Blogs : Food Media
Food Media CHOW's roundup of food-related news from blogs, newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and film.
Who Doesn't Have a Food Show?
On November 12, Chef David Chang, who recently caught heat for dissing San Francisco chefs for only putting figs on a plate rather than manipulating food in interesting ways, is a featured speaker at the IdeaConference, sponsored by Advertising Age in New York. I’m intrigued to see what awkward badassery Chang will pull out next.
He was in fine form on Munchies, the new food show from VBS (see video clip below). Quick digression: I love VBS for three reasons. First, Spike Jonze is the creative director. And they have the rights to use any Black Lips song (and they make good use of it). Then there’s the cute show Special-Needs Pets, which is a real winner.
Munchies’ first episode profiles Chang. On the show, I enjoyed how candid he was, admitting he’s not the greatest chef and that he couldn’t keep up with the other cooks while working at Café Boulud. But the episode never followed through on how he actually got to where he is now, instead fast-forwarding to a night on the town with Chang and a New York Times writer who’s the coauthor of Chang’s new book. They didn’t seem to have enough to say to each other, and it looked like the producers off camera had to keep asking Chang more questions. When they arrived at Chang’s Ssam Bar, he got drunk and made some food for Chef José Andrés, who responded to a Chang condiment by saying, “Only a crazy mind would come up with a coffee-mayo bullshit.”
The whole thing felt a little uncomfortable and forced, and nothing actually happened in the unnecessarily long 12-minute video. So here’s my pitch to you VBS producers: Just get famous chefs into a tiny apartment, get them really, really drunk, and then have them cook something for you. Of course you’ll need five hot semicelebrities just hanging out at the shoot for no reason other than to try the chefs’ severely compromised dishes.
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One Lemon Per Yob, Please
Here is a portrait of modern Britain in a tiny, terrifying gastronomic nutshell served up by the Telegraph:
“Chris Pether, 70, was told by his local Asda superstore in Aberdeen that health and safety rules prevented the sale of more than one loose lemon, orange or grapefruit. A supervisor explained the policy had been introduced to protect the public because local youths had been throwing the fruit at people.”
There you have it: Old men can no longer buy fruit because of a prevailing public opinion that fruit is most typically used as a missile hurled by thugs at passersby. It’s not exactly clear what dystopia this comes straight out of, but a number of British science-fiction writers are increasingly looking prophetic instead of merely grouchy.
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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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