Posts from the ‘links’ Category

Food Links, 09.10.2013

• The implications of the US government shutdown for the FDA’s food inspection programme. (Speaking of which, cake or debt ceiling?)
• A history of Russia‘s problem with alcohol.
• The US needs a Robin Hood tax to fund food stamps.
• ‘The post-food-bank model has to be based on relationships, not transactions.’
• The largest food fraud in US history.
• Big Soda’s role in land grabs.
• Has China bought land in the Ukraine to grow food?
• The Svalbard seed vault.
• ‘wild vegetation growing on former USSR farming lands has sucked up approximately 50 million tons of carbon every year since 1990.’
• Is it possible to produce foie gras humanely?
• A new supermarket which will sell only food past its sell-by date.
• Canada’s Maple Syrup Gang comes to a sticky end.
• ‘When Paleo-diet advocate Professor Tim Noakes has nightmares, it is probably the Gatsby that appears before him.’
• Americans are eating three times as much cheese as they did in the 1970s.
• The researchers who tested Britain’s wartime diet.
• Duffingate.
• ‘top colleges are locked in an amenities-spending arms race – in which catering to foodies, health nuts and gluten-shunners is a major theater of war.’
• A fantastic web exhibition on recipe books, cooking, and domesticity.
• Chewing gum wrappers from Israel, Japan, and the United States.
• Arthur Guinness – of Guinness – was a spy for the British.
• Burger King’s ‘healthy‘ chips.
• John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats talks about goats.
• Shifting attitudes towards oysters.
• Appalling photographs of tinned meat.
• Charles Ranhofer, late nineteenth-century New York’s most famous chef.
• A loaf of bread from the first century CE.
• Grape focaccia.
• A fascinating interview with a recipe tester.
• The Senegalese roots of southern cooking.
• Famous writers‘ favourite recipes.
• ‘While splashes of the bright red soup were found at the scene, it could not be immediately confirmed whether the bear had indeed not used a spoon.’
• The best countries to be a vegetarian.
• Twenty-one cooking tips.
• What your coffee preference says about you.
• Cairo‘s street food.
• Butter aerobics.
• The rise of the water sommelier.
• Is it possible to trademark the name of a soup?
• Photographs of a week’s groceries in different countries.

Food Links, 02.10.2013

• Remembering Marcella Hazan: she had two doctorates; she introduced Italian cooking to the United States; she was an excellent teacher; she ‘gave confidence‘ to Julian Barnes; and her famous tomato sauce.
• Charles Standing and Sonia Cabano are organising a food and forage day on 12 October. They’ll forage for food in the Cape Town CBD and Sea Point, and will then return home to cook the spoils. Get in touch with Charles if you’d like to go along.
• Children in some Cape Town schools are going hungry because the Peninsula Schools Feeding Programme lost its tender to provide meals.
• What the Republican vote to cut the food stamp programme, and support for the Farm Bill, says about the state of the party.
• The South African cabinet has approved a bill to ban alcohol advertising.
• Hunger is not caused by overpopulation.
• How calcium can increase maple syrup production.
• Fact-checking Dr Oz’s dubious claims about superfoods.
• Should we eat less sugar?
• David Cameron’s breadmaker.
• ‘A coconut has been detained by Maldivian police on suspicion of vote-rigging in a key presidential election.’
• The washday dinner problem.
• Rachel Laudan’s six essential texts for writing a global history of food.
• ‘quite a number of the [football]] fans carrying paraphernalia such as watermelons, loaves of bread, landline telephones, cabbages and giant dolls.’
• Where to eat in Shanghai.
• The London Review of Breakfasts samples a cronut.
• Recipes using mustard.
• The Mail and Guardian‘s restaurant critic reflects on his first five years of reviewing.
• The appeal of the hotel minibar.
• Frank Sinatra in his $100,000 kitchen.
• Why Szechuan pepper makes your lips tingle.
• ‘There are more breakfast taco establishments in Austin than there are Starbucks in Manhattan’.
• Recipes for brunch.
• The world’s biggest Halal food festival.
• A bottle of beer that costs $2,000.
• Words food writers should be banned from using.
• How to make sourdough bread.
• GQ‘s selection of the best things to eat and drink in the US.
• Hall’s Coca Wine: The Elixir of Life!
• A bar named after Christopher Hitchens.
• Moon farms to banish starvation.
• Facts about the Food Network.
• Revolting cupcakes.
• Photographs of snack vans.
• ‘The idea of the lonely gelato-guzzler is astonishingly persistent.’
• A photograph of Truth Coffee, Cape Town’s steampunk cafe.
• Mini M, the permanent pop-up supermarket.

Food Links, 25.09.2013

• Of milk cows and Saudi Arabia.
• Why are 47 million Americans on food stamps?
• Most of the tuna sold in the US is not tuna.
• Has the World Food Programme exaggerated the number of Zimbabweans in need of food aid?
• Urban agriculture in Cape Town.
• The value of processed food.
• Linus Pauling and the vitamin myth.
• Understanding the 1963 march on Washington through food.
• The sugar content of everyday foods.
• Save Smithfield Market.
• Using baking to cope with depression.
• We need to rename heirloom tomatoes.
• The gorilla bean harvest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
• The cover of Lucky Peach‘s gender issue is very, very unfortunate.
• Carrot cakes.
• On Modern Farmer, the magazine designed to ‘appeal to the person who wants to romanticise farming and the person who is knee deep in turkey droppings’.
• Mole soup is not a cough remedy.
• A rediscovery of Native American cooking.
• The UK’s National Vegetable Championships.
• A Han Solo fridge.
• How to eat well on a student budget.
• Coffee packaging.
• Body part-shaped chocolates.
• Every cake featured in the first episode of the Great British Bake Off.
• Readymade cake as a marker of social status.
• DIY sushi.
• Can you die from drinking too much coffee?
• The death of the inventor of After Eights – and what chocolate has to do with class in the UK.
• Beautiful éclairs.
• The man with a brewery in his gut.
• Kew’s Wild Crop Relatives project. (Thanks, Mum!)
• Eating hot dogs at baseball games.
• The future of ice cream.
• How to make croissants – in GIFs.
• The horrors of Whole Foods.
• Parisians seem to be developing a taste for underbaked bread.
• Inventing beer that does not cause hangovers.
• Why honey keeps indefinitely.
• The eggs font.
• Rediscovering the Cherokee Purple tomato.
• The Great Science Bake Off.
• Beer’s cicerones.
• Ruth Reichl turns to fiction.
• Carlisle Castle made out of custard creams.
• All about cashew nuts.
• Avocado beer.
• The origins of the myth that eating carrots will improve eyesight.
• Hemingway’s perfect burger.
• Is there such a thing as food addiction?
• How to be a better food photographer.
• Why food tastes delicious.
• What to do with leftover pickle brine.
• The worst bacon sandwich.
• The story of the coffee sleeve.
• ‘After weeks of careful reflection, I have decided to officially shutter my business Cash4ExpiredColeslaw after three months of not earning any profit and costing me over $250,000.’

Food Links, 18.09.2013

• The political, economic, and ethical implications of eating out.
• Sobering statistics around advertising food to children.
• Analysing hunger in Zimbabwe.
• Debating GM.
• The return of the short-haired bumblebee.
• Does artificial meat have a future?
• Where America’s fresh produce comes from.
• Is it possible to farm salmon sustainably?
• How fridges are contributing to climate change.
• Scarcity ‘puts people in a kind of cognitive tunnel, limiting what they are able to see. It depletes their self-control. It makes them more impulsive and sometimes a bit dumb.’
• How Chinese demand for pecan nuts is transforming Texan agriculture.
• What entomology can bring to the table: an infographic.
• Thoughts on salad, from 1615.
• Saffron salt.
• The rise and rise of bluefin tuna.
• ‘Why does it give me such a bad dose of the pip? Is it … the insistence that they’re purveying “cucina povera” (a style of cooking born of extreme Italian poverty)? Meat is rarely used in this; and, if it is, it’s of the innards and extremities variety.’
• The illegal vodka pipeline.
• Purple sweet potatoes could be used for food dyes.
• Guardian readers share photographs of their breakfasts.
• Fine art cakes. (Thanks, Mum!)
• Vintage Chinese restaurant menus.
• Weird pizza toppings.
• The results of an OED appeal for references to Earl Grey tea.
• An alphabet of potentially deadly foods.
• Flavour connections.
• ‘Part of [Stalin’s] sunniness mandate was the creation of a Soviet socialist food canon – source of all the meat patties (kotleti), mayonnaise-laden salads, and spicier fare from ethnic republics that would fuel the USSR for its next 50-plus years.’ (Thanks, Nafisa!)
• Accra’s first farmers’ market.
• The best butchers in Bohemia.
• The difficulties of running a fast-food restaurant in France.
• Fad diets are really very silly indeed.
• How serving temperature influences the way food tastes.
• Where to buy cronuts in South Africa.
• ‘So onto a play set inside a giant Emmental: Cheese, an absurdist allegory of the financial crisis.’

Food Links, 11.09.2013

• Why employees of fast food chains are on strike again in the US.
• Do Africans drink too much?
• The ten companies that control the food chain. (Thanks, Lize-Mare!)
• ‘It is not a good time to be an American pig.’
• Crop-eating pests are on the move.
• How Greek yogurt caught Big Food off guard.
• ‘You can’t have it all, but you can have cake.’
• The Australian election and sausages.
• ‘Saying that a food is “like crack”…is intended to be an edgy way of emphasising how instantly gratifying it is, and how difficult it is to stop eating it once it’s in front of you. Unfortunately, all it really does is demonstrate how out of touch and callously classist foodie culture has become.’
• Water in the ancient world.
• The row over chocolate museums in Mexico.
• ‘Meat is murder. Vegetarianism is genocide.’
• Detasseling corn in the Midwest.
• Why are there holes in Jarlsberg?
• Men drinking beer, c.1845.
• What did the people who built the Egyptian pyramids eat?
• Comparing cooks and authors, in 1735.
• The French Fry Burger.
• Behind the scenes in coffee warehouses.
• How to make your own halloumi cheese.
• Facebook-flavoured ice cream.
• Jeremy Bentham’s prison pie.
• The Espresso Mushroom Company.
• A Möbius cake.
• Where to eat breakfast in Paris.
• Ann Friedman adapts Diana Vreeland’s rules for lunch.
• How to make perfect coffee.
• A terrifying pineapple.
• These links are courtesy of my mum:
• Malawi sells a jet to avert a food crisis.
• The history of chopsticks in Japan.
• ‘the nature of research into early modern, English-language recipe writing, collecting and publishing’

Food Links, 28.08.2013

The campaign to save the Philippi Horticultural Area is gathering pace.

Want to know more about the development of the PHA? Come to a public meeting in Cape Town TOMORROW at 17:30. For more information and to RSVP, click here. It’s been organised by the amazing Greenpop.

Anyone interested in helping out with the campaign should click here, and get in touch with Nazeer Sonday, nasonday@gmail.com, or Rob Small, rob@farmgardentrust.org.

Please also sign the Avaaz petition, and share this excellent short documentary.

And back to these week’s food links:

• Why it’s so difficult to attract young people to farming in the UK.
• ‘Like steroid use in baseball, food safety will not change until those with the most power have the incentive to change behaviour.’
• Why is the price of farmland rising in the US?
• Jamie Oliver criticises poor people for eating badly. And why this criticism is misguided.
• ‘The goal is to put the burger before the cow.’
• The rise and rise of food banks in Britain.
• Doctors in New York City are prescribing fruit and vegetables.
• When will the American West run out of water?
• Should we be eating chickens?
• ‘Sustainable’ palm oil and the politics of eating Nutella.
• America’s fifty most powerful people in food.
• ‘at the 1904 World’s Fair, Anderson débuted puffed rice, shot out of eight bronze tubes into a giant cage.’
• The British obsession with pigs.
• Are bottomless drinks good for business?
• The most frequently adulterated foods.
• How the New Yorker Hotel’s menus tell the story of mid-century eating.
• True vegans, fake vegans, and ex-vegans.
• The cronut burger.
• Baking the earth.
• Cooking from an LA Times recipe book published in 1905.
• Questions never to ask at a farmers’ market.
• ‘The only reasonable explanation for drinking Budweiser is to get drunk.’
• A blog on Somali cuisine.
• How to make money out of your vegetable patch.
• This Twinkie is older than I am.
• The art of the menu.
• A visit to the Tabasco sauce factory.
• The agony of following Madonna’s diet.
• Wine flour.
• Cooking in the dishwasher.
• ‘Mr Neale, 70, of Langstone, Newport, who lovingly nurtured a mammoth 85.5lb vegetable to claim a Guinness World Record, met the hip-hop star Snoop Dog in Cardiff two years ago, who asked the gardener to tell him the secrets if his success.’
• Will a sheep’s wool keep growing forever? And other pressing, ovine-related questions.
• Jay Rayner is very, very cross indeed. (Thanks Dad!)
• How to make barbecued pizza.
• ‘there is what we might call the gluttony of delicate souls.’

Food Links, 21.08.2013

In addition to this week’s round-up of links, here are some about the development of the Philippi Horticultural Area, and the campaign to stop this:

Kit has written an amazing post about why we need to preserve this precious resource.

Anyone interested in helping out with the campaign should click here, and get in touch with Nazeer Sonday, nasonday@gmail.com, or Rob Small, rob@farmgardentrust.org.

Please also sign the Avaaz petition, and share this excellent short documentary.

The proposed development has been covered in the media over the past few years: by the the New Age, Mail and Guardian, ENews, the Daily Maverick, MoneyWeb, and, more recently, in the Cape Times (see here, here, here, and here). It’s been written about on blogs – mine and over at Food Jams – and I wrote about it for Eat Out too. Future Cape Town’s coverage of the PHA is predictably excellent: see here, here, here, and here.

Do please send me any posts, articles, and columns on the development, and I’ll list them here next week.

And back to our scheduled programming:

• ‘Most rich nations saw their sugar consumption increase by 30-40% between 1970 and 2000.’
• The female face of farming.
• Families are going hungry in Greece.
• Big Food’s appropriation of calories.
• Berlin’s kleingarten are under threat.
• Cooking and collaborative consumption.
• Using grazing to revive grassland.
• How climate change will influence winemaking.
• Using lemonade to teaching children about capitalism.
• Lyons Tea Shops and the history of computers.
• ‘The problem with jokes about chickens is that they aren’t funny.’
• London’s vineyard start-ups.
• The fatbergs of London’s sewers.
• A culinary tour of Lisbon.
• The pleasures of reading recipes.
• Protein bars made out of insects.
• Why Weight Watchers is floundering.
• Ants: the enemy of chocolate.
• Trader Joe’s, circa 1877.
• Layer cake queens.
• ‘There’s not a lot of evidence to suggest that Proust really ate madeleines.’
• Visualising 200 calories.
• Literary ice cream.
• Appalling tinned food.
• Chowder in Moby Dick.
• The smell of chocolate boosts the sales of romantic fiction.
• A house made out of beer cans.
• Depressed cakes.
• The global popularity of meatballs.
• Vegetables: A Biography
• These links are courtesy of my Mum:
• A coffee thesaurus.
• How to make calpis.
• Feasting and fasting during Ramadan.
• How to clean your coffee grinder.
• Do you know the difference between fruit and vegetables?
• Debunking myths about ice in cocktails.
• Uses for fruit and vegetable peel.
• ‘Dehydration of Herrings.’

Food Links, 14.08.2013

• Can synthetic meat feed the world? Is synthetic meat ‘natural’ food? And Peter Singer on synthetic meat.
• QR codes to identify fish.
• ‘In 1965, in an impoverished rural county in the Mississippi Delta, the pioneering physician Jack Geiger …  began writing “prescriptions” for food.’
• Why isn’t quinoa taking over the world?
• Workers at American fast food outlets are going on strike.
• We should eat less sugar.
• Cooking below the breadline.
• The dire state of farm workers’ housing in the Western Cape.
• The truth about bagged lettuce.
• Eating breakfast in Detroit.
• Crabs and lobsters do feel pain.
• ‘If you had a whole grain Hostess Twinkie, the calories in it would be the same.’
• Why it matters when tomatoes are ugly.
• Falling Fruit.
• ‘both pets and feral animals (like sewer rats) have been steadily gaining weight over the past few decades’.
• Marijuana-infused bacon.
• The contents of Prince‘s fridge.
• Margarine: a public and a personal history.
• Preserving and (re)creating Central Asian cuisines.
• Mapping New York City’s coffee shops.
• Incredible exploding rhubarb.
• The Great Molasses Flood.
• The Glorious Twelfth was on Monday.
• America’s strongest coffee.
• The biscuit periodic table.
• A guide to hating brunch.
• High end restaurants are in trouble with Brazil‘s food safety authorities.
• Three ways food and cooking have changed since the Georgian period.
• The New York Times and the Awl on chopped salads.
• Ethiopian coffee ceremonies in Washington DC.
• Supermarket displays in China.
• A twelve-course meal in a can.
• Annoying people in New York’s restaurants.
• ‘Some of the bees were wearing what looked like small silvery backpacks with 3-inch antennae, zipping between trees and flower heads. A scientist followed discreetly behind.’
• Ruth Bourdain‘s greatest tweets.
• A typographic culinary map of America.
• Will Self eats fish and chips.
• The professions that drink the most coffee.
• Terrible restaurant names.

Food Links, 07.08.2013

• The girls sold into slavery in India’s tea industry.
• ‘Monsanto, the US agribusiness, will withdraw applications to grow genetically modified crops in the EU.’
• The significance of wild foods to food security.
• Scurvy is on the rise in the UK.
• Is there a link between the use of antibiotics on farms, and the rise of drug-resistant bacteria?
• The school bus feeding children in rural Tennessee.
• Are we nearing ‘peak water‘?
• ‘Onions have played an outsized role in Indian politics’.
• Europe’s ability to grow its own food may be plateauing.
• Drinking coffee may reduce people’s risk of suicide.
• ‘Since 2008, Japanese law requires companies to measure and report the waist circumference of all employees between the ages of 40 and 74 so that, among other things, anyone over the recommended girth can receive an email of admonition and advice.’
• Tecoma, the town resisting McDonald’s.
• Buzzfeeds: the Guardian’s coverage of the bee crisis.
• Was the menu at the state banquet to celebrate the Obamas’ visit to South Africa, sub-standard?
• How Coke engineers its orange juice.
• A soup kitchen during the Great Depression, 1930.
• ‘drawing pictures of unhealthy food can have positive effects on mood.’
• ‘All I ever got from the cookbook was an autographed copy, but in those days I was grateful for any little crumb that white people let fall, so I kept my thoughts about the cookbook strictly to myself.’
• Hipsters can’t cope with their chickens.
• ‘The world’s about to be turned upside-down. Breakfast will become dinner, night will become day, and fasting turns to feasting.’
• hiSbe, the new ethical supermarket.
• Eating take-aways in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Paris.
• ‘the Ritz-Carlton Abu Dhabi, Grand Canal is celebrating the liquid that some call “white gold” by adding a “camel milk mixologist” to its catering team.’
• Eating Pyura chilensis.
• The return of the slushy.
• Essential Indian cookbooks.
• George Orwell and Douglas Adams on how to make tea.
• Artisan cheese from Sweden.
• New York City’s top kitchens are looking for chefs.
• In search of the perfect burger.
• Margarine v butter.
• ‘What would happen if restaurants had explicit dress codes?’
• Odd ways of using cheese.
• Our brains on coffee.
• Make your own cronut.
• Camp Gluten-Free.
• The planet Jupiter in cake form.
• How to make a giant baked bean.
• London’s two wine scenes.
• PD Smith reviews a newish history of the English breakfast.
• Introducing the ‘crookie‘.
• Why does jelly wobble?
• Jay Rayner dislikes picnics.
• Food Sherpas.
• Esquire‘s 1949 guide to brewing coffee.
• Grown-up friendly toddler food (and vice versa).
• What is a voodoo doughtnut?
• How to fry an egg.
• What’s in the average cup of coffee?
• ‘Remember, not everyone shares your food knowledge and refined palate. That’s the source of your power.’