Blogs : Food Media
Food Media CHOW's roundup of food-related news from blogs, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and film.
Alert the Vegan Police
Salon takes a peek at blog Quarrygirl.com’s “Operation Pancake: Undercover Investigation of LA Vegan Restaurants,” a 6,000-plus-word look at vegan restaurants in Los Angeles that finds that “vegan” dishes are often contaminated with egg, casein, and other verboten ingredients. Salon’s Andrew Leonard puts his finger on the most interesting issue: Fake meat from Taiwan (the most popular exporter) isn’t as pure as vegans would like. Why? The intrepid “Operation Pancake” investigators have the answer:
“In the Taiwanese and Chinese market [where most of these products are made and sold] vegetarian customers are only concerned with meat ingredients and not bothered at all if egg or milk ingredients are included [this is due to religious reasons in many cases, typically to accommodate Buddhists, who are often not vegan].”
Also, according to one Taiwanese manufacturer:
“There are few labeling regulations in Taiwan and they are rarely, if ever, enforced. We usually list the ingredients we put into food directly, but if if we’re using something from a third party we don’t always list the ingredients in that. It’s just not important in Taiwan.”
Does this remind anyone else of those guys who got busted for relabeling regular doughnuts as low-fat?
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Tagged with: media, food and cooking, fake meat, vegan, casein, egg, albumen, taiwan, operation pancake, salon, quarry girl
Food, Inc.: How Is It?
I’m supposed to go to the movies tonight, and I’m waffling on what to see. Should I go see Food, Inc., the latest anti–Big Ag cinematic screed? Since I’m up on the horrors of factory farms and the creeping menace of GMO foods, I wonder if rather than teaching me anything, it will just bum me out. A food-fan friend of mine saw it the other night and gave me this two-word review: “Bring tissues.”
Any thoughts? It does look interesting, I’ll say that for it. Horror-movie music combined with prosaic imagery always gives me the willies.
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Tagged with: media, food inc, robert kenner, eric schlosser, michael pollan, food industry
A Horse Is a Horse ... Unless It's a Steak
It turns out the debate about exporting horses for slaughter is pretty far from simple. Salon lays it out: On one side are those who argue that it’s cruel and terrifying for the horses involved. The other side: If you can’t slaughter the 100,000 unwanted horses that pop up annually, how do you dispose of them humanely and economically? Slaughter allows for a whole range of useful activities:
“Horse meat is eaten in France, Belgium, Italy, Japan and many other countries. Most every part of a horse is used: hides for leather; intestines for sausage casings; tails for paint brushes; hooves for glue. Historically horse byproducts went into pet food in the U.S.; even now, several zoos here import horse meat to feed their lions and tigers.”
Sounds good. On the other hand:
“Nancy Perry, the Humane Society’s vice president of government affairs, explains that unlike cows, chickens and pigs, horses live and work closely with people. They’re also flighty, fractious and easily frightened. These traits make them ill-suited for industrialized slaughter.”
Overall, a fascinating read that is more likely to leave you on the fence about horse slaughter than on either side of the issue.
Image source: Flickr member Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com under Creative Commons
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Tagged with: salon, horses, slaughter, export, animal cruelty, media
Sex with Chefs, Robert De Niro, and Prawns
The Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s artful online magazine/website, is a study of celebrity fascination, political punditry, and the sex lives of powerful people. Its food channel, Hungry Beast, just launched, and it’s a study of celebrity fascination, food punditry, and the sex lives of food-oriented people. It’s fun! And I don’t just say that because it’s linking to CHOW at the bottom of the page.
Hungry Beast will be updating features weekly, and the Cheat Sheet links to smart stuff that other people are writing.
The stories for this week include Gael Greene on the sex lives of chefs (she’s saddened by monogamy and by the prospect that today’s young, randy chefs aren’t getting enough action) and an assessment of Robert De Niro’s prospects as a restaurateur (they’re better than those of his now-shuttered Ago).
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Tagged with: daily beast, hungry beast, tina brown, media
Finally, a Taco Truck for LEGO People
Print ’em. Fold ’em. Vend miniature tacos and/or tortas and/or tamales from them. Yes, the technology of folded paper has finally come to the world of taco trucks. A Flickr user called goopymart has produced a wonderful assortment of seven different trucks for the public’s enjoyment and amusement.
Image used with permission of the artist
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Tagged with: taco trucks, media, goopymart, paper, folding, foldable, paper taco trucks
A Possible Good-bye for Two Old Chums: Britain and the Eel
“Jellied eels—cooked and sold cold in their own stock—could soon join the ranks of haslet, stotty cake and bara birth as a dish that is only found in rare pockets of Britain.”
That’s the opening of an article in the Telegraph, and if you can identify any of the three dishes cited after jellied eels, you’re probably either a cosmopolitan gastronome or a native Brit.
A drastic fall in eel stock, caused by “overfishing in combination with habitat loss, pollution, and the damming of rivers,” could change eating habits in Britain for the long term. Or at least until the numbers recover.
Incidentally, haslet is an herbed pork meatloaf, stotty cake is a doughy type of filled bread, and bara birth is a Welsh fruitcake—or so says the all-wise oracle known as the Internet.
Image source: Flickr member hoxtonboy under Creative Commons
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Tagged with: eels, britain, haslet, stotty cake, bara birth, media, eel pie, england, overfishing
