This past week the New York Times had an interesting interview with a local Ohio grocer who offered his tips on buying high-quality food on the cheap. His tips tended toward the obvious, the silly, and the self-serving: Buying prewashed and premade food because we'll waste less doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. But in these days of shrinking buying power, rapidly rising food prices, and economic insecurity, which we've all felt in one way or another, it does make sense for all of us to think about saving money while eating right and doing right. I write this knowing full well that absolute costs of food are pretty difficult to figure out, but we've...
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Alan Richman's latest GQ column on San Francisco's Ferry Building, "the West Coast's new temple of tastes" is a riveting read until you hit this sentence: "Alice Waters and sourdough bread aside, the Bay Area has contributed surprisingly little to the culinary ripening of America considering its proximity to fertile growing regions from the Central Valley to Napa and Sonoma counties." and then all you can do is shake your head, furrow your brow, and start wondering if he's begun smoking crack. The SF Chronicle's Michael Bauer naturally took exception and wrote about it on his blog, saying, "I simply don't know where to begin. Has he heard of wine? Artisan cheeses? Arugula?" and promises to post a list of...
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Ed Crowell, Kitty Crider, Dale Rice, and Renee Studebaker of the Austin American-Statesman all spent an entire week in April as locavores, trying their best to eat only food that was grown and manufactured within a 200-mile radius of Austin. Crider points out that "while Texas is a large agricultural state, Travis County is not," and so while there were many things they chose to do without (bananas, tortilla chips), there are also foods they expanded their definitions to include (oranges from the Rio Grande Valley, seafood from the Gulf), and others they rationalized into keeping like coffee, tea and spices saying, "after all, this country's pioneers traded afar for those things, too." All four writers kept detailed diaries...
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It's not every chef who can say they've cooked for royalty, but after this Saturday's Kentucky Derby, Gil Logan will be able to say exactly that because Queen Elizabeth II will be visiting Churchill Downs and choosing from the menu he's put together: "When it was decided that they'd be visiting the Derby and eating here, the queen's staff Googled me," Logan said. "The royal family prefers to eat organic, natural foods, and they travel with their own food service staff."But when they saw that I buy as much as I can from local farmers who are growing and raising food without pesticides or hormones or antibiotics, they were quite happy to eat from our regular menu." Logan actually...
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The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Hsiao-Ching Chou talks to Greg Conner, the founder of Eat Local, an area company dedicated to providing frozen microwavable meals made with organic, sustainably-raised seasonal produce and meats that all come from within a few hundred mile radius of the city, cooked in small batches every day for maximum freshness. "The cost runs from about $7 for a single portion to $55 for an eight-person entree. "We're not the cheapest," Conner acknowledges. "But we know the provenance of the food. You pay for the safety in your food and you're having less impact on the environment." [via The Food Section]...
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Meg Wilcox of the Boston Globe, on what makes a green restaurant green: "To qualify for green certification, a restaurant must recycle waste, be styrofoam-free, complete four environmental steps, and commit to four additional steps each year, says Michael Oshman, founder and director of the nonprofit Green Restaurant Association. "The key is completing additional steps each year," he says, "which could include energy or water conservation measures, elimination of toxic cleaners, sustainable food choices, using clean power, and others." More than 300 restaurants nationally have been certified -- bakeries, pizzerias, and luxurious dining rooms." Eight Boston restaurants are certified, most are upscale and no, they don't have to be vegan or even vegetarian to qualify, just committed to the cause;...
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Time Magazine's current cover story is Eating Better Than Organic by John Cloud, in which he explores the debate between buying local and buying organic. Which is better for the food system, food grown by a small farmer locally or one grown by a big organic firm that uses large-scale industrial methods? Is buying local food that might have been treated with pesticides better for the environment than organic food that's been trucked, shipped and flown from far away, using up tons of fossil fuels? Which tastes better? Cloud asked Whole Foods CEO John Mackey for his opinion: He told me that when he can't get locally grown organics--and even he can't reliably get them--he decides on the basis...
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