More Confusion...

"The least greenhouse gas-intensive meat is actually a battery chicken," says Tara Garnett from the Food Climate Research Network. "If you keep an animal in a very small space, don't let it expend any energy on exercising, feed it up really quickly and kill it within 40 days, it is going to be energy efficient. However, from an animal welfare point of view it is certainly not something I would endorse."

Pierre Lagoda pulled a small container from his pocket and spilled the contents onto his desk. Four tiny dice rolled to a stop.

“That’s what nature does,” Dr. Lagoda said. The random results of the dice, he explained, illustrate how spontaneous mutations create the genetic diversity that drives evolution and selective breeding.

He rolled the dice again. This time, he was mimicking what he and his colleagues have been doing quietly around the globe for more than a half-century — using radiation to scramble the genetic material in crops, a process that has produced valuable mutants like red grapefruit, Idisease-resistant cocoa and premium barley for Scotch whiskey.

“I’m doing the same thing,” he said, still toying with the dice. “I’m not doing anything different from what nature does. I’m not using anything that was not in the genetic material itself.”

Dr. Lagoda is the head of plant breeding and genetics at the International Atomic Energy Agency, reports William Broad in today's NYT(www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/science/28crop.html?). Dr. Lagoda works in two fields, genetic modification and radiation that scare the public. So far he's had better luck having radiation understood, perhaps because "The process leaves no residual radiation or other obvious marks of human intervention. It simply creates offspring that exhibit new characteristics."

I certainly didn't know that radiation breeding has produced thousands of useful mutants and a goodly number of crops, " including varieties of rice, barley, wheat, barley, pears, peas, cotton, peppermint, sunflowers, peanuts, sesame, bananas, cassava, sorghum. The mutant wheat is used for bread and pasta and the mutant barley for beer and fine whiskey."

The mutations can improve yield, quality, taste, size and resistance to disease and can help plants adapt to diverse climates and conditions.

Radiation breeding - by promoting crop flexibility - could help feed billions despite " shrinking land and water, rising oil and fertilizer costs, increasing soil exhaustion, growing resistance of insects to pesticides and looming climate change. Globally, food prices are already rising fast."

That last point is interesting. Michael Pollan in Omnivore's Dilemma decries the cheapness of our food in the West, saying we should pay more for better food.

But most of the world is still starving and needs cheap food.

If there’s a minty smell in the air, blame the newest, hottest, most passionate restaurant trend: chefs growing their own herbs and veggies. It’s the ultimate organic high. A chef simply needs a roof or a nearby patch, raised beds or big pots with perfect soil, a watering system, an enthusiastic and/or tolerant landlord. You don’t even have to be patient because a garden blossoms so fast. Customers are mainlining fresh’n’local, anguishing over carbon miles and they love the idea of biting down on a parsley wand or zucchini flower picked moments ago a mere l00 feet away.   more »

Andy Shay's september cheese selection includes this rich La Brise des Vignerons made from Jersey cow milk and with a bloomy rind. Other cheeses included in the $78 taster are...

Selles-sur-Cher - one of the most classic French goat cheeses, this specimen is a farmhouse cheese made with raw milk.
Soeur Angele - from the south shore of Quebec, this cheese is a soft ripened bloomy rind cheese, 60% cow milk and 40% goat milk.
Tomme des Demoiselles - Pied de Vent is now one of the most famous artisan Canadian cheeses. This cheese is its little sister, made only in the summer, from the sweet and salt sprayed grasses of the Ile de Madeline.
Tomme Grosse Isle - a semi-firm, raw milk, washed rind cheese from th! e Ile-aux-Grues in the St Lawrence river.
Shipping will be on Wednesday, September 5th and 12th.

For more info call Andy at
(cell) 647-274-5629
ashay@shaycheese.ca*******

A new hopeful report arrives daily of increasing organic fresh'n'local activity of some kind. Chefs are gardening, sourcing local meat, banning unethical fish etc.....

Yet I can't help noticing that Toronto is getting more and more filled with cars. I expected a slackening of traffic in August. On the contrary, there are more cars pouring out of the city around 4 along Rosedale Valley Road, making short cuts through residential streets.

I dine with people who are scrupulous about buying fresh'n'local but who have no scruples about using their cars to get to the shops.

I understand. The car gives you ops to go places quickly. But isn't that precisely what the philosophy of Slow Food is against? You may say without a car, I can't get to eat at Harvest in Prince Edward County. You can, actually, you can take a train. Too expensive when you count heads? Well, eating fresh'n'local is expensive and it's proud to be and those who support it should be eager to pay more as part of their commitment to the organic revolution, such as it is.

Until it is accepted that the car is the single most damaging thing to our environment -- and to our food - efforts to clean up the environment will be fruitless. Car addicts should be put on a 12 step program like alcoholics, acknowledge that their carlust is out of control.

Without an organic commitment to significantly reduce the emission of fossil fuels -- and not just gigs like ridding our cupboards of steel clothes hangars and stopping using toilet paper -- the locavores are simply Marie Antoinettes farming their versions of le petit hameauthat luxurious little farm on the grounds of Versailles.

The fresh and local and quartely zine Edible Toronto starts up in September. Edible Toronto is part of the Edible City series published locally across the continent to promote local food. Publisher/editor is Gail Gordon Oliver, a cookbook writer, editor, teacher. Oliver is among those involved in From the Ground Up, the first annual "Nurturing the Art of Sustainable Living" lecture with participants Jamie Kennedy Sinclair Philip from Vancouver and Michael Stadtlander. Date September 25,207.Place Isabel Bader theatre, 93 Charles St W, 416-586-8080. Tickets are $25, proceeds to go to children's programming at the Gardiner Ceramics museum.

Every so often I remember an article I read in Esquire by Roy Andries de Groot sometime around 1970. I know where I was at the time, in the dining car of the Broadway Limited on my way to visit friends in Pennsylvania. In those days, the dining car had white tablecloths and real china and served wine. It was the perfect context to savour de Groot, an urbane food writer, grounded in the French classic cuisine and often writing with irony about its fate in the new world.

de Groot's account of dining with Auden at the poet's East Village walkup made me laugh aloud. The only other guests were the Stravinskys. Auden greeted them with martinis and sat with a case of one of the bigger burgundies at his feet. Stravinsky ate Russian style, he slurped his soup noisily despite his wife shushing him, and he took food from t he serving plate and returned it when he didn't like it. Vera Stravinsky went to the bathroom and finding a bowl of dirty water in the wash basin she threw it out. It turned out to be the pudding.

I couldn't find the article in the Esquire archives so I went to Alibris and bought a collection of de Groot's food essays In Search of the Perfect Meal. No luck. The account of Auden's dinner wasn't included. But then I started reading and soon became enchanted by de Groot. His voice is from another more demanding age when fools weren't suffered gladly. I read with particular pleasure How to Get a Great Meal at a Great Restaurant which revealed how maitre d's code the wannabe diners. Skunks, nonentities are turned away. Monkeys, ok but drab, sent to a back room. Lions, the celebs are bowed down to. Tigers, who know more about food than anyone else, are treated with kid gloves.

de Groot is a tiger of course and he gives a map to would-be tigers. Take the menu.

"The menu tells you a great deal about the restaurant and its owner. First, in physical appearance. It should be a simple card, or a single folder, quite light to hold and it should not be enclosed in any sort of fancy cover. If it is oversized or overheavy - if it looks like a leatherbound book, embossed or encrusted with gold, or if it has any tricky gimmicks about it - begin sniffing the air for a tourist trap. Next, the general appearance of the text. Is it clearly printed in an orderly arrangement? Are the specialities de la maison made to stand out, either in different-coloured ink, or written in by hand, or in a box, or under a special heading? Above all(and this is crucial), there must be no explanatory paragraphs describing the dishes in salesman's terms. (my emphasis)

If such nonsense appears on your menu, cancel your plans at once."

This is the latest word from scientists: eat eggplant, blueberries and red cabbage and bilberries and most of all eat - purple corn.

What is Freegan cuisine? Skip Freegan.com's lofty mission statement, a Marxist reordering of society, and cut to the viability of dumpster diving, the ultimate in leftovers.

" Some urban foragers go at it alone, others dive in groups, but we always share the discoveries openly with one another and with anyone along the way who wants them. Groups like Food Not Bombs recover foods that would otherwise go to waste and use them to prepare meals to share in public places with anyone who wishes to partake."

But it turns out that the only dumpsters worth diving into belong to supermarkets/food shops. NY has a list of the richest dumpsters http://freegan.info/?page=Manhattan. That makes Freeganism a crock. If we don't overproduce food how will Freegans eat? And how many miles have those leftovers travelled before they end up in the dumpster?

....Fast Food’s gone green. Young men with faux-hawks, young women with highlights are standing in line at Fresh Fast Food in Commerce Court to buy huge salad bowls and they’re looking virtuous and peppy. I’m amazed. I’m very conscious of food court cuisine as I pass through a midtown court on my way to the subway. It’s populated by national/international chains and packed with people eating mounds of fast food from Styrofoam containers. But downtown the food court is something else, and that’s significant because they have to be the most populous eating places in the city. What’s happening?

To find out I go to Barbara Soule, the leasing agent for Cadillac Fairview, the owner of the TD Centre. In the early 2000s, CF decided to upgrade the centre’s food court to match the building’s image “The architect Mies van der Rohe wanted the TD Centre to mirror modernism and an urban clientele” aka bankers and lawyers.

CF scouted US cities for new food ‘cepts, taking along some of Toronto’s chefs (CF won’t give out names) as advisors and returned inspired. Ms. Soule says, “We changed the name to Food Hall mirroring the Harrods Food Hall. We didn’t want a food court which is a suburban image – foodies don’t want that image. We wanted to attract a more sophisticated clientele, the boomers and gen-xers who are into fitness and food.”....
   more »

And they'll be around til october....

Back in 2003, I wrote a story in the National Post called "Day Neutral Shortcake" which was about Salem Farms' success with a new strawberry that fruited from June to October. The strawberry is called Seascape and sure enough I found a Salem Farms box of the deep red berries at my local Pusateri right beside California monsters. The Seascapes are selling for $4.99 while the California berries go for $2.99.

I called the Hughes at Salem Farms and Elizabeth answered. Since her husband Peter died in 2004 she has cut back production to 20 acres. But she's doing very well. It's a little hot right for the Seascape but she's still getting a decent crop. As for sales: "I have a niche market, I grow 20 acres of Seascapes and have no trouble selling them to most of the fine food shops in the Toronto -- Longo's Pusateri, Harvest Wagon... I've a list of people who buy from me and I could grow and sell more. I get long distance calls from customers telling me how much they love my strawberries."

So what about the recent stories of Ontario berry farmers being driven out of business by cheap Californian berries? Those stories get up her nose. Those farmers, she says, don't accept the reality. If you sell your strawberries from your patch to the locals, fine, but you can't just pull up at the Ontario Food Terminal with a truckload of fresh-picked strawberries. "if you compete with California, you've got to pre-cool the berries to insure a longer shelf life."

From Saturday Post, May 17,2003.......Not so long ago, strawberries came only in June, and then, for
Canadians, it was back to imports from the strawberry factories of
Florida and California. But a revolution is changing strawberry
culture, as I find out from Peter Hughes, of Salem Farms, Ontario's
premier grower. (After Quebec, Ontario grows the most strawberries
in Canada.)

Peter and his wife, Elizabeth, grow more than a million strawberry
plants a year, and that means millions and millions of strawberries,
on their 400-acre farm along the shores of Lake Ontario, about an
hour east of Toronto. One-quarter of their crop are the traditional
June berries, and now fully three-fourths are Day Neutrals, the
strawberry that has revolutionized strawberries for grower and
consumer alike.

The Day Neutral, which was discovered in the late Seventies in the
Warsash Mountains of Utah, by an avid Californian pomologist (a
fruit scientist), is not sensitive to light the way a June berry is,
but responds to temperature. If the temperature remains above 35F
degrees and never goes above 85F, it will fruit continuously from
July to November....   more »

The battered Cuisinart Food Processor that sits on my counter is atleast thirty years old. It was my first tentative step toward Cooking Up. I was living in New York surfing the food boom in the early seventies. I even met nouvelle cuisine’s Paul Bocuse, Newsweek’s coverboy in 1975, when he flew in to cook dinner at the Four Seasons for Julia Child and ll distinguished women. It wasn’t exactly his shining hour. When US customs confiscated his goodies, foie gras etc, he threw all his tools out of the pram and only Julia’s assiduous stroking stopped him flying right home. After preparing a 12-course tasting menu, he was very nicely thank you as he badgered the uberblonde journo for her phone number - only to wipe the smile off his face when asked if he used a Cuisinart. “Non” he snapped.    more »

The buzz in California – the source of food fads - is sustainability. I wasn’t sure what sustainability really meant so I googled Sustainable Table and my eyes crossed. Lol this is Utopia. “Sustainable agriculture involves food production methods that are healthy, do not harm the environment, respect workers, are humane to animals, provide fair wages to farmers, and support farming communities.”

A pig escaping from Animal Farm just flew by my window.    more »

Marlon Pather of The Butchers (2636 Yonge Street) buys his organic chicken from Beretta Farms and Field Gate and marinates the breasts in a curry and pistachio cream. Scrape off the cream and save: grill the chicken, then spread the cream over it. Juicy and tender hot and even better cold when the chicken is still wonderfully moist.

Since 1998,  American and Canadian food manufacturers have had to add 140 micrograms of folic acid  to each 100 grams  of cereal grains that are labelled "enriched daily. The result:  devastating birth defects have been reduced,sparing l000 babies a year from spina bifida and anencephaly.

In only a few years, the rate of  defects in the U.S. fell, from 10.6 per 10,000 births in 1996, before fortification, to 7.6 per 10,000 births in 2000.

Canada also saw a sharp decline -- to 8.6 per 10,000 births in 2002 from 15.8 per 10,000 births in 1993, according to a report published last month.

The nonprofit March of Dimes, which has long endorsed increased fortification, is going to ask the FDA to  double folic acid levels in cereal grains.

But a recent study by Tufts University suggests those health gains may have come at a cost: an extra 15,000 cases of colon cancer annually. Last month the journal Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention reported that colon cancer cases in the U.S. and Canada spiked after manufacturers began fortifying cereal grains with folic.

The pattern was surprising, researchers said, because colon cancer rates had been steadily dropping since the mid-1980s. Greater consumption of folic acid looked like the explanation.

The LA Times quotes Dr. John Potter, a colon cancer expert at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre "Have we done more harm than benefit?"

Best bet, unless you're pregnant, buy unenriched natural grains from the health food store.

Finally, the fallacy that fresh'n'local eating reduces fossil fuel consumption incurred by flying, driving, trucking food thousands of miles, is sinking in. It's the cost of food production that is often more damaging to the environment than the distance food has to travel. James E. McWilliams' op-ed piece in the NYT today   (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html) is more confirmation that food miles are a chimera. What a relief.  The sanctimony of those who proselytize for fresh'n'local only (yes I mean Barbara Kingsolver) gets right up my nose. 

 McWilliams writes "Shouldn’t we create development incentives for regional nodes of food production that can provide sustainable produce for the less sustainable parts of the nation and the world as a whole? Might it be more logical to conceptualize a hub-and-spoke system of food production and distribution, with the hubs in a food system’s naturally fertile hot spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy?"

Now wait a minute, McWilliams is missing something important: the food industry. A hub such as he envisages would be California. But the huge California food industry that supplies Ontario supermarkets is also driving out of business our  local strawberry growers.  Endorsing a hub and spoke system would simply accelerate this trend.

Splendido is the train bleu of restaurants, a chic time capsule disinterred from the thirties, the most darkly glamourous decade of the 20th century symbolized by the sleek blue express that sped from Paris to the jewel-encrusted Cote d’Azur where the debris of the lost generation danced on the edge of the end of the world. I’m seamlessly absorbed into the time warp.The décor is like the stage set for a period comedy lit discreetly. I swear I hear a phrase from It Had to Be You, and isn’t that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor sitting in that corner? No surprise when the Man about Town snaps his fingers and calls for rose. Two flutes of pink champagne arrive with Jason the bartender who merges with the discreetly lit décor. The service is so good here that it’s invisible. This is an ideal restaurant for anything illicit. The 16 tables are so well spaced, the lights so low, that there’s no fear of hearing secrets exchanged over the Exotica Canadiana.    more »

I'm gonna.  I'm not going to buy anything from California.

The Toronto Star has run a couple of stories in the past few weeks about the plight of Ontario strawberry growers. Seems that they're being pushed out of business because the supermarkets can buy cheaper strawberries year round from California and don't want to jeopardize their relationship with the growers by promoting fresh,local,sustainable strawberries in the summer. 

Now I ask you, how can a state so sanctimonious about fresh,local sustainable food turn into such an industrial food bully.  No don't bother to answer. Just remember the poisoned organic spinach they shipped us last year.

California is a food prig of a state. On the one hand it exhibits the worst aspect of industrial food, on the other its chefs and foodies have a rich fantasy life about saving the planet. 

Russ Parsons of the LA Times has a very funny story about the sustainability buzz among restaurateurs. " Every time you turn around, someone is claiming to be "green" or "eco-friendly." 

Item: "Maury Rubin, the bicoastal owner of City Bakery in Manhattan and Brentwood, and Birdbath, the newest of which he hopes to open in Pacific Palisades before the end of the year.

The City Bakery operations are definitely eco-friendly; the Birdbaths are downright eco-rapturous. Not only does much of the produce come from the farmers market, but the flour and sugar are organic, the walls are made of wheat, and the cups are made of corn. The countertop is made from recycled paper and the paper bags have no petroleum-based wax coating. All of the electricity comes from wind power.

The delivery boys pedal rickshaws (soon to be switched to bio-diesel trucks). "

And oh the water dilemma.....Chez Panisse's Alice Waters stopped selling botttled water because of the amount of energy it took to ship from Europe.  Christopher Blobaum of Wilshire restaurant wanted to copy her "until he ran the numbers." 

"It's really crazy," he says. "I put in a reverse osmosis program for the restaurant so we have perfectly clean water going to all the stations, probably cleaner than most bottled water, but we still need to sell bottled water. That's partly because the customers demand it, but also because there's a lot of money involved in it. To give up bottled water, I would have to give up a fair amount of extra revenue."

oh dear

Just stop sending us those wooden strawberries.

Michael Summerfield wanted to call his new gastropub  at 696 Queen Street East
Booze Emporium. A bit naff perhaps but what the heck? But the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario  said no.

Summerfield changed the name to Prohibition.

Right on. Ontario is still the Prohibition province, channelling John Winthrop's Massachussetts Puritanism.  True, Ontario does now permit you to drink outside, the LCBO outlets no longer treat you like someone up on charges, you don't have to sign your name if you want to spend your own money on a bottle of bubbly -- but don't kid yourself, dour Toronto is far from dead.

US cities have found the happy hour - when a martini may go for a couple of bucks - have enlivened in some cases resuscitated downtown restaurants. But Puritan Ontario won't permit a happy hour.

And omg suppose tobacco is prohibited, as rumoured, from being sold in the 7/11s? The shops' profits will go up in smoke. We're gonna have the Afghanistan dilemma. How can you kill the opium poppy crop when you don't have anything as lucrative to replace it with? How about replacing tobacco with wine and beer?  Oh don't let's go there again -- once the province promised such a civilized measure but Puritan Toronto triumphed, and the province reneged.

The city's image as an entertaining place to come to is being chilled by provincial puritanism but Christopher Hume in the Toronto Star, Starhttp://www.thestar.com/article/238722, sees the city's decline as the inevitable outcome of an apathetic public.

Money quote:

"We know the city's in decline and that the provincial and federal governments are content to go on taxing it to death. We know we are governed by mediocrities of dubious motivation. We know that change is desperately needed.

But we also know nothing will happen. As a society we have lost the capacity to respond to the need for change and innovation. We have crafted a system that leads inevitably to stalemate, stasis and status quo. No one should lose, but neither can they be allowed to win."