MarketStEl

I should also note that in addition to the snacks, I stashed this in my desk drawer, knowing this was coming up: This ad from the center spread of the Dec. 31 Metro contains tales of four Weight Watchers success stories. I'm somewhat ambivalent about programs like this for several reasons: 1) While the Alcoholics Anonymous model has been proven to work and is highly effective for many, I've always been a keep-my-own-counsel sort when it comes to taking action of this type. I'll listen to advice from lots of sources, sure, and even act on some of it, but ultimately I want the decision to be mine. I went sober for 18 months without ever setting foot in an AA meeting. I might benefit from the group support, but I don't think I need it yet, and my current experience in the Landmark Forum has shown me anew both the strengths and the dangers of group improvement programs (though I suspect that some of the occupational hazards of Landmark are unique to it). 2) This ambivalence goes beyond Weight Watchers and AA-style programs per se: I don't really want to give up the foods I enjoy, and I enjoy a lot of them. Most diet programs usually call for you to give up or severely restrict your intake of some substance or another, and I think that may be part of the reason why most of them fail: in addition to the influence of our Lizard Brains, there is the similar psychological issue of the effects of deprivation. I will grant that with its point system, Weight Watchers doesn't so much put foods off limits as it does cause you to make conscious tradeoffs: Is this cheese cube worth forswearing a burger later? Can I make an ice cream cone up in salads tomorrow? As such, I suspect it's easier to stick to WW than many other diets, but I'm not at the point where I'm ready to try yet. 3) I'm not even sure I need to, for even though I am overweight and have a noticeable gut, I'm otherwise in good health. My blood pressure went from borderline high to normal after I went sober, and as I don't drink every day even now, it hasn't climbed back up from normal since I resumed drinking. My total cholesterol is high, but my bad cholesterol and triglycerides are low while my good cholesterol is high; given that there is no history of heart disease in my family, my doctor does not think it necessary for me to take either extraordinary measures or statins to reduce it. As I said before, my interest in losing weight is mainly one of physical fitness and physical appearance -- but as a gay man, those are often reasons enough for more intense steps than I have taken so far. I'm hoping Ellen will go into some detail about how her years as a Fat-Is-A-Feminist-Issue activist enabled her to escape the tyranny of appearance (and maybe touch on the differences between gay men and lesbians in this regard, for there are some; it strikes me that in gay America, the gender roles are reversed when it comes to primping, preening and doing all those things intended to make one more beautiful as conventionally defined). Speaking of "beautiful as conventionally defined," the Bette Midler song I quoted on the whiteboard in one of my earlier posts today speaks directly to this topic and is one of my favorites. Maybe I could get rid of the gut, but so what if I don't? "I'm beautiful, dammit!" Or: Don't just pussyfoot around and sit on your assets. Unleash your ferocity on an unsuspecting world! --from the same song Edited to add footnote: I note that the long-running Weight Watchers topic on this forum went dormant in mid-December. Have people run out of interesting things to eat and yet still lose weight?

Hey! I have that poster! Its my souvenir of a walking and eating trip 'round San Francisco - we stopped and bought a dark-chocolate dipped candied apricot in every candy store we saw. 13 of 'em total, in one day. LOTS of walking! The actual goal was to locate a poster shop that had that specific print, without dealing with city traffic and parking. The candy was a bonus. I remember it better than I remember the sights. I bought mine at the gift shop at the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge when I visited San Francisco, Seattle, Sean (my brother) and Estella Rose (my niece; these last two live in Woodinville, outside Seattle) last April. It's true: The fog really does burn off at noon. Well, that particular Saturday, it was 2 pm. A bit of Christmastime fun. My boss also distributed some puzzles and holiday doggerel on the last workday before Christmas. If I'm jonesin' for salt, I'll get a bag of chips from the vending machine or walk up to the Wawa. Actually, there is a place where I could keep a bike and take it partway to work with me. It's called "my apartment building." SEPTA permits bicycles on all off-peak Regional Rail trains. One seat at the end of each car has been removed, and bicyclists use that area for their bikes. Peak trains are those that arrive in Center City Philadelphia between 6 and 9:30 AM and depart it between 3:30 and 6:30 PM. My journey is in the opposite direction, so I could take a bike with me on SEPTA. While it won't do much for my muscle mass, I should consider getting one. It just so happens that there's an excellent biking/hiking trail just a stone's throw from my office. Pictures of it forthcoming. Edited to fix tag error.

Actually, Life cereal -- which I liked as a kid and still do -- didn't disappoint at all. But it is paradoxical in being a good-for-you food that's bad for you. Good for you because it's made from oats and is high in soluble fiber, almost like oatmeal. Bad for you because it's got added sugar. Before I join in the online new employee orientation, could I ask a site manager to delete the duplicate and triplicate posts I just made? For some reason, my browser is having a hard time communicating with the eG site today, and I got no indication that my post commands were successful. More on Monday in a little bit.

So why are folks "walking into town" at lunchtime? (The Borough of Yardley being about three square miles, and as Activant's Yardley office lies at the south edge of the town center, roughly midway [and spanning about one-third of the distance end to end] between the central intersection and the Yardley train station (a 15- to 20-minute walk in total), "walking into town" isn't as big a deal as it sounds.) Because today's forecast high is in the upper 60s, a few degrees warmer than yesterday; the high in Philadelphia could flirt with the record high for this day of 69 F, set in the 1930s. It will be a few degrees cooler up here in bucolic Bucks County. The office where I work is a handsome, low-slung, rustic structure, built in 1902 to house a tannery and completely rebuilt on the inside when what was then known as Prophet 21 Inc. bought the building in the early 1980s: It sits halfway up a fairly steep hill from Yardley's Main Street and thus well above the 100-year flood line. There have been three 100-year floods on this stretch of the Delaware in the last ten years or so. The hill: If I take "the long way" to my office at the building's south end, as I did Monday so I could take this picture of the main entrance at its north end, I feel a little like Maxwell Smart as I walk down the central corridor that runs the length of the building: My cubicle is sparsely decorated for now, but even without the nameplate (which was installed yesterday morning), you would probably recognize it as mine: (When I hung the "Subway Series" poster at the back of the first photo of this troika in my cubicle, our graphic designer, who is a huge New York sports fan, asked whether I was a fan of the Yankees or the Mets. "No," I told him. "I'm a fan of the subway." [besides, as a loyal Royal still, I could never warm up to the Yankees.] I also take my penchant for trivia on the road, as the newspaper clipping on the bulletin board should make clear.) My boss, whose cubicle is directly opposite mine: is also given to posting favorite quotes; mine change daily, hers weekly. We both share this sentiment: BTW, she knows I'm blogging. She also plans to attend the next PGMC concert -- and has seen this photo of me in a tutu from the 2006 holiday concert. I wouldn't call this company a dieter's disaster; on the contrary, it's probably easier to follow a diet here than it would be at many other companies, for it has no company cafeteria. There is a dining hall about midway down in the rear that has an array of vending machines with sodas, juices, water, ice cream,pre-packaged sandwiches, and cans of nukeable foods, and that's it. As a result, there are a large number of brown-baggers working here, as these shots of the two fridges in my area should demonstrate. There are two more fridges in the dining room and two each in the upper and lower segments of the main building. (My department is in a two-story wing that is attached to the rear of the main building's south end.) Now for the hydration part -- or, rather, the dehydration part. This company is powered by caffeine. It's not at all uncommon for me to walk into the kitchenette at 2:30 in the afternoon and see two fresh pots of coffee on the burners, though by that time of day, it's usually one regular, one decaf. A co-worker has already commented on my prodigious coffee consumption. I think I need to pick up a six-pack of V8 on my next grocery shopping trip. Now, would the stash I keep in one of my drawers make me a sinner? Well, maybe the Hamburger Helper Singles packet -- a free sample I received in the mail back around June -- would, but I think the rest of my snack/condiment repertoire passes the virtue test. But there is temptation nearby. In the cubicle next to mine, which the second of the two less seasoned writers I replaced vacated at the end of my first week on the job, are all sorts of treats left over from the Christmas presents our business partners and suppliers left us. Unfortunately, you missed the most spectacular of them, a construction called "the mountain of chocolate" -- cookies, popcorn, pretzels and candies, all stacked in a heap and covered in chocolate (some milk, some dark). I managed to scarf down my share of the goodies in this mountain without much damage to my weight. A late-night snack, OTOH, went to my gut. Other recurring temptations offered at this office are soft pretzels every Thursday morning and bagels with butter and cream cheese every payday (alternate Fridays). The pretzels are a quarter on the honor system; the bagels are on the house. I've been told that there is a company cook-out on the big lawn in front of the building (there's a volleyball net permanently strung up near its south end) every summer, and that T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops are common office garb in the warmer months (what would you expect at a high-tech company? I doubt I'll ever go that far down the casual-dress scale). I guess I should share with you all what I actually ate yesterday. That's coming up next.

Okay, I'm back, ensconced in my cubicle, Urban Knights playing on my headphones, and a stack of back Activant Insights newsletters at my side to prep for a meeting next week. The new commute will have to wait a bit -- I'm missing a shot or two to document it, and sure enough, I have no image editing software on my office computer (Windows Paint doesn't hack it). In the meantime, some followup comments and the rest of yesterday. 1) Yes. The salad spinner has both a centrifuge top and a storage lid. I usually buy my salad greens once a week, on Saturday, from O.K. Lee in the Reading Terminal Market -- he sells bagged romaine mix and spring mix for 99c/bag. I usually buy one of each, a head of radicchio, some bell peppers, a carrot, and a package (roughly 8 oz) of sliced mushrooms. Assembling the salad is fairly simple: Mix the bags (and tear the romaine some more--the produce vendors in the RTM leave huge chunks in their salad mix bags), slice the peppers, tear the radicchio, shred the carrot, and dump the sliced mushrooms into the mix. Spin, drain the water, put the spun-out carrot slivers back in the salad, toss a little, cover and refrigerate. I find that I can get an entire week's worth of tossed salads out of this purchase, which runs me somewhere in the neighborhood of $6-$7. Tomatoes add anywhere from $1 to $3 to the total, depending on the season and where I buy them; currently, 9th Street vendors are offering pint packages of grape Romas (pictured upthread) for a buck each. Even if half of them go bad, as the ones I bought last week did, I still come out ahead. 2). I almost never consume milk, except with cereal. Cheese is my principal Lizard Brain hazard, followed by sour cream-based dips with carbohydrates to dip in them. I did pay attention to Ellen's comments in her last foodblog about the urge to snack late at night -- something that pre-rational critter tells you to do -- and had been doing pretty well at avoiding this until the holidays. I find that eating a good dinner greatly diminishes the temptation to give into my Lizard Brain; however, this also flies in the face of a common bit of diet advice, which is, "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper." Yet I do better at keeping my weight down if I don't do that, because otherwise, I will be sorely tempted to pull out the chips or crackers and cheese or dip as I 'Net-surf before going to bed around midnight Eastern Time. 3). When I was sober, I found that fruit juice mixed with seltzer water was a good substitute for a mixed drink, and I still drink such combos from time to time. But more often, I find myself consuming Coke Zero or plain water at home. But flavored seltzer is IMO a decent low-sodium, low-calorie alternative to plain old water. There is one beverage I consume even more of. I'll reveal it in my next post. I did notice on my first visit to Los Angeles in 1966 that there were lots of ads for bottled water; I guess Angelenos didn't much care for their municipal supply, which is funny given that a few years ago, Consumer Reports magazine did a taste comparison of several municipal supplies and some popular brands of bottled water -- and the municipal supplies of New York and LA finished 1-2 in the rankings. People in Philadelphia love to complain about the taste of "Schuylkill Punch", and if chlorine in your water is a great worry for you, then I'd guess you'd want to avoid drinking Philadelphia's municipal supply -- or that of just about any other US city but New York, for that matter, for most water works chlorinate their water to get rid of harmful bacteria. (New York gets its water from reservoirs in the upper reaches of the Delaware River basin; as the reservoirs are protected from development, the natural filtration that occurs in the reservoirs is all the treatment New York City water gets -- or needs, it appears; that minimal treatment is probably what accounts for NYC tap water's famed taste and drinkability. By the time the Delaware reaches the City of Philadelphia's main water intake in the Torresdale section of Northeast Philadelphia, it's been past numerous industrial sites and several cities, including Trenton and the Lehigh Valley conurbation, so we aren't as fortunate as New Yorkers are.) I don't mind city water at all, but Gary and my roomie both do, so we buy bottled water in small bottles (that way everyone can drink right from the bottle without worry). Besides Coke Zero, I also am somewhat partial to Fresca, a sugar-free grapefruit/citrus soda, especially the peach citrus variety. As I composed this, I was informed by my boss via e-mail that there will be two groups of people here in Marketing and Sales "walking into town" at lunchtime: one group that will dine at the Canal Street Grill and another that will simply walk. Unfortunately for me, I can join neither group, for I'm set to log into the corporate new employee orientation at 12:15 pm today. (I got the Yardley office version the second week on the job.) Your introduction to the dining scene in Yardley, such as it is, will have to wait.

After trying Tillamook from Oregon, I'm afraid Cabot, good though it is, doesn't quite do it for me like it used to. But now to the day. Atkins devotees will probably be highly disappointed to see what I ate. Susan: I do pack my lunch most days. This morning, I assembled my salad as is most often my wont: and fixed myself a bowl of childhood: Make that the dregs of a bowl of childhood. I don't think that even Mikey would like this: Add milk: and down with juice. My fridge was as full this morning as Ellen's was empty. The large object in the lower of the two plastic bags on the top shelf was tonight's dinner, which I will probably get around to posting in the early A.M. Tuesday. One could ask, Why is a confirmed cheesehead drinking lactose free milk? Truth to tell, I probably should be taking Lactaid tablets with my meals, for as the salad above should indicate, I still work cheese into a lot of my dishes, and I think I am somewhat lactose intolerant, as many African-Americans are. Perhaps I should just work less cheese into my dishes. A cup of coffee would ordinarily materialize here, after I finished the green tea warmup, but both our coffee mills chose this morning to die. (I had a blade grinder I purchased at a used furniture store near me, and I also responded to an e-mail offer of a free burr grinder from a roast-your-own coffee outfit. Regarding the burr grinder, I got what I paid for -- its motor seizes after a few days of grinding coffee.) You'll have to wait 'til Tuesday for the rest of Monday. It's late, I had problems processing the large batch of pictures, and I need to get some rest. Exercise, such as it is, is among the highlights, along with the commute.

Coming up, Susan. I'm batch processing the day's pictures now. There will also be walking and riding involved. It wouldn't be a MarketStEl foodblog without a trip on public transit. I guess I could walk the 30 miles from my Center City home to Bucks County -- it would do wonders for my cardio and take off a chunk of weight -- but I need to sleep sometime. So my walking gets in at the ends of the journey. (What's that? Bike, you say? I haven't gotten up to the stamina level yet where I could negotiate the rather hilly terrain of the Neshaminy Creek valley and Lower Bucks County. And I'd still have to get up an hour and a half earlier at the least.)

There, of course, is yet another connection between Ellen and me, as eG regulars probably know all too well by now. Shortly after I got myself elected to it as Vice President of Marketing, the Philadelphia Gay Men's Chorus' board met with the artistic director and some of the board members of the GMCW to find out how they handled growing pains and governance issues. Some of their ideas we plan on implementing. We're just starting the rehearsals for our next subscription concert, in March, so there will be very little proselytizing for PGMC in this blog, though it will show up if for no other reason than the dinner that follows Wednesday night rehearsals.

Actually, we had not been in contact with each other from the time Ellen left Boston until we ran across each other here on eGullet! I thought her member ID looked familiar and dropped a pearl (IIRC, class year, then House affiliation) in a post; the affirmative response confirmed my suspicion. We had, however, been out to each other prior to Ellen's departure. More on that as the week progresses. This is not a direct answer, but: I will be batch processing photos on this blog, as I have neither a USB cable for my digital camera nor image-editing software on my office computer. IOW, the answer to this question will be revealed in due course.

Along with my job in University Relations, one of the other things I lost at Widener back in October was free access to the Wellness Center, a state-of-the-art fitness center that opened in March 2006, shortly after I started working there. I had made lunch-hour workouts at the Wellness Center part of my daily routine, and while my weight had not gotten below 197, I was doing pretty well with my cardio figures and beginning a weight training regimen. I'm back to Square One with all of this. I'm not in a position right now to join a commercial gym (there are two good ones near me*, one of them right across the street from my apartment building), given other things I want/need to do with the bigger income I'm earning at Activant Solutions, so for the short term, I will need to build in some exercise into my everyday activities. I've read up on some non-workout workouts one can do while, say, seated in one's cubicle, but haven't tried them yet. My office has a shower and lockers in one men's room (the one nearest me, as it turns out) but no gym. This might still offer me the opportunity to get in some exercise outside when the weather gets better again. *One of them -- the one closest to me -- is very popular with Gayborhood denizens and has a reputation for attracting gym bunnies. I'm not sure that I'd want to join this gym for that reason...and that reason also touches on the subject of body image, about which I'm sure we will all have more to say later.

I should note that there will be several other issues that my co-bloggers and I will touch on in the course of this blog. I'll let my colleagues explain those in more detail.

Greetings, everyone, from quaint, charming and tranquil Yardley, Pa., where I have worked since this past December 4. I'm also posting from a low hill overlooking a semi-vast expanse known as the Two Hundred Pound Plateau. You saw the view from that hill in the teaser photos for this foodblog, and one of the things I hope to do in the course of this foodblog is climb back down off of it -- the plateau as well as the hill. Our co-blogger mizducky, who knows me from when we were both young whippersnappers at Harvard, was supposed to have started this blog in the wee small hours Pacific Standard Time from her perch on the Left Coast, but the Invision PowerBoard servers that host eGullet had other ideas. So, reckoning that she is resting to face the new day (or probably rising right about the time I post this), and with the blessing of our third participant, CaliPoutine, I'm kicking off yet another tag-team eG Foodblog. We chose this week to blog because it's the first full week of the month when roughly one in every two Americans makes a New Year's resolution to lose weight. Of those, roughly nine in ten (all figures pure conjecture) either abandon that resolution within a short period or succeed, only to put the weight they lost back on. All three of us are watching our weight: two out of medical necessity and a third out of a desire to get into better shape overall. We thought that a foodblog devoted to weight management would be an excellent way to examine the whole subject of diet, weight loss, overweight and obesity, and some of the tensions and compromises inherent in being at once a food lover and a person who must watch the food they eat. It strikes me that gourmandry and weight management are at heart at odds with each other: I notice that truly svelte people appear to be absent from the ranks of food lovers. Yet at the same time, I also note that truly obese people are not overrepresented among them either, though we may have a disporportionate share of overweight people like myself. Perhaps we will figure out why this is so in the course of this blog; perhaps not. We will take a look at the diet-industrial complex, though, an entity that (I believe) all three of us have managed to avoid getting overly entangled with. One of my unused teaser photos was designed to illustrate one of the things I try to do in balancing a love of food with a desire to get rid of a gut: And we will look at the role of exercise too. More about that from my perspective in my posts later today. BTW, Tracey: That salad was homemade. I picked up several packets of salad dressing from the Wawa just up Main Street from my office so I would never be without dressing on days when I forgot to bring in my own. With this introduction out of the way, we can now take (it) off.

They then list a few of the companies that supply store brands, like Alcoa (Reynolds Wrap), Birds Eye, Chicken of the Sea, Del Monte, etc. A 2003 Fortune article explained the need of heavily branded food corporations expanding into store brands as a matter of economic necessity: ← That's true to a point, but some retail chains, such as Safeway, actually have their own manufacturing facilities for their store brands. There are also some very large -- as well as small -- manufacturers that specialize in private label products. ← 1) Perhaps we've come full circle, then? The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company in its heyday carried just about nothing but house brands and had several facilities across the country that produced them. Eventually, though, the company closed the plants, as they became a drain on A&P's profits as customers came to prefer nationally advertised brands. The power of mass media advertising led shoppers to assume that house-brand products were inferior to the ones they saw on TV, and the stigma has remained attached to them ever since, though threads like this one suggest that savvy consumers no longer turn up their noses at them. 2) The boyfriend of a friend of mine (PGMC's Vice President of Production) works at the deli counter at a Genuardi's (Philadelphian for "Safeway") in the northern 'burbs. He tells me that Safeway's deli meat line, Primo Taglio, is first rate. Can you back this up from your own experience? I may have to succumb to placing an order at genuardis.com to try it (the chain refuses to open stores within the city of Philadelphia, honoring its founding family's hostility to unions). As TJ's is the Aldi of natural/organic foods retailers (literally!), your experience there comes as no surprise. I have yet to encounter an Aldi product that is clearly inferior to either nationally advertised or regular supermarket house brands. Can't say the same for Save-a-Lot, but I'm not surprised to find out that brand-name manufacturers are making products for that chain under the table too. I'll second the endorsements of both Brand 365 and Archer Farms. In general, I will buy store brands unless I've discovered a good reason not to. The Acme (Albertson's) store brand is generally very good -- but I avoid their New York State cheddar, which has an off-taste I find off-putting; America's Choice, the Super Fresh (A&P family) regular store brand, is better. I have had generally poor experiences with house-brand refrigerated orange juice, though. Master Choice, the Super Fresh premium store brand, is an outstanding value -- their products are the equal of brands that cost two to three times as much, yet cost no more than Brand 365 does. (I do note that Brand 365 products, while competitively priced, do cost a little more than regular supermarket store brands.)

We've got a thread for that going already.

Just wondering whether you might have better luck asking people on the France board....

I'm willing to spend less for the merely okay in this case. As for Sagami, which is more than merely okay: So close to Ferry Avenue PATCO station, yet so far....

You're right, and you're also right about Alice Waters, who is indefatigable about getting better food into the hands of lower-income food buyers. I should probably bone up on what's happening in the Bay Area before attempting further comparisons. If the Headhouse Farmers' Market has the effect you postulate, then it is indeed all for the good, but it looks to me like the Food Trust had already made good strides well before it opened, judging from the list of ongoing and new locations for 2007 on their Web site. And we're all agreed that more can be done. I note that the Food Trust is now working on the corner stores, which could build on what the Urban Nutrition Initiative has been doing in the schools. (Granted, these two initiatives aren't really about promoting local produce as much as they are about promoting healthier eating in general in low-income communities, but the latter will ultimately benefit the former as people become more aware.)

So we're taking stock now? In 2007, I will eat as cheaply as I can (within reason, of course) so I can save up in order to celebrate my 50th birthday in 2008 at Le Bec-Fin. Well, I did manage to save up some money, but then had to spend it all to clean up a case of identity theft. With this year being a GALA Choruses Festival year, and with some other major moves in the works, I think that even with my new, bigger salary, I may have to put this resolution on the shelf and dust it off in 2008. I will make paella. It seems like it's not that complex a dish to make, just time-consuming, and it's something I imagine I could do at home. Didn't make the time to do it. Must remember to revisit this one. I will find my way to Tierra Colombiana, finally. Folded into the "eat at an interesting restaurant within Philadelphia but outside Center City or South Philly" resolution. Even though this place is well known to eGers, it still fits. I will learn how to hand-toss a pizza crust if it kills me. Still haven't gotten the hang of it. This is the year I will try tomatillos. Maybe in a homemade salsa if I work my way up to it. This I did manage to do, but not in a salsa -- instead, they made their way into a piri-piri sauce. I will taste organically raised meat or poultry and see if I notice any difference between it and the conventional product. Forgot about this one. I will use a new gadget I don't yet know I need. I think I got my first Kyocera ceramic slicer too early for them to fall under this resolution, but I added the ultra-thin and adjustable ones this year. Who needs a mandoline? I will give the rough equivalent of the contents of my pantry to local food banks over the course of the year. I did donate several canned items to area food banks and added a dollar or two to about a third of my grocery bills, but I don't know if this really adds up to "the rough equivalent of the contents of my pantry." I am always interested in finding companions for dining out. Mostly eGers, as it turned out, but I did dine out with a fellow Chorus member or two NOT in the post-rehearsal context. I need to give my old colleague Jon Caroulis a call. We will nonetheless do the bulk of our entertaining at home, no doubt. And so I did. Usually with good results. My kids will continue not to exist. Wasn't a difficult resolution to keep at all! I will teach others how to write well if the occasion presents itself. My cousin Akiba asked me if I could help motivate her high-school-age grandson, who says he wants to be a journalist or writer. I e-mailed him a few times but never heard anything from him. My offer is still on the table. I will read as much good food writing as I can, in hopes of emulating it soon. Well, I read a lot of good writing and even more mediocre writing, but not that much of it was about food. As this year's resolutions should make clear, the Gourmets are piling up.

I'd say we're playing a very good game of catch-up, though -- and that we do San Francisco (if not New York) one better in having two organizations that promote farmers' markets in neighborhoods throughout the region, both affluent and poor. The Food Trust's Farmers Market Program has done especially well in that last regard -- and they took care of the neighborhoods first before making a big splash with their 25th farmers' market, in a space that was made for them, the New Market shambles. (Note the "Food Stamp Program" information on the left side of the page I've linked.) To that we must add the 12 farmers' markets operated by Farm to City. While their locations tend to skew affluent, they too make an effort to serve a broad cross-section of the Greater Philadelphia community. Sure we're not doing all that well?

Feh! on Times' food writer Kim Seversen for the cheap shot. But kudos for acknowledging that Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market, even if it goes unnamed in the article, is a rare gem. ← This is an affliction that has beset the Times for decades. Their report on the opening of America's first subway on Sept. 1, 1897, included the passage, "That so conservative an American city as Boston is the leader in adopting this is viewed as unusual." You mean to tell us that there are civilized places in this country not named New York? And some of them are very close to us? Horrors!

Thank you for a most entertaining, visually appealing and multicultural blog. I need to sit at your feet for lessons in how to master the inexpensive point-and-shoot digital camera. As for cheese, it's never enough just to say it -- one must serve it as well. There was one question I had that appears to have gotten lost in the cracks -- the one about the cross-in-a-circle symbol that was also used by the Santa Fe railroad. Did anyone know its origins or significance? If it's too late to post a reply to this blog, please PM me.

1 kg = 2.2 lb €1 = ~US$1.20 Sounds like the price in Spain isn't that far off the price in the US. I would think it would be lower there if only because of the reduced transport costs and absence of tariffs or customs duties.

Completely forgot about Roaring 40s, which is merely The. Best. Blue. Cheese. I. Have. Eaten. All. Year. DiBruno's ran a promo a little while back in which they recommended pairing Buffalo Wing Flavor Pretzel Crisps with their Gorgonzola cheese spread. It was a match made in heaven. I think this trick might be worth trying with actual Buffalo wings as well. (With celery sticks at hand, of course.)

The usage maven will note that we in the English-speaking world have applied the French word entrée to the wrong course. Herewith begins a campaign to replace the inappropriate French word with the plain English "main course" or "main", which, thankfully, is also already used widely. At least with that the French will no longer think us stupid. (Okay, okay, it will take more than this to get them to that point.)

"Toasted" is what everyone gets by 11:59:59 local time tonight. (In much of the Eastern Hemisphere, that hour has already come and gone.) Wow! I don't think I've ever seen a fridge so pristine in the time I've been reading eG foodblogs! If I hadn't learned differently already, I'd have assumed you were a bachelor (heterosexual) or a graduate student just from seeing this.