food museum blog

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.

Museum for a Melon

The watermelon, long associated in the American mind with southern summer seed spitting contests, sweltering hot days, and ants paddling in rivers of pink juice on the creaky old picnic table, is native to Africa.  It was part of the Egyptian scene by 2000 BC and may well have grown wild throughout much of the continent, including the Kalahari desert.

It is only fitting, then, that there's a Watermelon Museum in China.

( Like that segue?)

China, as we are all painfully becoming aware, grows more of everything than any other country on earth, including watermelon. ( Turkey is a very distant second in watermelon production.)  A  small area in DaXing province has held a watermelon festival yearly since 1987, and the province grows 1/3 of all the world's watermelon, apparently. The museum in Panggezhuang Village  opened in 2004 and features over 170 different watermelon varieties, watermelon art, info on growing and harvesting, plus "the world's largest watermelon," whether in waxwork effigy or oozing on a pedestal we do not know.

The Japanese have been growing square watermelon in glass frames for decades now, and yellow watermelons, seedless watermelons and mini perfectly round watermelons are becoming commonplace. And for more on all this see the website of the National Watermelon Promotion Board.

For The FOOD Museum's exhibit on watermelon click here.

ps  True to its name, the w.melon is 92 % water,  but it also is vitamin rich and packs lycopene, an ingredient that supposedly has many health-giving qualities...