The Taste3 conference has put some videos from their 2006 conference up on YouTube. All three talks they posted are worth a look: Dan Barber of Blue Hill, global warming and wine, and Bryant Simon on Starbucks.
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kottke.org posts about food
Honeybee populations across the US are falling due to a mysterious disease. “Almond crops are immediately vulnerable because they rely on honeybee pollination at this time of year. And the insect decline could potentially affect other crops later in the year, such as apples and blueberries.”
Sometimes that fish on your plate isn’t what you ordered. “The alleged grouper at 17 of 24 area restaurants sampled by the investigators was actually another, less desirable species, according to a DNA analysis conducted for the state attorney general’s office and released earlier this month. Asian catfish. Emperor. Painted sweetlips. And twice, types of fish that could not be identified.”
Anthony Bourdain critiques Food Network and some its stars on Michael Ruhlman’s blog. “SANDRA LEE: Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves.” Blogging may well be Bourdain’s natural medium…it suits his vitriolic style.
Finalists for the 2007 version of the annual competition held by Design Within Reach to design the best chair out of a champagne cork. Check out the finalists from 2004 and the winner from 2006. (DWR’s site has a bit of a permalink problem, so I can’t find contest results from previous years.)
A woman recently went to her butcher and asked for some grass-fed beef. His response: “I don’t think you can feed grass to cows.”
White Castle is once again doing special Valentine’s Day dinners this year…you get your own server and candles! Here’s what last year’s meal looked like (more at Flickr).
I wanted to write more about this, but I don’t have the throughput right now and the article is 5 days old at this point, so this shorter post will have to do. Michael Pollan, who is doing some of the best food writing out there right now, wrote an article in the most recent NY Times Magazine on how we should be thinking about eating. In it, he blames the rise of nutritionism (the emphasis on the nutrients contained in food rather than the food itself) for our increasingly poor diets. This goes in the must-read pile for sure, if only for the great “silence of the yams” pun. If you absolutely can’t handle the length, skip to the “Beyond Nutritionism” section at the end for Pollan’s rules of thumb for eating, my favorite of which is #5: “Pay more, eat less.”
Update: Meg summarizes Pollan’s rules of thumb with some notes of her own.
British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay had high hopes for his new restaurant in NYC, but it garnered only two stars from the New York Times on Thursday in a review that called the restaurant cautious, polite, predictable, and timid. NYC food site Eater reports that copies of the NY Times distributed at the hotel in which Ramsay’s restaurant is located had the Dining section, and therefore the disappointing review, removed from them.
Formulas for writing reviews of music, restaurants, and boutique clothing stores (???). “What the a lacked in x, the b made up for in y. Where a = a menu item, x = a characteristic often used in conjunction with fast cars, b = a menu item, and y = an adjective generally used by Victorian novelists to describe a young woman.” (via airbag)
Dumb interface, but here are some neat maps of global fish catch locations, mostly tuna. For example, on these maps you can see the dramatic increase of purse seine fishing from 1964-1998. (thx, spencer)
Is it worth paying $700 for a bottle of wine? Well worth it, says Slate’s wine columnist, for the right bottle. “My father took a sniff of his glass, and he immediately registered a look of shock that called to mind the expression on Michael Spinks’ face when Mike Tyson first landed a glove on him in their 1988 title fight. Unlike Spinks, however, my father managed to remain upright. I took a sip of the wine and quickly pronounced the same verdict I had rendered 20 months earlier: ‘Holy shit.’”
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