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

Speaking of critters, I've never eaten any, but I love Loung Ung's description about roasted crickets 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." This book is not about food, of course. If anything, it's a lack of food. But before the Khmer Rouge hit, Loung's story starts with a description of the 1975 Phnom Penh marketplace. Here's just a small excerpt. "Ma and Pa enjoy taking us to a noodle shop in the morning before Pa goes off to work. As usual, the place is filled with people having breakfast. The clang and clatter of spoons against the bottom of bowls, the slurping of hot tea and soup, the smell of garlic, cilantro, ginger, and beef broth in the air make my stomach rumble with hunger. Across from us, a man uses chopsticks to shovel noodles into his mouth. Next to him, a girl dips a piece of chicken into a small saucer of hoisin sauce while her mother cleans her teeth with a toothpick. Noodle soup is a traditional breakfast for Cambodians and Chinese. We usually have this, or for a special treat, French bread with iced coffee." Edit: typo

http://www.loungung.com/ung_visit.php There is a section on food at the bottom half of the page. Also of interest, http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/travel/22cambodia.html

Thank you for that review, Devotay. Have you seen the McDonalds vs Schlosser vids on YouTube? http://youtube.com/results?search=McDonald...s&search=Search

The price of those free range eggs is pretty damn high, too. It can be a couple of bucks for a dozen. I'm not worried about the health aspects of eggs. In fact, I'm going to have 2 or 3 of them for breakfast tomorrow. I would LIKE to eat organic chickens and eggs and dairy, fruits, vegetables, etc. all the time. Really, I would. If you are going to eat "ethically", you gotta go "all in", don't you?? . But I just flat out can't justify the costs. I already spend too much money as it is preparing foods at home. Going all organic would raise my food costs even more. Maybe one day, the price difference will not be so great. Then, I'll be able to afford it all the time. ← I would say that you don't need to go all out. Even if you just occassionally bought ethically. I would recommend going for the cage free eggs. Above all else. When you can. (You don't necessarily need to go for the free range eggs. Just go for cage free.) Make sure the carton of eggs says Certified Humane, Free Farmed, Certified Organic, cage-free, or free-range. Otherwise, the eggs are almost certainly from hens confined in battery cages. The following is from an article by Michael Pollen called An Animal's Place. From everything I've read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their confinement, at least don't spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ''vices'' that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like ''vices'' and ''stress.'' Whatever you want to call what's going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can't bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be ''force-molted'' -- starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done. Full article... http://www.organicconsumers.org/organic/010403_organic.cfm

I'd be interested in what you think. You obviously think the book is an important read. In ten words or less, why? (Okay, you can go over ten words.) For bonus points, compare the book to A Scanner Darkly (Linklater's other current movie).

If you insist on getting your protein from animals, then how about eating a single egg a day from cage free hens? (Eating eggs from caged hens is worse than eating factory-farmed chickens.) If you are worried about health, I can show you an article from the Harvard Health Publications entitled 'The dangers of eggs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be' which says that an egg a day is fine. Or maybe a combination of eggs and beans would do the trick. Or perhaps some milk or yogurt. There are many protein alternatives to chicken. Yes, factory-farmed chicken is cheap, but it's only that cheap because the industry takes severe ethical shortcuts. I don't think it's silly to want to eat ethically. And as I said, you don't have to increase the amount you spend for chicken. Just eat less of it. It really just amounts to a small lifestyle change on your part. But think about the factory-farmed chicken. It's his life full time.

Because a cast iron frying pan on a conventional gas stovetop works better. Woks need btus unknown to home kitchens. ← Not to seem dense but, you mean, home stoves don't get hot enough? How hot does it have to get?

maggiethecat, you hate woks in Western kitchens? Why?

If you buy whole carrots and turn them yourself, you'll save enough to buy a free range bird. ← Heh.... But I don't have time to do that on a Wednesday night when I get home from work at 7:00 PM. My time is worth something! I'll have to check prices on those cut baby carrots. I don't think a pound of them costs a whole lot more than a pound of normal carrots. ← You could confine yourself to buying free range when you can afford it, and the rest of the time get your protein through sources such as beans. This would entail giving up some chicken eating, but would make you a more ethical shopper, which seems like a reasonable trade off, doesn't it?

Try this link: http://www.elbulli.com/catalogo/catalogo/index.php?lang=en