Lots of great pieces in the Chicago Reader's recently released yearly food issue—a guide to subscription farms for those who want to eat local, where to shop for ethnic groceries to diversify your larder, and the requisite Top 50 Restaurants as chosen by their readers—but the best by far is Nicholas Day's cover story on chef Michael Altenburg, whose soon-to-open pizzeria Crust will be Chicago's first ever certified organic restaurant and only the fourth in all of the US. Why so few? "Before a restaurant can flash the USDA organic seal, an inspector has to check the provenance of every ingredient in every recipe, which means chefs can’t be nearly as flexible. "Let’s say you’re Bill the Tomato Grower and...
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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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Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and Michael Pollan, author of last year's bestselling The Omnivore's Dilemma are talking tonight at UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall Auditorium after a presentation by Mackey called "The Past, Present, and Future of Food". There aren't any more tickets for the event but it will be a live webcast—it starts ten minutes before the event at 7 pm PST/10 pm EST. You can read more about how Mackey and Pollan's long-running conversation got started over at the Ethicurean....
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It's always perplexed me to watch Florida, that perma-tropic state, import its strawberries from Mexico, lemons from Seville, and oranges--I kid you not--from California, when all of these grow prolifically in our own back yards (or at least they did, before cutting crews cut down all the citrus trees during the canker scare of '02--I swear, if it's not one thing it's another). But this article in the Palm Beach Post claims to have seen people joining forces to buy organic food. Have I judged my people too harshly?...
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Confused by the morass of acronyms and catchphrases on your bag of beans? Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Bird Friendly, Utz Kapeh, 4Cs, and Starbucks CAFE Practices are explained in this article by Erik Ness....
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I sure have. Now I know....
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This week the New York Times reported that Wal-Mart is about to get into organic food in a big way. At first glance this seemed like real progress. It conjured up visions of Alice Waters giving out samples of Frog Hollow peaches at Wal-Marts all over the country. But a more careful examination of the story reveals a different scenario. As Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Assocation put it, "This model of one size fits all and lowest prices possible doesn't work in organic. Their (Wal-Mart) business model is going to wreck organic the way it's wrecking retail stores, driving out all competitors." An editorial today in the Times got it exactly right. On one hand...
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