Blogs : Food Media
Food Media CHOW's roundup of food-related news from blogs, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and film.
Whither the Pawpaw
Ari Weinzweig, cofounder of Zingerman’s (home of great food affordable enough for kings and queens), shares some information on the marvelous pawpaw, a native American fruit that was recorded as George Washington’s favorite dessert. Passion fruit–esque in flavor and often puréed into custard or pie, the pawpaw has a profound novelty factor, and is worth a bit of meditation. And, hey! For a mere $75, you can have 12 ounces of your own Zingerman’s pawpaw gelato by mail, along with five other flavors of frozen Thanksgiving-compliant yumminess.
Image source: Flickr member sarahemcc under Creative Commons
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When Cereal Boxes Are Full of It
If it irritates you that the Smart Choices food program claimed that Ritz Bits Peanut Butter Chocolatey Blast crackers are good for you, you’ll probably be stoked to read Dan Mitchell of Slate describe San Francisco’s assault on spurious cereal health claims.
Mitchell notes: “The suspension of Smart Choices didn’t stop insane label claims. Far from it.” Kellogg’s Cocoa Krispies are “still claiming, in giant letters emblazoned across the box, that the sugary cereal ‘[n]ow helps support your child’s immunity.’ In this worrisome time of virulent viruses, such a claim is likely to give some parents the wrong idea. But really, at any time, such a claim is at best amoral and at worst sinister.”
Whether San Francisco city attorney Dennis Herrera has the standing to take the company to the woodshed remains to be seen. But so long as every new product on the market (other than, perhaps, Drank) feels the need to sell itself as some kind of tasty parallel form of medicine, I’m grateful someone is working to make the marketeers back up their boasts.
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The "Fresh" Chicken That Traveled the World
Reporting from Sao Paulo and Great Britain, the Telegraph puts together a great story on a Pret a Manger “fresh” chicken sandwich. Why the reporting from Sao Paulo, you might reasonably wonder? The fresh chicken is, as it turns out, frozen chicken from Brazil.
Here’s the gemstone at the core of this story:
“Pret a Manger, the sandwich chain which boasts of using only ‘fresh, natural ingredients,’ rears its chickens in small farms around Marau, in the south east of Brazil, and then sends them to Perdigao for processing and freezing. The frozen, raw meat is then shipped thousands of miles across the Atlantic to be defrosted, cooked and put in sandwiches. Until Pret changed its website this week, consumers were not told of the food’s origins.”
Also to the story’s credit, it investigates working and farming conditions in Brazil, and reports that they’re not a horror show: Workers make a small but not appalling wage, often suffer from repetitive stress injuries, and work in cold, wet processing plants that lead to ill health … well, maybe it’s a bit of a horror show. The piece is a good read for anyone who ever considers believing anything told to him by a large food company, under just about any circumstances.
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Pumpkin Buying: The Science
Never in the history of humanity has there existed a Halloween pumpkin-purchasing flow chart as descriptively accurate and generally useful as this one, which ran in the excellent online comic Sheldon. Flow charts: If you’ve got a lot of information and little space, they’re the way to go. Even if the topic is squash.
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Co-op or Salt Mine? Ask an MFA.
Thesis of a recent New York Times first-person story about the Park Slope Food Coop: It’s really, really difficult to work at a co-op for 2.75 hours every four weeks.
Actual point proven by the New York Times’ first-person story about the Park Slope Food Coop: You kind of get what you pay for when you ask an MFA in poetry to perform manual labor.
Of course, Park Slope Food Coop horror stories are hardly unknown to us here at CHOW.
Image source: Flickr member stevendamron under Creative Commons
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It's Game On at the Food Network
On November 3, the Food Network’s new Wii game, Cook or Be Cooked, is scheduled for release. Though Eat Me Daily says the game appears to be a rejiggered version of Cooking Mama, Tracey John, a self-professed “terrible cook” at Wired, kinda got into it:
“Most of the motion gameplay involved a lot of shaking controllers to mimic the actions you’d do in actual cooking: Waggle the Wii remote to shake out the seasoning and cut vegetables; shake the Nunchuk to retrieve your saucepan or bowl; tilt the remote to oil the saucepan, pour liquids and turn the stove on and off.
“There’s also a timer for how long each item should be cooked, so you have to watch the clock. Thankfully, to speed things up you simply hit the C button. To earn extra points, try multitasking by beginning to cut and cook the potatoes for the potato salad while handling other food-prep chores.”
Hey! Sounds like my kitchen where I grind out a dinner every single night.
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