Serious Eats
Sunday Reading
The New Yorker on the relationship between food miles and their carbon footprint and the difficulty in measuring it: "Food carries enormous symbolic power, so the concept of 'food miles'—the distance a product travels from the farm to your home—is often used as a kind of shorthand to talk about climate change in general." If the priority is the reduction of emissions of greenhouse gases, then eating locally may not be best: "The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away."
Michael Laiskonis discusses the use of found objects in food, using items such as Ritz crackers or Dr Pepper: "In addition to a simple change in context, there is also merit in the mere manipulation of the source material itself.... In haute cuisine, we find the use of such ingredients as playful and ironic, with a healthy dash of nostalgia." He goes on to detail his reworking of the Tastykake for the Westend Bistro in Washington, D.C.
Amanda Hesser works with Karen DeMasco, the pastry chef at Craft, to update a 19th century recipe for blanc mange, a sweet opaque gelatinous dessert made with cornstarch and milk.
Michael Pollan is now blogging on Amazon. Only two items so far, but it looks like it's shaping up to become a weekly column on the online store's Omnivoracious blog. According to an email from Amazon: "He's posting weekly about his new book, In Defense of Food, and responding to your questions and comments about his 'eater's manifesto.'"