I don't drink the water from the tap in my apartment. It tastes off. Perhaps I have lead pipes, the building went up in the fifties, but I don't know as you cannot see, smell or taste lead which is harmful, specially to kids.

If you suspect your plumbing may include lead pipes, use only cold water for drinking and cooking.
Run water for fifteen minutes for 15-30 second before drinking it.

Boiling water can intensify the lead.More information is at www.epa.gov/lead or (800) 424-5323 (LEAD).

Here's a really good article about just what it takes to eat well and cheaply and locally from the Oklahoma Food Coop...

Slow Food for Low and Moderate Income People

In November Sharon Gordon posted a "food stamp challenge" in the Community Food Security listserv (comfood-L): eat for a week on a food stamp budget. We decided to do this using as much food as we could from local farmers so we expanded the challenge to show how the combination of (1) frugal supermarket shopping, (2) preparing meals from basic ingredients, (3) buying local foods, (4) gardening, (5) food storage, and (6) home preservation of food could add up to a healthy, affordable, practical, and environmentally sustainable meal plan, even though the local meats, eggs, and dairy products are typically more expensive than typical supermarket fare. And the food had to be satisfying and taste good too, otherwise, what's the point? Call this the Slow Food for the Poor Challenge. Frequently asked questions about this food stamp challenge.   more »

In the Daily Telegraph, columnist Jan Moir joins the backlash against sanctimonious millionaire chefs......

"On television, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver have been urging British consumers to spend more on better-quality chickens that have lived better-quality lives.

It has been quite a drama, with both men moved to prime-time tears at the plight of intensively reared poultry in this country. Poor little emoting boy chickies! How one yearns to dry their tears with butter muslin and get the skewers ready.

Chicken has become a social barometer

Naturally, Jamie and Hugh's independent but mutual angst produced nicely sauced television scenes that went down a storm. As the chickens headed towards certain death, the pair of them behaved like war widows waving their last fluffy son off to battle.

Since, inevitably in all this, it is poor, price-conscious housewives who are patronised for buying two-for-£5 battery chickens, I feel impelled to urge these millionaire chefs to turn the oven to gas mark six, bite hard on a lemon and get over it.

Agri-business is not pretty. The world of mass food production is a landscape of dank poultry sheds, pig carcasses, electrocuted cows and chicks that disappear into giant suction machines never to be seen again.

This is the reality of how the industrialised world feeds itself, has done for decades and will continue to do until the old blue ball explodes with exhaustion and despair at the way we have treated it and the animals who live here.

Yet how else could we provide food for all? When human beings have to live in high-rise coops and patients in hospitals are crammed into mixed-sex wards, I can't get too upset over the quality of life of our nation's poultry, even if Jamie Oliver is howling into his hankie over the fate of Hetty Hen in the background."

Last week in the NYT, the cookbook writer Joan Nathan channelled William Morris, the early English socialist and founder of the arts and crafts movement, as she exalted eating fresh and local in the winter on Martha’s Vineyard.

Nathan spends a couple of days with a local caterer… “Following Ms. Buhrman for a day or two as she gathers ingredients is a lesson in how to eat locally even in the coldest days of winter. Because she seems to know everybody on the island who raises, catches or forages for food, it is also a glimpse of an alternative economy of eating, one in which modern capitalism takes a back seat to a looser, island-grown style of bartering.” Italics mine.

Gosh how easy it is to be romantic on Martha’s Vineyard, the playground of the superrich. The median price of a house on the island is $700,000 even allowing for the recent decline in real estate. The base population of MV is 15,000 which balloons to 75,000 for a couple of months in the summer. Rich pickings for those who serve the rich and famous as I know because I once lived in a similar summer community on the Connecticut shore. The server network is like the staff on an old feudal estate: the members are buddies and help each other out and some like Buhrman have their own organic patch with not only veg but animals as well.

Thing is that most of us chickens need the despised modern capitalism to survive and if Nathan and Buhrman thought about it, they would recognize that their fantasy of profitless food does too.

This week's TIME has a good q and a with Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health, and co-author of one of the most comprehensive studies to date on the impact of fish consumption on human health.


Should we stop eating tuna?
No. Overall, the dangers of not eating fish [including tuna] outweigh the small possible dangers from mercury. The recommended amount for adults is to eat one or two servings of fish per week — but probably only 10% to 20% of the population in the U.S. eats sufficient fish. The real danger in this country, the real concern, is that we're not eating enough fish. That is very likely increasing our rates of death from heart disease.
.
What are the dangers of consuming high levels of mercury?
In adults who eat fish with high levels of mercury very frequently — like, every day — there have been case reports that it causes neurologic symptoms, like sensory disturbances and imbalance. Again, that's in people who are eating fish very frequently and eating fish that are generally high in mercury. But the symptoms are temporary; they go away if you stop eating mercury.

.......

We know from very good human studies that fish intake reduces the risk of dying from a heart attack by about a third. And heart attack is the number-one cause of death in the U.S. among both women and men. It's the number-one cause of death in almost every country in the world. And eating fish once or twice a week reduces that risk by a third. So if we're causing people not to eat fish or to choose to eat something other than fish because they're worried that the fish has some mercury in it, they're increasing their risk of dying from a heart attack for a concern that has not been established.


go to http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1706623-3,00.html for full interview.......

I’m reprinting part of AA Gill’s article in the Sunday Times on Jan 27 2008…

Reflective I think of the growing backlash against the latest food fad….. or as Gill puts it the “ maudlin, sanctimonious bout of petting-zoo food rights”

“As part of the concerted Channel 4 crusade against murder most fowl, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver have been using a lot of TV time and clout to stop intensive chicken farming. Now, normally I’m all for improving flavour, freshness, goodness and the sexual allure of livestock, but this isn’t about the quality of chicken, it’s about the quality of chicken’s lives, and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn dish of boiled wattles about the lives of chickens. Giving them a hay bale, a square yard of grass and an hour a day in the chilly drizzle is a bit like putting a bridge table on death row.

If you care about the quality of chickens’ lives, their happiness, there’s only one thing you can morally do: don’t eat them.

Animals are bred into humiliating, unnatural shapes and idiotic imbecility in strange, unnatural habitats, and then die for dinner. Get over it or eat grass. The only thing you should campaign about is whether they’re improved eating. This zoomorphic sentimentality, this Beatrix Pot-au-feu of food, is as dysfunctional and disassociated from the reality of field and table as medical foodies who think that all breakfast is either poison or a cure for cancer.

But it goes with the bosky, cute, Waltons-style sets that Hugh and Jamie make out they live in: gastro-arcadia, where everything is innocent, happy and immortal. It won’t do. Livestock engineering is about human engineering: there are 60m of us. Let’s say 50m want to eat chicken once a week, and you want the chickens to have a square metre of grass to play in. And they take a minimum of five weeks to get fat enough to eat. Well, that’s 25m chickens living on a square metre each, totalling an area roughly the size of Wales. A better use of the principality, we may agree, but it’s not exactly practical. For a start, it’ll be knee-deep in crap by Easter – and, of course, it won’t happen. What might happen is they just make chicken a lot more expensive. That won’t bother Jamie or Hugh or me much; we make a bob or two. But it might make a difference to people who depend on cheap, reliable food: the young, the old and invalids. We have intensive farming for a reason: not just simply for laziness, or because farmers like to work indoors, but because we are an intensive population.

Expensive food will send us back to the 19th century, and the national cuisine will be porridge and bark for the poor, who will get rickets. Chickens and rabbits are the cheapest, quickest and most efficient converters of protein. If you take them out of poor people’s diets, you have to replace them with something. It used to be fish – herring mostly. There is one fishing boat left in Great Yarmouth: start forming a queue now.
What this maudlin, sanctimonious bout of petting-zoo food rights leads to is simply exporting the moral problem. We ban the manufacture of veal, but not the consumption of it. So it is made in Holland, and we drive it back in lorries. We improved pigs’ rights, so our pork comes from Poland. Intensive chickens will be reared by the hungrier nations of the EU, and we will buy them back. And if you aim to make food contented, bespoke and rare, well, that’s just fine and dandy, but, please, will you tell the rest of us what parts of the world you’re planning on ethically starving to death.

I’m thinking of starting a campaign to repatriate chickens to their natural home: India.”

“Where’s the sun” asked the Bon Vivant as the grey days piled up. “I’m feeling SAD”. How about an Aztec sun rising high over the Andes while Indians chow down on hot spicy food and Margaritas? “Oh surely they didn’t have Margaritas?”

A friend says the hottest place on a cold night is Dos Amigos at Bathurst and Dupont. The welcome was so warm we might as well have been in Mexico. The restaurant is cozy and comforting, the service is willing if a little erratic but after all this is a Friday night and the place is packed. When we ask if the music could be turned down, it is! All in all, a great start to the evening.   more »

On March l, all fast food chains in New York City with more than 15 outlets will have to display calorie count information next to menu items. The New York Post quotes Margo Wootan, nutrition policy director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (an advocacy group): "It's going to get a lot easier to make informed choices at New York City's chain restaurants this spring."

Wait till you see a Starbucks Frappucino adds 600 calories to your personal count!

FYI McDonalds in the TD Centre already displays calorie count info ....

Now McDonalds et al are always getting dumped on but who's watching the calorie count in sandwiches.? The British National Consumer Council has called on shops to provide such information having found out that leading sandwich chains are selling
products that frequently contain more calories, salt and fat than a Big Mac – and failing to inform their customers.

I used to be against the idea of displaying calorie counts, but i'm coming round to it because I find myself buying more takeway. I'd like to know not just the calorie count of sandwiches but all takeaway......eventually a calorie count on menus...

I'd particularly like to know the calorie count of those salads that are served all the time in restaurants - the ones with hard green leaves that are so disagreeable to eat!

The New York Times reports today "Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them,a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency."


This is a small study ......for full article go to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/dining/23sushi.html

In the new ad for Loblaws, Galen Jr talks babytalk to a montage of highchairs as he tries to sell PC organic baby food......couldn't his writer get the facts right? Galen Jr throws in that old canard -- no chemical pesticides.....

First of all, chemical can be organic, the line should have read either "synthetic" or "inorganic"

But most of all, it should not have been written at all. Synthetic pesticide residue is dismissed as a health hazard because it's so small and second, we eat many more organic pesticides which are just as potentially poisonous as synthetic pesticides in the form of natural vegetables.....like Brussel Sprouts.

So if Galen's worried about pesticides he's worrying about the wrong kind.

All those in Ontario who support farmer Michael Schmidt's right to sell raw milk should take heart from this report from England.... As well, check www.foodrightsalliance.ca/for information about how to support Schmidt....

The Daily Telepraph reported on January 18th that the sale of raw milk and cream is rising in London....

"At farmers' markets across the country, demand is on the up. Despite government warnings that unpasteurised milk is one of the surest ways to pick up salmonella, campylobacter and E.coli, the 150 or so small dairy farmers who supply the markets are enjoying a big growth in sales.

In the past year, for example, Dave Paul, a third-generation farmer with a Guernsey herd at Olive Farm in Somerset, has seen his sales of raw milk and cream climb 30 per cent at London's farmers' markets.

And other dairies, which formerly brought only cheese to urban markets, are now compelled by popular demand to bring milk, too.

Who are these dare-devil milk drinkers? And why are they so keen?

"It just tastes good," says Lucia, who buys her milk at Notting Hill Farmers' Market in west London every Saturday.

A couple of lads in tracksuits and trainers are stashing 12 litres into a backpack. They come regularly from north London for their milk. "It's better for you," they say. "It's never made us ill."

People from across London come to Notting Hill to stock up.

They are affluent, hip cognoscenti who would sooner eat cat litter than non-organic food, and who want to know a chicken by name before they will eat its eggs.

But aren't they dicing with disease? The Government would have us think so.

"The risk of food poisoning from unpasteurised milk is very real," says a spokeswoman from the Food Standards Agency (FSA). "We particularly wouldn't recommend it for vulnerable people - the sick, infants and the elderly."

One of the main reasons raw milk was banned in the first place was because 65,000 people caught TB from it. Although the likelihood of this happening today is negligible, bovine TB is increasing.

At present, dairy farmers in Britain are only allowed to sell unpasteurised milk directly to the consumer, either from a milk float, the farm gate or a farmers' market.

You won't find it in Sainsbury's.

Elsewhere, the legislation is more draconian. In Scotland, raw milk has been banned since 1983 after a scary outbreak of milk-related illnesses. In America, you virtually have to own a cow to get your hands on the stuff.

Yet before the 1950s, raw milk was the norm on every breakfast table in the country. The Queen is still said to be a fan of raw milk from her Windsor Castle herd.

Proponents see unpasteurised milk as a panacea. They point out that pasteurisation - whereby milk is heated to 72C for 15 seconds and then rapidly cooled - destroys all enzymes, the very things that make it digestible to humans.

Raw milk is also higher in vitamins, is full of healthy bacteria such as acidophilus and seems to have a protective effect against asthma and allergies in children.

So why the laws?

As farmer Chris Hall of St Levan, West Cornwall, says: "In Britain you are allowed to drink yourself silly and smoke carcinogenic fags, but you can't drink raw milk. It doesn't make sense."

Thomas Cowan, a doctor from San Francisco, sees it as a big-versus-small business issue. "In order to produce raw milk, you need healthy cows, which precludes big business. You can't raise a healthy cow on anything but pasture. The giant dairies keep cows on concrete and feed them grains, soya and sometimes even meat; they turn them into factory animals. And then the cows get sick. You couldn't drink raw milk from those herds."

In Britain, the small dairies are much cleaner now than they were when pasteurisation came in. In addition, farmers who want to sell raw milk must pay for frequent tests.

"The fashion not so long ago was for cheap food," says Tim Jones of Lincolnshire Poacher, whose raw milk and cream sell like hot cakes. "Now people want quality. They want to feel connected to the land."

For me, the real test is in the taste. It is with trepidation that I try my first glass of cold raw milk. It's delicious: as silky as ice cream and as sweet as the smell of clover-strewn meadows. I'm not sure I'd feed it to my toddler, but I'll be in that queue again next weekend.

SHOULD YOU DRINK RAW MILK?

YES: It's healthier than pasteurised milk: it contains enzymes, higher concentrations of vitamins, probiotics and CLA, a "superfat" that helps you lose weight.

NO: It may contain bacteria such as salmonella. Between 1992 and 1999, half of all milk-related food poisoning cases in the UK were due to raw milk. None was fatal.


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Still reeling from the news that the Guide Michelin had awarded no less than 150 stars to restaurants in Tokyo, I determine to get on a plane and go there. But I overshoot Pearson and land up instead in Mississauga - to be precise at Kaiseki Yuzen Hashimoto. the next best thing to actually being on the Ginza.

I have enlisted as my guide the Shogun, an old Japan hand who has mastered the intricate diplomacy of interpreting East to West. He picks me up in his legacy Toyota which he recently had restored because how can something old and wonderful be wantonly abandoned? This is the true spirit of the conservative, as buoyant as the sporty old peer in The Boy Friend who claimed “A ruin can be charmin’”    more »

An anonymous reader posted a comment on a new Indian restaurant in Thornhill....

"Khana Khajana in Thornhill, is a new Indian restaurant. We shared many dishes with friends and I can't remember exactly what we had but the tomato soup was surprisingly wonderful.
It's a small place where the mother does the cooking and is becoming very popular. We don't go for chains or buffets (although they do have one at lunchtime for those who like quantity) and consider ourselves fairly discriminating so thought you might like to try it."

Yes, I've now got it on my list - and thanks......love to get this kind of tip...

I read in Toronto Life about fresh'n'local butters made by chefs Mark Cutrara (Cowbell) Scott Woods (Lucien) Rob Howland (Langdon Hall) but what I didn't learn was the butterfat content of the butters and it is the percentage of butterfat that defines good butter, particularly where cooking is concerned.

As far as I know all cream sold in Canada and thus to the chefs is 35% butterfat which makes 80% butterfat butter. The only exception I've heard of is Weston's 40% cream
which may be found in some Loblaw supermarkets.

If anyone knows of richer cream, please let me know.

I've been on the track of better Canadian butter since I wrote about its anemic quality in Last Chance to Eat. The 80% butterfat butter sold in Canada isn't rich enough to make good pastry. If you melt it in a pan, it will dissolve in water. French and some American butters have upwards of 82% a significant difference. And the best butters like Vermont Butter and Cheese's 86% butter and Buerre d'Echire's 84% are also cultured or ripened which not only produces a slightly sour taste but contributes
to the plasticity (a quality along with its higher melting point) that is needed to make croissants and puff pastry.

Rob Howland of Langdon Hall tells me he buys (from Hewitts) 20 liter bags of perhaps 40% butterfat cream which he then lets ripen to produce the desired cultured butter which has more than the normal 80% butterfat.

Presidents Choice and Lactantia both make a cultured butter but they have only 80% butterfat.

Canada bans imported butters - except for bulk butter from Uruguay and New Zealand which is distributed to the food industry - but I haven't been able to find out the butterfat content. The Canadian Dairy Association is jealous of information partly because Canada is chivied by other countries about its dairy protectionism. i


The only way to sample rich butter is to go travelling...

US butters with higher butterfat.....
Keller's Plugra - 82%
Keller's European Style Butter - 82%
Land O'Lakes Ultra Creamy Butter - 83%

The best brands for pastry are French...
Beurre d'Echire - 84% (highly regarded)
Isigny-Ste-Mere, Normandy
Celes-sur-Belle, Charentes-Poitou region

Londoners are to start paying up to $20 for fish and chips when restaurateur Tom Aikens opens a "sustainable" fish and chips spot in South Ken. Aikens spent all last year learning which fish are still sustainable and they don't come cheap.

The New York Times reports that "the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has developed a coding system that explains where a meal was caught. That code often appears on fresh and frozen fish sold in the United States and Europe, but deciphering it requires specialized knowledge (FAO Zone 34 is Ghana, for example)."

As wel, a few private nonprofit groups, like the Marine Stewardship Council and the Seafood Choices Alliance, have programs to certify that fish is sustainable, but so far only large commercial retailers are participating.

For that reason, it is easiest for most consumers to get certified sustainable fish in the frozen food section of stores like Wal-Mart which sells Stewardship Council-approved products. These programs have not extended to fish markets.

I rang Rick at Mike's fish market in the St. Lawrence Market to find out whether he's selling tagged fish. So far, he hasn't seen any.

Books Reviewed.....
In Defense of Food: An Eating Manifesto
By Michael Pollan
Penguin $26,50 231 pages

An Apple a Day, the Myths Misconceptions and Truths about the Foods We Eat
By Joe Schwarcz, Phd
Harper Collins $32.95 367 pages

In 1983, Julia Child and Robert Mondavi started the American Institute of Wine and Food (AIWF)to highlight the pleasures of eating. But soon a schism opened among board members, notably between Child and Alice Waters. Child objected to Waters’ evangelizing organic food and the “endless talk of pollutants and toxins” because she thought that it would reinforce “the country’s ingrained fear of pleasure”.

How right the Great Julia was. Today, fear of food has replaced joy in eating. Child awakened the American palate to the taste of food cooked in the deliciously French way, but today, taste, which is why we lucky Westerners eat, is overwhelmed by doubts about what we’re eating. It’s odd to recall that people cooked Julia’s recipes using the supermarket food which is now routinely trashed. In those happy days, the skill of a cook transcended food’s provenance.

I picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto hoping it would put pleasure back in food. But Pollan, a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, is a posterperson for the new food writing: he’s a nanny. Tapping into North Americans’ anxiety about the processed food we eat, he has come up with an “algorithm”, a set of instructions of how to eat healthy and without environmental angst - and without much fun either.   more »

To my mind, middle eastern food is the most misunderstood food in Toronto. That’s the trouble when you make irresistible fast food. Sure the streets are full of middle eastern food like the ubiquitous falafel, fried veggie fritters packed into a pita, doused with hot sauce, adorned by tabule, parsley salad, and eaten easily on the run if you don’t mind the hot sauce dribbling down your chin. The dips humous, babaganouj, tzadiki are now MOR and Pitas pushing aside Wonder Bread. The wannabe ME gourmand may not be as enthusiastic about the Giro/Shawarma, meat sliced from a vertical revolving roaster, slapped into a similar pita, more hot sauce and parsley salad - because it’s so often dry.

Who’d know from local Shawarma how superb vertically revolving roasted meat can taste? At the Iskender Doner Kebab on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, a third generation of Iskenders are roasting organic lamb grown on wild thyme in Anatolia, cooked tender and pink, served on a bed of pita, yogurt, tomatoes.   more »

Time to chew over all things gastronomic.

Restaurant of the Year: Amaya, Chef Dinesh Singh Butola. Owner Derek Valleau..

Dish of the year: Shane Waite’s brilliant fusion at Cru: Sardines in tempura matched with lobster boudin blanc – ‘an intricate fugue of flavours.’

Classic Toronto: Suzanne Baby at Gallery Grill is “decorously terrific.”

Reliable Big Bang Restos

The Fifth (JP Challet) The French narrative
Splendido (David Lee )Subtly Cosmo   more »