Holly Moore

Thanks for all the suggestions. Really like the idea of tilting the camera, or rotating and cropping to achieve the same effect. As to the fries showing - normally I would, but this was a special situation. Pub and Kitchen had just introduced their Churchill Burger - it was the first in Philadelphia to use La Frieda ground beef. I wanted to just show the burger and hide the fries. As I recall I ended up using a picture where the burger and bun were split open. I just grabbed this pic because it was an easy one to crop to varying degrees.

Thanks, dcarch, Are you saying you prefer the middle cropping, but with the changes you made? I often find cropping a plated dish difficult - whether to lose the overall feel to focus on the food.

[Moderator note: The original Food Shutter Bug Club topic became too large for our servers to handle efficiently, so we've divided it up; the preceding part of this discussion is here: Food Shutter Bug Club (Part 1)] Got a question about framing/cropping food on a plate - how tight to go? I waiver between showing most or all of the plate or cropping in on the food. Three crops of the same pic - and maybe none are the best approach. 1 - Plate with the background. 2 - Tight on plate - framing right on the edge of the plate and below on the plate shadow. 3 - Cropping all the way to the food, omitting most of the plate. Cropping to the food, emphasizes the food but can take it out of context. Curious how others approach cropping plated dishes. Pic is of the Churchill Burger at Pub and Kitchen in Philadelphia.

If you get a tad homesick, check out Big Apple Hot Dogs a hot dog cart at 239 Old London Street. The owner makes his own dogs - three versions that I know of - all with natural casings. From what I hear, a tasty lunch time adventure.

Simplicity - thick sliced, in season, heirloom tomatoes and crisp iceberg lettuce, with mayonnaise on Metropolitan Bakery whole wheat bread or Arnold's thin sliced white sandwich bread. When tomatoes are not in season, grilled cheese sandwich with three year or older cheddar, cooked on an old fashioned (not Belgium style) waffle maker.

I toast bread in the salamander on my Garland range. Gives me great control and even browning. Very fast too. Not sure there is a faster method of toasting toast. Often too fast. A slight distraction or other lapse of focus yields charcoal. Once the toast is finished I'll turn off the gas, take butter from the refrigerator, slice off a few very thin dabs, spread it about the toast and slide it back under the still hot salamander for quick melting. in Philadelphia we have the Metropolitan Bakery. Their whole grain whole wheat makes great toast.

I can't forgive the show for empowering Guy Fieri. Oddly, the participants get to do more real cooking than those on Top Chef Masters.

Summer brings fond memories of the Jellied Consomme Madrilene of yesteryear. Does anyone still work with mayonnaise based chaud froid sauce?

Frangelli's Bakery in South Philadelphia, which makes Philadelphia's best donuts, also offers a doughnut filled with ice cream.

With typical deft touch, the production team took an interesting elimination challenge - food scientific principles - and turned the show into Top Chef Romper Room by forcing the chefs to cook with beakers, test tubes and bunsen burners. If Grant Atchez and Wylie Dufresne get to use a range and fryer ...

Twitter is competing with and seems to be taking away much of the regional postings and celeb/professional participation from food discussion forums. Twitter's lack of topic continuity and conversational capability is outweighed by its spontaneity, timeliness, and freewheeling attitude. No form of media - print, electronic or digital - matches Twitter for restaurant news. By following just four or five posters I am up to date on everything important that happens with Philadelphia restaurants. Newspaper food columnists post to Twitter so they won't be scooped before their story comes out in print. Of course Twitter limits tweets to 140 characters. Often that is not a bad thing.

I believe the answer may be found somewhere in the USDA Standard of Identity for Ice Cream.

Futile wish - Shola has set aside a serving of country pate just for me. Wow. Some spread that was.

Crabs are too much work for too little reward unless we're talking Dungeness. Lobster Boil / Clam Bake, for sure, though I once attended a crawfish and shrimp boil outside of New Orleans that was kind of special.

Speeding is not unethical or evil. It is good sport.

Manichean? Almost like it is a talking point. I was a hotel/restaurant management major. Had to look Manichean up. I don't believe the general tone of this thread, with perhaps a few exceptions, has declared plastic bag and grape absconders and mushroom stem off-snappers to be evil people or even unethical people. Rather opinion was expressed as to whether the acts were ethical. I doubt anyone is purely ethical, especially in other peoples' eyes. I also looked up the definition of poorly reasoned: No questioning that.

So many souls being bared in this thead. Tis a pity eGullet doesn't have the power to grant absolution.

Fagin didn't stop and Oliver turned out ok.

Unfair and in a way stealing (trying to come up with a softer word). The mushrooms are sold "as is." The supermarket paid for whole mushrooms, not caps, and based their pricing on customers purchasing whole mushrooms. By leaving the relatively unsellable stems, the market will either lose money or build it into everyone's pricing. I'd also say unfair to the customers later that day, hoping for shiitake mushrooms and finding mostly stems. Finally, the action potentially leads to the produce department electing to prepackage mushrooms meaning not only will you not be able to break off the stems, you can not select the mushrooms that appeal to you. Ethically, would you do the same in front of the farmer at a farmer's market?

After this discussion I envision New York Fairway markets downloading Steven's head shot and posting it at every checkout lane.

Must be a New York thing. Hereabouts, no ads on plastic produce bags in the markets where I shop.

Steven, Some shrinkage (shoplifting, employee pilfering, waste) is built into pricing, making the cost of supplies and therefore pricing slightly higher. Knowing that a supermarket allows for shrinkage doesn't justify my stealing a T-Bone steak because it is built into the price. Edited to add and having nothing to do with this discussion but..., in the delis I ran we had to allow for evaporation. Since deli meats are sold by the pound, and water evaporates out of them over time, it reduces the total sales yield from a roll of bologna. We found we sold more deli meats if they were displayed sliced, but it was more expensive because of the increased loss of moisture.

For the record, based on a very quick internet search, produce bags cost in the area of $.005 each. Using rough 2006 figures: Average weekly customer count for a medium size supermarket - 12,000 Assume one out of ten customers takes 5 bags Weekly cost to market, $30 $30 per week is $1,500 a year. $1,500 at $10 hourly wage, is 150 hours or the cost of one employee for almost four weeks. Average weekly sales - $330,000 $30/wk is .01 percent of sales Average supermarket profit 1.5% of sales

Under this theory, how many items can one take? Is it ok to take a roll of the bags?

I once worked as the deli and prepared foods mercahdiser for a regional supermarket chain / distributor, meaning I was responsible for those departments in the stores. It also meant that I sat in on the weekly meetings of all departmental merchandisers, giving me a good understanding of the supermarket business. Along with the vast quantities of products a supermarket inventories and sells - I paid less for ingredients than McDonald's stores - one of the most impacting factors in the business is the minimal profit margin. When a distributor pays cash in anticipation of delivery, they receive a one to two percent discount off the manufacturer's invoice. In the chain I worked for, our pretax profits were limited to those cash discounts. The margins are very slim. Even so, a few extra bags a day is not going to have a significant effect on profits, mainly because it is not all that common an occurrence. If every customer took five bags, a few plastic containers or a handful of grapes it would be a meaningful cost.