barritz

Make that a table for two. Yes.

What's wrong with selling production methods and provenance? A lot of people care how their food is produced. For example, a person might want to buy fair trade coffee, and would like to shop somewhere that supplies it. What's so wrong with that?

Singer and Mason have a chapter in their book called "Trade, Fair Trade, and Workers' Rights" that address the points Azurite makes. If you're interested in this issue, I definately recommend you check it out. The book is called The Way We Eat : Why Our Food Choices Matter.

Thank you for posting that information, Sparrowgrass. I only have one point to clarify. You wrote: "Cage free eggs come from hens who are nearly as closely confined as battery hens--a huge shed stuffed full of thousands of birds." While this may be true, there is a big difference between caged birds and cage free. Cage free birds "have the ability to engage in many of their natural behaviors such as walking, nesting, and spreading their wings." Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that cage free birds live great lives. (After all, the cage free label still permits debeaking and forced molting through starvation.) I'm just saying they live much better lives then caged birds. But what you write, in the whole, is very valuable. It is extremely important to look behind the label -- to research what the label means. This may help as far as eggs are concerned... A Brief Guide to Egg Carton Labels and Their Relevance to Animal Welfare

← I'm angry too, but not surprised. The USDA seem very comfortable inventing their own definitions and classifications. Did you know they classify rabbits as poultry? Here's more USDA fun... http://www.hsus.org/farm_animals/farm_anim..._out_there.html

Do you think I could get some online? I did search for "maengdaa" but only came up with eight hits, and the first hit was your blog. Is there another name for it? Maybe not the name of the insect, but the name of what it secretes?

My favorite thing about Whole Foods is that since June 2004, it has not sold eggs from hens kept in cages, and that in 2005 it also eliminated such eggs from its kitchens and bakeries and from those it commissions to make baked or prepared foods. But to address Grub's points... Mackey's argument is that, instead of committing business suicide by making the entire chain vegan, Mackey "decided to educate Whole Foods' suppliers to produce their animal products in a more compassionate way, and to persuade its customers to make more compassionate choices." Whole Foods worked with organizations, like the Humane Society of the United States, to develop new standards a wide range of animals, such as ducks, cattle, pigs, sheep, etc... They're currently in the process of certifying that their suppliers meet the new standards. Then they'll slap on a nifty "Animal Compassion" logos onto the food. That process should be complete by 2008. Mackey is a libertarian and is philosophically opposed to unions. But why does being opposed to unions equal not being concerned with employees? For eight consecutive years, Whole Foods has been listed by Fortune magazine among the best 100 companies to work for. In 2005, it ranked 30. It's currently ranking 15... http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bes...nies/full_list/ Edit: I just want to add this link to Whole Foods' "Farm Animal and Meat Quality Standards". http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/products/m...ystandards.html

Excellent, thanks! I want to try these. Do you think I'll have trouble finding “maengdaa, a type of insect that secretes a fruit-like essence”?

Roasted crickets. I've never had any, but check out Loung Ung's description of them in her book First They Killed My Father: "Wrapped in green lotus leaf, the brown, glazed crickets smell of smoked wood and honey. They taste like salty burnt nuts." I also read they're good beer food. I'm thinking about making them for myself, but frankly I'm scared. Also, I'm not sure the best place to get them. I found a place that sells them online, but only in quantities of a thousand. They seem like a good source of protein, and not at all fattening. I'm surprised more people aren't using them as a diet food. Oh wait, now I remember, Westerners are afraid to eat insects. We should break this unfair taboo. I see a future in the west where insect eating outpaces chicken consumption. Across American, l imagine all-you-can-eat mealworm buffets, and resturants where the specials are roaches in a light, creamy fruit fly sauce and home made--backyard made, in fact--earthworm ravioli.

I communicated about this on another message board and got the reply: you can go to asian store and fine black rice there. All you need is Yeast, Black rice. Once you cook the rice let it sit and cool down. Also crush the yeast till it solid once that done just sprinkle it on the rice and mix it up and roll it to a ball if you like or put the whole thing in a nice clean pant. Cover it up leave it couple day, make sure you cover the pant with pastic or blanket. It dont have to be black rice, you can also make it from sweet rice to aka sticky rice. It really easy to make My grandma use to make them, she make the best ta paeb ever.

This reminds me of something Trillin wrote. "There came a time when Alice began to refer to a certain sort of people I have corresponded with over the years -- the sort of people who are particularly intense about, say, seeking out the best burrito in East Los Angeles -- as "food crazies."

I once saw an episode of Twin Peaks where one of the characters raved about a baguette with brie and butter.

The fine people at Wikipedia seem to think the word is a synonym for 'gourmet', saying that "the word was coined synchronously by Gael Greene and by Paul Levy and Ann Barr, co-authors of The Official Foodie Handbook (1984)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodie Here's an article called "What is a foodie, anyway?" http://www.slashfood.com/2006/02/10/what-is-a-foodie-anyway/ Here's the Urban Dictionary entry for the term. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=foodie

On Amazon.com, Bourdain's review of Heat includes the line, "It's going right in between Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London and Zola's The Belly of Paris on my bookshelf." So those two books. I haven't read the Zola book, but I've read the Orwell one. Only part of the book is about his experience working in a resturant, and his goal was to examine poverity, so his emphasis is different from the Buford book. I don't mean to deter you from reading it; it's something of a classic. It is one of the two books I've ever read that changed my worldview--that changed me. (The other is Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father.) If you missed Buford's article in the New Yorker, "The Dessert Lab", you can listen to an audio version here: http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/products/...1&redirectFlag=

That's spot on. Those super size chickens that you see in supermarkets are quite literally mutant hybrids on steroids injected with brine. Cook two birds - it'll always taste better, or make an interesting stuffing to pad it out. ← I read something involving this in the book The Way We Eat : Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer and Jim Mason. "Chickens have been bred over many generations to produce the maximum amount of meat in the least amount of time. They now grow three times as fast as chickens raised in the 1950s while comsuming one-third as much feed. But this relentless pursuit of efficiency has come at a cost: their bone growth is outpaced by the growth of their muscles and fat. One study found that 90 percent of broilers had detectable leg problems, while 26 percent suffered chronic pain as a result of bone disease. Professor John Webster of the University of Bristol's School of Veterinary Science has said: 'Broilers are the only livestock that are in chronic pain for the last 20 percent of their lives. They don't move around, not because they are overstocked, but because it hurts their joints so much.' Sometimes vertebrae snap, causing paralysis. Paralyzed birds or birds whose legs have collapsed cannot get to food or water, and--because the growers don't bother to, or don't have time to, check on individual birds--die of thirst or starvation." edit: typo