Entries tagged with 'organic'
Page 2 of 4
As opposed to, say, organic meat or dairy products, people understand that there are fewer benefits to be gained from consuming organic packaged foods.
These are all highly processed foods anyway, so it's harder to see what we derive from them—all while paying more for the privilege.
Continue reading »
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...
Continue reading »
In a city of numerous and terrific markets that are spread among wonderfully characteristic neighborhoods, it is almost hard to become attached to yet another one. But Rome's twice-monthly
Organic Market has definitely won me over.
Continue reading »
Yesterday, Renzata posted this Talk topic, "WTF is on my swiss chard?" with the above accompanying images. "No freakin' clue," was my first answer. Luckily, Serious Eats readers were more helpful and pointed out they were beetle eggs. Or UFOs. Related What to do with Swiss Chard? Dinner Tonight: Farfalle with Swiss Chard...
Continue reading »
Good magazine—with the help of a Michigan State University agriculture and resource studies professor—has put together a chart showing which of the major U.S. corporate food processors own or have ties to the organic brands we often see on the shelves. It's a helpful chart, but there's no accompanying article that I could find on the site. So I ask: What's the point? I'd like to read something that informs me as to why I should care about the relationship between these entities. Otherwise, the chart's implication is "association with corporations = bad." Which prompts me to play devil's advocate: Is it a given that simply being a subsidiary of a major corporation paints the organic brand with a less-than-green...
Continue reading »
Salon.com ran a fascinating article over the weekend about organic wines, and how the USDA prohibition against using sulfites in those wines can lead to instability and unpredictable flavor changes during aging. Some wine-makers get around this rule by labeling their product as "made with organic grapes," a designation that guarantees that at least 70 percent of the grapes in the wine are organic, but one that also allows for the addition of sulfites to help preserve flavor. Sulfites are a naturally occurring byproduct in wine-making, and are additionally added as a preservative to prevent oxidation. According to the article, wine-makers have been adding sulfites for hundreds of years to help slow the gradual transition into vinegar that all wines...
Continue reading »
The UK's Soil Association, a nonprofit organization responsible for certifying 80% of the country's organic produce, has released a set of rules that govern whether it will certify produce that has been shipped by air. At one side of the issue is the fact that shipping food by air has a very large carbon footprint, and as such is not sustainable as a food-delivery mechanism. On the other side, however, is that 80 percent of the produce that is shipped to Europe by air comes from "lower or middle income countries," primarily in Africa, and so curtailing the means of delivery from those countries could have an adverse affect on their agriculture economies. The Soil Association has therefore proposed two...
Continue reading »
The New York Times had a blog post the other day that was brilliantly titled Five Easy Ways to Go Organic. Throw "easy" and "organic" into the same title and you're bound to elicit a response. If they had thrown "cheap" in there as well, they would have seen thousands of comments on the blog posts instead of hundreds. The gist of the post, which was mostly gleaned from an interview with Alan Greene, author of Raising Baby Green: Switching to organic is tough for many families who don’t want to pay higher prices or give up their favorite foods. But by choosing organic versions of just a few foods that you eat often, you can increase the percentage of...
Continue reading »
Yes, if you are a rat. Harold McGee shares the results of a 21-year study of organic wheat production: As an "integrative method" for assessing quality, they gave lab animals a choice of biscuits made from organic or conventional wheat. The rats ate significantly more of the former. The authors call this result remarkable, because they found the two wheats to be very similar in chemical composition and baking performance. Recent studies conducted with humans have shown that we can less reliably (if at all) discern a difference in taste between organic and non-organic foods. Assuming the rats are right and organic foods are tastier, what's to account for it? One hypothesis is that the higher levels of phytochemicals are...
Continue reading »
Photograph from {saffron} on Flickr Here's what your mixed organic box might look like this time of year if you lived in Sydney, Australia....
Continue reading »
