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Moopheus

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Posts posted by Moopheus

  1. Speculators are merely reacting to the fact that fundamental uncertainty is causing the prices in the markets to rise.

    Right-o. You don't think today's financial wizards are going to let a little thing like supply and demand stop them?

    Sure, there's been instability in the middle east--triggered in part by rising food costs.

  2. A

    Is the States actually growing corn for fuel? Does this make financial sense?

    a) Yes, b) no. But corn growers like it because it's a ready market, and it's subsidized. Not too surpisingly, demand for corn for ethanol has spiked in the last few years with high oil prices. It's more efficient to use sugar cane or beets, but those don't grow as well in Iowa.

    Yes, energy costs and weather play a role (food costs are highly volatile for a reason), as do global demand and even financial speculation. The guys who play in the global futures trading market don't really give a hoot if you or I can afford to eat. The US sells an enormous (and growing) quantity of feed grain to China. China grows its own wheat and rice (or at least did until the recent droughts), but they import most of the feed for their chickens and pigs.

  3. It's not your imagination. It's pretty clear that food processors are passing along cost increases, as much as they can. Particularly in the last few months. See The BLS numbers. Note that dairy is getting especially hard hit. This report says 1.7 percent increase in dairy for April. For one month in the seasonally-adjusted aggregate figures, that indicates a real change.

    for myself, I'm just glad that the CSA that supplies a lot of my produce didn't raise rates very much this year--only two percent more than last year.

  4. The consensus seemed to be it was an idea whose time, perhaps, had not come just yet.

    Didn't we learn this back in the paleo-internet days when we had "internet cafes" with terminals for ordering?

    There's a local food truck that actually uses an iphone-based ordering system (they have two cooks stations in the truck) and that's just what happens--parts of your order are done at different times, so you're standing around with your falafel waiting for your fries.

    The Melt thing sounds like a bad idea right out of the box. He's probably thinking, "they can't make a phone do this!" but just wait. Soon we'll see a droid with a radiant heating element in the back. I mean, it's a microwave transmitter anyway, right? Just crank up the wattage.

  5. I love shrimp--I know they are just ocean bugs--but insects will never cross my lips if I can help it.

    Technically, I suppose, crustaceans and insects are both arthropods but different subphylum. They're closely related but not the same. But, yeah, even knowing that, and knowing that I will eat crustaceans, I would resist eating insects, even though I also know it is normal in some cultures and a part of human history. I mean, humans have only two basic rules about food choice: a) can I make this fit in my mouth, and b) will it kill me.

  6. Years ago (in the late 80s), Ben & Jerry's made a brownie bar, which was two very thin fudgy brownies around vanilla ice cream. They disappeared and then came back in the early 90s and then disappeared again.

    That happened with the Peace Pops too. Those were pretty good, as I recall. But Ben & Jerry don't run the place any more.

  7. Is it still possible to purchase a good traditional ice cream sandwich

    Was it ever? I personally can't remember a time when commercial novelty items like Hood ice cream sandwiches, Klondike bars, chocolate eclairs, etc. etc., were ever made with anything except the cheapest possible stuff they could get away with.

  8. Important, too, was that the Chinese were even lower on the social scale than the Jews. Jews didn't have to feel competitive with the Chinese, as they might with Italians. Indeed, they could feel superior.

    Was that statement a slag, or one that is supposed to denote cameraderie? Hmmm, I'm not sure whether to be offended or to laugh.

    My father's family was Jewish, and my mother's Italian-Catholic, so I'd have to say that the social dynamic described, did exist. At least until the dispersal to the 'burbs. Where the "Chinese" food was often Polynesian. I didn't know what the difference was until I was in high school and had a friend who lived in Chinatown.

  9. No but it's the reality of how little people pay attention to this stuff and that says something about whether we really need to waste resources on these types of regs (both governmentally and on the producers side).

    As I said in my post, actually noticing that it says something different is just the first step in the regulations actually being informative. A consumer still has to find the relevant reg and then work to comprehend it. Your average person would not only be unlikely to know where to look for this information; they would also be unlikely to understand it even once they found it.

    Actually I disagree. Consumers do not actually need to understand the regulations. The information on the labeling is supposed to be comprehensible as it is. You don't need to know the regulations about nutritional labeling to read the labels, do you? I agree that the labeling is far from perfect. Food processors expend a great deal of lobbying effort to make sure they have some weasel room (for example "zero fat" really means "less than half a percent"). The FDA is often too compliant to industry concerns. Do you think there should be content standards? The FDA says ice cream needs to be 10 percent milkfat to be called ice cream. Not a particularly high standard, but the industry fought it for decades. The producers wanted a lower standard. In the early years of the 20th century, when advances in refrigeration increased ice cream sales, commercial ice cream was often atrociously bad--stuff that wouldn't be legal for sale today. Hell, if they could get away with it, they'd market ice cream as a health food (which was actually done in the 1950s). I mean, really--would you prefer to go into a store and have no idea at all what was really in the package?

  10. It sounds like what you are making is roughly equivalent to what is sold here as granola bars. Do you find that when they are done they are sticky or does the flour keep them from being too hard to handle?

  11. The plain-ish flavors, like vanilla and chocolate, say "ice cream" on the packaging. The more flavored flavors, like butter pecan, don't. Weird.

    Right--the milkfat content of the base is probably as close to the legal limit for calling it ice cream as they can make it. So, as dave says, if you add bulky stuff, that lowers the percentage for the entire product, even though the base itself may be the same. So they can't call it ice cream. It seems weird because the base still qualifies, but if the FDA let it pass, then producers would clearly be motivated to load up their products with any bulky item that was cheaper than the dairy ingredient. Which they do anyway, but at least they have to call it something different.

  12. Bryers regular ice cream is NOT the ice "cream" that is being sold in Canada. What is sold in Canada is a totally different product. Its called "frozen dessert". It says so on the package. There are limited amounts of regular Bryer's sold and its 6.99-8.99. Sometimes it went on sale for 3.99.

    Then is it deceptive packaging? I mean, if they are not claiming it is ice cream, then you can't really complain about the labeling. I mean, it may be a crappy product, but that is a different problem. Also, the fact that different countries have different established standards doesn't make the packaging intrinsically deceptive.

  13. Huh. Here in Ecuador, what you see on the label is exactly what you get. If the cake is topped with non-dairy edible oil products, it has to say it, in fairly large letters, on the packaging. Equally, you can't say "ice cream" without the first ingredient in the stuff being cream, not milk - there's another term for that.

    The only time we see deceptive labeling is on products imported from the US.

    In what way are they deceptive? In the US, labeling of ice cream is defined by milkfat content. It's not a very high standard--ten percent is the minimum. Obviously, the usual sources of milkfat are cream and milk, but others are allowed. Breyer's regular ice cream, which Ms. Poutine poo-poos, qualifies. They list the ingredients of the natural vanilla as "Milk, Cream, Sugar, Natural Tara Gum, Natural Vanilla Flavor." (Note the tara gum was added by Unilever). Admittedly, they make a variety of dessert items and "low-fat" products that do not qualify, and are labeled appropriately--they are not allowed to be called ice cream.

  14. Or, labels that are "new and improved" when all they do is change the shape of the package so they can sell you less product for the same price.

    Can you give an example of that? Usually when producers are reducing package size they don't want to bring attention to that.

  15. When was the pick of eGullet? 2005? I remember being addicted back then, checking for new posts every 10 minutes at work... I believe the content quality was a lot higher. I come now once every few months and I have not posted in years....

    One thing that occurs to me, and this may not be true in absolute numbers but just dilution due to the growth in the number of members, is that it seems to me that there used to be much more participation from professionals in the food industry than there is now.

  16. In my younger days when I used to do more road trips, chocolate-covered coffee beans were often my stay-awake snacks while driving. A properly roasted coffee bean is already going to be pretty dry and crunchy, I don't see that additional roasting is going to be needed.

  17. That is the primary reason why I initially went with Chowhound... but also the reason I evenutally hovered to EG hoping for a higher level of discussion. Unfortunately, most stuff on EG is pretty light weight, and discussions can end so abruptly.

    Welcome to the Internet, man.

  18. So what would you eat if the world were ending tomorrow?

    The world is not ending tomorrow. Camping has said the world won't end until August. Saturday is the Rapture. Which means, for the rest of us, raiding the fridges of the Raptured! Hmm, on second thought, probably all they'll leave behind is three-bean casserole and Spam.

  19. Incidentally it IS "fora," originally and formally -- a casualty of declining dictionary use, a problem only if you also dislike "data," "media," and similar common plurals.

    As a professional user of dictionaries, I would point out that no major English dictionary--there's a few of them here in my office--lists fora as the preferred plural, not even the OED. Which doesn't give it at all, not even in the extensive list of historical references.

    As to the forum thing, it seems to be a usual thing for most of the content to be generated by a small portion of the members, topics get covered repetitively, partly because search functions tend to suck. It does happen that topics come up where I know it was covered two, three, four years ago, whatever. I don't think this necessarily means that every possible topic is exhausted or that no new thing will come up. Or that we're going to find something better to do.

    And yes, the moderated single-topic boards tend to be better.

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