerful interest in reducing rates of
obesity and chronic diseases linked to diet."
According to Pollan, currently it costs the country $147 billion to handle obesity in the United States.
Yesterday evening, out walking with the terrier, I watched young parents leaving the neighborhood soccer fields with their kids after practice. A pretty, seriously overweight blond mother looking well shy of 30, and her hefty 6 year-old daughter climbed up into their Jeep, the mom with some effort.
Soon after Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that contained this paragraph, ""The last thing our country needs is a massive new health care
entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new
unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of
our health care system..," some of WF's liberal, affluent customers cried "Woe!" Or more likely, whoa!
The baby zucchinis started to hit the fan. Mutterings of boycotting WF were heard in the land. Spokespersons for WF said the remarks did not reflect the corporation's views. Wait--Mackey is the CEO, right? Huh?
Union types weighed in. According to a report on HuffPost, "Now the Change To Win Investment Group and United Food And Commercial
Workers Union -- both a part of the Change To Win federation of unions
representing six million workers -- have put out statements criticizing
Mackey and encouraging a boycott of the store." Needless to say, WF is not a union shop.
Up in Santa Fe, where people who work for WF ( and most other retail establishments) cannot afford to live, soon after Mackey's remarks, I observed eager shoppers locking carts in their eagerness to purchase $14.99 a pound tilapia. The place was jammed, and lines were long at the checkouts.
Boycott?
Now everyone's current favorite food author Michael Pollan has said he will not boycott WF, though he disagrees with Mackey's remarks on health care. "...Whole Foods is often right about food, and their support for the
farmers matters more to me than the political views of their founder."
Whole Foods is the country's biggest natural/organic food store--it has over 270 stores in North America and the UK, and after buying up Wild Oats, it may be the only game in town for some.
Thanks to Trader Joe's, the local growers market, and Southwest chain ( established by the former head of Wild Oats, incidentally,) Sunflower Farmers Market--it's not a farmers market, dare I say!--I rarely hit Whole Foods, lovely though it is. When I do, I buy Swiss vegetable broth cubes, faux Canadian bacon, and a small container of butternut squash/crab bisque which I sit down and eat in situ. That's about it. The place is way too pricey, other than its house brand of crackers, relish, and similar items.
So--to boycott? I never darken Home Depot's door anymore, after discovering its head honcho was a huge backer of G. Dubya. Bush. But its competitor, Lowe's, is an easy alternative.
Given my pitiful purchasing patterns at the Whole Oat, I doubt my absence will be missed. I'll go back there in a month or so, after Obama's health care legislation passes.
You, too, can fight back against food tax! YEAH! I just stumbled onto this cheery, filled-with-young-healthy-looking models website called Americans Against Food Taxes, with its healthy lunch box message. The gigantic US beverage/convenience store industry cares deeply about your health, and that of your kids, and doesn't want bananas, um, and apples, huh?, taxed. No Cokes are pictured, oddly. No 7-Up pictured, either. No crappy soft drinks pictured anywhere on the website. Gosh and golly.
On the News tab is a photo of a young guy holding a paper bag overflowing with fresh veggies. No one is going to tax bell peppers, lettuce and asparagus..........
But here's the text, as it begins the --be afraid, America, be very afraid-- message that health care is bad and scary, and soft drinks are good and American.
"Get ready, because that’s exactly what many lawmakers and advocates of
health care reform have in mind to help pay for the massive health care
reform being considered in Congress. Senate leaders are considering new
federal taxes on soda and other sugary drinks. Other watchdog groups
are busy identifying other food items they believe are too high in
sugar or fat content to tax as well."
65 grams of sugars, 240 calories. See sugar content of assorted drinks/juices here. And this, from a 2008 report published by newser.com:
"According to a study recently published in The Journal of School
Nursing, soft drink consumption has increased by 300 percent in the
past 20 years, the Allen Press reports, with 56 to 85 percent of
children consuming at least one soft drink daily.
These beverages currently constitute the leading source of added sugars in the diet.."
So much to be pissed off about these days. I think I'll go cultivate my garden.
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